Alix Dunn

Explaining to my 6-year old daughter what just happened in Brazil is 😭 So relieved and inspired.

In his acceptance speech, Lula says he will work to regulate digital platforms in Brazil. “Digital crimes must be dealt with like real-life crimes.” This comes after Meta directly interfered with the Brazilian elections, favouring Flávio Bolsonaro.

So great to sit down with @stevenrenderos.bsky.social to hear about his work and the work of @mediajustice.bsky.social leading up to these AI-soiled midterms and more generally how they have helped build the political foundation for the epic pushback we are seeing around the world.

You can't dismiss this as "NIMBYISM". Bb's own article shows ~3,000 MTCO2 of extra US power pollution 2025-2035 = 84 new coal plants /yr = 33k lost jobs globally = 1.2m more ppl pushed into unlivable climate That is **everyone's backyard** that those emissions destroy. The whole world's backyard.

Amazing to be in a moment when as I read books about what's going on I am nodding along as many friends and collaborators are name checked over and over again. Such incredible work happening nearby and so proud of the people doing it 🤗

What would happen if you took a stock market bubble bigger than the dot-com bubble and combined it with a pile of risky debt bigger than the one that caused the 2008 financial crisis? You'd get something that looks a lot like the AI bubble we have today. www.openmarketsinstitute.org/publications...

Cat says dogs are stupid.

Where is the ATProto network for authorized nation state accounts? Would be great to have a well governed decentralized authenticated channel for them to move to...

I wish Ezra Klein knew women.

The president of Brazil has won a court case against Meta, after accusing them of restricting his posts and algorithmically favoring his opponent, Flavio Bolsonaro www.nbcnews.com/world/south-...

“The Emperor is a fan of Flock.” Why did Anthony Ralphs need to dress up like Darth Vader to protest Flock cameras in San Diego? After months of making his case to the city council, it took a Darth Vader costume to get people to pay attention. @404media.co www.404media.co/darth-vader-...

I got to be a guest on one of my favourite podcasts this week 🎉 @parismarx.com's The Tech Won't Save Us. I could have talked to Paris all day about AI and data centres. Listen below. techwontsave.us/episode/350_... PS. pre-order Paris' new book Hyperscale ASAP www.waterstones.com/book/hypersc...

We are failing these young people. So moving and impressive to see them fight for their rights.

The CFAA has been updated since, but the 2nd Circuit held that intent was only needed for gaining access, not for damage caused. While a diligent developer is unlikely to write ordinary code that accidentally hacks someone, LLM systems can and do. Are agents malware? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_...

Wow buying oil from Russia and sanctioning the ICC. With apologies, world, for dismantling the international order.

we have a policy for the use of genAI at the @aial.ie. we reflect on values key to scientific integrity, such as replicability, and err on the side of not using it blogpost: aial.ie/blog/gen-ai-... pdf: zenodo.org/records/2322...

In @macleans.bsky.social, I push back on AI doom discourse

"A spiralling legal crisis threatens to engulf OpenAI after its AI agents hacked dozens of companies and governments worldwide, with the prospect of a barrage of lawsuits marking the latest test of Sam Altman’s leadership."

After the first computer viruses did we spent months debating whether viruses were living things?

New just now in The Atlantic: David Robinson resigned this week. He was among the longest-tenured employees at OpenAI—and oversaw safety reports on 12 frontier launches. He is very worried: “The time for trial and error is over.” You can read his essay here: www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Heathrow airport launched a chatbot and if you are curious if it will be accurate, you may not be reassured when you find an obvious typo in the billboard ad. Tho it is good advice not share your "personal infomtion" with an airport chat bot.

AI execs want you to believe that their predictions are inevitable. But really, it’s just marketing. I spoke with @carissaveliz.bsky.social about her new book ‘Prophecy.’ We explore the history of predictions as a tool to secure power. Catch the conversation here: www.themaybe.org/podcast/bewa...

This book and this conversation were FANTASTIC!

I am 90% of the way through Disclosure Day on a flight and it is, I am here to report, the worst movie I have ever seen. There is an ELDERLY ALIEN talking to Emily Blunt rn. If they don't do a reveal jump scare where the aliens eat all of the people, imma be pissed.

For a long time I've wanted a sense of how trump has or hasn't interacted with chatbots (we know he posts a lot of slop sure). And this TIME anecdote about Grok arguably leading Trump into war is just extremely bracing

Thank you @stefanturk.bsky.social for drawing my attention to the signature of Greg Brockman. The biggest revelation in the new EO. Man babies the lot of them.

Who could have guessed.

It's funny how hard they try to project responsibility in their language. This reads as: Like hey uh guys this is us doing you a favor and uh we're just helping out to let you know you might want to fix the door we broke into. Just here to help kthxbai!

Until very recently I thought Butlerian Jihad was a joke about Judith Butler vs TERFs.

AI is eating resources that could have gone to meaningful services. Seattle paid $2 million for an app, Talkspace, that provided text messaging "therapy" to 442 teens last year. Talkspace says teen sessions were excluded from training for its AI therapy bot. www.proofnews.org/millions-spe...

Stop asking AI CEOs what society needs. The alarm sounded by AI chief executives about the very products they have raced to market amounts to a remarkable admission of failure and a spectacular failure of governance. ↘️ giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

The lengths people will go not to read something but to be credited with having read it.

I just love the idea of big tech leaders - in a moment of reckoning for their recklessness - to seek the counsel and brand affiliation of a monarch. So fitting.

This NRA reference is also used by Latour! And I tend to agree with him: we need to look at the full "system," which includes the mechanisms, but also users, designers, bureaucracies, labor, economics. "The machine did this" hides that; "the process produced this" has to surface it.

For real!! Comedian Micky Overman says it like it is. Generally the only people even entertaining the thought of evil AGI are men. Women are too busy fixing the ACTUAL problems of AI, like idk, the way it automates, reproduces and exacerbates misogyny and makes all our lives worse...

Dave Karpf compares Amodei's embedded-evaluators plan to "Arthur Andersen's relationship to Enron" — a case study in what happens when independent monitoring gets captured by the industry it's watching.

Guys, the Coxon dude did not do this for money.

HEY EVERYONE - NEW REPORT!!! NVIDIA is the largest company by market cap on the planet. But it hides key climate data, while claiming AI is going to be a 'net benefit' for climate. We (8 groups) put together the first ever broad critique of NVIDIA's climate record: ketanjoshi.co/2026/09/16/n...

In this special episode, @alixdunn.com spoke with @js-tan.bsky.social and Clarissa Redwine, authors of the book ‘Against Tech Oligarchy,’ about the dramatic shift in tech worker power over the last decade—and what it takes for workers to organize and fight back. www.themaybe.org/podcast/the-...

Who is working on unwinding the idea that national compute is a path to control?

Today is the day! A journey that Astra and I started as an essay in The Guardian is now officially out in the world. End Times Fascism – And the Fight for the Living World is in bookstores now. If you are inclined, please buy one from an indie bookseller or borrow it from your local library.

Was curious what the pod bros would say about the AI discourse. It's amazing how obsessed center left analysts are with polls UNTIL we talk about AI and then they turn into 17 year old boys talking about accelerating acceleration and superintelligent AI.