Matt Tutt

I have decided to stop using BlueSky and switch entirely to Mastodon - not just because I don't feel aligned with BS (look at their recent $100 million investment from "Bain Capital Crypto") - but I get more engagement over there with less than 1/10th of the follower count. (continued...)

"much dumber than you think it is" 🤔

Learned of this great quote today. Should be seared to the forehead of any such white "liberals" who claim to care about ideals around freedom and liberty. "Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will." 💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯

Anyone got any good music recommendations? This is what I have been listening to recently (maybe it helps!...) - Kneecap (Fenian) - Shame (Cutthroat) - Murder Capital (Blindness) - Fontaines DC (anything....) - Wunderhorse (anything...) Any suggestions? 🙂

Kids have been banned from Facebook to stop them seeing harmful content. In totally unrelated news, my 60 year old neighbour on Facebook has just AI'ed a video of himself throwing a woman in a burqa into the back of a bin lorry.

The UK should face sanctions from the rest of the world over its proscription of Palestine Action

If anyone is wondering what that yeasty, fruity smell is that is emanating from my office - it is not me - I tried making some elderflower "champagne" a few days ago 🙂 All you need: - Approx 15 flowerheads - Sugar (700g) - Lemons (4) - Water

Terrible news: the Court of Appeal has just ruled that the Government’s ban on Palestine Action is lawful. PA is now likely to lodge an appeal before the Supreme Court. So the mass arrests of peaceful people sitting with cardboard signs will continue. Because that is what terrorism looks like ...

Sad but true - this is the real point of the whole "social media ban for kids" - nothing to do with preventing harm, everything to do with building more surveillance tech. If they were serious about tackling this, they wouldn't ban it.

Ryan isn't guilty of this - but can we all (please) stop with the simpleton "let's just tax the billionaires!" mantra. A system which allows 1 man to hoard wealth ($1 trillion?) is not fit for purpose and needs rebuilding from the ground up. Let's not avoid the hard work.

The demand for consumer AI adoption is not coming from consumers or their markets. Instead, it is coming from speculative investors. I feel like this exposes a bigger and much deeper problem with our economy.

Unpopular opinion: this framing (good vs bad, right vs wrong) is bad and will only make things worse. If you turn this into a battle against the far right - you (paradoxically) end up emboldening and strengthening them. This is what they all want. We need to stop this pretentious posturing.

I have a nice little scam I have been sitting on for a while. Today I am happy to share it with you. Sometimes I find myself short of elastic bands. What do I do? I go to the local supermarket and buy a bundle of asparagus (bear with me). - Why do I do this? It comes with a free elastic band!!!!

This is good - might not be perfect (what is?) - but it is getting us closer to the direction we need to be taking. Needs to be more talk of this, more honest confrontation of the causes of growing inequality, and what needs to happen to start to fix it.

I recently received some glowing feedback on a blog post I wrote, which I will now share with you: "wow you write a cringe" As a reminder - you can read that piece here: matttutt.me/the-problem-... Thank you! 🙂

Super sad to hear about Trevor Dietz who was the manager of Fontaines DC (one of my favourite bands); sounded like an all round great person - passionate about standing up for Palestine and other causes and was a massive part of the music scene in Dublin 🙏🙏🙏 www.instagram.com/p/DZXfSEPCBC...

Just Rutger Bregman being Rutger Bregman 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️

Unpopular opinion but until the mainstream media are overthrown - the people will never be free. And the mainstream media are of course part of the establishment.

Just heard about this elsewhere from good sources: Proton is funding the French far right on YouTube.

Literally insane to see what is being published on the website of the White House 😅 I am also enjoying the picture of Trump out in the fields, sun beating down on him "separating the wheat from the chaff" (as if he's ever done a proper days work!!)

I sent out invoice number 600 earlier... which feels like a big milestone??? I still feel like a bit of a fraud/imposter despite probably 15+ years doing SEO for a range of (fairly small) clients. Also, I should probably celebrate? 🤔

I only check X for LFC transfer news, but I'm still getting these ads. When you click, it takes you to this, which is exactly the disinformation we're fighting. Fagash is the most "elite"-proximate politician there is, but they want gullible working-class voters to think he's on their side.

Mildly interesting - DuckDuckGo launched a No AI version of their search engine - but they are blocking all other search engines from their site. This is how it looks like in Google currently. Intentional... or an accident? 🤔 #seo

"An equal and habitable world is possible’: academics set out sweeping vision for planetary survival" I want to write a thread about this, but before that, there is something necessary to make clear. It was always known what the solutions were. www.theguardian.com/environment/... 1/🧵

I shudder at the thought of the energy cost of such tools... and I say this as someone working as an SEO consultant 🫠🫠🫠

On a chat with Microsoft Ads support (yeah I know) - having gone through their AI support first and later selecting the live chat feature - I was doubtful about whether I was dealing with a human. I asked, they dodged the Q a few times, and finally said yes they are human... 🤔

Found one of my favourite flowers out on a walk yesterday - St John's Wort. Usually in flower around now (June) but a fairly short season at least where I am. Used as a treatment for anxiety and depression - two things clearly on the rise in a society obsessed with endless growth and consumption 🫠

This is interesting as from my own investigation I have found evidence of US based organisations that do the same - on the outside they track "predators" on platforms like TikTok etc - but actually they seek to (also) carry out surveillance for their masters.

Today I have been working on a proposal for the No To Big Tech group - where we are figuring out what it is we seek to achieve as an activist group. I like to be open about our movement - if anyone wants a link to the full doc let me know!

we gotta start talking about Substack radicalisation Your 30,000 word Claude-generated post called "Narrative violation: IQ is real and the science shows which races fall behind" is awful and you should be doing lego build competitions instead

References to Palantir have been redacted from the Mandelson files on the grounds that they would be "prejudicial to UK national security or international relations"

Reading a bloody good book (pardon my language): Ivan Illich: Tools for Conviviality. 1st published 1973 (!) - I especially like this part: "As the power of machines increases, the role of persons more and more decreases to that of consumers." Remind you of anything going on in the world? 🤔🤔

"Why are people so negative about the economy?" Consider this. There are two possibilities: 1) He's right and my livelihood is screwed. Maybe not 18 months but soon. 2) He's full of shit, it won't happen, and AI is a giant bubble that will crash the economy. Why would I feel good about either?

So we’ve been cooking up some thoughts on Gen AI at @amnesty.org and I’m ecstatic to finally see it out in the world! Our 🗝️ conclusion: standalone gen AI systems, built on unlawful web scraping, constitute mass invasions of privacy by design & should be prohibited www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ne...

One day in the future, people will come to realise how much of the internet is being used as a way to track and monitor people's activities, and that the organisations that are doing this are those that claim to be providing security services and/or tracking hate speech, or other "liberal" values.

Books that I very much look forward to reading: Techno-Negative A long History of Refusing the Machine by Thomas Dekeyser.

A nice summary of the real issue at play here, provided in this screenshot: can't access the paper unless you pay. Climate change is just one of the many symptoms of a very messed up society. Fix the bigger stuff and you will fix the rest.

Quite the page turner here: Concrete Destruction - Costs and Damages of the Concrete and Cement Industry and the Future of Construction - Responsible for 8-9% of all global CO2 emissions 🔥 Hard to get people engaged with concrete (if you pardon the pun!!!!!!!!!!) www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rl...

David Graeber explained that hopelessness is manufactured Socialism can never be seen to win, as if it does win, it'd give hope to people across the world that alternatives to neoliberalism are possible Its why Corbyn had to be crushed & why they're now so desperate to crush Socialism in Bolivia

People say it's stupid to propose alternative ways of living, non-capitalist aligned forms or whatever... and then according to this source, $1.4 trillion has been spent on AI. Imagine what kind of society we could have been (re)building, with that kind of money 😪😪😪

The prediction of a Reform government shows what this country has become due to our nasty spiteful media class who have allowed the far right to thrive - today will be 35 degrees and our next government could very well be one of climate change deniers , robber barons and asset strippers

Had an email recently which almost brought a tear to my (relatively hard and crusty) eye 🥲🥲🥲

The applicability test is whether sustainability practitioners are willing to say the word shrink in a room full of funders. Most are not. That silence is the gap between sustainability as practice and sustainability as branding. The IDN work forces the honest version.