Victor Shammas

“The auction winners were not Trump Jr’s only companions in the Mongolian wilderness this summer. He also spent two days with Umar Kremlev, a businessman with a criminal record who has close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s personal security service.” #Trump #Putin #oligarchs

1 Torsten Slok, chief economist, Apollo Global Management: Despite massive investments & widespread hype around #artificialintelligence, the #technology has delivered zero financial payoff to #corporateAmerica outside of #tech. Revenue per worker is rising for the #Mag7 but is flat for the S&P 493 🧵

Ukraine losing access to Starshield raises serious concerns for our national security—like who controls critical capabilities the U.S. government has spent billions to procure & how decisions to restrict them are made. I'm demanding answers from the Department of Defense & SpaceX

Musk’s political influence: “The world’s richest man poured $446 million of his own money into this year’s midterm elections.”

Yesterday there was a general assembly of staff and students at Roskilde University in response to the firing of professor Michelle Pace and the repression of the student movement in solidarity with Palestine. The assembly unanimously agreed on five demands incl. the reinstatement of Professor Pace.

WSJ on Musk's Starlink restrictions: "A person familiar with the situation said Musk talked to multiple senior administration officials, including with Trump, before imposing the new speed cap, which Ukrainian officials said had allowed Russian missiles to evade their defenses."

Anthropic’s infrastructure commitments total $600B in the coming years, possibly rising to as much as $750B. Meanwhile, its revenue for the first half of 2026 was a mere $16.3B. Its growth may be “red-hot,” in the WSJ’s phrase, but can it sustain spending at this scale? And what happens if it can’t?

Elon Musk has “reportedly spent $366m since last year to buoy the Republican Party in the United States midterm elections.”

"The search takes place within the 60-day window of the midterm elections, when the Justice Department has historically avoided such investigative steps related to political candidates."

'There are also concerns about whether “Musk” will eventually land on HBO as originally planned in the aftermath of the Skydance merger, the new entertainment giant…“Would Musk be able to call Larry [Ellison] or David [Ellison] and say, you know, don’t put this doc ["Musk"] on? Yeah,” Gibney said.'

Yeesh. 👀 (Bloomberg) - The most likely long-term outcome of the AI boom will be massive capital destruction in the US, with market share going to cheaper open-source Chinese models, according to Jefferies Financial Group Inc. @bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

“What Gibney didn’t expect was that it would also be a chance to examine how tech power had become political power…Gibney was ready to deliver a two-hour movie to the fall film festivals in 2024, but then Musk started campaigning in support of Trump’s presidential bid.”

AI anthropomorphism is a commodified distortion of a technology that could be far less personal.

“This #quantified, #self-optimizing #self that #AI companies tap into is part of the broader #subject-formation that #SiliconValley has long built its #businessmodels on, seen in everything from sleep apps to smartwatches.”

"BMW CEO Milan Nedeljković told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), referring to the AfD, that right-wing populism and nationalism 'are poison for a cosmopolitan business location that depends on global trade.'" [via Google Translate]

“ #AI companies have figured out how to turn “mere” tools into something closer to companions, and so to turn the use-value of being helped by an instrument into the feeling of being understood by a particular someone.” open.substack.com/pub/victorsh...

Archive of @britishacademy.bsky.social Fellow Stuart Hall is now live. Includes looking at his impact on the history of communication theory, culminating in the architecture of contemporary AI models www.theguardian.com/society/2026... Archive link: stuarthalldigital.bham.ac.uk/archival_mat...

In the first nine months of 2026, around 100 tech billionaires gained $845bn, according to Bloomberg. Together they now control wealth totaling $4.6 trillion. We're witnessing an extraordinary concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small group of tech owners.

A lot of the “AI as existential threat” discourse from tech giants likely doubles as advertising aimed at the Trump administration (“buy our offensive capabilities”) and adversary nations (“fear our offensive capabilities”).

RFK Jr. received "more than $250,000 worth of free flights to Fiji and Greece as well as use of a vacation home in Washington, D.C. from Gavin de Becker..." de Becker has been described as Jeff Bezo's "top security staffer" www.wsj.com/politics/rfk...

“Why did a Russian oligarch who is close to Putin pay for much of the president’s son’s wedding?…A retired career FBI official…put it this way: ‘If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something.’”

“…the most substantial danger that is before us [is] not a malignant AGI/ASI…but the unchecked concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a delusional set of billionaires.”

“A Microsoft executive called the training of artificial intelligence models the ‘largest theft of labor in human history,’ according to a legal brief…The comments come from Brent Hecht, Microsoft’s director of applied science.”

“A Russian businessman with ties to the Kremlin paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to help finance Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding after-party in the Bahamas this year…In April, Putin honored Mr. Kremlev with a high-level state award, the Order of Friendship.”

Sweden’s nominally center-right PM, parroting Trumpian rhetoric, says he wants to “make Sweden great again”—which means, in practice, catapulting the far right to power.

"Job postings and interviews with senior security officials at Anthropic show that the frontier AI lab is building out an extensive monitoring system to keep tabs on activists who oppose the rapid development of artificial intelligence." #AI #CriticalTech

"It’s another example of how quickly Meta dropped its once-stricter content moderation policies when Donald Trump returned to the White House. Shortly before his second inauguration, Meta loosened its standards around hate speech, particularly on topics like gender identity and immigration." ⚠️

The WSJ asked whether it’s time to “liquidate” sociology. It’s a question tied to a wider reactionary politics. My essay: www.theorybrief.com/p/the-politi...

The WSJ asked whether it’s time to “liquidate” sociology. It’s a question tied to a wider reactionary politics. My essay: www.theorybrief.com/p/the-politi...

Slobodian & Tarnoff's book "Muskism" shifts attention from pure biography to the political-economic formation Elon Musk might represent. My review:

I’m already very tired of “—maxxing.” We should be “maxxminning.” #maaxing

So now we know the price of that red card removal (and the FIFA “Peace Prize”).

Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal.

"The minute you deny the legal standing of a minority and refuse to acknowledge that they exist within legal and public discourse, you nullify their legal and public existence…They fall into a kind of legal unreality…that allows for their rights to be taken away, including the right to life."

Musk's SpaceX in talks to provide computing power to the Pentagon, WSJ reports reut.rs/4wcnxAM

"Fascism has a script…You attack the universities, you attack the journalists…You attack voting rights. And he's doing it, step by step." (Video source: @thegoodliars.bsky.social)

“For a starting fee of about $2,000, the rich and aggrieved can pay to put a journalist’s work on trial before an ‘AI jury,’ which then issues a verdict and assigns the reporter an ‘Honor Index’ score. A private, billionaire-funded tribunal that uses AI to attack journalists.” @gilduran.com

Catastrophic meltdown awaits the Ellisons, Zuckerbergs, and Musks of the world. When will the balloon pop!? Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/b...

“A guest on Malaysian soil…is publicly threatening the prime minister with capital flight unless he is granted an audience—and a memorandum of understanding. This is the Network State ideology performed in real time: power and sovereignty as a negotiation between a government and a bloc of capital.”

"The father of a Colombian immigrant shot and killed by a federal agent in Maine on Monday described him as 'a good person raised with strong values,' who worked two jobs to support his wife and 3-year-old daughter."

Reflect Orbital wants to reflect sunlight onto Earth during the nighttime, brightening the night sky artificially. The Trump-aligned FCC just approved the first satellite. The company wants 50,000 of them. #SpacePolitics

“Mr President, your plan will fail miserably. If you think the American people will allow fascism, you are gravely mistaken. The NAACP will do everything in our power to send people to the polls and make their voices heard.” –Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP

Steven Shaviro reviews a biography "tracing the strange alchemy by which [J. G.] Ballard was able to transmute both his personal experience and the often dreadful historical events of the mid- and late-20th century into fantastic fiction."

The real puzzle is why so many keep backing Musk—from Tesla-driving, Starlink-surfing consumers to governments and corporations that continue doing business with him. Musk has agency, but we also need to understand the social order that has permitted his rise, despite his noxious views and actions.