This is a literal revolution but one against the participatory web, against us: The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google’s abstraction on top of it. An abstraction they control and moderate. It’s about monopolizing access to information. A true Metaverse unbound by open standards and your ability to build your own corner of the web according to your needs and desires. Which – given how strong Google’s influence is on web standards – will change the shape of the standards for the technological landscape we are building the web on.

Let us be clear: workers are being displaced by AI in the workplace, but that displacement is not due to the actual ability of AI technology doing the jobs of workers to the same quality, or even to a sufficient quality. It is a market-oriented move by firms to brag about becoming AI-first, while finding cost-savings by laying off employees. And the workers who do remain in their jobs are left to deal with labor intensification, that is, a combination of doing more work with less time, the addition of other work tasks as a result either new technological processes, or taking on the task of other people who have been laid off. As one of us wrote in a recent book, “AI is not going to replace your job. But it will make your job a lot shittier.”

The nature of AI is that it is almost entirely a fascist project, not in a moral sense per se (though I think you could make that argument and I would if pressed) but in the sense that it is a tool meant to empower greater private corporate control over various spheres of life. It creates a worse environment for workers and a better environment for bosses, and in turn it empowers firms to take over more aspects of public life.

The balance of American experience is between public and private infrastructure. Public infrastructure principally serves a purpose for the public, private infrastructure serves a purpose to the shareholders and owners in the form of profit.

I have yet to see a way that largescale "AI" can be used for a public, pro-social end. I think that when we talk about fighting fascism, we have to understand that at least at this time, in this moment, the generative AI 'project' is undoubtedly a fascist one.

Google is transforming Search from a list of links into an AI-powered experience filled with conversational answers, autonomous agents, and interactive interfaces — a shift that could further reduce traffic to publishers across the web.

Cannot express enough how much you should get off of Google. I'm saying this for myself as well, to be clear -- I'm about halfway to setting up a Nextcloud and have plenty of self-hosted services already, but I need to get immich working for photos and a more stable cloud sync.

But I'm already off of the basic search in general, thanks to Kagi (which I cannot recommend highly enough -- it is both very good as search and refreshingly AI-critical).

Fuck Google, fuck genAI, fuck your LLM.

A commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida was booed, with graduating humanities students yelling out, "AI SUCKS!"

Jon Ganz committed a terrible crime in his youth, but he survived prison, fell in love, and started over. His new life unraveled in a way nobody could have predicted.

This is a bit of a merger of two talks I recently gave about fascism and AI. One was in German at the Cables Of Resistance conference, one in English at the Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy. I added some shots of the slides I used as a structure for the text which might make it look a bit weird. You can just ignore the images if you want to. They are kinda like subchapter marks. The text is not exactly what I said but a longer version of my arguments that should be easier to read.