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Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller

Notable Links

The Key Figures Working Alongside Elon Musk at DOGE and in the Trump Administration

[Avi Asher-Schapiro, Christopher Bing, Annie Waldman, Brett Murphy, Andy Kroll, Justin Elliott, Kirsten Berg, Sebastian Rotella, Alex Mierjeski, Pratheek Rebala and Al Shaw at ProPublica] My colleagues at ProPublica have published the largest list yet of who is actually involved in DOGE: "While some have been public about their

06 Feb 2025

Notable Links

Update on the 2024/2025 End of Term Web Archive

[Caralee Adams at the Internet Archive] The Internet Archive is always a gem, but it's been particularly important this year. "With two-thirds of the process complete, the 2024/2025 EOT crawl has collected more than 500 terabytes of material, including more than 100 million unique web pages.

06 Feb 2025

Notable Links

You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism

[Janus Rose at 404 Media] This is an important but hard pill to swallow: "“The reality is you are oxygenating the things these people are saying even as you purport to debunk them,” Katherine Cross, a sociologist and author of Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix,

06 Feb 2025

Move fast and break democracy

For the last few years, AI vendors have had an interesting marketing playbook: they’ve described the potential power of the technologies as being so great that it could lead to an artificial general intelligence that could either kill humanity or leave us behind and head for the stars. We

05 Feb 2025

Technology

Google ends DEI hiring goals

[Alex Heath at The Verge] And so begin the knock-on effects on companies across America: "In a Wednesday memo to employees that I obtained (and you can read below), Google’s head of HR, Fiona Cicconi, said there will no longer be DEI hiring targets due to the company’

05 Feb 2025

Technology

The Making of an Anti-Woke Zealot: How Elon Musk Was Infected with the MAGA Mind-Virus

[Eoin Higgins, excerpted in Lit Hub] This is a neat encapsulation of Musk’s rightward turn, and everything that happened next: “By this point, Musk believed that part of the business problem of Twitter was that, somehow, the right wing was “suppressed.” As such, “woke culture” needed to be destroyed

05 Feb 2025

AI

Google removes pledge to not use AI for weapons from website

[Maxwell Zeff at TechCrunch] I know "don't be evil" is from another era of Google, but still, this rankles: "Google removed a pledge to not build AI for weapons or surveillance from its website this week. The change was first spotted by Bloomberg. The company

04 Feb 2025

Notable Links

A Push to Stop Police Ticketing in Illinois Schools Becomes Urgent in the Trump Era

[Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards at ProPublica] From my colleagues at ProPublica: "Citing an urgency to protect students’ civil rights in a second Trump administration, Illinois lawmakers filed a new bill Monday that would explicitly prevent school police from ticketing and fining students for misbehavior." This

04 Feb 2025

Notable Links

The Guardian view on Donald Trump’s power grab: a coup veiled by chaos

[The Guardian Editorial] The Guardian editorial board isn't mincing words: "Donald Trump is provoking a US constitutional crisis, claiming sweeping powers to override or bypass Congress’s control over spending in a brazen attempt to centralise financial power in the executive branch. If he succeeds, Nobel laureate

04 Feb 2025

Notable Links

Settlements With Trump Are Weakening Press Freedoms

[Jameel Jaffer in The New York Times] Jameel Jaffer is the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University: "The spectacle of powerful media organizations debasing themselves before Mr. Trump has become so familiar that it is beginning to feel like scheduled programming. [...] Mr. Trump captured

04 Feb 2025

askacto

Ask a CTO

I’ve been a technical leader a few times: CTO and Director of Technology at two nonprofit newsrooms; technical lead at five tech companies of varying sizes; investor and advisor in early-stage startups. I’ve enjoyed reading Ask a Manager for years, and it occurred to me that a similar

03 Feb 2025

Notable Links

Musk’s Takeover Of The Government’s Computer Systems Needs To Be Understood As A Cyberattack, Or Worse

[Cathy Gellis at TechDirt] On point: "So that Elon Musk and his minions have managed to walk right into government offices to take over computer systems where they had no legitimate authorization or entitlement needs to be understood as a cyberattack by a rogue actor. And every ounce of

03 Feb 2025
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Werd I/O explores the intersection of technology, democracy, and society. It's independently published by Ben Werdmuller, reader-supported, and always free to read.