Commentary on links that caught my attention around the web.
Notable Links
[Natalia Antelava in Coda Story] This is a useful framework for thinking about ongoing harm. "It was 2014, and I was standing in the ruins of Donetsk airport, when a Russian-backed rebel commander launched into what seemed like an oddly academic lecture. Between bursts of artillery fire, he explained
Notable Links
[Dan Hon in MIT Technology Review] The always-brilliant Dan Hon on DOGE: "We’re seeing in real time that there are no practical technical measures preventing someone from taking a spanner to the technology that keeps our government stable, that keeps society running every day—despite the very real
Notable Links
[Gil Duran in The Nerd Reich] Curtis Yarvin's influence is felt again: " In an essay on his paywalled Substack, he imagined a second Trump presidency in which Trump would enable a radical government transformation. The proposal will sound familiar to anyone who has watched Musk wreak havoc
Notable Links
[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
Notable Links
[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.
Notable Links
[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,
Technology
[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’
Technology
[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
AI
[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
Notable Links
[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
Notable Links
[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
Notable Links
[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