Coté

Tag: politics

  • The AI CMO’s annual performance review is going to be brutal this year

    “When I am governor I will issue a moratorium — a ban — on all data center approvals until laws can be passed by the Legislature to protect Texans.” The governor-elect during her campaign outlined a slate of priorities for lawmakers that included requiring data center operators to hire union workers, protecting communities’ water supplies…

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  • Wealthier countries dislike social media the most, US sentiment has been level since 2022

    Across the Globe, People Increasingly Say Social Media Is Harming Democracy The global median still says social media has been good for democracy, 55 percent to 35 percent – the pessimism that dominates Anglophone commentary is a rich-country position, and the correlation with GDP per capita is 0.63. What is moving is the rest of…

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  • Big Tech’s PR Playbook for Overcoming Data Center Opponents

    The data center industry has imported tobacco and fossil fuel influence tactics: opaque nonprofit front groups sharing website templates and ad IDs, super PAC-funded influencers and sockpuppet accounts, and community forums engineered to keep residents off the microphone. It works because property tax limits have left municipalities dependent on exactly this kind of capital, and…

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  • How Autocracies Recruit “Loyal Losers” to Do Their Dirty Work

    This is a summary of the research on how midlevel mediocrity sustains modern authoritarianism. Summarized by AI. 🔗 How Autocracies Recruit “Loyal Losers” to Do Their Dirty Work

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  • Apparently The Real Reason Anthropic’s Models Are Offline: A Six-Year-Old Trump Grudge

    A shutdown of Fable 5 and Mythos 5 over personal politics removed key AI tools from U.S. defenders, sparking expert backlash. Summarized by AI. 🔗 Apparently The Real Reason Anthropic’s Models Are Offline: A Six-Year-Old Trump Grudge

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  • ‘Fake’ Christian? Or Faithful?

    Talarico’s faith-forward campaign reveals the gulf between Mainline social witness and MAGA Christian nationalism, underscoring the need to separate religious conviction from coercive state power. Summarized by AI. 🔗 ‘Fake’ Christian? Or Faithful?

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  • The AI Race Is Not a Race: It Is a Game and We Are Playing It Wrong

    Building AGI without global inclusion is cognitively self-defeating; only interdependent design can unlock true intelligence. Summarized by AI. 🔗 The AI Race Is Not a Race: It Is a Game and We Are Playing It Wrong

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  • Magnifica Humanitas

    Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical applies Catholic Social Doctrine to AI, arguing technology is never neutral, that private transnational tech power has outpaced states, and that AI must be “disarmed” from monopolistic and military logic. Transhumanism gets rejected as a false soteriology; just-war theory is declared outdated; data and algorithms are pulled under the universal…

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  • Muskism as Fordism

    The authors propose Muskism as the successor to post-Fordism, with a regime of accumulation built on state symbiosis, vertical integration, and survivalist tech, and a mode of regulation thinned to a “fan contract” plus racialized threat. Unlike Fordism or post-Fordism, Muskism is oriented toward social war rather than social peace, made possible by the collapse…

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  • Tyler Cowen: Wokeness Has Peaked. What Followed Is Worse.

    This reads like the ultimate Cowen-Straussian piece: look at us now, with the world on fire…oh to be back in the days when all we debated were pronouns. 🔗 Tyler Cowen: Wokeness Has Peaked. What Followed Is Worse.

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  • AI backlash, from the read the room/Picard face-palm files.

    The normies don’t like AI, esp. The Kids: They’re being told, usually by people who already have theirs, that they should be more excited about the latest evolutions in software automation. “Why aren’t you more interested in nuanced conversations about the latest evolutions in software automation,” fans of the latest evolutions in software automation will…

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  • Runciman’s thesis, roughly, is that any given week in a democracy looks like a clown show of dithering, delay, u-turns, squabbling and complacency. But from the longer perspective the chaos is effective – a symptom of democracy’s capacity to criticise itself, to change tack, to spread its bets widely, keep its options open and correct…

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  • Outrage about TikTok, so heated a few years ago, now seems like a time capsule from another era. That the negligent, self-dealing new arrangement seems to be going ahead with so little opposition shows not that TikTok has become safer, but that so much else in America has become more dangerous. From The Economist, gift-link:…

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  • Related to your interests, Wednesday

    More than 20% of videos shown to new YouTube users are ‘AI slop’, study finds – “Together, these AI slop channels have amassed more than 63bn views and 221 million subscribers, generating about $117m (£90m) in revenue each year, according to estimates.” // Assuming The Algorithm” is working (showing people things they will watch and…

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  • Recently, in America

    Recently, in America

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  • This matters politically because it means that in Latter-day Saint theology, coercion is not merely misguided policy or poor governance. It is literally Satanic. The negation of agency, forced conformity, compulsory salvation–these align with the devil’s rebellion against God’s plan. 🔗 Why are Mormons so Libertarian?

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  • tl;dr: “Nobody likes a smartarse”

    People are not rebelling against economic elites,” writes Heath. Instead, this is “a rebellion against [cognitive] executive function”. In this view, populism is a movement that appeals to people who trust their gut, rather than those who rely on some too-clever-by-half argument. There is a lot that rings true about this suggestion. Consider the following…

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  • It’s the people

    A little too ad hominem, but feels right from a critical stance: ”All my misgivings about AI really are to do with the fact that it’s owned by a group of people that I don’t trust at all. I don’t trust their taste, I don’t trust their morals, and I don’t trust their politics, and…

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  • 1953–1961

    I always forget that Nixon was a vice president, and I’m still shocked every time I’m reminded of that.

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  • 1989: Japan Buys A Used President – This is an incredible piece of writing just one sample: “It is sad and disturbing to witness with what insouciance he now sells the stature which his country afforded him to any country which can afford him. It demeans us all to see him so available, so eager…

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