#Tech Won't Save Us

[probablyasocialecologist]

Paris Marx is joined by Jason Hickel to discuss how technology would change in a degrowth society and why it doesn’t make sense to organize society around profit and infinite expansion.

[wat3rm370n]

Tech assisted fraudulent stuff is a reality.

404 Media - The Age of Realtime Deepfake Fraud Is Here Joseph Cox · Apr 28, 2025 at 9:00 AM The bearded man, however, doesn’t really exist. Instead, he is a realtime deepfake created by a fraudster, likely to lure the woman as part of a romance scam and have her send money. Someone filming the interaction captures what is really happening: a young Black man is sitting in front of a laptop and webcam, and software is then automatically transforming his appearance to that of the much older white man and feeding that into Skype, all live. Other realtime deepfakes from fraudsters include a Black man making himself appear as a white woman, and many cases of scammers being able to hold objects during the live call without breaking the illusion. One deepfake scammer even included an American flag in the background of their live video call.

Look after your seniors, since widowed elders are the most targeted market for a lot of these scams because they're considered vulnerable, not tech savvy, and with enough wealth to make the effort worth it for the scammers.

[haveyouheardthispodcast]

[theblindmachine]

Listen: https://open.spotify.com/episode/02nc4k4ZknOXVupuo9xOz8 "# The AI Con: Unmasking the Hype and Embracing Reality In a world captivated by the allure of generative AI, we stand at a pivotal moment. The promises of this technology gleam like gold, but beneath the surface lies a murky reality that many are reluctant to confront. In a recent episode of *Tech Won’t Save Us*, Paris Marx is joined by two visionary thinkers—Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna—to dissect the harrowing truths surrounding generative AI, its societal impacts, and what we can do to demand better. Bender, a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington, and Hanna, the Director of Research at the Distributed AI Institute, bring a wealth of knowledge and critical insight to the table. They expertly illustrate how the industry is often clouded by lofty promises, leaving the public grappling with the consequences of these technological advances that do not meet our expectations. They know firsthand that while companies like OpenAI tout their innovations, the shadows of misinformation and unfulfilled assurances linger ominously. Recent reports from New York Magazine underscore the ramifications of tools like ChatGPT infiltrating education, further complicating an already fraught landscape. The reliance on such technologies threatens to reshape our learning environments in ways that necessitate urgent, thoughtful discussion. Bender and Hanna argue that it’s time to reclaim the conversation around AI—pushing back against the relentless optimism surrounding generative technologies, which often distracts from the real harms they can inflict. We must recognize that the narrative isn’t just about progress; it’s about power. The gloss of innovation can easily obscure the ethical dilemmas and societal costs. How can we allow ourselves to be swept up in the excitement while ignoring the glaring issues of bias, inaccuracy, and privacy that accompany these systems? The truth is, the reliance on AI isn’t a path to utopia; it’s a slippery slope toward unchecked corporate dominance and social inequity. So, what’s next? How do we mobilize against this tide of hype? Bender and Hanna encourage us to engage critically with technology and advocate for a future that prioritizes human values over corporate greed. This isn’t merely a call to action; it’s a necessary foundation for fighting back against big tech’s manipulation of public perception. We can demand transparency, accountability, and ethical practices from the companies that shape our digital landscape. The conversation initiated by Bender and Hanna is crucial. It’s time to harness our collective voice to challenge the status quo and influence the direction of AI development. Support initiatives that focus on ethical AI, push for substantive policy changes, and engage in discussions that hold big tech accountable for its promises. Join us in this fight. Tune into *Tech Won’t Save Us* and become part of the movement to reshape the future of technology. Together, we can dismantle the hype and construct a world where technology serves humanity rather than the other way around. Let’s create a future that we want—one that is built on integrity, inclusivity, and responsibility."

[jwood718]

Elon Musky sez all human data for AI training is exhausted already.

All I can think is "Well, boo-hoo."

story

[portablecity]

the story of this zine is wonderful! i listened to an interview with one of the founders, Chris Carlsson, on Tech Won't Save Us:

https://techwontsave.us/episode/231_escaping_the_processed_world_w_chris_carlsson

It can feel like we're the first people to say "it's bad that tech is a tool of capitalism" but there's a long history, and also i always love hearing about collective zine projects from the past. Worth a listen. There's also links to more info are writing on the zine, and the full archives of it, at the podcast page.

[dbluegreen]

Escaping the Processed World w/ Chris Carlsson

[thoughtportal]

It's a fun thought experiment: what if the universe is a simulation, and nothing around us is real? But lately, some of the most powerful people in tech (and politics) have been saying they believe this is true. Why would they think that? To understand, we talk to Damien P. Williams at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Paris Marx, host of the Tech Won't Save Us podcast. Spoiler alert: anyone who'd trap us in a simulation would have to be a total sociopath.

[wat3rm370n]

Weak ties on twitter can move anywhere.

[inkprovised]

I was sketching when my graphic tablet died on me...

[batcavescolony]

S4 E3 Supernatural

Now THIS is a good episode. Castiel took Dean back in time to 1973! We find out Sam and Dean's maternal grandparents, Samuel and Deanna Campbell, and Mary are hunters. On top of that, Azazel is playing match maker so he can have his little psychic children be the best of the best, and he made a deal with Mary to revive John after he killed him. Also as if Azazel hasn't killed enough of Sam & Dean's family they killed Samuel and Deanna too. Oh this is so interesting, then Castiel taking Dean back, saying destiny can't be changed but Sam is going down a dark path and either Dean stops him or angels do.

[shikai-the-storyteller]

Ok I heard Pac is doing the Fallout watchparty in a few days (?) and his VOD won't be saved either, so I'm frickin learning how to use OBS solely so I can record the entire thing WITH subtitles.

[queen-mabs-revenge]

The rise of neoliberalism as a dominant political paradigm in the 1970s and the emergence of platform capitalism in the 21st century resulted in new areas of employment and a decrease in the relative numbers of workers employed in traditional working-class jobs. Data work, that is, the labor that goes into producing data for so-called “intelligent” systems, not only brings with it unprecedented forms of exploitation but, crucially, possibilities for organization and resistance in globally networked economies. 

The Data Workers’ Inquiry is a community-based research project in which data workers join us as community researchers to lead their own inquiry in their respective workplaces. The community researchers guide the direction of the research, such that it is oriented towards their needs and goals of building workplace power but supported by formally trained qualitative researchers.

We adapt Marx’s 1880 Workers’ Inquiry to the phenomenon of data workers who are both essential for contemporary AI applications yet precariously employed—if at all—and politically dispersed.

[the-hwaelweg]

Working in publishing, my inbox is basically just:

Article on the Horrors of AI

Article on How AI Can Help Your Business

Article on How AI Has Peaked

Article on How AI Is Here to Stay Forever

Article on How AI Is a Silicon Valley Scam That Doesn't Live Up to the Promise and In Fact Can't Because They've Literally Run Out of Written Words to Train LLMs On

[catmask]

meowdy! looks like our move to a new apartment is not going to be so peaceful after all - our old apartment is currently leaking sewage water and we have to evacuate four people and two cats! donations are appreciated, but im opening an emergency sale + commissions too! (more under the cut)

KO-FI SHOP SALE + EMERGENCY COMMISSIONS ARE OPEN!

DISCOUNT CODE IS 'LEAK' IN ALL CAPS

so for this section, i'm going to break down everything thats happening + when things will come off hiatus! i'm hoping that everything will be set up in the new place by JUNE 1st, so that is the hard deadline i'm setting to start all functions up again as usual.

WHAT'S HAPPENING?

two years ago, my fiance and i were offered emergency housing when we (very suddenly and tragically) became the parents to his orphaned little sister. both of us are only 26 and had to move 8 hours from where we had been living at the time, so the housing we had was the best 2 people with few connections and no established jobs could find within a single weeks notice.

since then, we have been saving up and working to finally have a proper place to live. and we did so! at the beginning of this month we found an apartment where all of us can move to. we have a friend staying with us who is helping with the move as well.

i really wanted this move to be seamless - basically, you wouldn't have had to know it was happening. we were going to pay double rent for two months while i would stream and work from the old place, and begin sleeping at the new one. its expensive, but i didn't want my real life to trouble anyone here.

unfortunately this is no longer possible. the old building we were staying at had a pipe begin to leak, then eventually flood our entire apartment. this has been a reoccurring problem the landlord hasn't seemed to find a solution for, and it's led to a biohazard where we were planning on slowly moving from - leading to an immediate and emergency evacuation for the safety of everyone in our family.

SO... STREAMING?

will be back online as soon as possible! we moved out our tech as soon as we could due to fear of water damage, and it seems like everything is A-OK. we just need to rebuild my desk and sound proof the new room, so this will probaaabbly be back online within a week? im just going to take the week off to make sure everything is set up and there are no bugs. (digital. digital bugs.)

LAIKA'S COMET?

for the sake of not losing my buffer crazystyle, i'm pausing laika's until JUNE 1st. but i'm going to post one more page right now to leave you guys on a cliffhanger because i think it's funny. (the ko-fi will still update as regular as i finish pages! tbh, in between moving i am going to be drawing.... a LOT... it's like my only self soothing activity i have access to right now </3)

SHOP STUFF?

you basically won't notice a difference. orders go out every 2 weeks anyway, and literally the day before this happened we completely caught up to date. that + all of the goods we had were already moved over because (similar to the tech) we were worried about water damage, so nothing will be yucky... (i dont know if i can say the same about our furniture or clothes ; _ ; )

FINAL NOTES

while we did manage to get out with emergency bags and a weeks worth of outfits + things to sleep on + cook with, we have no real means of knowing the extent of damage until we bring things out of the apartment and clean them here. thankfully *most* things appear undamaged, its largely the flooring and the smell that are unliveable... walking through puddles of sewage water and having to wear a mask to breathe is not really liveable conditions.

however, considering this move is sped up way faster than planned, and i wont be able to work during it - any sales or donations are hugely appreciated. ; w ;

i'm sorry to ask for help like this, and its only if you are comfortable to do so!!! i can work hard, so i don't mind doing a little extra art to make money, this is just if you feel okay to help out and would like to.

if you read this far, thank you so much - hopefully next time i will return with good news - and maybe a new apartment tour...?

[wat3rm370n]

Tech tycoon guru reveals the Accusation in a Mirror of conservative pandemic rhetoric.

Curtis Yarvin is reportedly a guru to tech tycoons and their acolytes like JD Vance, and he articulated that the aristocrat revolution should involve pandemic-type measures.

If you want to know more about Curtis Yarvin, there have been 2 recent podcasts: Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, and the Behind the Bastards podcast had a 2 part episode. I found one of Curtis Yarvin’s publications because Julia Black, who wrote about Curtis Garvin in The Information, references some of what’s in Curtis Yarvin’s monarchist piece, on the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast. 

I would like to just present some excerpts from the piece, which I think there's a reveal here of the disingenuous lockdown revisionist rhetoric, saying the quiet part out loud, some covid for thee but not for me, and also Accusation in a Mirror.

Gray Mirror - A conversation about monarchy "Now and for the foreseeable future, any election is either plenary or nugatory." Mar 12, 2024 Yet the entire transition must remain orderly. Is there a huge difference between life in the public and private sectors? One big company is going out of business—another is being founded. No one is being dragged away and shot. It is not the 20th century. At most a week of Covid-style lockdown should be enough to secure the new regime—not only are the Americans of today, especially the blue-state ones, no Minutemen, but unlike most historical urban populations they do not even know how to be a mob. Today, civilian numbers are as irrelevant to contests of force as in the 13th century. 21st-century Americans are a civilized people. We do not chimp. Let’s go through some critical steps in a real 21st-century regime change. Here is what a real “unitary executive” would do if he was a real “dictator on the first day.” Libs: if you are used to squeaking fearfully about far-right conservatives, this very reasonable and if anything mild program will make your prostate gland quiver.  And yet, nobody needs to get shot—or even thrown out on the street. While there are many things to say against a government running on a soft currency, the power to print money sure makes it easy to run a regime change. All the civil soldiers of the old regime—and there are a lot of them—can be severed very gently from their positions. [...] Of course, journalism is just one category of education. While education (and even religion) are long-term responsibilities of government, they are not immediate needs in the same way as, say, nutrition. The exception is their function as daycare—for which we can do what we did during Covid. If you are a caregiver who needs to stay home because schools are closed, you should get your current salary to homeschool—at least until the new schools are spun up. [...] Finally, once the new regime has universally demonstrated the incompetence of the old regime, both through historical re-education and by its own vastly superior performance, any remaining interest in reversing the transition will belong to antiquarian cranks. There are still people today who want to restore the Holy Roman Empire, or Covid masks, or something. Whatevs. [...] “No widespread or systematic execution” is a hell of a standard. Covid doesn’t put everyone on a ventilator, either. So everyone should get Covid?

Every accusation is, indeed, a confession apparently.

The idea that the right and conservatives are just against disruption, and that protecting people from covid was just too disruptive to be tolerated, is clearly simply pure bullshit. (Of course we already knew that.) They’re all for disrupting the status quo if it serves elite interests - a revolution to thwart any attempt at democratic government oversight of business or to protect public safety.

I seriously suggest that whenever there’s opposition to single payer health insurance in the U.S., and some conservative comes along railing about the jobs that will be lost in the private health insurance industry, even though it will likely mean people just move from one job to another because it’s not like there will be less patients… I suggest saving this quote of Curtis Yarvin: “One big company is going out of business—another is being founded. No one is being dragged away and shot.”

The weird part here is of course that the right-wing cohorts are actually suggesting “live streamed swatting raids” — according to Ivan Raiklin they’ll be carried out by deputized anti-vaxxers at the county level. I don’t know who needs to hear this but typically swatting raids involve guns, and surprise raids with guns usually at least sometimes involve people being shot and or dragged away. These operations rarely stay neatly confined when you’re dealing with, as Rwandan Jill D. Rutaremara described in a masters thesis: “the interests and fears of the masses, and why they responded to genocide ideology and elite incitement.” And, after all — “No widespread or systematic execution” is a hell of a standard.

They already for a long time have deployed astroturf activism to serve anti-regulation interests. They don’t want oversight by the people. But anti-government doesn’t mean anti-governance, because it appears that they want to install full corporate control by elite CEOs exercising power like a boss in the round the clock lives of all of us. They always say you’re free because you can quit your job any time. But can you quit a monopoly? Matt Stoller says no, that’s what makes monopolies an authoritarian governance — it’s totalitarianism.

These people are not willing to tolerate mitigation measures that might remind people of danger and might quell interest in shopping in person, and are against remote work because it threatens commercial real estate interests. But in an authoritarian regime change — they would totally bring it.

The “Dark Elf” Leading Tech’s Extreme Right w/ Julia Black - Tech Won’t Save Us - Oct 17 Part One: Curtis Yarvin: The Philosopher Behind J.D. Vance | Behind the Bastards - Sep 18 Part Two: Curtis Yarvin: The Philosopher Behind J.D. Vance | Behind the Bastards - Sep 20

If you’re wondering where JD Vance got his idea that a little monarchy might be good for America — these people are on the same page. They possibly see themselves as aristocrats, like those from the 1700s, who viewed as a possible threat, so-called tyranny from below - equality and democracy is seen as that by aristocrats. I’ve mentioned before that the billionaire cryptocurrency proponent Balaji Srinivasan was supposed to be the Trump pick to run the FDA back in 2017, favoured by Peter Thiel, because of course he’s anti-regulation. So Elon Musk isn’t the only billionaire up for cabinet positions. This guy had also claimed back in late 2020 that broken trust in the pandemic that supposedly led to anti-mask sentiments could be solved with blockchain — you really can’t make this stuff up. Gil Duran reported that Srinivasan said “No Blues should be welcomed there” - meaning in San Francisco - referring to Democrats. And on the Tim Ferriss Show interview from 2022, Srinivasan got details about the Lance Armstrong doping timeline wrong, and admitted that he probably was getting things wrong (multiple times in the same interview). He references Andrew Huberman positively — that’s the scientist influencer from Stanford who has a podcast that promotes unregulated supplements that are unproven and dubious, and who was revealed as a serial liar in his personal life and who repeatedly recounted an apparently made up clinical study about sunscreen. And Srinivasan says we should view doping in a positive way, saying: "So in the same way, once we flip that moral premise and say optimalism good, enhancement good, then we start shifting it out of Game of Shadows and Soviets and the doping scandals and cheating, all those negative adjectives and we start going to the positive stuff of what Huberman is doing and what David Sinclair is doing. And so on and so forth. The reason I just want to identify this, I actually think that moral language, that moral premise, is everything and it’s often not articulated."

Performance drugs, pseudoscience, re-education, and a tycoon-run monarchy corporate government. What could possibly go wrong?

Apparently the revolution will be gaslit.

The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smallest details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent or disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing. And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. — Bob Black

(crossposted)