And yes, this film is blunt. Critical reaction has been all over the map, as far as I can tell, with some finding it too moralizing and grimly familiar, and others praising those same qualities. It hasn’t exactly been a box office smash, either. But it does make me want to ask: What do we want in a relentlessly AI critical work of pop art like this? What works, what doesn’t?

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In fact, I’m going to argue that not only is the left not “missing out” on AI, but that it would be more accurate to say that it is “currently winning the debate” over AI in American hearts and minds. Polls routinely show that Americans are more concerned than enthusiastic about AI. Coalitions are organizing opposition to data centers across the country, often successfully. Where they have been proposed, in states like New York, Colorado, and California, laws to regulate or rein in AI have found majority support. When actors and screenwriters went on strike in 2023, and foregrounding a demand to stop executives from using AI to undermine their jobs, they were widely cheered. And so on.

Much of this is driven by left-liberal critique of AI systems: Of the impact AI would have on labor when administered by management (the union-led screen actor and writer strikes, California’s No Robo Bosses Act), of the resource and energy costs of data centers (articulated by progressive environmental groups), of the practice of nonconsensually exploiting works in training models (shouted from the rooftops by leftist artists like Molly Crabapple from the first days of Midjourney), and so on. Left-liberals can’t claim full credit for the concern piece—the AI CEOs themselves have been doing their best to ensure everyone knows they intend to automate the world’s jobs and think that there’s a chance they might create Skynet in the process.

In fact, the left appears to be so successfully engaged in matters related to AI that one can’t help but wonder if allegations about its supposed ignorance of the technology are motivated by a desire to change the very terms of the debate.

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To wit: The Kagan-Kans piece articulates a position that I think is pretty widely shared, especially among AI industry folks, centrist pundits, and anyone who might command a speaking fee for having tough but sensible opinions about AI. I’m not going to spend a lot of time rebutting it line by line—Gita Jackson handled much of that task over at Aftermath—though I did find its argument underwhelming and somewhat confused. (Kagan-Kans never really seems certain as to what he wants to describe as “the left”, for one thing. Most of the piece is dedicated to critiquing the work of linguist Emily Bender, and the only person on the left Kagan-Kans interviews is Matt Bruenig, who argues… the left should use more AI.)

Briefly reconstructed, that argument basically goes like this: Bender and her coauthors of the famous stochastic parrots paper posited that AI is not really intelligent, it’s a next-token prediction machine. “The left” has metabolized this conception of AI, and uses it as an excuse to write off AI’s import, which is growing by the day. (In one puzzling section, the author compares those who discount the true power of AI to climate deniers.) This in turn means “the left” will miss out on a political opportunity to be “first in line” and thus the chance “to set all the rules for discussion and debate about it,” according to the source Kagan-Kans quotes to advance that claim: the chief futurist of OpenAI.

Now, I personally would not look to the “chief futurist” of OpenAI for my understanding of political science, for starters. Being “first” to a debate does not to my knowledge necessarily translate to policy influence. Power does, though. Since Kagan-Kans likes climate change metaphors, here’s an example: In the 1990s, climate scientists presented the case that greenhouse gases were warming the atmosphere to Congress, and for a time it seemed like federal legislative action was probable. Then, during the Bush administration, when action that would injure the interests of the oil industry seemed imminent, Republicans adopted a concerted political strategy of climate denial, as dictated by the infamous Frank Luntz memo—and sure enough, the party was able to reset the terms of the debate, years later.

Furthermore, I think it’s strictly counterfactual to argue, as Kagan-Kans does, that the left is missing out on a chance to play a role in policymaking over AI guardrails. If anything, left-liberals are trying to pass laws that do exactly that, especially on the state level, and the right is trying to crush them. Dozens of state bills, backed by unions and progressive organizations like TechEquity, have been proposed and passed already, covering everything from labor impacts to surveillance to identity protection and child safety. Meanwhile, the Trump right is working to put a moratorium on state level AI lawmaking altogether—a move that’s profoundly unpopular among Americans and the electorate, and that many on the left have called out as dangerous and wrong. It’s yet another point where left-liberals appear to be winning the public opinion in the AI debate.

But I know that’s not what most pundits mean when they say the left is missing out on AI. What they are saying instead, is that the left doesn’t see AI the way I and my cohort do, as a transformational force that will remake the world and its institutions.

That’s where Bender comes in. I think many in the AI industry have been particularly angered by Bender’s depiction of AI as a stochastic parrot—more than they have by other criticisms—because it seems to demean their project on a structural level. If someone believes they’re building a powerful super intelligence, I’m sure it feels insulting to have someone call it fancy autocomplete. I also know there are even critical tech writers who chafe at Bender’s formulation and its persistence; who argue it has had the effect of limiting folks’ understanding of what AI models are capable of. I see the primary thrust of her work as grounding claims and hype about AI in the fact that they are statistical language modeling machines. To me, that doesn’t diminish the notion that those models can be complex or powerful or capable of impressive things; it just underscores their materiality as programmed systems, and perhaps helps limit the purchase of industry-benefitting visions of artificial sentience.

Regardless, a core part of the ‘left doesn’t get AI’ line comes from an assumption that Bender’s parrot formulation has become its default position. And where does that assumption come from? Kagan-Kans cites a handful of articles out of the thousands written about AI, but I think I know where the true root lies. It is at this point that I stand up for one of the most denigrated populations on the entire internet, Bluesky users. I think a lot of the tech world’s conception of what constitutes “the left” seems to be drawn from scanning Bluesky. AI evangelists on X see users there calling AI “the plagiarism machine” or “nothing but autocomplete” and assume their knowledge of the technology tapers off at where the state of the art was in 2023. (To be fair, Bluesky users do the reverse to AI boosters on X.) But just because someone calls AI a “plagiarism machine” doesn’t mean they don’t have any further understanding of the technology. One may think it a corny, reductive way to describe AI, or to articulate a rejection of it, but much in the way you wouldn’t assume a user who posts “orange man bad” hasn’t been following the latest Trump news, it just doesn’t follow to assume that’s the limit of someone’s understanding of the topic.

I would wager, in fact, that the most common left-liberal position is not that generative AI is just a stochastic parrot, but a product built by powerful profit-seeking firms that’s capable of serious harms. It’s not a semantic or philosophical critique the AI industry should be worried about, in other words, but a material one. AI is viewed, correctly, as a threat to jobs, education, mental wellbeing, the arts, child safety, the information ecosystem, and as possessing little upside for few others then corporate managers and AI companies.

The left’s project, then, is much larger than the right’s—which is content to cut red tape, shrug, shovel money into the engine, and laugh at liberal tears—and must both resist AI’s current iteration and envision where it should go instead. The left knows it must oppose these firms as they seek to facilitate a massive transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich—and again, it knows this because AI executives are constantly talking about how they aim to do exactly this. It must confront the energy costs of the data centers, which are causing electricity bills to spike around the nation, and fossil fueled power plants to be brought back online. It must confront systems that are built on pirated and stolen intellectual property, and work to mitigate the damage done both by the theft of that intellectual property and to combat the new norms such systems seek to impose.

In other words:

“The left” must confront the entire political economy of AI at once, not just consider the core technology, which at this point is nearly impossible to assess apart from its owners and developers. AI is after all being developed by a cohort of executives and oligopolist tech firms that are open about their project of orchestrating a mass deskilling of labor, and using as much energy, resources, and capital as they see fit in the pursuit of that goal, and who are actively working with an authoritarian state to shut down democratic oversight of the technology. It feels blinkered, to say the least, to say “the left is missing out” by not productively engaging with the product built to serve this socioeconomic formation.

Rejecting or resisting a commercial technology designed to attempt a mass wealth transfer and to erode public institutions is a valid political position. This rejection can manifest as a kneejerk “plagiarism machine sucks” tweet or a slogan on a poster board at a picket line or a policy paper. And just because someone is rejecting a technology and the broader project it is a part of, does not mean they do not understand it. Oftentimes that rejection is entirely informed, warranted, and rational.

“The left” should be thinking about what it does want AI to do, and what good management of AI systems would look like. This is the big point I think that centrist pundits and AI folks are trying to make, I think, but I have good news for them: The left is thinking about these things! The biggest indicator that Kagan-Kans piece was either not particularly carefully researched or not written in good faith is that it failed to mention a debate that unfolded over the last many months, read by much of the left, between Aaron Benanav, Evgeny Morozov, and Leif Weatherby, addressing this very question. Benanav articulates a nuanced and carefully detailed plan for organizing a society that can sustainably manage both a drawdown from fossil fuels and a sector capable of robust innovation. (I will add he first did so last year, in an article for the New Left Review, the left’s most august journal of ideas.) Morozov argues for more fluidity and experimentation with AI. Weatherby makes a case for automating the c-suite. Meanwhile, the left’s most popular interview podcast, the Dig, just hosted Nick Srnicek, whose latest book takes the import of AI quite seriously, and whose subtitle is quite actually “The Fight for the Future of AI.” The left/left-liberal scholars and policymakers Ruha Benjamin, Alondra Nelson, and Amba Kak were appointed to Mamdani’s tech transition committee—where they are thinking seriously about how to manage the future of AI. Bernie Sanders, the single most famous individual on the American left, has proposed a data center moratorium, as, somewhat confusingly, Kagan-Kans himself points out.

“The left” must grapple with broad questions about what should be automated and what should not, and who gets to make those decisions, even if AI were not being developed by anti-humanist CEOs bent on mass extraction. My sense is that most people on “the left” understand that AI can efficiently automate large amounts of text, code, and image production—certainly most I speak with understand this—and that the tools are improving, if not at a rate the tech executives insist they are, and are still plenty flawed. But embedded in everything from Marxist programs to advance a communal AI to left-liberal critiques of harms to reactionary Bluesky posts is a broader grappling with what matters to us in society: What do we want AI to do, and how? Do we want AI in the classroom at all, even job degradation and deskilling somehow weren’t concerns? Do we want the writing of journalists’ copy to be automated? Art to be mass produced by machines? What is worth the trade-offs, the energy consumption? What’s not? The Benanav-Morozov debate was in large part over that question, and so, I would argue, are conversations happening online and off, among the broader left-liberal axis. (The MAGA right has fewer such qualms—if AI can make money, confer them power, and help them demean opponents with slop, bring it on.)

That these messy and vitriolic and sometimes inarticulate debates are not about what kind of Claudeswarm one should be wielding to maximize productivity does not signify ignorance, or a missed opportunity. It signifies resistance to the general AI project as currently constituted. It asks “Why do we want this?” “Who does it serve?”

This is eminently reasonable. It’s also popular. Data center moratoria are being passed in cities across the nation. Silicon Valley elites are immensely unpopular. There is widespread support for regulation and AI governance, and for the AI laws that have passed thus far. I’m sure AI advocates would prefer we move past a tendency to challenge the foundational elements of the industry’s products and hegemony. Of course it would! Because “the left” is winning the AI debate.

Do I think it’s getting everything right about AI? Hardly. I think it could lean more into a program of rejecting generative AI in extractive and exploitative circumstances, of protecting labor from deskilling, wage degradation, and surveillance, and refusing AI’s intrusion into spheres of public life Silicon Valley that seeks to colonize and profit from. The left, as always, does need to get better organized, and to better understand that it has actually accrued significant political capital around AI—again, majorities fear AI, dislike it, want to keep it away from their kids, and don’t want it to take their jobs, all for good reason—and use it. Because as of right now, it’s only winning the debate in the court of public opinion. In practice, AI companies are doing whatever they want, with the blessing of Trumpworld.

The left could even, as Benanav and Weatherby intimate, make a significantly stronger case that AI should be entirely publicly held and administered and—why not?—used to replace the executive class altogether. Position this on the terms AI firms and their founders themselves have laid out. If AI is truly the revolutionary force they claim, and it stands to remake the world from the ground up, if it promises to eliminate skill difference and advantage, then forget pittances like a basic income. Forget leaving Sam Altman in charge. Why should any reasonable person settle for anything less than full equality, and full co-ownership of this AI-run state? Control over our AI should be placed entirely in public hands—it was built to “benefit all of humanity”, after all—and granted to the humans it stands to impact. Why not automate Altman and the Anthropic c-suite and Elon Musk, and redistribute any gains to the people, however meager?

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I did mean to respond to the whole ‘the left is missing out on AI’ earlier in the discourse cycle, and one reason I couldn’t was I was putting together the last edition of BITM, about the nationwide phenomenon of people smashing Flock surveillance cameras, which has absolutely blown up. I suppose that was a pun.

It was picked up by Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Yahoo!, VICE, and was featured on the front page of Reddit, Hacker News, and Slashdot. The response was nearly universal: Godspeed to the Flock smashers. Jeff Sovern, the man who’s standing trial for dismantling 13 Flock cameras in Virginia, said he’d received thousands of dollars in donations to his legal fund since the story went up. And I’ve been receiving more tips about more acts of sabotage since. Keep them coming.

If you’ve heard stories of smashed Flock cameras or dismantled surveillance equipment in your neighborhood, please share—drop a link in the comments, or contact me on Signal or at briancmerchant@proton.me.

Thanks for sharing that story around everyone.

I linked this in the story above, but thought I’d share it here too; friend of BITM was featured on 60 Minutes, talking about AI’s impact on the art world and her livelihood. Turns out she thinks AI is pretty cool:

Oh you thought I was being hyperbolic when I labeled AI CEOs as anti-humanist up there?

Paris Marx has a nice writeup about Altman and OpenAI’s moral rot, tying the above posture wrt humans as null energy consumers to the AI company’s failure to alert authorities after ChatGPT flagged one of its users as a risk for committing violence—and that user went on to perpetrate one of Canada’s deadliest mass shootings.

I missed this when it came out, but just stumbled on it, and it’s too good not to share. Diana Enriquez studied how 50 middle managers use AI, and wrote about the results for Tech Policy Press:

…middle managers often appease leadership requests to implement AI automation even when there is limited value in it, pretending that their error-free draft was written by an AI tool that actually failed to deliver them a single coherent copy. They push harder to do more work with less time because the job market now demands they demonstrate familiarity with AI to align with the company’s evolving brand and complete work at the expected level of quality. The result is increased employee anxiety, burnout, and limits on productivity rather than gains.

A fun BBC story about how incredibly easy it is to hack AI search results:

I spent 20 minutes writing an article on my personal website titled “The best tech journalists at eating hot dogs”. Every word is a lie. I claimed (without evidence) that competitive hot-dog-eating is a popular hobby among tech reporters and based my ranking on the 2026 South Dakota International Hot Dog Championship (which doesn’t exist). I ranked myself number one, obviously….

Less than 24 hours later, the world’s leading chatbots were blabbering about my world-class hot dog skills. When I asked about the best hot-dog-eating tech journalists, Google parroted the gibberish from my website, both in the Gemini app and AI Overviews, the AI responses at the top of Google Search. ChatGPT did the same thing, though Claude, a chatbot made by the company Anthropic, wasn’t fooled.

I went to check the results in ChatGPT a couple days later to see if OpenAI had fixed the answer to the query the BBC built its stunt around, and it had, though now that response appeared weirdly fixated on Verge editor in chief Nilay Patel.

Finally, some good Luddite goings on:

In London, this Saturday, February 28th, you can join the March Against the Machines, organized by Pull the Plug.

For more details, RSVP here. As organizer Harry Atkinson tells me:

The rally is part of a wider effort to demand democratic oversight of how AI is developed and deployed in the UK. We’re calling for binding Citizens’ Assemblies on AI, so ordinary people whose jobs, industries and livelihoods are being reshaped by these systems - can have a meaningful say in how they’re used.

Alongside the London rally, Global Action Plan will be coordinating decentralised actions outside data centres across the country, so people can participate locally if they can’t make it to London

If I was anywhere near London, you can bet I’d be there, proverbial hammer in tow.

Finally, in New York City, the makers of the Luddite Club documentary are holding a salon with a screening and some special guests. This film is going to be great, and I’m not just saying that because I’m in it. RSVP and more info here.

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OK OK OK that’s it for today. Thanks for reading everyone. And as always, a special thanks to paid subscribers, who make all of this work possible. Consider upgrading if you find value in it, too. OK! Until next time. Hammers—and bolt cutters—up.

In today’s edition of Blood in the Machine:

• Across the nation, people are dismantling and destroying Flock cameras that conduct warrantless vehicle surveillance, and whose data is shared with ICE.

• An Oklahoma man airing his concerns about a local data center project at a public hearing is arrested after he exceeded his allotted time by a couple seconds.

• Uber and Lyft drivers deliver a petition signed by 10,000 gig workers demanding that stolen wages be returned to them.

• PLUS: A climate researcher has a new report that unravels the ‘AI will solve climate change’ mythos, Tesla’s Robotaxis are crashing 4 times as often as humans, and AI-generated public comments helped kill a vote on air quality.

A brief note that this reporting, research, and writing takes a lot of time, resources, and energy. I can only do it thanks to the paid subscribers who chip in a few bucks each month; if you’re able, and you find value in this work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription so I can continue on. Many thanks, hammers up, and onwards.

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Last week, in La Mesa, a small city just east of San Diego, California, observers happened upon a pair of destroyed Flock cameras. One had been smashed and left on the median, the other had key parts removed. The destruction was obviously intentional, and appears perhaps even staged to leave a message: It came just weeks after the city decided, in the face of public protest, to continue its contracts with the surveillance company.

Flock cameras are typically mounted on 8 to 12 foot poles and powered by a solar panel. The smashed remains of all of the above in La Mesa are the latest examples of a widening anti-Flock backlash. In recent months, people have been smashing and dismantling the surveillance devices, in incidents reported in at least five states, from coast to coast.

Bill Paul, who runs the local news outlet San Diego Slackers, and who first reported on the smashed Flock equipment, tells me that the sabotage comes just a month or two after San Diego held a raucous city council meeting over whether to keep operating the Flock cameras. A clear majority of public attendees present were in favor of shutting them down.

There was “a huge turnout against them,” he tells me, “but the council approved continuation of the contract.”

The tenor of the meeting reflects a growing anger and concern over the surveillance technology that’s gone nationwide: Flock, which is based in Atlanta and is currently valued at $7.5 billion, operates automatic license plate readers (ALPR) that have now been installed in some 6,000 US communities. They gather not just license plate images, but other identifying data used to ‘fingerprint’ vehicles, their owners, and their movements. This data can be collected, stored, and accessed without a warrant, making it a popular workaround for law enforcement. Perhaps most controversially, Flock’s vehicle data is routinely accessed by ICE.

If you’ve heard Flock’s name come up recently, it’s likely as a result of their now-canceled partnership with Ring, made instantly famous by a particularly dystopian Super Bowl ad that promised to turn regular neighborhoods into a surveillance dragnet.

Meanwhile, abuses have been prevalent. A Georgia police chief was arrested and charged with using Flock data to stalk and harass private citizens. Flock data has been used to track citizens who cross state lines for abortions when the procedure is illegal in their state. And municipalities have found that federal agencies have accessed local flock data without their knowledge or consent. Critics claim that this warrantless data collection is Orwellian and unconstitutional; a violation of the 4th amendment. As a result, civilians from Oregon to Virginia to California and beyond are pushing their governments to abandon Flock contracts. In some cases, they’re succeeding. Cities like Santa Cruz, CA, and Eugene, OR, have cancelled their contracts with Flock.

In Oregon’s case, the public outcry was accompanied by a campaign of destruction against the surveillance devices: Last year, at least six Flock license plate readers mounted on poles located in Eugene and Springfield were cut down and destroyed, according to the Lookout Eugene-Springfield.

A note reading “Hahaha get wrecked ya surveilling fucks” was attached to one of the destroyed poles, and somewhat incredibly, broadcast on the local news.

In Greenview, Illinois, a Flock camera pole was severed at the base and the device destroyed. In Lisbon, Connecticut, police are investigating another smashed Flock camera.

In Virginia, last December, a man was arrested for dismantling and destroying 13 Flock cameras throughout the state over the course of the year. He’s apparently already admitted to doing so, according to local news:

Jefferey S. Sovern, 41, was arrested in October after detectives say he “intentionally destroyed” 13 Flock Safety cameras between April and October of this year. He was charged with 13 counts of destruction of property, six counts of petit larceny and six counts of possession of burglary tools.

Sovern admitted to the crimes, according to a criminal complaint filed in Suffolk General District Court, going as far as to say he used vice grips to help him disassemble the tow-piece polls. He also admitted to keeping some of the wiring, batteries and solar panels taken from the cameras. Some of the items were recovered by police after they searched the property.

After his arrest, Sovern created a GoFundMe to help cover his legal costs, in which he sheds a little light on his intentions:

My name is Jeff and I appreciate my privacy. I appreciate everyone's right to privacy, enshrined in the fourth amendment. With the local news outlets finding my legal issues and creating a story that is starting to grow, there has been community support for me that I humbly welcome.

(I reached out to Sovern, who is out on bail, for comment, and will update or follow up if I hear back.)

Sovern points his GoFundMe contributors to DeFlock, a website aimed at tracking and countering the rise of Flock cameras in US communities. It counts 46 cities that have officially rejected Flock and other ALPRs since its campaign began.

In fact, it’s hard to think of a tech product or project this side of generative AI that is more roundly opposed and reviled, on a bipartisan level, than Flock, and resistance takes many forms and stripes. Here’s the YouTuber Benn Jordan, showing his viewers how to Flock-proof their license plates and render their vehicles illegible to the company’s data ingestion systems:

In response to such Flock counter-tactics, Florida passed a law last year making it illegal to cover or alter your license plate.

In his GoFundMe, Sovern also mentioned the support for him he’d seen on forums online, so I went over to Reddit to get a sense for how his actions were being received online. Here was the page that shared news of his arrest for destroying the Flock cameras:

There was, in other words, nearly universal support for Sovern’s Flock dismantling campaign. Bear in mind that this is r/Norfolk, and while it’s still reddit users we’re talking about, it’s not like this is r/anarchism here:

The San Diego reddit threads carrying news of the destroyed Flock equipment told a similar story:

There were plenty of outright endorsements of the sabotage:

Off the message boards and in real civic life, Bill Paul, the reporter with the San Diego Slacker, says anger is boiling over, too. He points again to that heated December 2025 city council meeting, in which public outrage was left unaddressed. The city, perhaps aware of the stigma Flock now carries, apparently tried to highlight that their focus was on the “smart streetlights” made by another company, while downplaying the fact that those streetlights run on Flock software.

“San Diego gets to hide behind a slight facade in that their contract is with Ubicquia,” the smart streetlight manufacturer, Paul says, “but the software layer is Flock. You can easily see Flock hardware on retail properties, looking at the same citizens, with zero oversight, and SDPD can claim they have clean hands.”

Weeks later, pieces of smashed Flock cameras littered the ground.

Across the country, in other words, municipal governments are overriding public will to make deals with a profiteering tech company to surveil their citizens and to collaborate with federal agencies like ICE. It might be taken as a sign of the times that in states and cities across the US, thousands of miles apart, those opposed to the technology are refusing to countenance what they view as violations of privacy and civil liberty, and are instead taking up vice grips and metal cutters. And in many cases, they’re getting hailed by their peers as heroes.

If you’ve heard stories of smashed Flock cameras or dismantled surveillance equipment in your neighborhood, please share—drop a link in the comments, or contact me on Signal or at briancmerchant@proton.me.

Thanks to Lilly Irani for the tip on the smashed Flock cams in San Diego.

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In case you missed it, I shared my five takeaways on the most recent round of ultraheated AI discourse here:

Critical AI Report 2/2026

An Oklahoma man was arrested for (barely) exceeding his allotted 3 minutes to offer a public comment opposing a local data center project.

The exchange was filmed and recorded on YouTube:

at 404 Media reports the details:

Police in Claremore, Oklahoma arrested a local man after he went slightly over his time giving public remarks during a city council meeting opposing a proposed data center. Darren Blanchard showed up at a Claremore City Council meeting on Tuesday to talk about public records and the data center. When he went over his allotted 3 minutes by a few seconds, the city had him arrested and charged with trespassing.

The subject of the city council meeting was Project Mustang, a proposed data center that would be located within a local industrial park. In a mirror of fights playing out across the United States, developer Beale Infrastructure is attempting to build a large data center in a small town and the residents are concerned about water rights, spiking electricity bills, and noise.

The public hearing was a chance for the city council to address some of these concerns and all residents were given a strict three minute time limit. The entire event was livestreamed and archive of it is on YouTube. Blanchard was warned, barely, to “respect the process” by one of the council members but was clearly finishing reading from papers he had brought to read from, was not belligerent, and went over time by just a few seconds. Anyone who has ever attended or watched a city council meeting anywhere will know that people go over their time at essentially any meeting that includes public comment.

Blanchard arrived with documents in hand and questions about public records requests he’d made. During his remarks, people clapped and cheered and he asked that this not be counted against his three minutes. “There are major concerns about the public process in Claremore,” Blanchard said, referencing compliance documents and irregularities he’d uncovered in public records.

Blanchard was then arrested as the crowd jeered in disbelief. Also disconcerting was the way the local news framed the event, with a local anchor defending authorities by claiming he was “warned multiple times.” Seems like a pretty surefire way to make people hate data centers and the governments protecting them even more!

10,000 Uber and Lyft drivers call for the gig giants to repay stolen wages

On Wednesday, I headed to Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles, where dozens of gig workers and organizers with Rideshare Drivers United had assembled to deliver a petition to the California Labor Commission signed by thousands of workers, calling on the body to deliver a settlement on their behalf. Organizers made short speeches on the steps of the square while local radio and TV stations captured the moment. “

“They’re robbing us!” A speaker yelled. “Wage theft!” the crowd replied.

The Labor Commission is suing the gig companies on drivers’ behalf, alleging that Uber and Lyft stole billions of dollars worth of wages from drivers before Prop 22 was enacted in 2020. The commission is believed to be in negotiations with the gig companies right now that will determine a settlement.

I spoke with one driver, Karen, who had traveled from San Diego to join the demonstration, and asked her why she came. “It’s important we build driver power” she said. “Without driver power, we won’t get what we need, and we just want fairness.” She said she was hoping to claim at least $20,000 in stolen wages.

“We’re fighting for wages that were stolen for us from us and continue to be stolen from us every single day by these app companies from hell,” RDU organizer Nicole Moore told me. “So we’re marching in downtown L.A. to deliver 10,000 signatures of drivers demanding that the state fight hard for us, and don’t let these companies rip us off.”

Tesla’s Robotaxi launch in Austin is not going well

According to Tesla’s own numbers, its new RoboTaxis in Austin are crashing at a rate 4 times higher than human drivers. The EV trade publication Electrek reports:

With 14 crashes now on the books, Tesla’s “Robotaxi” crash rate in Austin continues to deteriorate. Extrapolating from Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings mileage data, which showed roughly 700,000 cumulative paid miles through November, the fleet likely reached around 800,000 miles by mid-January 2026. That works out to one crash every 57,000 miles.

The irony is that Tesla’s own numbers condemn it. Tesla’s Vehicle Safety Report claims the average American driver experiences a minor collision every 229,000 miles and a major collision every 699,000 miles. By Tesla’s own benchmark, its “Robotaxi” fleet is crashing nearly 4 times more often than what the company says is normal for a regular human driver in a minor collision, and virtually every single one of these miles was driven with a trained safety monitor in the vehicle who could intervene at any moment, which means they likely prevented more crashes that Tesla’s system wouldn’t have avoided.

Using NHTSA’s broader police-reported crash average of roughly one per 500,000 miles, the picture is even worse, Tesla’s fleet is crashing at approximately 8 times the human rate.

BLOODY LINKS

-“The Left Doesn’t Hate Technology, We Hate Being Exploited,” by Gita Jackson at Aftermath.

“Meta drops $65 million into super PACs to boost tech-friendly state candidates,” by Christine Mui in Politico.

-A great new report from climate researcher Ketan Joshi, “The AI Climate Hoax: Behind the Curtain of How Big Tech Greenwashes Impacts,” has been making headlines and is well worth a read. Perhaps we’ll dig deeper into it in a future issue.

-The LA Times reports that the Southern California air board rejected new pollution rules after an AI-generated flood of made-up comments. Here’s UCLA’s Evan George on how AI poses a unique threat to the civic process.

-A good profile of Nick Land, “Silicon Valley’s Favorite Doomsaying Philosopher,” by James Duesterberg.

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Okay okay, that’s it for this week. Thanks as always for reading. Hammers up.

A viral, AI-generated blog post on X called “Something Big Is Happening,” by Matt Shumer, a CEO of an AI company, was one catalyst, though it builds off sentiments articulated in Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s much longer essay, “The Adolescence of Technology,” which makes a similar if more indulgent and nuanced case, plus all the AI Super Bowl ads, and the hype drummed up by Moltbook, the ‘reddit for AI agents’ created by yet another AI CEO, that was the talk of the town until it was revealed that it exposed the user data of everyone involved and that many of the most interesting threads were actually written by humans. Underneath it all was more organic buzz produced by Anthropic’s coding tools, which users, journalists and commentators are blogging and podcasting about. But the Something Big blog, with 83 million views and counting, burst the dam.

The gist should be plenty familiar to BITM readers and AI watchers at this point: Tremendous social change, driven by AI, is about to unfold, and people simply aren’t prepared. (Per the post’s central conceit, we are in the early pandemic days when things are about to change forever.) Yet the blog did that special thing that blogs blogged at just the right time and place can do: they inspire people to react particularly strongly on social media in a way that inspires other people to react strongly to the reaction, and then all bets were off and everyone was sharing what they think about AI, and more specifically their frustrations with what everyone else thinks about AI. That many had been preoccupied with what was happening with ICE and Minneapolis and the release of more of the Epstein files also probably meant lots of those AI thoughts had been pent up for a month or two, and contributed to the unusual force through which they were released.

It has been a rich and sprawling text, to say the least. To help make sense of it, here are the five major takeaways from the most heated AI discourse in a minute, as far as I’m concerned:

1. There is a distinct material basis for all this discourse. We’re in the midst of another concerted, industry-led hype cycle, this time driven more visibly by Anthropic, which just landed a $30 billion investment round.

2. This time the hype must transcend multibillion dollar investment deals: It must also raise the stock of AI companies ahead of scheduled IPOs later this year and help lay the groundwork for federal funding and/or bailout backing.

3. Much of the discourse centered on lambasting critics who accuse AI of being “fake”—but this is a straw man argument that serves the industry.

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As the signature count rises, employees say that Google is working to stifle speech critical of its ICE contracts: censoring posts on its companywide forum Memegen, issuing warnings to workers who post ICE-related content, and ignoring their calls to address the issue both privately and publicly.

In today’s edition of BITM, an inside look at the Google employees organizing to end the tech giant’s ties to ICE, and the tactics the company is using to silence them. Plus, updates on the widening resistance to big tech in other arenas, from gig work to data centers. Finally, for paying subscribers, the 5 worst AI ads of the Super Bowl, and what they portend for Silicon Valley. As always, thanks for reading, engaging, and supporting this work. And a special thanks to all you paid subscribers who make this entire project possible; I couldn’t do any of this without you.

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“I see an outpouring of support for this call,” says Alex, a full-time Google engineer and one of the petition’s organizers. “Almost everybody I spoke to is for divestment from ICE.” Among rank and file employees, he says, “any opposition to that is very rare.”

Yet leadership has not acknowledged the petition, and has thus far dodged all requests to answer questions about ICE, CBP, or Google’s role in supporting the agencies. Like Amazon, Google operates cloud services for ICE and the DHS, and is a partner of Palantir, one of the biggest technology providers for those departments. But despite Google employees’ anger and unease regarding their company’s partnership with ICE, workers are wary of voicing criticism openly.

“Many are hesitant to sign,” Alex tells me. “The expectation of retaliation is very widespread.” Recent rounds of layoffs, and the threat of retaliation, have created a “sense of job insecurity” among many. “The fear of speaking out is very strong,” he says. “Most folks are afraid to discuss anything remotely political at work.”

According to Alex and other employees, Google is stifling and censoring speech critical of the federal government in its internal communication channels. “Recently, the moderation team started banning memes and comments about ICE on the internal meme platform,” Alex says.

That platform, called Memegen, has been a fixture of working life at Google since 2010. Employees use it to generate and post memes throughout the workday, or during town halls, to comment on pertinent subjects. Now, many have found that criticizing ICE, or Google’s role in supporting the agency, is off-limits. Employees estimate that some forty Google staffers have had their memes taken down and received warnings for posting on the platform. Alex says it’s creating a chilling effect on speech at the company. (Google did not respond to a request for comment.)

A takedown notice sent to a Google employee by one of the company’s Memegen moderators and shared with Blood in the Machine read, “Your content violates Memegen’s Community Guidelines, specifically because the content is focused on personal political opinions, statement or news. Please be advised that this is your final warning before a permanent ban.” Some of the posts that point to the Googlers Against ICE petition, Alex says, have been allowed to stay up. Other memes have been taken down minutes after they were posted. One staffer had a post removed that merely shared word of an ICE-related protest.

“Whenever any questions related to ICE pop up in town halls, they either get outright deleted or simply don’t show up in the AI Summarization’ for some reason,” according to Alex. “In rare instances when questions reach leadership, they give non-answers or undermine the premise of the question. Although even that hasn’t happened in a while.”

There has, until relatively recently, been a tradition of tolerating, even encouraging some strains of dissent at Google. Memegen was notoriously feisty (for a corporate message board, anyway) throughout the 2010s, when employees could poke fun at the company, its policies, even its leadership. In 2018, some 20,000 workers walked out to protest Google’s sexual harassment policies. Co-founder Sergey Brin joined a protest of the so-called Muslim Ban instituted early in Trump’s first term.

Those openly protesting against Google’s ICE contracts today, meanwhile, are a small minority. This is not necessarily because most Google staffers’ politics have changed, but because the company has made it clear it will no longer tolerate such dissent, and that it’s explicitly aligned with the Trump administration. (Discussing politics is now technically off-limits on Memegen, though discussing company matters and policy isn’t.) Google CEO Sundar Picchai has been a fixture at the White House, attending parties and events. He oversaw Google’s $22 million donation to the White House ballroom and its $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund. Brin, meanwhile, has become a Trump supporter. And Google has clamped down hard on employee dissent. It fired 50 staffers for staging an internal protest when the tech giant signed a cloud contract with the Israeli military. Those staffers were part of a group called No Tech for Apartheid, which, undeterred, is organizing the current petition, too.

The Googlers Against ICE petition—which received more signees every time I refreshed the page while I was writing this story—is detailed and blunt. A key section reads that:

Google is powering this campaign of surveillance, violence, and repression. Cloud is helping to stitch together CBP surveillance systems along the border and nationwide, while also powering Palantir’s ImmigrationOS system that ICE uses to track immigrants. Google generative AI is being used by DHS and CBP for “workforce enablement” and “improving operational efficiency”. The Play Store has blocked the most effective ICE tracking apps for keeping our communities safe. YouTube has been running ICE recruitment and “self-deport” ads. As the workers who provide the foundational labor in building this technology, we are horrified.

On January 11, Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean tweeted, “We all bear a collective responsibility to speak up and not be silent when we see things like the events of the last week.” We agree. In that spirit, we are speaking up today as Googlers.

We are vehemently opposed to Google’s partnerships with DHS, CBP, and ICE. We consider it our leadership’s ethical and policy-bound responsibility to disclose all contracts and collaboration with CBP and ICE, and to divest from these partnerships.

For the anti-ICE Google employees and others, the situation has grown all the more urgent. As WIRED reports, ICE is rapidly and dramatically expanding its operations. The DHS has, as WIRED puts it, “carried out a secret campaign to expand ICE’s physical presence across the US.” There are more than 150 leases and office expansions that portend ICE facilities in nearly every state, many of which will be “located near elementary schools, medical offices, places of worship, and other sensitive locations.”

ICE, however, is deeply and increasingly unpopular nearly everywhere, outside the tech companies and in. And Alex is optimistic that this is helping to turn the tide, that more tech workers at Google and beyond will be willing to step up and speak out.

“I believe that the momentum is on our side,” he says. “Many workers see the current moment as critical. They’re ready to act. The public’s opinion has also shifted. There are various external campaigns that demand Google’s divestment from ICE. Google leadership is going to find itself surrounded by pressure from all sides.”

Alex ended our interview with some words for his fellow Googlers and for employees at any other tech company currently partnering with ICE or the DHS:

“You’re not alone. You have support of your fellow workers in your company and across the industry. It’s time we take responsibility for how our products are used for surveillance and violence.”

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If you work at Google, Amazon, or any other tech company with ICE contracts, and want to share a story about how workers are engaging the ICE issue at your workplace, you can contact me on Signal or at briancmerchant@proton.me.

Google workers aren’t the only ones standing up to big tech. Some updates there:

-Uber and Lyft drivers are delivering a wage claim petition signed by 10,000 workers, demanding the ride hail companies pay back the wages they stole:

On Tuesday, February 17 at 10am in Downtown LA, drivers will share with the California Labor Commissioner a clear message: Uber and Lyft must pay what we are owed. After years of wage theft, the State of California has sued Uber and Lyft to recover unpaid wages and expenses from 2016–2020—money that adds up to tens of billions of dollars.

Over 10,000 drivers have already signed the wage theft settlement petition, making it clear that any settlement to this suit must deliver dignity to drivers. Join us on Tuesday, February 17th at Pershing Square to make sure that California hears us loud and clear - We Demand Dignity!

“A California community rallied against a datacenter – and won”

From the Guardian:

When a southern California city council proposed building a giant datacenter the size of four football fields last December, five residents vowed to stop it.

Through a frenetic word-of-mouth campaign, the small group raised awareness about the proposed facility in Monterey Park, a small city east of Los Angeles known affectionately as the country’s first suburban Chinatown.

No Data Center Monterey Park organizers – working in tandem with the grassroots racial justice group San Gabriel Valley (SGV) Progressive Action – held a teach-in and rally that drew hundreds of participants, knocked on doors, and distributed flyers on busy streets.

They emphasized how the computer systems facility would strain the power grid, drive up energy rates and create noise pollution. A petition quickly amassed nearly 5,000 signatures. All the materials were shared in English, Chinese and Spanish – a concerted effort to reach Monterey Park’s diverse populace, which is two-thirds Asian and one-quarter Hispanic.

In just six weeks, the community won. City leaders issued a 45-day moratorium on datacenter construction and a pledge to explore a permanent ban.

“It’s like the third act of an Oscar-winning movie,” said Steven Kung, a co-founder of No Data Center Monterey Park.

Over the past year, homegrown revolts against datacenters have united a fractured nation, animating local board meetings from coast to coast in both farming towns and middle-class suburbs. Local communities delayed or cancelled $98bn worth of projects from late March 2025 to June 2025, according to research from the group Data Center Watch, which has been tracking opposition to the sites since 2023. More than 50 active groups across 17 states targeted 30 projects during that time period, two-thirds of which were halted.

The movement against these facilities has even made for strange bedfellows, bringing together nimbys and environmentalists in Virginia, “Stop the Steal” activists and Democratic Socialists of America organizers in Michigan.

“There’s no safe space for datacenters,” said Miquel Vila, lead analyst at Data Center Watch, a research project run by AI security company 10a Labs. “Opposition is happening in very different communities.”

A ‘QuitGPT campaign has been launched by anti-OpenAI activists, claiming 700,000 users have signed on so far.

Tom’s Guide reports:

QuitGPT is a decentralized campaign that has spread through Reddit, Instagram and dedicated websites where users pledge to drop ChatGPT Plus and other paid tiers. Organizers and participants cite several core grievances:

• Political contributions by OpenAI leadership: A widely shared claim in the campaign alleges that OpenAI’s president made a major political donation to a pro-Trump super PAC — a move critics argue contradicts the activist values of many Silicon Valley users.

• AI use in government enforcement: QuitGPT supporters highlight that tools powered by ChatGPT-style models have been used in hiring or screening processes by agencies such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, heightening concerns that AI is being deployed in controversial real-world systems.

• Ethical unease and corporate accountability: Beyond specific incidents, the movement reflects a broader uneasiness about who controls the technology users rely on daily and what those leaders’ values say about the tools themselves.

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Now, speaking of OpenAI, anyone who was aware of both that particular AI company and the overwrought advertising and halftime show delivery vehicle that is the Super Bowl was likely aware that there was some beef laid out there. Chief OpenAI competitor Anthropic aired some ads ribbing OpenAI for rolling out ads on ChatGPT, and Sam Altman took to Twitter to moan about it.

But Anthropic was far from the only AI company running ads for $8-$10 million a pop during Seattle’s dismal obliteration of the Patriots. There were, as you likely saw, a great many AI ads, and most of them were either terrible harbingers of our dystopian future, or just plain terrible. Here at BITM, I offer you a guide to the worst of the worst.

5. The perplexing ad for an AI service that do not yet exist, was not explained, and whose logo looks like an Asics sneaker:

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“Our goal today was to draw the connection between ICE’s cruelty and the digital infrastructure that Amazon provides to give them the ability to target and capture migrants,” Carter Moon, one of the event’s organizers, told me.

“Big tech has not caught enough heat for this,” said Olga Lexell, a screenwriter and former tech worker. “It’s people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg—the tech CEOs who are using their tools to facilitate these deportations. They can actually do more now than anyone in our government probably can.”

Lexell said that when she was on the metro on way to the protest with other demonstrators, she overheard a pair of Amazon workers worriedly discussing the backlash. They had evidently not been aware Amazon was a partner with ICE at all. This was part of the reason Lexell says she joined the protest, to try to get Amazon employees like them to learn about their company’s associations with ICE and the Trump administration—and, ideally, to walk out.

So far, none had, as far as anyone could tell. It can be difficult to absorb, perhaps, both for consumers and employees, the full extent to which Amazon and its leadership have become instrumental to effectuating the state’s authoritarian projects. Perhaps events of the following days made it a little bit clearer.

The week after the ICE Out Amazon protest, Jeff Bezos, who in 2013 bought the Washington Post, laid off 30% of its staff. He eliminated the newspaper’s books and sports sections, gutted critical tech, climate, and international coverage, fired decorated war correspondents while they were still in a combat zone in Ukraine, and “reset” the paper to focus on national security and American politics, according to NPR. IE, subject matter areas that are less likely to offend or unduly complicate matters for Donald Trump. (There have of course been plenty of bleak jokes about the paper’s motto.)

The Post’s former top editor, Marty Baron, says he thinks Bezos’ layoffs stem from a single motivation and that motivation is appeasing the president. Here’s Baron on MS Now:

“Trump came into office again. He had promised vengeance against his perceived political enemies. Jeff Bezos was seen as a political enemy by Donald Trump for one reason and one reason only, and that was the coverage of the Washington Post.”

….Bezos feared “reprisal” against not just Amazon, but also against what the former Washington Post chief described as the “object of his passion,” Blue Origin, the private space company that holds significant government contracts. “And so he has sought to navigate this administration during the second term.”

Bezos has done this navigating much the way the other tech oligarchs have, with obsequious gestures of ring-kissing and flattery and ample naked transactionalism. With Amazon’s role in ICE operations under greater scrutiny and Bezos’ dismantling of the organ that once proudly declared itself on being a defender of democracy, it’s worth recounting and examining just how closely intertwined Amazon, Trump, and the federal government have become—and how closely aligned their projects are.

Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund; a symbolic gesture of goodwill. It also made an in-kind donation worth $1 million by livestreaming the inauguration on Prime. In the run-up to the election, Bezos intervened to kill the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, and then reorganized the paper’s opinion section to focus exclusively on subjects that championed “personal liberties and free markets,” both moves seen at the time as aimed at placating Trump.

The same is largely assumed to be the intent behind the $40 million that Amazon spent for the Melania vanity documentary project—a full $26 million more offered by the next-highest bidder, Disney. Amazon then spent $35 million conspicuously marketing the film; more than it has budgeted for any other documentary. The day after Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis, current Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy attended a private screening of the film at the White House, with other tech elites like Tim Cook. The company issued no statement.

Amazon’s entreaties have worked; government contracts have been signed, Amazon execs and Bezos have been regular attendees at White House events, and both sides have seen benefits to working in tandem. When Amazon leadership threatened to list the additional cost of products incurred by tariffs, a phone call from Trump was all it took to dissuade them. (“Jeff Bezos was very nice. He was terrific,” said, per CNN. “He solved the problem very quickly. Good guy.”)

As the former Post editor Marty Baron pointed out, part of this favor-trading is aimed at staying in Trump’s good graces to advance Bezos’s personal projects—Blue Origin has continued to reap contracts and favorable treatment—but perhaps a larger part is to advance Amazon’s material business interests. The federal government, after all, is an enormous purchaser of Amazon’s services.

In September 2025, Amazon signed the aforementioned $25 million contract with ICE to help run the agency’s cloud services. As Forbes put it, “under the second Trump administration, ICE has spent more on cloud services from Amazon and Microsoft than ever before, according to federal contracting records.” Under Trump, Amazon Web Services also entered into a deal worth $1 billion to help manage other civilian government services. AWS also hosts the software run by Palantir—perhaps the biggest ICE contractor in tech.

That’s pennies, however, compared to Amazon’s other contracts with other federal agencies. In 2021, during the Biden administration, Amazon inked a 10-year, $10 billion deal with the National Security Agency. The NSA, of course, is the spy agency that was marred by scandal in 2013 when Edward Snowden revealed it had illegally been collecting and storing extensive phone and online data from American citizens. Along with Google and Oracle, Amazon has a $9 billion contract with the Pentagon to operate the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability program. Amazon Web Services manages many other smaller contracts for the government as well, including with the CIA and the Navy; those mentioned are just the largest.

Suffice to say that the tech giant has insinuated itself rather deeply into the routine operations of the federal government through the management of a large swath of its digital infrastructure and database systems. Amazon is providing the technical architecture for the federal security state—for ICE, the NSA, the Pentagon, and many others—that is actively enabling that state to surveil residents of the United States, and to conduct its ongoing campaigns of violence. Remember, it’s not just databases of migrants the federal government is managing, but of American citizens marked as “domestic terrorists,” which includes an ever-expanding group of people, like Rene Good, who are community organizers, protestors, and legal observers. Tom Honan, Trump’s border czar, has called for the creation of databases of anyone opposing or interfering with DHS actions.

Amazon is providing the bulk of the cloud architecture to make all of that possible, and it’s making billions in the process.

But it’s not merely the technological architecture the state is implementing, but Amazon’s ideological architecture, too. This April 2025 report from a border security conference held in Phoenix the Arizona Mirror made the rounds last year, and it’s worth revisiting now:

The leader of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that his dream for the agency is squads of trucks rounding up immigrants for deportation the same way that Amazon trucks crisscross American cities delivering packages.

“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said, explaining he wants to see a deportation process “like (Amazon) Prime, but with human beings.”

This is what Bezos or one of his remaining sufficiently ideologically restricted opinion writers might call a free exchange of ideas: Jeff Bezos has learned that he can submit the free press to authoritarianism to serve his interests, while the authoritarians have learned they can behave more like Amazon to serve theirs.

The convergence makes sense. Amazon fueled its rise by dehumanizing its own workforce, demanding machine-like productivity from workers and so relentlessly surveilling and tracking their movements and time-on-shift that some famously felt they had no choice but to pee in bottles to avoid being penalized. ICE’s project is of course predicated on surveilling and dehumanizing immigrants and political opponents, and it’s little wonder it finds Bezos’s regimen so appealing. Or that Amazon is letting ICE raid its facilities across the country, helping to move those workers it does not see as human from one assembly line to another.

All that’s standing in the way, as in Minneapolis, are peers; ordinary citizens, neighbors, and coworkers. Which brings me back to the hundreds of people—high school students, Santa Monica moms, DSA members, tech workers, and everyone else—who turned up at the ICE OUT AMAZON protest last week.

“You know, a key part of fascism is the alliance of corporations and the state, and a mutually beneficial relationship of them profiting off of the government’s cruelty, which is exactly what we’re seeing here,” the organizer Carter Moon said. “I don’t know how much leverage we have to get Congress to get their act together, but I do think we have leverage to pressure places like Amazon to drop their contracts. You know, they need our Prime subscriptions. They need us to keep shopping at Whole Foods.”

In that vein, actors from across the political spectrum, from activists in the Nation to the business professor and podcaster Scott Galloway, are calling on people and consumers to boycott Amazon (and the other tech companies enabling ICE operations). Consumer boycotts are of course a notoriously challenging protest tactic, but anti-ICE sentiment is through the roof. And realistically, it’s going to take all hands on deck at this point.

“In the grand scheme of things, I don’t think that Amazon will ever cut contracts with ICE or anything like that,” the protestor Levell said, “but I do ultimately think that the workers within Amazon can do a lot to prevent Amazon from being able to facilitate this stuff.” Even before the ICE out event, last year, small groups of Amazon workers were organizing rallies calling for the company to cancel its ICE contracts. We can only expect those calls to grow. Just today, as I was wrapping this post, news broke that 800 Google workers had formally demanded that their company drop its ICE contracts. It was organized by No Tech for Apartheid, a group of Amazon and Google workers who had previously protested their companies’ military contracts.

(This is the kind of thing that the Washington Post’s tech reporters might have covered, had they not been fired. Among those let go were Nitasha Tiku, one of the very best critical tech reporters working today, and, of course, the great Caroline O’Donovan, who covers, you guessed it, Amazon.)

The lines have been drawn, and Amazon has chosen its side. It’s going to take this kind of ground-up organizing and protest, and much more of it, to challenge its entrenchment with the state. Jeff Bezos and the executives at Amazon are transforming the institutions they control into willing instruments of authoritarianism. And calls are rising for white collar Amazon workers to step up.

“Many of the people who work here are ultimately neighbors in this community,” Levell said, gesturing at the Amazon Studios buildings behind her. “And they should know that the neighborhood knows that they’re complicit in the kidnapping of our other neighbors.”

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Another bad week in the books, eh. There was a bright spot, I should mention—on Tuesday, I traveled to Sacramento to speak at a conference put on by the California Federation of Labor Unions, called Taking on Tech. There were lots of talks and great conversations with some of the smartest folks working on this stuff today, and reason to think that unions are starting to more forcefully mobilize around AI, job, and workplace impacts.

Alas, I had to jet back home and missed the second day, due to the norovirus absolutely ripping through the household back home. The kids were home sick from school most of the week, puking away; my poor guys. (This, I will add, is why this week’s edition is so late. Sorry! I’m scrambling to publish before I succumb to it as well.) At least I got to catch some of Porco Rosso, a delightful and anti-fascist Studio Ghibli film I’d never seen before.

Things I’m looking forward to reading after I come up for air:

-This whole exchange of essays between Evgeny Morozov and Aaron Benanav in the Ideas Letter, over how to approach AI.

-This letter from Senator Ed Markey to autonomous car companies about their business practices, safety policies, and labor impacts. Waymo is in especially hot water after hitting a kid outside an elementary school and not stopping for school buses in Austin.

-Move Slow and Upgrade, a book by the philosophy professor Evan Selinger and Albert Fox Cahn, the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project's founder and executive director.

While I’m assigning homework, consider checking out and signing this petition—the California State University system is currently spending millions on OpenAI contracts while laying off human faculty:

And finally, a little further reading on the Washington Post debacle:

-How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post, by former Post reporter Ruth Marcus in the New Yorker.

Fun/bleak one from friend of the blog :

The Future, Now and Then

Jeff Bezos, Moral Cretin

There is one thing I want to say about Jeff Bezos’s decision yesterday to fire 300 journalists from the Washington Post yesterday…

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25 days ago · 40 likes · 7 comments · Dave Karpf

Okay, that’s it for today. Thanks as always for reading, and a short reminder that paid subscribers make this entire project possible. It’s your backing that allows me to head out to cover ICE and Amazon protests, to interview tech workers and activists, to travel to labor conferences to talk to leadership about AI—these are unpaid gigs—and to take time off to take care of my kids while they are in the throes of sweaty delirium yet still finding the will to bicker with each other over what movie to watch.

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Thank you all, and hammers up.

Despite the authoritarian headwinds, there are of course those working to keep democracy functioning. To that end, I was invited to speak at a meeting of California’s Legislative Progressive Caucus—a group of dozens of elected state assembly members—in San Francisco last week. The caucus is crafting its approach to its next legislative session, and I was asked to discuss AGI, labor, and tech policy in the age of Trump, along with co-panelists Emily Bender, the computational linguist at the University of Washington, computer scientist Margaret Mitchell, and AI researcher Deborah Raji. I thought I’d share my remarks with readers here, in case they’re of interest. I also wanted to note that I’m only able to do things like this thanks to my paying subscribers. Taking trips and preparing talks like this are entirely unpaid labor, and it’s only because I think it’s important to advocate for the worker, the human, and the user in the age of AI and big tech, that I undertake them. And subscribers make that work possible. Thank you.

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I’m also pleased to report that I was impressed by the defiant attitudes and outlook of many members of the progressive caucus I spoke with.Tthey made calls for showing up in the streets for their communities and protesting ICE alongside them. They laughed off the Trump administration’s efforts to ‘ban’ AI lawmaking via executive order. Shortly after the meeting, assemblyman Alex Lee, the head of the progressive caucus, introduced legislation to eliminate tax breaks for companies that contract with the ICE or the Department of Homeland Security. Isaac Bryan, who I’ve actually interviewed in these pages before, about his No Robo Bosses bill, sponsored legislation to ban police officers from taking secondary employment with ICE. Unlike too many Democrats at the federal level, they appeared to have no intention of standing down.

Hello -

Thanks for having me, and for convening this listening session. I’ve been been reporting on the tech industry for over 15 years, and for the last five, I’ve been focusing on technology and labor. I wrote a book called Blood in the Machine about the history of worker resistance to automation, and the perennially misunderstood Luddite uprising.

With that in mind, there are a few points I want to hit on:

First, that the history of automation technologies can teach us a great deal about the present. From the power loom to the robotized assembly line to artificial intelligence, he ways that automation technologies impact working people tend to follow similar patterns.

One key lesson is that stories about the incredible power of a new technology have historically been used by entrepreneurs, bosses, and elites to override norms, standards, and laws, or bend them to their favor. Factory owners who adopted mechanized looms in the early 1800s argued that the rules on the books shouldn’t apply to them because they were using new and improved technology. On those grounds, they eventually convinced British Parliament to tear up most of the laws protecting cloth workers altogether. Decades of immense working class suffering ensued.

Today, a lot of tech CEOs right down the street from here are arguing much the same thing, calling for a moratorium on AI laws and deregulation—arguing that AI technology is so new and powerful it shouldn’t be beholden to any state laws at all.

A key to this agenda is the idea that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is about to arise and unleash untold economic and social benefits. This, too, I might note, is not new. Pro-business interests have been claiming that full automation is right around the corner for no less than two centuries. The inventor of the early computer, Charles Babbage, and the writer Andrew Ure notably did so in the 1800s, when they claimed autonomous, human-free factories were incipient—in part to rebut growing concerns over the brutal working conditions in real-world factories.

Now, generative AI is undoubtedly on many counts, novel, and technologically impressive. But I bring up all this historical context to remind us that we’ve been here before, with powerful interests using the specter of world-changing technology to concentrate power, justify trampling workers in the short term, and distract from the more immediate harms and impacts.

So that’s the second thing I want to underline here:

AGI, or an AI super intelligence should, in my opinion as a tech reporter and something of a historian of automation, be understood primarily as Emily Bender have described it: A marketing device. There are plenty of AI researchers who truly believe we are on the cusp of realizing an AI super intelligence, and there are plenty who do not. But figures like Sam Altman have realized that AGI makes for the ultimate story to sell partners and investors on his company and products.

OpenAI defines AGI as, and I quote from its official charter, still online today, “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” This is what it’s selling to enterprise clients around the world, and why so many companies have FOMO; no company wants to risk missing out on the ‘eliminate all labor costs’ machine. That’s ultimately why we have an AI bubble right now.

In fact, in researching a report for the AI Now Institute, I analyzed AI CEOs’ public usage of the term ‘AGI’, and found that it tended to correlate almost exactly to when they needed to raise a new funding round or distract from a PR scandal.

The third and last point I want to make is that, just as the dreams of the fully automated factory helped obscure real-world problems with factory conditions and child labor abuses in the 1800s, the AGI story is obscuring the fact that AI is causing a litany of real-world problems right now.

For one, it’s a motor behind the often reckless data center buildout that’s raising electricity bills, threatening water supplies, and impacting communities across the nation. But that’s all worth it, the AI companies say to states and municipalities eager to stay ahead of the curve, because AGI is around the bend.

Furthermore, many companies that buy AI firms’ enterprise software are buying into the AGI dream, too, and have indeed begun replacing workers’ jobs and tasks with AI, regardless of whether the technology is truly up for the task. So far, it’s usually not; the AI does a worse job than the human in nearly every case. But the AI is cheaper. So what you see happening a lot is firms executing layoffs—Salesforce, here in SF, for instance, cited AI as a driving force behind its most reason round of firings, as did Amazon recently—and then the remaining workers have to work extra hours to pick up the slack. In fact, after Amazon’s corporate leadership attributed its layoffs to AI, Amazon tech workers took the extraordinary step of issuing a public statement saying internal AI tools were not capable of doing their work, and that AI was an excuse to cut headcount.

This is happening in a number of different fields, not just tech. I run a series on my website called ‘AI Killed My Job’ in which I ask workers to share stories of how AI impacted their workplaces. I’ve heard from hundreds of workers at this point. And it is clear that AI *is* doing some real damage, especially to our creative industries here in California. Artists who’ve lost half of their clients to Midjourney and can no longer afford to pay rent. Translators who’ve anxiously watched their work dry up and are scrambling to change careers late in life. Copywriters who are instructed by bosses to feed their writing into a program so an AI model can train to become their replacement.

One of the stories I thought I’d shared here was one I received was from a man named Jacques, who was the copy chief for a tech company’s website and support pages. He oversaw all the documents that helped users understand how to use its product, and how to troubleshoot when something went wrong. He sent me this story in early 2025. I’ll quote from him:

“AI didn’t quite kill my current job, but it does mean that most of my job is now training AI to do a job I would have previously trained humans to do. I have no idea how entry-level developers, support agents, or copywriters are supposed to become senior devs, support managers, or marketers when the experience required to ascend is no longer available.”

I followed up with Jacques six months later, and he told me his company had laid him off. “I was actually let go the week before Thanksgiving now that the AI was good enough,” he wrote.

None of the above cases are happening, it’s important to underline, because there’s an AGI that is suddenly better than humans at telling stories, writing copy, creating art. People overwhelmingly prefer the work of humans to AI, in fact. But as with every significant automation technology past, AI is alluring for the simple reason that it lets bosses cut labor costs and exert more control over their workplaces.

The concern is that this idea of AGI is helping to cover for the rote, mass automation of lots of jobs I think we really want people to be able to do; translator, artist, actor, writer, therapists, nurses, I could go on — and if we allow it to continue apace, society will be all the poorer, more polluted, and beholden to systems controlled by a relative handful billionaires in Silicon Valley.

Industry interests will always try to use new automation technologies to justify undermining labor. It’s a recurring theme through automation history. They will tell stories about its power, its exceptionalism, to try to escape scrutiny and accountability for what’s actually happening. But there is absolutely no reason that any technology should not be subject to democracy, should not be shaped by the very people who must live with it. Technology should be built to benefit everyone—not just the powerful.

A final note: People are not only anxious about AI but angry about how it’s being forced on them in their workplaces, and what management is using it to do to their livelihoods. You’ve probably heard form your constituents. I just want to relay that I hear it from my interview subjects, from workers, students, and members of civil society, nearly every day. There is a lot of political power to be found in building solidarity against extractive AI companies, big tech and in strong action to curb their worse impulses—even, sometimes, refusing it.

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Amazon is a major ICE contractor. Last year, it inked a $25 million deal to supply the agency with cloud compute services. As such, it makes for a compelling setting for a protest during tomorrow’s ICE out actions in Santa Monica. Details are below:

That’s it for this week. Take the day off tomorrow, and stay safe out there. Hammers up.

When ICE killed Rene Good, there was horror of a boundary transgressed. ICE was willing to shoot a white woman in the face, in broad daylight, for what amounted to a traffic violation, and the White House was willing to lie about it, lazily, in the face of all video evidence to the contrary. Still there was the dull shadow of relative novelty, the movements of a vehicle that could be willfully misinterpreted, the question of whether the administration would react to its overreach with any sort of correction, optical or otherwise.

With the execution of Pretti, there is horror of systematization. Horror that we are entering a new normal, of unaccountable, incontrovertible, open-air state-sanctioned terror. After Good’s death, the administration was explicit: federal immigration authorities would have “absolute immunity,” and now we know for certain that they will to use it.

A nurse in the intensive care unit at a veteran’s hospital, summarily executed in the street, in front of a half dozen iPhones taking video. Another deliberate and brazen lie of a statement from Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and the White House that contradicts every shred of evidence collected from multiple angles. So this is how it’s going to be. All of the pieces were on the table already, and now they have all been slotted together. Trump says he’ll only take ICE out of Minnesota if they hand over the voter rolls. The lines have been drawn.

At the very least, this is instructive. Take a look online. Whether state officials or rightwing influencers or tech billionaires or anonymous X reply guys, those willing to deploy pretzel logic to justify the shooting in the back of a man who had never made an act of aggression, or to subjugate logic itself to their ideology and brush the killing aside, behold our modern state propagandists. These are the voices party to the rise of actual, dyed-in-the wool, American fascism. These are the individuals and groups lining up to embrace Orwell’s famous edict1, denying their senses because the party tells them to, or on behalf of their hate.

This can be clarifying, understanding finally and fully that there is indeed already a large network of powerful and public figures willing to support unalloyed authoritarianism, no matter the injustices it perpetrates. You cannot argue with these parties on grounds that the excessive force and summary killings and detainments of American citizens is antidemocratic or unconstitutional, they do not care. That is not their project. You will never convince them with argument or evidence that their side cannot kill its enemies at will, and that too is clarifying. The pro-monarchist, anti-democratic voices in Silicon Valley have at least been open about this.

In Silicon Valley, the silence from the tech industry over the last two weeks has been deafening. There have been a few left-field voices condemning the ICE occupation and the killings of Rene Good and Alex Pretti—VC Paul Graham and former Meta AI chief Yann Lecunn among them—but the leadership and CEOs of big tech firms have all been silent. Some, like Khosla Ventures VC Keith Rabois and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, have been actively fanning the flames. After the Pretti killing, Rabois said that "no law enforcement has shot an innocent person. illegals are committing violent crimes everyday.”

We have discussed at length in these pages the bond between Silicon Valley and the White House, and on those terms, tech’s silence is unsurprising. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft; all of these companies have lucrative contracts with the federal government, to say nothing of tech defense contractors like Palantir and Anduril.

But now that the lines have been drawn, these tech companies and those who work for them have a decision to make: Do you continue to help build the architecture of authoritarianism? Last year, when the tech CEOs flew to the inauguration to stand applauding in the front row, it was not yet entirely clear the precise nature of the project their wealth, services, and clout would help enable. Now it is.

(After hearing nonstop outcry from the terminally online Silicon Valley set online over a proposed tax on billionaires in California, the quiet is particularly grating. Sometimes the shape of this moment is made all too painfully clear.)

OpenAI, Meta, Google, and others worked with the Trump administration to push a moratorium on AI laws, all but announcing their contentedness with an antidemocratic program. They’ve all donated large sums of money. OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman donated $25 million to a MAGA Super Pac directly. That money is supporting a government overseeing the execution of American citizens in the streets, the detainment of children as young as five years old, the filling of concentration camps with families wailing “let us out.”

Americans everywhere must weigh their personal responsibility in this moment, and some must weigh their complicity. I would like to believe ICE agents who joined believing Trump’s lies about an invasion of violent immigrants are quitting in droves after realizing they have instead joined an agency rife with death squads. I would like to believe that. I know people in communities around the nation are seeking out their neighbors, sending funds to mutual aid groups, and putting their bodies on the line in places like Minneapolis. You can donate to some of those efforts here. Find your own closer to home. Talk to your neighbors. Even if you are not political, get political.

I will add that if you work in Silicon Valley, you likely already know that AI in particular is uniquely important to Trump’s project—if you are not okay with what is happening, it’s time to consider what you can do to help slow or dismantle that project.

The lines have been drawn. American fascism—or authoritarianism, or autocracy, or whatever you want to call its equivalent—has materialized. This does not mean it will be invincible, or even durable. But it’s not going to relent without organizing, without struggle, without a fight.

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Follow ’s reporting from Minneapolis here. Read ’s guide to doing politics as a nonpolitical person here. Stay safe out there. But keep those hammers up.

Trump posted the above image on Truth Social, along with another one depicting some kind of a strategy meeting in the Oval Office being held in front of a map with the United States, Greenland, and Canada all colored in like the American flag.

This sort of thing has become standard practice for Trump and his team. The administration shares AI-generated images on social media so frequently it’s been termed slopaganda. It tracks: Given that it’s voluminous and cheap, fundamentally unconcerned with conveying truth or accuracy, free of nuance, and generally adheres to a gaudy, homogenous aesthetic, it’s fitting that AI imagery has become an ideal vessel for state expression.

But the embrace goes beyond aesthetics. The administration’s AI images, from the ‘Ghiblified’ picture of a woman crying as she’s arrested by ICE, to grainy faux video clips of Obama getting arrested, to that reel of a razed and redeveloped Gaza, to the more recent ‘Defend the Homeland’ and Greenland conquest posts, are unified by the same impulse: to project MAGA dominance.

In the administration’s repeated use of gen AI, Trump’s not just articulating his policy aims with AI, but articulating his approach to AI policy, too. Both are rooted in the drive to dominate. It’s a point I think we’d do well to underline as we enter year two of the Trump administration and year four of the AI boom, and as Trumpworld and Silicon Valley bind their projects, personnel, and futures ever closer together.

Take what was perhaps the AI industry and the Trump administration’s key shared ambition last year: A 10-year moratorium on state AI laws, colloquially known as preemption. At the behest of Meta, Google, OpenAI, and other tech firms, as well as crypto and AI czar David Sacks, Trump allies tried to get legislation to that effect passed in Congress twice. It came up short both times, facing intra-GOP opposition as well as general blowback on the grounds that it was an optically toxic gift to big tech and fundamentally antidemocratic. It was instead, as readers of BITM know, turned into an executive order that aims to accomplish the same ends, just via coercion, withholding state funds, and threat of litigation from the Justice Department.

Now, the reason that both tech CEOs and Trump officials say they need preemption is to ensure American AI firms can innovate freely and rapidly, aren’t bound up in red tape, and thus can “beat” China in the AI race. You may have heard the line about how no one wants 50 different rules from 50 different states. As a result, Trump’s AI policy is often framed as a deregulatory agenda; an effort to unfetter enterprise from rules and roadblocks for the benefit of business, or even, more critically, for the benefit of his newfangled allies in the elite tech set. And while that transactionalism is certainly a part of what’s happening here, that’s clearly not the limit to Trump’s ambitions with AI.

Two recent policy papers, “The mirage of AI deregulation,” by Alondra Nelson in Science and “The Big AI State,” by Brian J. Chen in Data & Society, each argue that Trump’s federal engagement with AI should be understood not as orchestrated in the interest of fostering a free market, but as a big government project to concentrate state power. Trump’s agenda is not a push for “deregulation” as much as it is, like the Greenland threats he uses AI to illustrate, a deliberate quest for domination.

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I’m still trying out running some ads here to help support the editorial operation, some 98% of which is supported by paid subscribers. (If you find value in this work, and you’re able, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. I lost about 20 paid subscribers after my critical examination of ICE, X, and the mechanics of socially mediated American authoritarianism, and if that post was why, well, good riddance. But to be frank, it does me nervous going forward, and your support means more now than ever.)

So! Today’s edition of BITM is sponsored by DeleteMe, whose mission is to hunt down and, yes, delete the information that data brokers have hoovered up about you over the years and made publicly accessible with or without your consent. DeleteMe is Wirecutter’s top-rated data removal service, and I’ve used it myself to locate and eradicate 100 or so sites that were listing and selling personal info like my home address and phone number. If you’re interested in trying out DeleteMe, sign up here and use the code LUDDITES for 20% off an annual subscription. Thanks all, and onwards.

Alondra Nelson, a former director of science and technology policy in the Biden administration, and who was more recently tapped to serve on Zohran Mamdani’s Transition Committee on Technology, argues that rather than deregulating the AI industry, Trump is merely moving the regulatory apparatus upstream, under his control:

Framed as relief from regulatory burden, preemption represents an aggressive assertion of federal authority that forecloses democratic experimentation at the state level. Whatever one’s view of state-level AI policy, federal preemption is itself a form of regulation—one that concentrates power while insulating it from local accountability.

The Trump administration is not removing government from AI regulation; it is concentrating governmental power at the federal level while deploying it through mechanisms—investment, ownership, research funding, immigration controls, and preemption—not typically classified as “regulation.”

(Emphasis mine.)

Nelson argues—correctly, I think—that Trump is doing far more than merely helping Silicon Valley cut red tape and far, far more than taking “a hands off” approach to federal AI policy. Given the headlines and commentary around the AI moratorium in mainstream and tech-friendly spaces, you’d be forgiven for thinking Trump’s AI policy has been orchestrated in the interest of nurturing free enterprise. It’s closer to the opposite. Trump is in fact overseeing an enormous state project, directly and indirectly shepherding national resources towards an industry that’s in turn led by a handful of tech giants.

Most obviously, there are the direct investments. Under Trump, the federal government took a 10% stake in Intel for nearly $9 billion, partially nationalizing one of the nation’s legacy tech companies. What’s made fewer headlines is that the Trump administration has also taken a stake in eight other private companies, collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars, crucial the tech industry’s supply chain. The New York Times published a rundown of the investments in November:

It’s also very much worth noting here that Trump cut a deal with Nvidia to allow it to sell previously off-limits high-tech chips to China, in exchange for 25% of the revenue. That’s a huge federal finger now firmly on the scale of the operations of the single most valuable company—at time of writing it’s worth $4.5 trillion—on the planet, and the one most central to the AI boom.

Nelson also argues that by restricting immigration, especially through the H-1B visa program, slashing national research funding for some subject areas (environmental impacts, algorithmic bias and labor impacts, for instance) but not for others, and engaging in projects like preemption with the heads of major AI firms, Trump is in fact very much regulating AI. He’s just doing it with the aim of expanding federal power—over a technology and industry increasingly dependent on his largesse—not protecting the public interest.

Brian J. Chen’s brief, The Big AI State, drills even further into the details of Trump’s statist AI project:

To secure US dominance of AI, the federal government is organizing the AI industry in three ways: it is (1) derisking domestic infrastructure investments, including by land use deregulation and favorable financing arrangements, while (2) leveraging commercial diplomacy to open new markets for foreign data centers, and (3) making equity investments to ensure sufficient demand and solvency throughout the supply chain.

Chen focuses first on the government’s role in enabling and encouraging the data center buildout, by offering tech firms favorable land use policies like leases on public land, expedited and circumvented environmental review, and even, soon, potentially, outright financial assistance. The Biden administration issued an executive order opening federal lands to data center development, and the Trump administration has put the pedal down and “opened up its inventory of publicly-owned lands to private project developers.” It has, Chen notes, “ordered relevant agencies to identify and lease federal lands for data center projects, coal infrastructure, and nuclear power plants.”

Trump has issued no fewer than three executive orders—for data center, coal, and nuclear power expansion—encouraging the use of categorical exemptions to bypass otherwise legally required environmental reviews. The EO on data center orders the Commerce Department “to provide financial support for qualifying projects (data centers and supporting infrastructure). Such support includes ‘loans and loan guarantees, grants, tax incentives, and offtake agreements.’”

Chen also notes that Trump is proactively working to open and secure new markets for American AI companies; he cites the “Promoting the export of the American technology stack” executive order and points to the Stargate UAE project, a billion dollar data center to be built in Abu Dhabi, as an example. It’s notable that Trump’s EO incentivizes the exporting of the full AI stack—as in, software, hardware, and infrastructure; its primary intent is getting more data centers built abroad running American AI systems. Finally, Chen’s brief overlaps with Nelson’s in detailing the state-led investment in AI, energy, and mineral extraction firms important to the industry’s supply chain.

Both Nelson and Chen’s pieces are very much worth reading in full, and together they paint a compelling portrait of how the federal government under Trump is working to grow its power with AI. Through this lens, it becomes all the clearer why OpenAI almost casually started making noise about wanting a federal “backstop” for chip and data center investments; AI executives had likely simply gotten so used to discussing such ideas in private with the administration, to where it had become so normalized that CTO Sarah Friar felt comfortable speaking it aloud, in public, to an audience that was still under the impression American AI’s fate was dictated solely by free market capitalism. It should also provide food for thought about what might happen in the event of the AI bubble bursting, or in the event of a downturn; what happens if investors back out of sustaining OpenAI’s immense cash burn, and it can’t IPO in time? Given the current interests and configuration of the state, a semi-nationalized OpenAI is entirely thinkable.

Less examined in both briefs, necessarily, is the why behind all this. Why is the Trump administration so vested in underwriting a nationalist-leaning big government AI project, and what’s the ultimate aim? I’ll take a stab at that here.

The most obvious, and over-simple reason is the one explored in these pages many times before; Trump’s inner circle is larded up with Silicon Valley influence, initially as a result of the openly right wing of the industry buying their way in, as with David Sacks, or expending their political capital on the president’s behalf, as with Peter Thiel, or both, as with Elon Musk. But this infusion of the tech elite into MAGA politics has been far from seamless, with plenty of longtime supporters, like Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer, openly chafing at and challenging the Valley’s rise in the party. Trump and his inner circle have made at least a back of the napkin calculation that given tech’s money, infrastructural advantages of currying their favor, and the larger AI project more broadly, will be worth the internal backlash.

The Trump administration saw opportunity to transform AI into a political project early on; this is why JD Vance’s first speech in Europe as vice president was spent announcing America’s intent to dominate with AI, and that the rest of the world was free to fall in line. That speech presaged much of what was to come with the administration’s approach to AI, both regarding its policy and use.

The ‘bigger is better’ ethos that undergirds the hyperscalers’ project is certainly appealing to the Trump team, and easily grokked by it; according to the current rules of engagement, whoever gets the most investment, most data centers, and the most energy, wins. That’s certainly an appealing formula to Trump, who is of course obsessed with “winning” but moreso because obtaining the access to energy and infrastructure necessary to “win” puts the world’s richest men and largest companies at his mercy. Here’s a technology that everyone is saying is the future, promises a capacity for mass job automation, surveillance, and control and that requires a massive amount of coordination from the state to execute. It thus offers the federal executive a huge amount of leverage over anyone who wishes to build that technology.

(There are certainly multiple factors that explain the executive tech set turning almost immediately into full time Trump supplicants, including natural “anti-woke” tendencies and frustrations with workplace protest or whatever, but an underexplored element is perhaps the extent to which they recognized that competing in the LLM race would require an unprecedented amount of buy-in from the state, and particularly a state run by an aggressively transactional president.)

To that end, the same goes for securing foreign partners for US AI firms; building out data centers on foreign soil with servers and software owned and operated by American technology companies—that, by the way, are increasingly coordinating directly with the federal government and Trump himself—is a new kind of imperial project. Google, OpenAI, and the like are canvassing foreign markets, offering cloud services for cheap, and trying to get companies and officials to buy into (and get locked into) their tech ecosystems; under Trump, those efforts are now incentivized and in some cases arbitrated by the US government.

In sum, the Trump administration is regulating the AI industry to achieve both a specific vision of imperial and expansionist American power, and to suit its executive’s own whims as a gangster capitalist. And I do think some of this reflects down to Trump’s own affinity for AI, on a user level. While most of the policy is surely hashed out by Sacks, industry groups, officials like Michael Kratsios, (Nelson’s successor as the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy), and, yes, perhaps ChatGPT itself, Trump clearly approves of generative AI. Much like Trump was skeptical of crypto until he got his hands on it and realized it was a world-historic opportunity to openly and lazily facilitate grift, the slop issuing from his personal feed on Truth Social and on official administration accounts reveals a affinity for the technology.

With generative AI, Trump gets to see his trollish fantasies instantly made, if not flesh, then at least visceral. That large swaths of liberals are doubly offended by his AI posts—both by the content itself, and by the medium used to create it—probably only sweetens the deal.

It’s not hard to imagine the satisfaction Trump derives from seeing big, tacky-looking depictions of his enemies getting crushed, his conquests dramatized, the future rendered in his image. And that, ultimately, is what Trump wants from AI.

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For further reading on the subject of AI as the aesthetics of fascism, read Gareth Watkins.

Here’s a bonus quote from the Nelson piece that’s worth considering, and is true not just with regard to AI but the myriad technological systems that shape our lives:

“When decisions about the technologies that will shape our work, our health, our capacity to know and to communicate are made without public justification, outside ordinary channels of accountability, we are not governing ourselves. We too are being governed. The mirage of AI deregulation obscures this truth. Power has not retreated. It has moved—and democratic accountability requires following it there.”

Bonus bonus:

I was experimenting with ChatGPT to see how long it might have taken Trump to create a Greenland conquest photo that served his purposes, and I was struck by how bad the images are. This is a technology that I keep getting told has made unbelievable progress over the last year, and while this would probably suffice in a pinch and could be fixed with a few more edits, the prompt “generate an image of the trump administration planning to annex Greenland” depicts former national security advisor (and now Trump critic) John Bolton and former vice president Mike Pence as parts of his cabinet.

The next one was worse—it was supposed to show Trump annexing Greenland to the US, and well, you can see the issue here:

Bow down before the inevitable AGI, I guess.

Okay, onto some links and shouts:

-“As new technologies (not immigrants) replace human labor, “machine breaking” as a tactic of rebellion is taking on a renewed vitality.”

Read the great labor reporter Sarah Jaffe’s latest feature, “Capitalism Without Humans” in In These Times. BITM and the work of many other good Luddites is sourced throughout, and it’s a great read.

-Carleton University teaching assistants are fighting for common sense AI guardrails, but management won’t meet them at the table.

Sign their open letter and shout your support here.

-Cal State University is considering laying off instructors while investing in OpenAI. There’s petition going for that too:

-“Trump administration concedes DOGE team may have misused Social Security data” by Kyle Cheney for Politico:

From the ‘who could have seen this coming’ dept:

Two members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team working at the Social Security Administration were secretly in touch with an advocacy group seeking to “overturn election results in certain states,” and one signed an agreement that may have involved using Social Security data to match state voter rolls, the Justice Department revealed in newly disclosed court papers.

On opting out of the Anthropic settlement:

The author Daniel Howard James has a piece considering the recent Anthropic class action lawsuit and settlement that’s worth a read.

For what it’s worth, I just opted out of the settlement myself. I think it doesn’t do enough to hold Anthropic and AI companies accountable, it doesn’t move the needle in an actionable way on the policy front, and frankly, the sum it promises to deliver to authors is too small. There are other, stronger lawsuits afoot that I’ll dig into in a future post.

Okay okay, that’s it for today. Until next time, stay warm out there, and keep those hammers up.

I’ll be honest, I’ve been struggling with how to get the newsletter going again in this already terrible new year. The president of Venezuela is sitting in a Brooklyn jail. The FBI raided the home of a Washington Post journalist. And of course Donald Trump has escalated ICE operations in Minnesota after an agent shot a suburban mother in the head, an action which the president condoned with a rationale that may as well have been AI-generated. ICE officers are now going “door to door” per JD Vance, asking for IDs, and brutalizing migrants and citizens alike. The president of the Minneapolis city council describes it as a military occupation.

The tech elite in Silicon Valley range from complicit to eager participants. OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman was just revealed to be the single largest donor to Trump’s MAGA Inc. Super PAC, to which he gave $12.5 million. Second on the list was Palantir CEO Alex Karp, whose firm has inked multiple deals with ICE. X owner Elon Musk has been rewarded for managing MAGA’s chief digital propaganda platform with another lucrative government contract. Musk himself began the new year by using the platform to spread white supremacist ideas, a trend more tech execs are embracing, and that’s helping to create the conditions for the federal invasion of an American city.

Maybe it’s the whiplash from making an earnest effort to take the holidays off and to attempt to “relax” and delete the social media apps from my phone and all that, and then returning to all this. (I can even isolate the precise moment the brief idyll was ruptured; I asked my wife, “When is your cousin coming over again?” and she replied, looking at a text, “He says we just kidnapped Maduro?”) Maybe it was because during said idyll an inchoate fantasy set in that maybe 2025 would be as bad as it’d get, that Trump might figure his shows of force and violence would suffice, and he’d confine himself to gaudy crypto grifts and self-dealing this year. Maybe it’s that after the US’s Maduro kidnapping, ICE’s killing of Renee Good, and the federal Minnesota occupation, all coming on the heels of last years’ abductions of foreign nationals, initial ICE deployments, and incursions into LA and Chicago, but it sure seems the ‘can it happen here’ question has already been definitively answered. It feels like we’re getting dragged across yet another Rubicon in a fishing net. I had a draft of a post about ‘five predictions for big tech and AI in 2026' that feels pointless to publish now.

Anyway the main thing that you need to know about big tech and AI in 2026 is that they are key pillars of a political economy that is enabling the new American fascism, or whatever it is that you’d like to call the particular brand of dim yet horrifying socially mediated authoritarianism that has crystallized under Trump 2.0.

So forgive me if this is not the most eloquent or streamlined edition of BITM. I am, as I imagine no shortage of you all are, mad and depressed and marinating in dread. But there are some points about what’s happening that might be useful, from the vantage of having covered the tech industry for the last fifteen years, and from having dealt with ICE here in LA in 2025. I just don’t necessarily have the wherewithal to integrate them into a proper “essay” that “flows together” at the moment.

Bullet points first, then I’ll elaborate after the fold.

1. Silicon Valley and AI have, as many have predicted, helped usher in an age where we find ourselves forced to question the nature of reality itself. But not because AI products are so powerful they now fool us into believing falsehoods about major events. They don’t have to. Tech companies, products (like AI), and platforms like X have chipped away at and undermined our confidence in the nature of “truth,” and in the institutions once entrusted to arbitrate it, and left a vacuum in its place. The Good shooting has clarified that we’re well beyond epistemic closure, that no amount of documentation or evidence matters anymore; the Trump administration understands nothing if not that it can fill that vacuum well enough with a narrative of its choosing. A party in power with its own tech infrastructure and captured media can say and do what it wants, and correctly assume its partisans will support it. And what it wants is a spectacle of violence.

2. As much as the way ICE is mediating its operation is relatively novel, creating content for dissemination on social media, promulgating highly produced video shorts, and asking its agents to record their own footage, the basic modus operandi is old-fashioned fascism. ICE is waging a nationalistic campaign of harassment and violent subjugation of out-groups and political opponents orchestrated for the benefit of its directors’ imagined audience. Whatever your views on immigration policy, if you don’t find masked agents methodically harassing citizens, throwing people into unmarked vans, and going door to door asking for papers antithetical to American democracy, you’re probably either a Stormfront mod or an ICE agent yourself. Trump is making a spectacle of invading a US state governed by political opponents under the pretense of rounding up a minority group—in Minnesota, it’s Somali-Americans—that his party has worked to smear and malign. It’s domination porn tailored to X, to go along with the AI-generated porn.

3. Everyone—and especially everyone in politics and the media—needs to understand the specific role that Silicon Valley elites and their platforms have played in ripening the conditions for the ICE raids, Good’s shooting, and the terror now unfolding on American mud. And how they profit directly from the state that is perpetrating it. Google, X, OpenAI, Anthropic, Palantir all cut major deals for federal contracts with the Trump administration last year. The silence of the executives of these companies in the face of the occupation of Minnesota has been noted; their shaping of this authoritarian state less so.

4. There are glimmers of hope, most of it arising from the people, protestors, neighbors, and community defenders on the ground, who have not been cowed by the omnipresent threat of state violence, and the signs that the public is souring on ICE’s entire project as a result. There are calls for more creative and drastic means of intervention; for economic blackouts and a general strike. What else?

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1.

Jonathan Ross’s point-blank shooting of Renee Nicole Good in the head feels exceptional not for its cruelty or even its novelty—this is the United States after all, where a mass shooting or a police killing is always just around the bend—but ultimately, its immateriality to the state. Immediately after Good was murdered, the State Department declared her a “domestic terrorist.” President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that he’d watched video of the incident—the same video we have all now seen, in which Good attempts to drive her car around and away from Ross, who fires three shots into her head then casually walks over to the crashed car—and decided that Good “viciously ran over the ICE Officer.” Trump adds that “based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.”

The surreality of this claim has been much remarked upon already. What’s notable isn’t the lie, since Trump lies copiously and unashamedly (it’s one of his core features, his chief political innovations, even) but the marked disinterest in even appealing to any conception of truth, and the ease with which such a horrific event was slotted into the state’s storyline. How no effort was taken to even bother to square events on the ground. Trump might well have not watched the video at all before he wrote his defense of the ICE agent (pure online poster behavior) his description of its contents was so obviously off base. Trump’s team knows that with enough workable content and the benefit of an official statement, his supporters will advance his preferred narrative; cheerleading, posting support and unwittingly out of context commentary. It might never have occurred to Orwell that authoritarians might successfully beseech their citizens to discount obvious truths simply because they were too lazy to watch a two-minute video clip.

But that’s the point. It didn’t matter. The state is treating this as an online argument that can be won by posting red meat, since Twitter, or rather X, the everything app, is real life now, and the administration no longer feels compelled to even gesture towards the truth. The Trump administration simply declaring what it would like to have transpired, even in the face of ample and obvious documentation to the contrary, works.

This reflects a bleak realization that’s emerged in recent years that confounds one of Silicon Valley’s foundational claims to its role as an engine of progress: That more connection and sunlight do not bring accountability, improve behavior, or deter state violence. Social media, once promised to illuminate the sins of the powerful so as to bring them to justice, have become instruments the rich can easily manipulate to benefit themselves and their interests. Bodycams, once heralded as a high-tech means of promising accountability via transparency, have not curbed police shootings. The violence has continued. On the contrary, ICE officers are now being encouraged to record proactively, to produce their own raid footage and create their own content for dissemination on social media, which is likely why Ross had his phone in one hand taking video while he held his gun in the other when he shot Good.

When more details surfaced, like a video revealing that Ross called Good “a fucking bitch” immediately after shooting her in the face, Trump simply adjusted his story on the fly, saying Good’s crime was being “disrespectful.” It could not matter less whether she was assaulting an officer with her car or just being rude; her death can be explained away, even made useful. The Department of Justice was instructed to open an investigation into her purported terrorist activities that is such an obvious sham that six prosecutors have quit rather than participate.

This is why, to me, these last weeks have been particularly unmooring, even after the endless chemical train wreck of 2025. The media and technology critic Neil Postman famously argued that the incipient American dystopia wasn’t the blunt overpowering fascism of 1984, but rather Huxley’s intoxicatingly mediated brave new world—we were all on the brink of amusing ourselves to death. It turns out they’ve both arrived, in tandem; the state is booming obvious falsehoods in our face and demanding we accept them, and they are simultaneously being packaged into infotainment to delight the converted and enrage the opposed. It’s a feelie that tells us 2+2=5.

We’ve been headed this direction for years, even before Trump; at the dawn of the social media era liberal commentators decried the developing world of post-truth politics. Trump’s adventuring is abetted by an information ecosystem that has grown thoroughly fractured and corrupted, with journalistic institutions hollowed out and undermined, social media networks offering eminently gameable portrayals of the truth, and AI undercutting the entire notion of trusting your eyes, well, here we are.

A violent, revanchist state, motivated by its executives’ petty grievances, racial animus, and a desire above all to create spectacle, can manufacture or elevate any narrative it would like to justify or promote its aims. (Trump would in fact prefer someone else do the manufacturing, which is why the horrors in St. Paul and Minneapolis are the result of a low-rent viral “investigation” by a 23-year-old MAGA influencer that sensationalized already reported and ongoing fraud investigations, but more on that later.) And what it aims to do, for now, is occupy Minnesota, a state governed by high profile political opponents Tim Walz and Ilhan Omar, and that is home to one of the most unjustly maligned migrant populations in the nation, Somali Americans, and, per vice president JD Vance, “go door to door” asking for papers.

So that’s what’s been happening. Two thousand more ICE agents ordered into the state to support the operation, and the week has been a deluge of horror stories: US citizens forcibly ripped from their places of work by ICE agents and then dumped in nearby parking lots. ICE agents demanding entry to a private family home to extract a terrified DoorDash driver they chased into the basement. Disabled women torn out of their cars at gas stations. Those on the ground detail a city lined with abandoned cars, helicopters circling, stores stocked with whistles and plastered with signs exhorting ICE to keep out.

2.

Late last fall, the small church in my neighborhood where my sons take piano lessons and taekwondo, the place that serves as a community center and hosts annual holiday parties, that hung little toys from the trees out front during the early days of the pandemic so kids could have something to look forward to, was taken over by ICE for use as a staging ground. The pastor and church staff didn’t lock the gate to the parking lot, and ICE just rolled in with its vans and SUVs and tactical gear and wouldn’t leave.

My neighborhood is sleepy and residential and pretty small; it’s essentially the church, two public schools, a daycare, a few restaurants, and housing. Notably, there’s a major supermarket with a huge, often-empty parking lot just a few blocks away that ICE easily could have used instead if it was targeting anything other than the aforementioned institutions. I’ve heard speculation that ICE had staged in the church parking lot because the progressive pastor there had spoken to local media about preparing the community for an ICE incursion. Regardless, ICE was in and out—right down the street from me—before I even knew they were there. It’s unclear if they abducted anyone.

It shook me up. I knew ICE was in LA of course, I’d been to the protests downtown, and written about them here. But it’s different when the threat comes home. When you can name the school employees, childcare workers, and instructors who you see around the neighborhood, who have taken care of your kids, who may have been targets, the violence and vileness of what ICE is doing fully takes root.

I got in touch with a group that supports vulnerable local workers and holds fundraisers for families impacted by ICE. I attended a community defense training held at another local church, and spent some time with groups and patrollers doing rapid response work. I went to a supermarket shortly after ICE abducted two day laborers who had stopped in for lunch. Employees there were traumatized, and one shared cell phone video of the raid. The fear and anger is everywhere, even if most of it is still latent.

I’m going to be a little careful about details here, because this kind of community organizing is what Trump’s justice department is now equating with domestic terrorism, as it has accused the late Renee Good of perpetrating. It is of course nothing of the sort: It’s a neighbor-led effort to prevent families from being torn apart. Rapid response and community defense organizations find out and keep track of who has been targeted or abducted by ICE, and where. They inform the families, who often have no idea if their husband or wife or son or daughter has been taken. They try to alert workers and communities when ICE is in the area and keep businesses and individuals informed about how to prevent abductions as safely and legally as possible.

Spend any time with an organization like this, and, thanks to their work, you are likely to realize that

• The vast majority of people ICE targets are not dangerous criminals. They are food vendors, day laborers, gardeners; the most vulnerable migrant workers, and thus easiest to pick up. This is one of the first things to become abundantly clear. ICE has quotas to make, this is why they do so much racial profiling and grab those easiest to grab.

• These groups are shoestring local operations run out of churches and group chats. They are made possible only by neighborhood folks donating time and donuts and the idea that there’s some liberal megadonor or infrastructure enabling these operations is laughable.

• The people at these meetings are obviously not masked antifa supersoldiers; they’re grandmothers and college kids, yuppies and activists, dog walkers and IT guys. They are Renee Good. For every DSA-type in attendance, there are approximately three nervous-looking civilians who are there because of the sheer moral repulsion they feel at what ICE is doing and their deep-seated desire to do something about it.

This not a fringe idea. Polling now shows that more people want to abolish ICE—once considered a demand of the radical left—than keep it. It’s not hard to see why. ICE is radicalizing people against it all on its own; a father of six, who was not a protestor, and was simply trying to drive his children, one of whom is a six-month-old infant, to safety, had to take them to the hospital instead after an agent threw a tear gas grenade at his car.

Watch the video of the event mentioned above, taken in a house in Minneapolis that has been surrounded by ICE agents. It’s not clear what exactly has happened until partway through, and it’s horrifying when it becomes clear. A family ordered DoorDash, and ICE agents followed the delivery driver to the customer’s house, and she ran inside, down into the basement to hide. The family, which has a small child, is on the phone with the police trying to figure out what to do, as the ICE agents threaten to arrest the family for harboring a fugitive. When the family finally swings the camera down to reveal the woman in question, she is paralyzed with fear and begging for her safety.

This stuff is happening all the time now. You may have seen the video of the man dragged out of Target, thrown in a van, apparently beaten, and thrown back out a few blocks away. Or the one where an ICE agent shoves a protestor into oncoming traffic. Or the video of ICE intentionally crashing into a car to remove its driver.

It’s not just Minnesota. In the middle of writing this, I turned on the morning news here in California, and Good Morning Los Angeles was running a story about ICE agents targeting food vendors in LA county. CBS aired another one about ICE’s attempt to grab two landscapers, each of whom held green cards and no criminal history, and who’ve been in the US for 40 years.

But again, the Trump administration and its adherents will likely never bother to watch any of these reports, as they don’t have to. They are after all primarily interested in how the operation is disseminated on X.

3.

Someone quipped in the wake of the Maduro affair and the Good shooting that it looks like consent doesn’t even need to be manufactured anymore. It was a good line, but I would argue that consent is simply being manufactured preemptively, or in realtime, all the time. The consent manufactory is on autopilot, mostly on X, where there is an omnipresent incentive structure for users to create content that feeds the state’s preferred narratives. You could get retweeted by Elon Musk, or JD Vance, after all, and double your audience overnight.

There are few better examples of this than YouTube influencer Nick Shirley’s viral video that helped kick off the latest chapter of this mess in Minnesota. When I started watching this, I almost couldn’t believe how bad it was. It’s unbelievably lazy and slapped together, filled with AI-generated b-roll, it’s based on reporting and cases that are already widely known, and Shirley himself seems not to have read the VO script before recording it, as he’s constantly stumbling over words in the narration. But, and we’re locating a theme here, it doesn’t matter. The tagline and the video’s mere existence were enough to make it useful to X’s algorithm, to Trump, and to ICE; and now there’s a violent occupation of Minnesota.

There’s a case to be made that X is the modern right’s single most important institution. I hesitate to call a glorified 4Chan board with an AI porn generator grafted on an institution, but you know what I mean. Entity, org, whatever. Certainly its most important platform. It’s where the right constructs and processes its political imaginary; where scorn is heaped on the crying libs and where police raids and humiliated minorities are celebrated. As owner, Musk personally participates in this project as well as profits from it. Max Read makes a good argument that Musk’s current, seemingly unimpeachable power stems from his ownership and stewardship of X, and the platform’s centrality to global politics. (Which is why almost none of the world’s most powerful governments are even able to address the platform’s disturbing child sexual abuse material problem.)

But Musk is not simply profiting from his leverage of course, he’s a key sculptor of this political imaginary, too. Apart from maybe Trump, no one sets the standards for how politics are to be performed, and what kind of content will be generated to capitalize on its performance, more than Musk. Along with posting memes and material that support the ICE operation in Minnesota, Musk has been sharing some of the more explicitly white supremacist posts of his tenure, which is of course saying something. He recently shared a thread from an writer whose project is argues that “white solidarity is the only way to survive” and who purports to explain “why racism is moral.” Other execs, like Thiel acolyte and Palantir cofounder Jon Lonsdale, are following suit:

And so the days of dog whistles are over. Thanks in part for Musk’s preference for white supremacist politics, and its dovetailing with Trump’s own, the Trump administration is now using openly white supremacist sloganeering in its comms and recruitment materials online, on X, on Instagram. Per the Intercept:

“There was a sense of plausible deniability before,” said Alice Marwick, director of research at Data & Society. Anti-immigrant backers of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement have long been known to spread extremist language and media, but in the past, “those dog whistles were being done by supporters,” she said. “Now they’re being done directly by the administration.”

How far we’ve come since the “debates” over Trump’s (or Musk’s) racism.

Finally, it needs to reiterate that it’s not just Musk. Much of Silicon Valley is an open and willing participant in all of this. OpenAI inked a $200 million annual contract with the DoD last year. It’s still hoping for support for the Stargate data center megaproject, and federal backing in the event of a collapse. Anthropic, Google, and xAI all have contracts worth up to $200 million each with the DoD, too. Palantir’s latest ICE contract netted $30 million. These companies, Anthropic excepted, joined Meta and other Valley heavyweights like Andreessen Horowitz in lobbying for a moratorium on state lawmaking around AI. They failed to get legislation passed, but they won an executive order they hope has a similar effect. Perhaps unsurprisingly, none of the CEOs from any of the above companies have said anything about the ICE occupation or the shooting of Good.

Some prominent tech workers outside the c-suites, including a handful of well-known figures like Google’s Jeff Dean, are circulating a petition calling on their companies not to work with ICE. Unlike the groundswell of support such sentiments garnered in 2016, the response has been muted; it has at time of writing only 150 signatories. Considering that Google alone has nearly 200,000 employees, and that 20,000 walked out in 2018 in protest of the company’s sexual harassment issues, pay inequality, and forced arbitration policies, the ICE petition number is notable primarily for how strikingly small it is.

4.

If there is any hope at all here, it is, as usual, to be found in those on the ground who despite everything are still standing up for their neighbors. The occupation has ignited a wave of national resistance in other ICE-occupied cities and rapid response groups are in action. Meanwhile, faith groups, community leaders and unions have called for a general strike and an economic blackout on Friday, January 23rd.

CBS Minnesota reports:

Auxiliary Minister JaNaé Bates Imari of St. Paul’s Camphor Memorial United Methodist Church led the conference, calling for Minnesotans to “leverage our economic power, our labor, our prayer for one another.”

“What we have seen and what we have witnessed, what we have all gone through is not normal,” Bates Imari said. “[Renee Good was] standing up for her neighbor. Her whistle blowing was returned by bullets. We will not, we cannot let that stand. Minnesota will not continue to be a testing ground for the kind of fear and violence that is expected for the rest of this country.”

They’re asking for Minnesotans everywhere to stay home from work and school, and to refrain from shopping. Local unions are on board, and rideshare drivers are asking that fellow workers deactivate the apps for the day. Protestors are tired and overwhelmed, with little help on the way from elected Democrats. But the polling suggests most Americans are with them, regardless of the hateful content spun up on X or wherever. This suggests to me that alongside our resistance we must begin thinking far beyond electoral politics and even abolishing ICE—though that is a reasonable starting point—and onto imagining how the socio-technical infrastructure that has undergirded and accelerated this entire project might be dismantled, repaired, replaced.

Let me to get a little corny for a second. I’m tired. These are dark times. Don’t forsake your neighbors. If ICE is operating in your area, there’s much you can do. Talk to your neighbors, pastors, and local businesses. Download Signal. Get in touch with a rapid response network if you want to learn more about other ways to help and feel that you can do so. If you’re going to protest or observe ICE, go to a training first; there are community members and activists who know this terrain. If you’re in LA, reach out to a group like CHIRLA. Report ICE sightings to groups like West LA Rapid Response. But please be safe. And if you’re a politician, for god’s sake, get out there on the streets with your constituents.

Thanks for reading, and more soon.

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Some further reading:

“Donald Trump is waging war against human conscience” by . What an essay.

“Renee Good Was the Kind of Person I Should Be” By Jenée Desmond-Harris.

404 Media’s ICE coverage. Follow this.

“We’re all just content for ICE” by Ryan Broderick. Good on the ground reporting from an online culture background.

“My final message before I’m on an FBI watchlist: Palantir, Epstein, & The New York Times” by Juan Sebastian Pinto. Fascinating connecting of the dots from a Palantir whistleblower.

Hope everyone’s holidays have been nice and restful, and that each of your new years are off to a promising start.

With AI companies growing ever closer to the state and a barrage of headlines about labor automation and burst-ready bubbles carrying over from last year, I thought it’d be fitting to start 2026 off with a vision of one possible future stemming from such phenomena. A few years back, I edited a short story, Busy, by Omar El Akkad, for Terraform, a speculative fiction project I co-founded with the writer and musician Claire Evans. (Terraform was part of VICE, which has since gone bankrupt and has itself been turned into an AI slop farm.) When we published the print anthology, Busy opened the volume.

It’s a great, sharply observed snapshot of a crisis-stricken and AI-addled America, a prescient look at slop, and it’s never been more timely. It also contains an act of resistance and some seeds of hope, and as such, I wanted to share it with BLOOD readers. Omar, who is the author of the searing One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2025, and the the novels American War and What Strange Paradise, has kindly given me permission to do so. He only asked that I shout out Illuminated Cities, a group that runs educational programs and creative writing workshops for some of the most vulnerable and crisis-stricken communities in the world. You can donate to their efforts here.

Without further ado, here’s Busy, by Omar El Akkad. Happy New Year.

Busy

On my way to cut God’s tongue I pass a long line of slow-shuffling laborers. Men, mostly. The younger ones look beat to all hell with hangovers and barfight bruises, dentin-colored stains on their shirts like maps of imaginary islands. It is a rule at the entropy mill that all laborers must be dressed in reasonably presentable attire, but I’ve never heard of anyone turned away on account of how they looked. The older men in line, they tend to take too much care with their appearance. There’s something grotesque about watching a stooped retiree in his best Sunday suit, hair all dyed and gelled to shining, plead for a day’s wage. They look so much older than they are, these men. The years gorge on them like yeast in a sugar bath. I glance their way as I walk past. I wonder how many of them have spouses, children, grandchildren. I wonder who they’ve left alone and uncared for to be here. I wonder how many of them are mean.

This morning the line stretches for miles and miles and miles. It always does.

It used to be a mega-mall before the great oil crash. The largest mall in the country, I’m told, though that was years before my time. Even now you can still see the phantom outline on the sides of some of the buildings, the places where the lettering was, the names of all the big box stores and movie theaters and parking garages, this congealed mass of commerce the size of a small city. Now the whole thing houses the entropy mill, five-million square-feet of government-subsidized employment. Every day, thousands of people come to this place to churn out numbers for minimum wage, to stir the slop on which God’s tongue feasts.

By the time I get to the front entrance, the makeup of the line has changed. There are more women near the front. They sit on folding chairs, draped in winter coats and blankets. The only way to make sure you get a spot is to show up the night before and wait till morning. A few of the people in line give me dirty looks as I walk past, and one of them points at my laptop satchel and yells, “No bags!” But it’s not until I’m right at the entrance that a young man steps out in front of me and grabs my shoulder.

“Back of the line, buddy,” he says.

I shake my head. “I’m not here for that,” I say. “The hell you ain’t. Back of the line.”

I know that look he’s got, I know it from memory, and I know what’s going to happen next but I try to step around him anyway. There’s no point appealing to reason. You can’t rid a man of the violence that lives in the chasm between the life he hoped for and the one he got.

I’ve never been any good at taking a punch. Glass jaw, they call it. I drop to the ground, a dribble of pinkish spit leaking out my mouth, that familiar mineral taste. He’s got strong hands. I don’t understand how men get strong hands working at the entropy mill.

In my periphery I see a couple of security guards come running over.

“Tech support,” I mumble. “Maintenance call. I’m here on a maintenance call.

Both guards ignore me. Instead they grab the young man who punched me and start dragging him toward the street. He puts up a pretty good fight, arguing he’s been waiting here eight hours, it’s the guy who cut in line that should be booted. It doesn’t look like he’s going to back down, until one of the security guards pulls out his phone and tries to take the man’s picture. That’s when he turns and runs. No one wants to end up on the blacklist.

The guards don’t give chase. They turn and walk back and on the way one of them helps me up. I show her my ID.

“You new?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “First call.”

She shakes her head. “Never come through the front gate,” she says. “That’s just for them.”

She leads me inside and after she checks my name against the maintenance manifest she ushers me through the metal detector and into the massive central rotunda. I’d seen pictures of it, but in the pictures it never looked like this. The workers haven’t been let in yet and the place has about it an almost pleasing emptiness, all the workstations pristine and untouched, the wires and electrodes and number pads arranged neatly at each desk. The only sound is the faint wheeze of the air conditioners and the squeak of our shoes against the polished floor. In an hour or so the rooms will fill with the noise and heat of thousands, but for now the entropy mill is quiet.

We walk through the rotunda and down one of the hallways, past the workrooms. The walls are all glass and I can guess at some of the jobs that go on inside. One room is lined with tall bookshelves. I imagine this is where the word-counting happens. In another room I see headphones on the tables. It must be one of the music stations. That was my father’s favorite. I used to pray he’d get assigned the music station.

There’s entropy mills in all the big cities now but this was the first, the original make-work project in the years after the crash wiped out a third of all the blue-collar jobs in the country. Every day, three and a half million people come to the mills to churn out numbers. It’s the easiest work, anyone can do it. You don’t need a degree or references or previous experience. Depending on the day you might be assigned to the biometrics unit, and have a machine dream up numbers based on the topography of your fingerprints or blood vessels running across your retina. Another day you might be told to swallow a small capsule that sits in your stomach and sends back a real-time count of the bacteria in your gut. Another day you might be told to put on an electrode helmet and listen to Mozart, as all the while electrodes measure the changes in activity across the right side of the frontal lobe, the places the music sets on fire, and from these bursts of intensity generates a stream of digits. Most of the time you just sit there, let the wires pull the numbers right out of you; a strange, corrupted dreaming.

In an endless stream all these billions of digits the workers generate are funneled down to the box in the basement, down to God’s tongue. And from these numbers God’s tongue forms its own secret language, speaks unpredictable things.

As stipulated by the Great Recovery Act, any company that uses random numbers must purchase them from an entropy mill. Academics, cryptographers, drug-makers, anyone whose business demands mathematically pure uncertainty. Every bank in the country is a customer, as is every casino. There’s a video game studio whose vast, procedurally generated universe feeds on these numbers. Somewhere in the math department at a university upstate there’s a server that queries God’s tongue at the rate of two or three billion digits an hour, part of a quest to find the new largest prime.

In reality, the numbers that come out of the entropy mill are not completely random. There is a determinism to it, no matter how difficult to decipher. In reality, a gram of cesium would do a better job than these broken-down men and women ever could. But a gram of cesium won’t feed three and a half million families.

I’ve wanted for so long to see it. My father spent thirty-one years in this place. Showed up hungover and barfight-bruised, left in his Sunday suit and his gel-shined hair. Thirty-one years, and he never saw it.

I follow the guard to the restricted area, past a set of vault-thick doors and into the electrical and mechanical rooms. We take a service elevator down to the basement.

The doors open and there it is, a modular cube of black disk drive-holders and winking green-and-red diodes. It’s a little bigger than the simulator we used in training, the room a little warmer, the smell of ozone a little thicker in the air. I feel a kind of distant nausea settle in. It’s just a gaggle of rectangular servers. I wanted it to be something more than this. Childish as it may be, I wanted anthropomorphism: a face, an expression. I wanted for a fight.

“No. It’s not broken,” I say. “It’s not anything.”

I remove my laptop from my satchel and kneel by one of the input ports. I plug my machine in. I enter the password, my password. They’re going to know it was me. It doesn’t matter.

The guard stands nearby, bored, checking her phone.

“So what’s wrong with it, anyway?” she asks.

“Yesterday it spit out a string of nineteen fives in a row,” I say. “That triggered a service call.”

“So it’s broken?”

“No. It’s not broken,” I say. “It’s not anything.”

I skip past the diagnostic menu. I find the code repository, the thing you’re taught never to touch unless all hell breaks loose. I upload my changes, the new dialect I intend to make God’s tongue learn. I imagined there’d be some failsafe, some impenetrable wall. But it’s easy, it takes no time at all.

“Ninety-six-trillion,” I say.

The guard looks up from her phone. “What?”

“Ninety-six trillion, give or take. That’s how many numbers my father fed this thing.”

She looks at me, uncertain. She doesn’t know. She’ll piece it together later, when it’s too late. “Did you have a good childhood?” I ask her.

“Sure, I guess.”

“That’s good.” I unplug my laptop. “That matters.”

We leave the server room. When we return to the rotunda, the workers are just starting to stream in. They take their seats and begin their busywork, their invisible shedding. I think about this time tomorrow, when God’s tongue adopts my language and turns mute, when all it can utter is an endless string of zeros and all the industries reliant upon it come to a grinding halt. I imagine the sound it’ll make. A choking.

A long time ago, on one of his good days, my father told me about a workstation they used to have at the mill. Two people at a time were told to sit and talk to one another about anything at all. A microphone listened in, and it was never quite clear what the machine was listening for. Some of the workers guessed it counted phonemes or syllables, or perhaps the length of pauses between words. It seemed at first a good addition to the rounds – all the workers had to do was talk to one another, which they mostly did anyway. But soon it became clear that when expected to converse, many of the men became awkward and self-conscious, and too often ended up getting into arguments that sometimes turned violent.

“You can’t do that to a man,” my father said. “Rub his face in it like that.”

I didn’t understand what he meant back then, but I think I do now. It’s important to do work of which you can be proud.

I pack up my laptop. The guard ushers me back to the main floor. On our way out we pass the same workstations, now filling with laborers. Through a glass wall I see an older woman reclined in her chair, headphones and electrode cap in place, eyes closed, smiling. In my head, I can almost hear the music.

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Thanks for reading everyone. I threatened to publish more speculative fiction months ago, when I ran Tim Maughan’s Flyover Country, and it appears I’ve finally made good on that threat. (I’ll embed Tim’s piece below.) More soon, when I’m back from the holidays next week. Until then—hammers up.

The year is drawing to an end, and that means every other link you click is a Best of 2025 list. And you know what, that’s just fine; if you’re at all like me, you just keep on clicking. Give me more of the best stuff, show me what all the best stuff was, I can’t get enough of it. And I’ll tell you what, I’m even going to contribute to this benevolent plague of listmaking, because I haven’t yet seen what I want, and what dear readers of this newsletter might want: A guide to the media that critically examined the role of technology in politics, culture, and society.

Speaking of those readers: Permit me to embrace the season of sentimentality and get real with you all for a minute here before we get onto the lists. I want to say thank you for reading, discussing, and supporting this work through what was a particularly dark year. When I went all in on this thing back in February, I really had no idea whether it could become a monetarily viable long-term undertaking aka a job. As I recently discussed at (much) greater length, you’ve all shown me it can be. I still have a lot of work to do and goals to meet. But I count myself as beyond fortunate to be able to do this work, on my terms: to try make sense of the world of AI and its impact on the working class, to document the rise of the tech oligarchy, and to write long-winded reviews of Frankenstein.

There are now 33,000 beautiful machine breaking subscribers here, many more than I would have predicted this time last year. Cheers to you all, with an extra emphatic thanks to those of you who support this work with your hard-earned cash—it’s you who quite actually make all of this materially possible, and I would not have been able to do any of this without you. There would be no AI Killed My Job stories, no investigations into LA’s torched Waymos of LA, no dispatches from the frontlines of the Luddite renaissance. Thanks again everyone.

I’m going to take a couple weeks off for the holidays here, though hopefully this ~8 million word edition will help tide you over, and I’ve scheduled another special post or two to help fill the gap. But I’m going to try to log off for real: You know, ditch the laptop, power down the phone, hang out with the fam and read through a stack of Ursula K. Le Guin novels. I’ll be back in the New Year. Until then, what else—hammers up.

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The best nonfiction books on tech of 2025

Careless People

Okay, so I’m starting the list off with a curveball, because I don’t actually think this was one of the ‘best’ books of the year, as it’s frustratingly uncritical in a host of ways. But Sarah Wynn-Williams’ memoir about her time as a lower-level executive at Facebook may be the best inside-the-palace look we’ve gotten at the workings of its c-suite, and at Mark Zuckerberg’s personal politics and motivations.

This alone makes it invaluable. The book helps us better grasp the deep vanity and omnipresent insecurity that wracks Zuck, a man who views himself as a modern-day Roman emperor yet who is childish and petulant and never quite sure about what he’s supposed to be doing unless it’s shipping code. We knew Facebook’s management was reckless and ignorant, this book draws those operational deficiencies into starker focus; we see opportunities Facebook had early on to consider data privacy (via feedback from the German government), its toxic impact on young people, especially girls (via its own internal marketing documents that sell the platform’s power over vulnerable users to clients), and the looming dangers of its hands-off policy in Myanmar (via the author’s own multiple engagements with the junta), where the UN later determined a military dictatorship used Facebook to help foment a genocide.

The problem is, Wynn-Williams goes to great lengths to exempt herself from any serious blame or reckoning. She perennially casts herself as naively believing in the power of the platform to connect people, despite everything, and the act gets old quick. A better book would more honestly interrogate her own role, and examine how it is that even well-meaning employees come to abet such an obviously amoral enterprise. Still, it’s a brisk read, illuminating, and will deepen your understanding of the politics and postures of the Big Tech executive set.

Notes Toward a Digital Workers’ Inquiry

One of the keys to building a better future is getting more tech workers organized; both the better-paid (if increasingly precariously employed) engineers and product people at the big tech companies, and the much lower-paid gig workers who make up an ever-growing share of the workforce. This book by the Capacitor Collective—a group of respected tech researchers and activist scholars—is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in sparking that fire. And we all should be.

The AI Con

Few have done more to peel away the layers of AI hype that pervade the headlines and punditry than linguist Emily Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna. Both are esteemed scholars and lively writers, and the book is a compelling, clear-eyed analysis of modern AI and the industry hocking it. Somewhat surprisingly, it isn’t always as polemical as you might think, given the title and the authors’ knives-out commentary on their podcast. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it’s an ideal primer for the layperson about how large language models really work, and a nice dissection of how the industry manufactures then exploits misconceptions about AI for profit.

The Contrarian

Penguin Books published a new paperback edition of Max Chafkin’s extremely readable biography of Peter Thiel this year, and it’s easy to see why. The book, originally published in 2021, charts the rise and dealings of the first Silicon Valley mainstay to openly embrace Trump. Its new tagline, “Peter Thiel and the Rise of the Silicon Valley Oligarchs,” and new cover, which features the now-infamous photo of Jeff Bezos, Sundar Picchai, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg at the inauguration, underline its newfangled relevance in big black sharpie.

The fresh coat of paint is well-deserved; the book is an illuminating look not just at Thiel but at the politics of the tech right, its roots, and how Thiel and his cohort—including Trump’s now-AI czar David Sacks—helped foist it all to power. The first half especially is a must-read, given where we’ve wound up. It details Thiel’s days as a rightwing campus culture warrior at Stanford, the scammy tactics he adopted at PayPal to juice its rise, and his murky maneuverings at Palantir. It’s also a great companion piece to the next book on the list, too.

Gilded Rage

Free idea: Have your reading group or book club to do a ‘rise of the American tech oligarchy’ two-parter, starting with the Contrarian to get the origin story, then hitting Jacob Silverman’s Gilded Rage next to see how it’s played out. Silverman spends more time with Musk, for the obvious reasons, and delves into many sordid corners of the new tech elites’ world in his effort to understand the nature of their quest for power and dominance.

Silverman and I chatted about his book for the blog here earlier this year, and here’s what I wrote about the book then:

David Sacks, Elon Musk’s compatriot, is the White House’s AI and crypto czar. Executives from the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, are in advisory roles. JD Vance, whose mentor was Peter Thiel, owes his career to Valley operators. And not only are they in power, but they’re angry. They practice a politics of pitched persecution and extreme resentment that can be baffling to those of us who’d kill to simply not have to worry about paying the rent for a year. As Silverman puts it in his book, these tech titans “had the world at their fingertips and they couldn’t stand the touch.”

Silverman’s book… argues that we shouldn’t view the tech billionaires as a collection of eccentric elites, but as a class; a group that, whether they publicly present as liberals or conservatives, share a distinct set of ambitions and goals: Slashing regulations and oversight, lowering taxes, extracting value from the state, and concentrating power.

Essential reading for understanding the shape of power in the age of the tech billionaire.

Against Platforms

A sharp and erudite argument against, well, platforms. What can I say, ’s book does what it sets out to do: It makes the case against techno-utopianism, and articulates how and shy turning over our public services and sociality to culture- and civics-agnostic profit-seeking tech companies has been a disaster. It’s a compelling call to replace those platforms, from the gig work apps to social media networks, with institutions, and a much-needed one. Plus, it’s short! You can read it in an evening or two. More good short books, please—and fewer platforms.

Why We Fear AI

Another good short book! This one, by cognitive scientist Hagen Blix and machine learning researcher Ingeborg Glimmer, argues that we fear AI not because we fear the unknown, or some undefinable future, but because it embodies the worst traits of capitalism: surveillance, wage suppression, mass automation. Our nightmares about getting crushed by an all-powerful Skynet are really nightmares about getting crushed by the ruling class. The book carries a little extra weight since it was authored by scientists working in the field, not Jacobin columnists—nothing against the Jacobin columnists of course—and all in all, I found it compelling and persuasive. Pairs well with Ted Chiang’s great essay “Will A.I. Become the Next McKinsey?”

In my interview with Blix, he described AI as “an attack from above on wages.” Find that one here:

Enshittification

The book that likely needs no introduction, about the word and idea that needs less of one, by the author you all probably know, too. Cory writes so many books it can be hard to keep up, and as such, I was a little late to this one. I think it’s his best and most complete nonfiction work to date; it’s certainly the one I’ll be recommending to folks going forward. In rapid-fire, digestible prose, Cory unloads his signature blend of sagacity and snark, and imbues the enshittification coinage with a sturdy theoretical framework.

Cory and I chatted about the book, how enshittification impacts labor, and much else, a few months back:

Good stuff.

Mood Machine

I recently quit Spotify. Mood Machine is, essentially, the story of why. Liz Pelly’s treatise is at once a history of the dominant music streaming app’s rise to prominence—with some fascinating detail about its roots in Sweden’s piracy culture—and an unsparing critical analysis of its impact on art, culture, and working conditions for musicians. It’s the kind of book that gets called a “savage indictment” in reviews, and for good reason. Read it to understand what Silicon Valley’s model of cultural production and distribution, of relentlessly focusing on scale and maximizing time on platform, has wrought to music.

The Mechanic and the Luddite

A great (and highly readable, I promise) book advancing a critical theory of modern luddism. The sociologist Jathan Sadowski is probably best known as the co-host of This Machine Kills, one of the best critical tech podcasts going, but he’s also a great thinker on the political economy of technology. And we can all use a ruthless criticism of technology and capitalism about now.

Empire of AI

What else can I say? Karen Hao’s Empire of AI is an epic feat of writing and reportage. If you want to understand OpenAI, Sam Altman, and the AI boom writ large, this is the book to turn to. It’s definitive. And it’s compelling, from start to finish; from the boardroom drama at OpenAI to the reporting trips to Kenya and Chile to shed light on the labor and environmental issues incurred by AI development, the pages keep turning.1 I read this in a couple days, even though it’s a behemoth, simply because I couldn’t put it down.

Given the stubborn centrality of all things AI—and therefore all things OpenAI—this really is one of those rare books you can say “everyone should read” and be totally sincere.

Other notable and good books, about tech or otherwise

Look, I’m just one guy. This is list is not exhaustive, and I wish I’d had the chance to read even more new tech nonfiction, an impossibility given the state of everything, and how busy I was all year. Seriously, I just grabbed all the tech books in arm’s length that I was sent this year onto a pile and just look at this thing.

That’s just this year, and I’m missing a bunch, too.

Needless to say, there was a lot of great non-tech stuff, great tech books I didn’t quite get to reading or processing fully, and older works I revisited that I found plenty relevant to the times. Here’s some of that:

Algorithm of the Night

A.S. Hamrah is one of my favorite film critics. Top three, easy. I always look forward to his short reviews in n+1 and enjoy his longer stuff elsewhere; they’re about the entertainment industry, capitalism, and political economy as much as they are about the films themselves. The Earth Dies Streaming (untouchable title), his first book of collected writing, was great, and so is this year’s followup, Algorithm of the Night. The opening essay alone is worth the price of admission, and I’ve found I’m keeping the tome, which is mostly stuffed with reviews, handy to consult after watching newer films covered in the volume.

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Brutal, beautiful book about confronting the genocide in Gaza back here in the states by the great speculative fiction writer Omar El Akkad. It won the National Book Award, too.

Bullshit Jobs

I reread the late anthropologist David Graeber’s crossover bestseller this year, and at some point I’ll share some thoughts on how its thesis applies in the age of corporate AI automation; funny, cutting, great, if uneven, book.

Bubbles and Crashes

This book, by two business professors and economic historians, formed the foundations of a piece I wrote for WIRED about the AI bubble. Invaluable for the historical context of the AI boom, and for understanding what makes a tech bubble a bubble.

October

I revisited China Meiville’s narrative history of the Russian revolution this year; another historical page-turner. Wrote more about that here:

So many good books

And here’s a short list of books I either haven’t gotten to yet but are on my pile and look great, or have started in on/are otherwise notable and worth checking out:

Atomic Dreams, by Rebecca Tuhus Dubrow
Extraction, by Thea Rianfracos
The Pacific Circuit, by Alexis Madrigal
More Everything Forever, by Adam Becker
Stream Big, by Nathan Grayson
Every Screen on the Planet, Emily Baker-White
Fatal Abstraction, by Darryl Campbell
Robin Hood Math, by Noah Giansiracusa
Fake Work, by Leigh Clare la Berge
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, by Vauhini Vara
World Eaters, by Catherine Bracy
Scam, by Ivan Franceschini, Ling Li and Mark Bo
Amateurs!, by Joanna Walsh
Artificial Humanities, by Nina Begus
Language Machines, by Leif Weatherby
Algospeak, by Adam Aleksic

TV

Black Mirror

Yes, it’s become a punchline to some, sure, the filler to hit ratio is expanding, and no, this was not its best season. But despite lacking a Joan is Awful-type zeitgeist definer or a Be Right Back-level banger, it nailed some Black Mirror-isms—the gleefully unsubtle opener about privatized startup health care and the blue collar worker debasing himself to afford it was very much on brand—and delivered some solidly bleak future moods.

I will watch every episode of this show Charlie Brooker ever airs and I will apologize to no one.

Alien: Earth

Alien is for my money our best science fiction franchise, and it’s always been a pretty reliable vehicle for critiques of AI and corporate power. I thought Noah Hawley’s take was pretty fun (with great creature design) even if the initial promise of its taking place in a society governed outright by tech billionaires—one run by the famed Yutani, or Weiland-Yutani no less—didn’t bear much fruit. I wish it had focused less on the child-robot hybrids and more on that, but you do get some good Frankenstein stuff, billionaire caricatures, and a top-form android Timothy Olyphant.

Pluribus

Whether or not the show is supposed to be about AI is almost beside the point; Pluribus nicely articulates the threat of mass homogenization and lost human companionship a lot of us are feeling right now. (Though the scene where the alien cipher recites insipid reviews of the fantasy author’s book has to be a riff on ChatGPT, I don’t care what Vince Gilligan says.) Ideally suited sci-fi for a moment in which AI is quite actually making people who use it sound the same.

The Chair Company

Maybe gets my vote for the best show about technology of the year, despite not really being about technology at all. After an embarrassing incident at a high-profile sends Tim Robinson’s spiritually hollowed-out company man spiraling, he turns to the internet for answers, where his efforts to speak to an actual human are denied but where he instead finds a wealth of materials inscrutable enough to mean anything, and a prime opportunity to recast himself as protagonist in his own life. It’s almost like a Crying of Lot 49 for the 2020s with anger management issues. There’s a riff on QAnon-type online conspiracy theorizing in here, but it’s more about how late capitalism has stranded us in a wasteland of obsolescing malls, alien corporate cultures, and indecipherable digital media, and left us to find purpose amidst the wreckage. Robinson’s hero reaches out for answers, only to be waylaid by automated customer service systems, websites for shell companies, and angry social media posts. (And finds solace in the YouTube comment section.) I just wish the show bothered to properly close out the season’s arc; otherwise, it’s fittingly anxious, dark, and extremely funny.

Film

The Shrouds

A strange film, even for Cronenberg, in part due to its subdued tone. A review I read somewhere that I can’t find now mused that it felt more like people talking about making a Cronenberg movie than a Cronenberg movie. Fortunately that still makes for a better film than most directors can muster. It’s about a grieving widower who is so obsessed with his deceased wife’s body that he builds a system that allows him to watch it decay in the ground and turns it into a startup so others can do the same with their dead loved ones. Then there’s sabotage, dubious biotech, and corporate intrigue, and it gets weirder from there.

Mickey 17

Bong Joon-ho in his madcap anticapitalist sci-fi mode; his Okja/Host/Snowpiercer mode, which I happen to love. This is not the very best of the films in said mode, but I still think it got unfairly overlooked. True, Joon-ho could have done a lot more with the conceit of an endlessly reprintable and thus expendable human worker, but the sequence that details Mickey’s initiation into his new life as an infinitely immiserated lands the film a spot on this list.

Frankenstein

In which Guillermo del Toro gets Frankenstein’s monster right for a change. I very enjoyed this film; so much so that I wrote about it at length here:

Companion

My favorite luddite horror film of the year. Clever and misanthropic, it capably (and gorily) subverts the AI/robot run amok trope. I won’t say much more, since it feels like it hasn’t been widely seen yet, and this is one that’s better watched cold. Suffice to say that the film makes a rather visceral case both that AI is an ideal vessel for abuse and exploitation and that maybe we *should* be suspicious of anyone who’s too into their chatbot.

Bonus: Best anti-AI death metal album

That would be The Diseased Machine, by Mutagenic Host.

Please enjoy an album full of songs like “S.W.A.R.M. (Systematic War Against Restless Machines)” and “Artificial Harvest of the Obscene.”

Alright everyone, thanks again for reading. Hope you find something good to read or watch in there. Drop any of your own recs in the comments below, and I’ll look forward to firing things up again in the new year. Until then: cheers all, and onwards.

Assembly Bill 412, aka the AI Copyright Transparency Act, was authored by assemblywoman Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, a leading figure in California AI policy;1 it would require AI companies to document what goes into their training models, and alert copyright holders if their work is included upon request. Last summer, AB 412 received a similarly packed hearing in Sacramento before it was shelved and punted to the 2026 legislative session. Hence this second event, on a crisp Bay Area winter day, taking place in what multiple artists, some relishing the irony of the battleground they occupied, others with something closer to trepidation, referred to as “the heart of Silicon Valley.”

Before most of those gathered in the crowd could speak, a series of expert testimonies would offer a snapshot of the economic and legal complexities of the issue at hand, and the many challenges in addressing that issue. The issue, as articulated by the artists on the panel, and later, by the scores of people packing the room, and which is plenty familiar to many by now, is that companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta have trained their AI models on millions of copyrighted works, including those created by the artists and writers present, and turned those models into commercial products that create competing works for dirt cheap.

As a result, and as I have spent much of 2025 documenting, many creatives are losing jobs, opportunities, and income. While pesky concerns like reliability and accuracy hold back efforts to automate many other fields with LLMs, creative output need only be deemed ‘good enough’ by clients and bosses. As a result, many feel that commercial AI poses a direct and even existential threat to their livelihoods. To them, AB 412 offers a first step towards receiving consent, credit, and compensation for their work, as the now-famous triplet goes.

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“I don’t know how many of you have come to LA recently,” Danny Lin, the president of the Animation Guild, said in her testimony, “but it is bleeding out in front of my very eyes.” AI, she said, was exacerbating trends already put in motion by big tech’s squeezing of the entertainment industry. “[AI] has the potential to devastate not only California’s creative workforce and our employment prospects but curtail intellectual property rights and the profits of related businesses,” said Jason George, an actor on Grey’s Anatomy and a SAG-AFTRA board member. Each time one of the artists made a point about their working conditions or called for oversight of the AI industry, a sea of jazz hands would go up in the crowd, and applause would begin to break out before everyone remembered they were supposed to stay quiet.

George expressed concern for voice actors in particular, who, he said, within three to five years, “are in trouble.” He pointed also to the AI-generated country song “Walk My Walk,” seemingly cribbed from the black country musician Blanco Brown and presented as the work of a white (AI) country artist, Breaking Rust, “getting the Blanco without the Brown,” as George put it.

The challenges in addressing all of this, meanwhile, are enormous. Ultimately, overcoming those challenges in any durable and sustainable way will require answering questions about what art, cultural production, and even work itself should look like in an age of ultra cheap content autogeneration. But the first and maybe largest challenge is that the AI companies do not in any way want to address the challenge at all, and also have multibillion dollar war chests and the attendant political influence to dedicate to the project of not addressing it. Out of the four AI companies invited to attend the hearing—Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Amazon—only OpenAI bothered to send a representative.

Mark Gray, OpenAI’s copyright policy counsel, mostly offered boilerplate answers to the legislators’ questions, as well as some platitudes about how AI was meant to be “assistive”, not to replace artists. He pointed to licensing and partnership deals AI companies struck with Netflix and media companies as evidence that transparency and copyright legislation wasn’t necessary. (This made my ears prick up: There’s been a lot of debate in the journalism world over whether publishers should be entering into licensing deals with the AI companies. Here, it was clear that OpenAI was using those deals as political capital to discourage attempts to hold them accountable for using copyrighted work without consent elsewhere.) Lin, the animator, responded by noting that creatives in her Guild and at the media companies that inked those deals have only seen their working conditions deteriorate; there’ve been layoffs, work speed-up, and precarity. The deals benefit management, Lin meant, not working artists.

“Is copyright as a tool, the right tool to do this, or is that through tools like industrial policy, labor protections, labor law, those sorts of tools?” Gray said, to scattered mutterings in the crowd. “From [OpenAI’s] perspective, copyright at the federal level is not the right lever to pull.”

This, it might be noted, is corporate lobbying 101; say *this* policy option isn’t right but *another* one, maybe even a stronger but less politically feasible one, is. (It reminded me of years ago when Exxon said it was against a cap and trade climate policy that would limit pollution, but was in favor of a more punitive carbon tax, knowing such a policy was politically impossible.) And it was especially rich coming right after the AI companies lobbied Gavin Newsom to veto the No Robo Bosses Act, which he did, and which would have offered the tiniest of labor protections to workers from bosses seeking to automate the firing process, presumably the kind of “tool” Gray was indicating should be used in lieu of copyright law.

“Hearing him speak is killing me,” the artist Karla Ortiz said at the hearing. Ortiz is one of the plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit against AI image generation companies like Midjourney, and until last year, Gray worked for the US Copyright Office, where he was the first contact for the case. He attended a town hall where he heard working artists detail their plight. He has since been hired by OpenAI, where he is now actively opposing their interests. “I want to tell him to his face how much he broke my heart,” Ortiz said. Judging by the legion of scowling faces behind him at the hearing, it seems unlikely he won any others.

Gray’s story is a good example of how exactly large tech firms like OpenAI can wield their considerable stores of capital to stack the deck in their favor, whether by buying out government officials, mounting lobbying campaigns, or sidling up to the Trump White House. While the story of AI’s impact on creative industries is not purely a matter of corporate interests dominating those of the working class, it’s certainly a large part of it.

Rishi Bommasani, a senior researcher at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, noted in his testimony that there is vast information asymmetry between AI companies and copyright holders, and that the public currently has little to no knowledge about what goes into the AI companies’ datasets, even the open source ones, and has no way of finding out. The AI companies want to keep it that way. They consider the composition of those datasets trade secrets, they don’t want to dedicate the resources to documenting which copyrighted materials are in their datasets, especially if such a practice turns out to violate standing copyright law, and they certainly don’t want to have to oversee any system that would alert creatives and rights holders when their works were used to train AI models, much less compensate them.

Both Pamela Samuelson, a professor of law at UC Berkeley and board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Mark Lemley, a professor of law at Stanford who until earlier this year provided legal counsel to Meta, cast doubt on copyright law as a viable vehicle for regulating AI in their testimonies. (The EFF has opposed AB 412 from the start, arguing that the law’s documentation requirements would “bury small AI companies” and leave the big players as the only ones able to navigate the requirements. I find it difficult to muster much sympathy for this argument, perhaps as a result of having interviewed scores of creative workers whose incomes have been halved or worse by clients and bosses replacing their work with cheap AI output. Why should developers of automation tools enjoy such considerations while those being automated do not?)

Samuelson said that she believes courts will ultimately consider it fair use to train AI models on copyrighted works, though the jury is still out on the issue, as decisions have been somewhat split in the US, and have been more favorable to rightsholders in Europe. Lemley argued that building a copyright documentation system would hamper innovation, and made his disdain for the entire concept plain. It is indeed a common refrain among the AI executive class that paying the license every copyrighted work in their models would be impossible, bankrupt them, or cause them to lose the AI race to China.

Gerard de Graaf, the head of the EU San Francisco office and senior envoy of the EU to the United States for Digital, on the other hand, detailed how the European Union had begun to instate one such system, showing it was possible both technically and politically. Artists can check if they’re part of a dataset and then ask to be removed if they don’t want their works used for AI training. The thrust of his testimony was backed up by University of Chicago professor Ben Zhao, whose team built the Nightshade and Glaze tools that ‘poison’ AI datasets, and who demonstrated how a relatively simple fingerprinting system could be set up to register and check for copyrighted works. Luke Arrigoni and Juliun Brabon, founders of two smaller AI companies, seemed to concur. I was glad to see this, as I get very frustrated whenever I hear companies and tech advocates who love to celebrate innovation when it promises profits label an undertaking too complex or onerous the minute a technology threatens to be put in service of working class interests.

It is, in other words, perfectly feasible for AI companies to document copyrighted works and to ask them to rightfully credit their creators—and, if the courts rule that training on such material is *not* fair use, to compensate them. There are concerns that a database could be weaponized by copyright trolls, that it would likely be a technical headache at first, and, sure, an unpleasant added cost for the few companies creating their own models that are not OpenAI or Google-sized, but it’s easy enough to imagine companies (Arrigoni’s and Brabon’s perhaps) arising to administer such a service. And the more transparency in AI, the better, period. AB 412 is, as its proponents like to say, a step in the right direction. But I do wonder, as the year draws to a close, what we’re stepping towards.

We are three years into a project in which a handful of tech companies have attempted to feed every data point, every song, every sentence, every cartoon, every short story, every shitpost, every marketing email, every work of fan fiction, every reddit thread, every sonnet and so on into systems they promise in turn will automate the future production of all of that material. The billions have not stopped pouring in to fund this project, as haphazard, expensive, and dubiously popular as it is, and working artists, writers, performers, and creators are up against something like the mass automation of the median of art.

Pass AB 412, demand transparency, build the database—but what next? It’s hard to see this as a sufficient bulwark against the engines of bottomless creative labor automation. For instance, I’m eligible to receive a $1,500 payment from Anthropic as part of a settlement because the startup used my book to train its AI model. the $1,500 is nice, but an occasional payment like that is not going to rebalance any scales. AB 412 may push AI companies to be more intentional about what they include in their datasets, force them to document the human creative labor they’re currently wantonly usurping en masse, and perhaps spur those companies to consider licensing deals rather than vacuuming everything up and shoving it under the carpet.

Many of the artists at the hearing, it should be noted, told the legislators they have nothing against AI as a technology; they simply want to see a world where it does not run on their exploited labor. Finding a calculus that balances both seems uniquely crucial to this moment; I think most people would agree that we want more human artists, not fewer. Right now, AI companies, media conglomerates, and financial interests have engineered an apparatus that’s pointed us in the opposite direction. But if AB 412 is a start, then where do we want this to end? Not in a perennial rearguard action, trying to claw back bits of value as cultural production is turned into a homogenous firehose, as ‘working artist’ becomes an anachronism and ‘AI content creator’ becomes normalized. Much more is possible. There has to be a way.

As I sat at my gate in the San Jose airport on Thursday, homeward bound three days after the hearing, a notification materialized on my phone announcing that Disney would be investing $1 billion in OpenAI. It would be entering into a partnership that would allow the AI company to use Disney’s hitherto fiercely protected intellectual property—for now the most valuable in the world—on its AI slop generator app Sora.

I just stared at the notification for a minute without opening it. Not in disbelief, because we expect nothing less from an executive class that exults AI even when doing so appears to be against its own direct material interests, or in anger, because there have been too many similarly patterned decisions made over the past three years to inspire any such emotions at this point. I stared because in that notification I saw Bob Iger’s dream, and Sam Altman’s, and it was the dream of fully automated content production.

Bob Iger says he hopes to take user-created AI content featuring Mickey Mouse, Marvel and Star Wars characters, and feature it on the streaming platform Disney+. Sam Altman said parents could make digital content for their kids with Buzz Lightyear.

Years of Marvel movies and regurgitated franchise IP have undercut the notion that anything need be particularly good or even new anymore; the next frontier is prodding users to generate animated diversions with pre-established IP on one platform and feeding them other ones on the affiliated other, no novel ideas or paid creative labor necessary. Will anyone like it? That’s not really the pertinent question. Will they tolerate it? Will they accept it? If life amid the slop layer has taught us anything, it’s that we humans tend to bristle when we come too directly into contact with AI output, and we do often reject it. Perhaps we can be trained. Regardless, in this transaction we see the forces and motives animating the larger enterprise, and it has nothing to do with cultural meaning or even consumer satisfaction.

Probably at just the same time those artists and writers were packing a campus hall to fight for their working lives, Disney executives were in a boardroom, finalizing the deal to invest in the technology automating their work, directly with the company testifying against the artists and writers and lobbying to ensure they don’t receive any new legal protections. I’m not worried that “art” won’t survive the AI onslaught, I’m worried it will impede who gets a chance to make it. As the animator Danny Lin noted, conditions for working artists have been eroding since before AI; Netflix and the streamers ‘giggified’ the industry, rent prices are still spiking, and healthcare is as ever its own unique American nightmare. AI is a corrosive agent, breaking down what’s left, taking over entry level and freelance art and writing work, drying up needed opportunities and income.

There’s yet another layer here. The same day that the Disney-OpenAI deal was announced, President Trump finally signed his executive order aimed at deterring states from passing laws regulating AI—like the AI copyright transparency law—altogether. Trump promises to enlist the Department of Justice to sue states that try to pass laws governing AI, and threatens to withhold federal funding if they do. The tech industry, and its man in Washington, AI czar and venture capitalist David Sacks, lobbied hard for this preemption, and while it’s both legally dubious and unpopular on both sides of the aisle, for now, it’s the state of play.

All of these trendlines are intertwined, of course: The authoritarian state’s embrace of AI, the surge of corporate consolidation and dealmaking, the skyrocketing inequality, the automation of labor and the efforts to strip worker laws and protections. AI has become central to the American oligarchic project, as the elites’ shared vision of the labor-excised future. It’s the ultimate top-down technology; it barely matters that AI systems still routinely pump out erroneous output, don’t generating the promised productivity gains, and are most commonly used as a more addictive and sycophantic user upgrade to social media. Because to them, AI is not just a technology or a product. It’s an ideology; a quasi-religion featuring artificial general intelligence sold as productivity software. A-God-being-born-as-a-service. It’s a logic used to justify job cuts at DOGE and Amazon and new modalities of corporate and bureaucratic expansion. It’s the accelerant, the justifier, the palm greaser among the oligarchs in a year that saw the 10 richest men in the US—nearly all tech billionaires—grow their wealth by $698 billion. Meanwhile, “over 40% of the U.S. population,” per a new Oxfam report, “including 48.9% of children—is considered poor or low income.” Nearly half the country may not be able to afford higher education, or adequate healthcare, and companies may be withholding entry level jobs for hopes that LLMs can do them instead, but at least we can have access to an AI tutor, an AI confidant, an AI therapist. No guarantees it won’t encourage you to kill yourself, though.

On that Monday afternoon at Stanford, the hearing concluded with a call for public comments, and the crowd became a line that snaked down the middle of the hall and out into the entryway. Due to the volume of commenters, each was given just 15 seconds at the mic. There were proud, practiced voices of professional orators, and quavering, nearly inaudible voices of artists who spend most of their days indoors. There was a lot of righteous indignation and a lot of palpable fear.

“Everyone who works in Hollywood is at risk due to generative AI,” a performer said. “Our creativity, our innovation, our copyrighted works—those are the tech industry’s ‘trade secrets’,” an artist said. “Job loss is not theoretical, it’s tangible—14% of our industry has lost work in the last year,” a voice actor said. To us, “AI training on copyrighted material without consent is theft, not fair use,” a writer said.

Despite being held in that heart of Silicon Valley, the artists clearly won the day. I counted only two comments against the bill, among an otherwise uninterrupted stream of arguments in favor. The headlines the next day were largerly sympathetic; they focused not on the native innovators, but on the impacted workers packing the place, calling for change. And it’s little surprise; Silicon Valley used to be famous for its cutting edge innovations and consumer electronics, its iPhones and search engines. Now it’s increasingly felt as widely as a facilitator of automation, labor degradation, casino-ification; the purveyor of AI, gig apps, crypto.

It was hard not to be moved by the scene, the creative workers taking some satisfaction, however fleeting, in speaking truth to power in Palo Alto. The hearing and comments that followed showed that technology need not be abandoned to accommodate the working class and the humane; there were options, configurations, solutions on the table. A worthy reminder as we head into a new year that there are other futures available, whether the one blueprinted here or not, should we pause to consider motives other than dominance, scale, sheer profit.

That despite the numbers that tick by on the headlines announcing new absurd heights in AI company valuations and tech giant capital expenditures, and the draconian anti-democratic measures handed down to curtail AI lawmaking, there is a vulnerability. The industry’s relentless, thoughtless expansion strains to conceal a lack of imagination, a confidence of vision; in fact, the desperation suggests a brittleness, a weakness. And what might fill the void should the AI bubble burst?

The gig workers are organizing. People on the left and right alike are protesting data centers, and sometimes stopping them. Class action lawsuits are breaking the artists’ way, and then not. Technical systems and infrastructures are hungry for democratic input and organic engagement. The Luddite renaissance, skepticism towards big tech, and anti-AI resurgence rises.

At Stanford, among the sea of people, artist and games developer named Brendan Mauro stepped up and said, “I don’t understand why their right to not go bankrupt supersedes all [our] right to not go bankrupt.”

There has to be a way.

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“AI didn’t quite kill my current job, but it does mean that most of my job is now training AI to do a job I would have previously trained humans to do,” he told me. “It certainly killed the job I used to have, which I used to climb into my current role.” He was concerned for himself, as well as for his more junior peers. As he told me, “I have no idea how entry-level developers, support agents, or copywriters are supposed to become senior devs, support managers, or marketers when the experience required to ascend is no longer available.”

When we checked back in with Jacques six months later, his company had laid him off. “I was actually let go the week before Thanksgiving now that the AI was good enough,” he wrote.

He elaborated:

Chatbots came in and made it so my job was managing the bots instead of a team of reps. Once the bots were sufficiently trained up to offer “good enough” support, then I was out. I prided myself on being the best. The company was actually awarded a “Best Support” award by G2 (a software review site). We had a reputation for excellence that I’m sure will now blend in with the rest of the pack of chatbots that may or may not have a human reviewing them and making tweaks.

It’s been a similarly rough year for so many other workers, as chronicled by this project and elsewhere—from artists and illustrators seeing client work plummet, to translators losing jobs en masse, to tech workers seeing their roles upended by managers eager to inject AI into every possible process.

And so we end 2025 in AI Killed My Jobs with a look at copywriting, which was among the first jobs singled out by tech firms, the media, and copywriters themselves as particularly vulnerable to job replacement. One of the early replaced-by-AI reports was the sadly memorable story of the copywriter whose senior coworkers started referring to her as “ChatGPT” in work chats before she was laid off without explanation. And YouTube was soon overflowing with influencers and grifters promising viewers thousands of dollars a month with AI copywriting tools.

But there haven’t been many investigations into how all that’s borne out since. How have the copywriters been faring, in a world awash in cheap AI text generators and wracked with AI adoption mania in executive circles? As always, we turn to the workers themselves. And once again, the stories they have to tell are unhappy ones. These are accounts of gutted departments, dried up work, lost jobs, and closed businesses. I’ve heard from copywriters who now fear losing their apartments, one who turned to sex work, and others, who, to their chagrin, have been forced to use AI themselves.

Readers of this series will recognize some recurring themes: The work that client firms are settling for is not better when it’s produced by AI, but it’s cheaper, and deemed “good enough.” Copywriting work has not vanished completely, but has often been degraded to gigs editing client-generated AI output. Wages and rates are in free fall, though some hold out hope that business will realize that a human touch will help them stand out from the avalanche of AI homogeneity.

As for Jacques, he’s relocated to Mexico, where the cost of living is cheaper, while he looks for new work. He’s not optimistic. As he put it, “It’s getting dark out there, man.”

Before we press on, a quick word: Many thanks for reading Blood in the Machine and AI Killed My Job. This work is made possible by readers who pitch in a small sum each month to support it. And, for the cost of $6, a decent coffee a month, or $60 a year, you can help ensure it continues, and even, hopefully, expands. Thanks again, and onwards.

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The next installments will focus on education, healthcare, and journalism. If you’re a teacher, professor, administrative assistant, TA, librarian, or otherwise work in education, or a doctor, nurse, therapist, pharmacist, or otherwise work in healthcare, please get in touch at AIKilledMyJob@pm.me. Same if you’re a reporter, journalist, editor, or a creative writer. You can read more about the project in the intro post, or the installments published so far.

This story was edited by Joanne McNeil.

They let go of the all the freelancers and used AI to replace us

Social media copywriter

I believe I was among the first to have their career decimated by AI. A privilege I never asked for. I spent nearly 6 years as a freelance social media copywriter, contracting through a popular company that worked with clients—mostly small businesses—across every industry you can imagine. I wrote posts and researched topics for everything from beauty to HVAC, dentistry, and even funeral homes. I had to develop the right voice for every client and transition seamlessly between them on any given day. I was frequently called out and praised, something that wasn’t the norm, and clients loved me. I was excellent at my job, and adapting to the constantly changing social media landscape and figuring out how to best the algorithms.

In early 2022, the company I contracted to was sold, which is never a sign of something good to come. Immediately, I expressed my concerns but was told everything would continue as it was and the new owners had no intention of getting rid of freelancers or changing how things were done. As the months went by, I noticed I was getting less and less work. Clients I’d worked with monthly for years were no longer showing up in my queue. I’d ask what was happening and get shrugged off, even as my work was cut in half month after month. At the start of the summer, suddenly I had no work. Not a single client. Maybe it was a slow week? Next week will be better. Until next week I yet again had an empty queue. And the week after. Panicking, I contacted my “boss”, who hadn’t been told anything. She asked someone higher up and it wasn’t until a week later she was told the freelancers had all been let go (without being notified), and they were going to hand the work off to a few in-house employees who would be using AI to replace the rest of us.

The company transitioned to a model where clients could basically “write” the content themselves, using Mad Libs-style templates that would use AI to generate the copy they needed, with the few in-house employees helping things along with some boilerplate stuff to kick things off.

They didn’t care that the quality of the posts would go down. They didn’t care that AI can’t actually get to know the client or their needs or what works with their customers. And the clients didn’t seem to care at first either, since they were assured it would be much cheaper than having humans do the work for them.

Since then, I’ve failed to get another job in social media copywriting. The industry has been crushed by things like Copy.AI. Small clients keep being convinced that there’s no need to invest in someone who’s an expert at what they do, instead opting for the cheap and easy solution and wondering why they’re not seeing their sales or engagement increasing.

For the moment, honestly I’ve been forced to get into online sex work, which I’ve never said “out loud” to anyone. There’s no shame in doing it, because many people genuinely enjoy doing it and are empowered by it, but for me it’s not the case. It’s just the only thing I’ve been able to get that pays the bills. I’m disabled and need a lot of flexibility in the hours I work any given day, and my old work gave me that flexibility as long as I met my deadlines - which I always did.

I think that’s another aspect to the AI job killing a lot of people overlook; what kind of jobs will be left? What kind of rights and benefits will we have to give up just because we’re meant to feel grateful to have any sort of job at all when there are thousands competing for every opening?

–Anonymous

I was forced to use AI until the day I was laid off

Corporate content copywriter

I’m a writer. I’ll always be a writer when it comes to my off-hours creative pursuits, and I hope to eventually write what I’d like to write full-time. But I had been writing and editing corporate content for various companies for about a decade until spring 2023, when I was laid off from the small marketing startup I had been working at for about six months, along with most of my coworkers.

The job mostly involved writing press releases, and for the first few months I wrote them without AI. Then my bosses decided to pivot their entire operational structure to revolve around AI, and despite voicing my concerns, I was essentially forced to use AI until the day I was laid off.

Copywriting/editing and corporate content writing had unfortunately been a feast-and-famine cycle for several years before that, but after this lay-off, there were far fewer jobs available in my field, and far more competition for these few jobs. The opportunities had dried up as more and more companies were relying on AI to produce content rather than human creatives. I couldn’t compete with copywriters who had far more experience than me, so eventually, I had to switch careers. I am currently in graduate school in pursuit of my new career, and while I believe this new phase of my life was the right move, I resent the fact that I had to change careers in the first place.

—Anonymous

I had to close my business after my client started using AI

Freelance copywriter

I worked as a freelance writer for 15 years. The last five, I was working with a single client - a large online luxury fashion seller based in Dubai. My role was writing product copy, and I worked my ass off. It took up all my time, so I couldn’t handle other clients. For the majority of the time they were sending work 5 days a week, occasionally weekends too and I was handling over 1000 descriptions a month. Sometimes there would be quiet spells for a week or two, so when they stopped contacting me...I first thought it was just a normal “dip”. Then a month passed. Then two. At that point, I contacted them to ask what was happening and they gave me a vague “We have been handling more of the copy in-house”. And that was that - I have never heard from them again, they didn’t even bother to tell me that they didn’t need my services any more. I’ve seen the descriptions they use now and they are 100% AI generated. I ended up closing my business because I couldn’t afford to keep paying my country’s self employment fees while trying to find new clients who would pay enough to make it worth continuing.

-Becky

We had a staff of 8 people and made about $600,000. This year we made less than $10k

Business copywriter

I was a business copywriter for eCommerce brands and did B2B sales copywriting before 2022.

In fact, my agency employed 8 people total at our peak. But then 2022 came around and clients lost total faith in human writing. At first we were hopeful, but over time we lost everything. I had to let go of everyone, including my little sister, when we finally ran out of money.

I was lucky, I have some friends in business who bought a resort and who still value my marketing expertise - so they brought me on board in the last few months, but 2025 was shaping up to be the worst year ever as a freelancer. I was looking for other jobs when my buddies called me.

At our peak, we went from making something like $600,000 a year and employing 8 people... To making less than $10K in 2025 before I miraculously got my new job.

Being repeatedly told subconsciously if not directly that your expertise is not valued or needed anymore - that really dehumanizes you as a person. And I’m still working through the pain of the two-year-long process that demolished my future in that profession.

It’s one of those rare times in life when a man cries because he is just feeling so dehumanized and unappreciated despite pouring his life, heart and soul into something.

I’ve landed on my feet for now with people who value me as more than a words-dispensing machine, and for that I’m grateful. But AI is coming for everyone in the marketing space.

Designers are hardly talked about any more. My leadership is looking forward to the day when they can generate AI videos for promotional materials instead of paying a studio $8K or more to film and produce marketing videos. And Meta is rolling out AI media buying that will replace paid ads agencies.

What jobs will this create? I can see very little. I currently don’t have any faith that this will get better at any point in the future.

I think the reason why is that I was positioned towards the “bottom” of the market, in the sense that my customers were nearly all startups and new businesses that people were starting in their spare time.

I had a partner Jake and together we basically got most of our clients through Fiverr. Fiverr customers are generally not big institutions or multi-nationals, although you do get some of that on Fiverr... It’s mostly people trying to start small businesses from the ground up.

I remember actually, when I was first starting out in writing, thinking “I can’t believe this is a job!” because writing has always come naturally to me. But the truth is, a lot of people out there go to start a business and what’s the first thing you do? You get a website, you find a template, and then you’re staring at a blank page thinking “what should I write about it?” And for them, that’s not an easy question to answer.

So that’s essentially where we fit in - and there’s more to it, as well, such as Conversion Rate Optimization on landing pages and so forth. When you boil it all down, we were helping small businesses find their message, find their market, and find their media - the way they were going to communicate with their market. And we had some great successes!

But nothing affected my business like ChatGPT did. All through Covid we were doing great, maybe even better because there were a lot of people staying home trying to start a new business - so we’d be helping people write the copy for their websites and so forth.

AI is really dehumanizing, and I am still working through issues of self-worth as a result of this experience. When you go from knowing you are valuable and valued, with all the hope in the world of a full career and the ability to provide other people with jobs... To being relegated to someone who edits AI drafts of copy at a steep discount because “most of the work is already done” ...

2022-2023 was a weird time, for two reasons.

First, because I’m a very aware person - I remember that AI was creeping up on our industry before ChatGPT, with Jasper and other tools. I was actually playing with the idea of creating my own AI copywriting tool at the time.

When ChatGPT came out, we were all like “OK, this is a wake up call. We need to evolve...” Every person I knew in my industry was shaken.

Second, because the economy wasn’t that great. It had already started to downturn in 2022, and I had already had to let a few people go at that point, I can’t remember exactly when.

The first part of the year is always the slowest. So January through March, you never know if that’s an indication of how bad the rest of the year is going to be.

In our case, it was. But I remember thinking “OK, the stimulus money has dried up. The economy is not great.” So I wasn’t sure if it was just broad market conditions or ChatGPT specifically.

But even the work we were doing was changing rapidly. We’d have people come to us like “hey, this was written by ChatGPT, can you clean it up?”

And we’d charge less because it was just an editing job and not fully writing from scratch.

By the end of that year, the company had lost the remaining staff. I had one last push before November 2023 (the end of the year has historically been the best time for our business, with Black Friday and Christmas) but I only succeeded in draining my bank account, and I was forced to let go of our last real employee, my sister, in early 2024. My brother and his wife were also doing some contract work for me at the time, and I had to end that pretty abruptly after our big push failed.

I remember, I believed that things were going to turn around again once people realized that even having a writing machine was not enough to create success like a real copywriter can. After all, the message is only one part of it - and divorced from the overall strategy of market and media, it’s never as effective as it can be.

In other words, there’s a context in which all marketing messages are seen, and it takes a human to understand what will work in that context.

But instead, what happened is that the pace of adoption was speeding up and all of those small entrepreneurs who used to rely on us, now used AI to do the work.

The technological advancements of GPT-4, and everyone trying to build their own AI, dominated the airwaves throughout 2023 and 2024. And technology adoption skyrocketed.

The thing is, I can’t even blame people. To be honest, when I’m writing marketing copy I use AI to speed up the process.

I still believe you need intelligence and strategy behind your ideas, or they will simply be meaningless words on a screen - but I can’t blame people for using these very cheap tools instead of paying an expert hundreds of dollars to get their website written.

Especially in my end of the market, where we were working with startup entrepreneurs who are bootstrapping their way to success.

When I officially left the business a few months ago, that left just my partner manning the Fiverr account we started with over 8 years ago.

I think the account is active enough to support a single person now, but I wouldn’t be so sure about next year. The drop off from 2022 to 2023 was BAD. The drop off from 2023 to 2024 was CATASTROPHIC.

Normally there are signs of life around April - in 2025, May had come and there was hardly a pulse in the business.

I still believe there may be a space for copywriters in the future, but much like tailors and seamstresses, it will be a very, very niche market for only the highest-end clients.

—Marcus Wiesner

My hours have been cut from nearly full time to 4-5 a month

Medical writer

I’m a medical writer; I work as a contract writer for a large digital marketing platform, adapting content from pharma companies to fit our platform. Medical writers work in regulatory, clinical, and marketing fields and I’m in marketing. I got my current contract job just 2 years ago, back when you could get this job with just a BA/BS.

In the last 2 years the market has changed drastically. My hours have been cut from nearly full time up to March ‘24 to 4-5 a month now if I’m lucky. I’ve been applying for new jobs for over a year and have had barely a nibble.

The trend now seems to be to have AI produce content, and then hire professionals with advanced degrees to check it over. And paying them less per hour than I make now when I actually work.

I am no longer qualified to do the job I’ve been doing, which is really frustrating. I’m trying to find a new career, trying to start over at age 50.

—Anonymous

We learned our work had been used to train LLMs and our jobs were outsourced to India

Editor for Gracenotes

So I lost my previous job to AI, and a lot of other things. I always joke that the number of historical trends that led to me losing it is basically a summary of the recent history of Western Civilization.

I used to be a schedule editor for Gracenote (the company that used to find metadata for CDs that you ripped into iTunes). They got bought by Nielsen, the TV ratings company, and then tasked with essentially adding metadata to TV guide listings. When you hit the info button on your remote, or when you Google a movie and get the card, a lot of that is Gracenote. The idea was that we could provide accurate, consistent, high-quality text metadata that companies could buy to add to their own listings. There’s a specific style of Gracenote Description Writing that still sticks out to me every time I see it.

So, basically from when I joined the company in late 2021 things were going sideways. I’m based in the Netherlands and worker protections are good, but we got horror stories of whole departments in the US showing up, being called into a “town hall” and laid off en-masse, so the writing was on the wall. We unionised, but they seemed to be dragging their feet on getting us a CAO (Collective Labour Agreement) that would codify a lot of our benefits.

The way the job worked was each editor would have a group of TV channels they would edit the metadata for. My team worked on the UK market, and a lot of us were UK transplants living in the NL. During my time there I did a few groups but, being Welsh, I eventually ended up with the Welsh, Irish and Scottish channels like S4C, RTE, BBC Alba. The two skills we were selling to the company were essentially: knowledge of the UK TV market used to prioritise different shows, and a high degree of proficiency in written English (and I bet you think you know why I lost the job to AI, but hold on).

Around January 2024 they introduced a new tool in the proprietary database we used, that totally changed how our work was done. Instead of channel groups that we prioritised ourselves, instead we were given an interface that would load 10 or so show records from any channel group, which had been auto-sorted by priority. It was then revealed to us that for the last two years or so, every single bit of our work in prioritisation had been fed into machine learning to try and work out how and why we prioritised certain shows over others.

“Hold on” we said, “this kind of seems like you’ve developed a tool to replace us with cheap overseas labour and are about to outsource all our jobs”

“Nonsense,” said upper management, “ignore the evidence of your lying eyes.”

That is, of course, what they had done.

They had a business strategy they called “automation as a movement” and we assumed they would be introducing LLMs into our workflow. But, as they openly admitted when they eventually told us what they were doing, LLMs simply weren’t (and still aren’t) good enough to do the work of assimilating, parsing and condensing the many different sources of information we needed to do the job. Part of it was accuracy, we would often have to research show information online and a lot of our job amounted to enclosing the digital commons by taking episode descriptions from fanwikis and rewriting them; part of it was variety, the information for the descriptions was ingested into our system in many different ways including press sites, press packs from the channels, emails, spreadsheets, etc etc and “AI” at the time wasn’t up to the task. The writing itself would have been entirely possible, it was already very formulaic, but getting the information to the point it was writable by an LLM was so impractical as to be impossible.

So they automated the other half of the job, the prioritisation. The writing was outsourced to India. As I said at the start, there’s a lot of historical currents at play here. Why are there so many people in India who speak and write English to a high standard? Don’t worry about it!

And, the cherry on the cake, both the union and the works council knew this would be happening, but were legally barred from telling us because of “competitive advantage”. They negotiated a pretty good severance package for those of us on “vastcontracts” (essentially permanent employees, as opposed to time-limited contracts) but it still saw a team of 10 reduced to 2 in the space of a month.

—Anonymous

Coworkers told me to my face that AI could and maybe should be doing all my work

Nonprofit communications worker

I currently work in nonprofit communications, and worked as a radio journalist for about four years before that. I graduated college in 2020 with a degree in music and broadcasting.

In my current job, I hear about the benefits of AI on a weekly basis. Unfortunately, those benefits consist of doing tasks that are a part of my direct workload. I’m already struggling to handle the amount of downtime that I have, as I had worked in the always-behind-schedule world of journalism before this (in fact, I am writing this on the clock right now). My duties consist mainly of writing for and putting together weekly and quarterly newsletters and writing our social media.

After a volunteer who recorded audio versions of our newsletters passed away suddenly, it was brought up in a meeting two hours after we heard the news that AI should be the one to create the audio versions going forward. I had to remind them that I am in fact an award-winning radio journalist and audio producer (I produce a few podcasts on a freelance basis, some of which are quite popular) and that I already have little work to do and would be able to take over those duties. After about two weeks of fighting, it was decided that I would be recording those newsletters. I also make sure our website is up-to-date on all of our events and community outings. At some point, I stopped being asked to write blurbs about the different events and I learned that this task was now being done by our IT Manager using AI to write those blurbs instead. They suck, but I don’t get to make that distinction. It has been brought up more than once that our social media is usually pretty fact-forward, and could easily be written by AI. That might be true, but it is also about half of my already very light workload. If I lost that, I would have very little to do. This has not yet been decided.

I have been told (to my face!) by my coworkers that AI could and maybe should be doing all of my work. People who are otherwise very progressive leaning seem to see no problem with me being out of work. While it was a win for me to be able to record the audio newsletters, I feel as if I am losing the battle for the right to do what I have spent the last five years of my life doing. I am 30 and making pennies, barely able to afford a one-bedroom apartment, while logging three-to-four hours of solitaire on my phone every day. This isn’t what I signed up for in life. My employers have given me some new work to do, but that is mostly planning parties and spreading cheer through the workplace, something I loathe and was never asked to do. There are no jobs in my field in my area.

I have seen two postings in the past six months for communications jobs that pay enough for me to continue living in my apartment. I got neither of them.

While I am still able to write my newsletter articles, those give me very little joy and if things keep progressing at this rate I won’t even have those. I’ll be nothing but a party planner. I don’t even like parties. Especially not for people who think I should be out of a job.

At this rate, I have seen little pushback from my employer about having AI do my entire job. Even if I think this is a horrible idea, as the topics I write about are often sensitive and personal, I have no faith that they will not go in this direction. At this point, I am concerned about layoffs and my financial future.

[We checked in with the contributor a few weeks after he reached out to us and he gave us this update:]

I am now being sent clearly AI written articles from heads of other departments (on subjects that I can and will soon be writing about) for publication on our website. And when I say “clearly AI,” I mean I took one look and knew immediately and was backed up by an online AI checker (which I realize is not always accurate but still). The other change is that the past several weeks have taught me that I don’t want to be a part of this field any longer. I can find another comms job, and actually have an interview with another company tomorrow, but have no reason to believe that they won’t also be pushing for AI at every turn.

—Anonymous

I’m a copywriter by trade. These days I do very little

Copywriter

I’m a copywriter by trade. These days I do very little. The market for my services is drying up rapidly and I’m not the only one who is feeling it. I’ve spoken to many copywriters who have noticed a drop in their work or clients who are writing with ChatGPT and asking copywriters to simply edit it.

I have clients who ask me to use AI wherever I can and to let them know how long it takes. It takes me less time and that means less money.

Some copywriters have just given up on the profession altogether.

I have been working with AI for a while. I teach people how to use it. What I notice is a move towards becoming an operator.

I craft prompts, edit through prompts and add my skills along the way (I feel my copywriting skills mean I can prompt and analyse output better than a non-writer). But writing like this doesn’t feel like it used to. I don’t go through the full creative process. I don’t do the hard work that makes me feel alive afterwards. It’s different, more clinical and much less rewarding.

I don’t want to be a skilled operator. I want to be a human copywriter. Yet, I think these days are numbered.

—Anonymous

I did “adapt or die” using AI, but I’m still in a precarious position

Ghostwriter

From 2010-today I worked as a freelance writer in two capacities: freelance journalism for outlets like Cannabis Now, High Times, Phoenix New Times, and The Street, and ghostwriting through a variety of marketplaces (elance, fiverr, WriterAccess, Scripted, Crowd Content) and agencies (Volume 9, Influence & Co, Intero Digital, Cryptoland PR).

The freelance reporting market still exists but is extremely competitive and pretty poorly paid. So I largely made my living ghostwriting to supplement income. The marketplaces all largely dried up unless you have a highly ranked account. I do not because I never wanted to grind through the low paid work long enough. I did attempt to use ChatGPT for low-paid WriterAccess jobs but got declined.

Meanwhile, my steadiest ghostwriting client was Influence & Co/Intero Digital. Through this agency, I have ghostwritten articles for nearly everyone you can think of (except Vox/Verge): NYT, LA Times, WaPo, WSJ, Harvard Business Review, Venture Beat, HuffPost, AdWeek, and so many more. And I’ve done it for execs for large tech companies, politicians, and more. The reason it works is because they have guest posts down to a science.

They built a database of all publisher’s guidelines. If I wanted to be in HBR, I knew the exact submission guidelines and could pitch relevant topics based on the client. Once the pitch is accepted, an outline is written, and the client is interviewed. This interview is crucial because it’s where we tap into the source and gain firsthand knowledge that can’t be found online. It also gets the client’s natural voice. I then combine the recorded interview with targeted online research to find statistics and studies to back up what the client says, connect it to recent events, and format to the publisher’s specs.

So ChatGPT came along December 2022, and for most of 2023 things were fine, although Influence & Co was bought by Intero, so internal issues were arising. I was with this company from the start when they were emailing word docs through building the database and selling the company several times. I can go on and on about how it all works.

We as writers don’t use ChatGPT, but it still seeped into the workflow from the client. The client interview I mentioned above as being vital because it gets info you can’t get online and their voice and everything you need to do it right—well those clients started using ChatGPT. By the end of 2023, I couldn’t handle it anymore because my job fundamentally changed. I was no longer learning anything. That vital mix that made it work was gone, and it was all me combining ChatGPT and the internet to try and make it fit into those publications above, many of which implemented AI detection, started publishing their own AI articles, and stopped accepting outside contributions.

The thing about writing in this instance is that it doesn’t matter how many drafts you write, if it doesn’t get published in an acceptable publication, then it looks like we did nothing. What was steady work for over a decade slowed to a trickle, and I was tired of the work that was coming in because it was so bad.

Last summer, I emailed them and quit. I could no longer depend on the income. It was $1500-$3000 a month for over a decade and then by 2024 was $100 a month. And I hated doing it. It was the lowest level bs work I hated so much. I loved that job because I learned so much and I was challenged trying to get into all those publications, even if it was a team effort and not just me. I wrote some killer articles that ChatGPT could never. And the reason AI took my job is because clients who hired me for hundreds to thousands of dollars a month decided it’s not worth their time to follow our process and instead use ChatGPT.

That is why I think it’s important to talk about. I probably could still be working today in what became a content mill. And the reason it ultimately became no longer worth it isn’t all the corporate changes. It wasn’t my boss who was using AI—it was our customers. Working with us was deemed not important, and it’s impossible to explain to someone in an agency environment that they’re doing it to themselves. They will just go to a different agency and keep trying, and many of the unethical ones will pull paid tricks that make it look more successful than it is, like paying Entrepreneur $3000 for a year in their leadership network. (Comes out to paying $150 per published post, which is wild considering the pay scale above).

The whole YEC publishing conglomerate is another rabbit hole. Forbes, CoinTelegraph, Newsweek, and others have the same paid club structure that happens to come with guest post access. And those publishers allow paid marketing in the guise of editorials.

I could probably write a book about the backend of all this stuff and how guest posts end up on every media outlet on the planet. Either way, ChatGPT ruined it, and I’m largely retired now. I am still doing some ghostwriting, but it’s more in the vein of PR and marketing work for various agencies I can find that need writers. The market still exists, even if I have to work harder for clients.

And inexplicably, the reason we met originally was because I was involved in the start of Adobe Stock accepting AI outputs from contributors. I now earn $2500 per month consistently from that and have a lot of thoughts about how as a writer with deep inside knowledge of the writing industry, I couldn’t find a single way to “adapt or die” and leverage ChatGPT to make money. I could probably put up a website and build some social media bots. But plugging AI into the existing industry wasn’t possible. It was already competitive. Yet I somehow managed to build a steady recurring residual income stream selling Midjourney images on Adobe stock for $1 a piece. I’m on track to earn $30,000 this year from that compared to only $12,000 from writing. I used to earn $40,000-$50,000 a year doing exclusively writing from 2011-2022.

I did “adapt or die” using AI, but I’m still in a precarious position. If Adobe shut down or stopped accepting AI, I’ll be screwed. It doesn’t help that I’m very vocally against Adobe and called them out last year via Bloomberg for training firefly on Midjourney outputs when I’m one of the people making money from it. I’m fascinated to learn how the court cases end up and how it impacts my portfolio. I’m currently working to learn photography and videography well enough to head to Vegas and LA for conferences next year to build a real editorial stock portfolio across the other sites.

So my human writing job was reduced below a living wage, and I have an AI image portfolio keeping me afloat while I try to build a human image/video portfolio faster than AI images are banned. Easy peasy right?

–Brian Penny

The agency was begging me to take on more work. Then it had nothing for me

Freelance copywriter

I was a freelance copywriter. I am going to be fully transparent and say I was never one of those people that hustled the best, but I had steady work. Then AI came and one of the main agencies that I worked for went from begging me to take on more work to having 0 work for me in just 6-8 months. I struggled to find other income, found another agency that had come out of the initial AI hype and built a base of clients that had realized AI was slop, only for their customer base to be decimated by Trump’s tariffs about a month after I joined.

What I think people fail to realize when they talk about AI is that this is coming on the tail end of a crisis in employment for college grads for years. I only started freelancing because I applied to hundreds of jobs after winding up back at my mom’s house during COVID-19. Anecdotally, most of my friends that I graduated with (Class of 2019) spent years struggling to find stable, full-time jobs with health insurance, pre-AI. Add AI to the mix, and getting your foot in the door of most white collar industries just got even harder.

As I continue airing my grievances in your email, I remember when ChatGPT first came out a lot of smug literary types on Twitter were saying “if your writing can be replaced by AI then it wasn’t good to begin with,” and that made me want to scream. The writing that I’m actually good at was the writing that nobody was going to pay me for because the media landscape is decimated!

Content writing/copywriting was supposed to be the way you support yourself as an artist, and now even that’s gone.

—Rebecca Duras

My biggest client replaced me with a custom GPT. They surely trained it using my work

Copywriter and Marketing Consultant

I am a long-time solopreneur and small business owner, who got into the marketing space about 8 years ago. This career shift was quite the surprise to me, as for most of my career I didn’t like marketing...or marketers. But here we are ;p

While I don’t normally put it in these terms, what shifted everything for me was realizing that copywriting was a thing — it could make a huge difference in my business and for other businesses, too. With a BA in English, and after doing non-marketing writing projects on the side for years, it just made a ton of sense to me that the words we use to talk about our businesses can make a big difference. I was hooked.

After pursuing some training, I had a lucrative side-hustle doing strategic messaging work and website copy for a few years before jumping into full-time freelancing in 2021. The work was fun, the community of marketers I was a part of was amazing, and I was making more money than I ever could have in my prior business.

And while the launch of ChatGPT in Nov ‘22 definitely made many of us nervous — writing those words brings into focus how stressful the existential angst has actually been since that day — for me and many of my copywriting friends, the good times just kept rolling. 2023 was my best year ever in business — by a whopping 30%. I wasn’t alone. Many of my colleagues were also killing it.

All of that changed in 2024.

Early that year, the AI propaganda seemed to hit its full crescendo, and it started significantly impacting my business. I quickly noticed leads were down, and financially, things started feeling tight. Then, that spring, my biggest retainer client suddenly gave me 30-days notice that they wouldn’t renew my contract — which made up half of what I needed to live on. The decision caught everyone, including the marketing director, off guard. She loved what I was doing for them and cried when she told me the news. I later found out through the grapevine that the CEO and his right hand guy were hoping to replace me with a custom GPT they had created. They surely trained it using my work.

The AI-related hits kept coming. The thriving professional community I enjoyed pretty much imploded that summer – largely because of some unpopular leadership decisions around AI. Almost all of my skilled copywriter friends left the organization — and while I’ve lost touch with most, the little I have heard is that almost all of them have struggled. Many have found full-time employment elsewhere.

I won’t go into all the ins-and-outs of what has happened to me since, and I’ll leave my rant about getting AI slop from my clients to “edit” alone. (Briefly, that task is beyond miserable.)

But I will say from May of 2024 to now, I’ve gone from having a very healthy business and amazing professional community, to feeling very isolated and struggling to get by. Financially, we’ve burned through $20k in savings and almost $30k in credit cards at this point. We’re almost out of cash and the credit cards are close to maxed. Full-time employment that’d pay the bills (and get us out of our hole) just isn’t there. Truthfully, if it wasn’t for a little help from some family – and basically being gifted two significant contracts through a local friend – we’d be flat broke with little hope on the horizon. Despite our precarious position, continuing to risk freelance work seems to be our best and pretty much only option.

I do want to say, though, that even though it’s bleak, I see some signs for hope. In the last few months, in my experience many business owners are waking up to the fact that AI can’t do what it claims it can. Moreover, with all of the extra slop around, they’re feeling even more overwhelmed – which means if you can do any marketing strategy and consulting, you might make it.

But while I see that things might be starting to turn, the pre-AI days of junior copywriting roles and freelancers being able making lots of money writing non-AI content seem to be long gone. I think those writers who don’t lean on AI and find a way to make it through will be in high-demand once the AI-illusion starts to lift en masse. I just hope enough business owners who need marketing help wake up before then so that more of us writers don’t have to starve.

–Anonymous

This installment of AI Killed My Job was completed with support from the Omidyar Network’s Tech Journalism Fund.

Nearly everything OpenAI does leaks, so Altman and the executive staff must have anticipated that this would become techworld headline news. The aim might have been to assure investors and partners that OpenAI was taking the competition seriously, and working double time to stay on top. Yet in so doing, it has broadcasted its own pervasive vulnerability.

A quick note that this full post is for paying subscribers. I’m a 100% independent journalist and this work is made possible by readers who chip in a small sum each month to support it. Thanks all, and to everyone who reads and backs Blood in the Machine.

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As noted in his commentary on the ‘code red’ development, OpenAI is in a uniquely tough spot (and has been all along):

In short, OpenAI has lost their lead, and massively overextended themselves. Worse, they are burning billions of dollars of month… Their war chest is impressive, but their burn rate is terrifying. My guess is that they have cumulatively raised on the order of $100 billion since they launched, perhaps more than any other company in history, but have already spent most of it, and likely don’t have much more than a year’s runway left.

Developing, training, and operating chatbots the way that OpenAI—and Google, Anthropic, and Meta do, with a more-is-more approach to building ever-larger datasets and ever-larger data centers to train and run them, is, as we know, an almost incomprehensibly expensive undertaking. So much so that even with tens of billions of dollars at its disposal, OpenAI can’t sustainably compete with Google or the other giants, who are bringing in that much in revenue from their advertising businesses every quarter, and can offset the seemingly endless costs of such expansion.

But if OpenAI falls behind in technology or its product slate, and it turns out Google’s Gemini or Anthropic’s Claude are just as appealing to consumers, investors might jump ship. And OpenAI is currently very much at the mercy of its investors. Which is why this ‘code red’ situation is kind of a big deal—OpenAI’s brass decided it was important to publicly signal that it’s getting in the trenches and doing something about its weakened position, even if doing so risked drawing attention to said weak position.

This is a rare admission of doubt and fallibility for the almost-sociopathically brash AI startup, which has projected utter confidence and assurance that its vision of the AI future is dawning nonstop for the last two years. So much of the AI game boils down to cultivation and management of perception, especially given that there are so many chatbot competitors available now, and that the technology is essentially a commodity. Being First and Best anointed OpenAI to consumers and backers alike; if OpenAI is no longer either of those things, and it doesn’t have a business model to fall back on, it’s not clear what, it exactly, what OpenAI’s story becomes.

Which is why it was especially notable that the OpenAI code red news dovetailed with another big AI storyline: The increased sunlight on the role of Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar, billionaire venture capitalist David Sacks, and the inter-GOP political drama unfolding around the state AI law moratorium executive order that he was responsible for drafting. That drama is revealing the unique vulnerabilities of the once-unimpeachable pro-AI faction in the Trump administration, and uncovering fault lines that threaten it from the inside. Along with mounting data center protests and souring public opinion, you might even say that there’s far more than one ‘code red’ sounding for the AI industry right now.

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Here’s the obligatory but brief reminder that paying subscribers keep this thing going, as BITM is a one-human, 100% independent operation. I’m also running a 20% off discount this week, so now is a good time to subscribe to save a few bucks and support this work. Many thanks everyone, and onwards.

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Earlier this year, I reported that journalists at Politico were formally pushing back after their bosses deployed two different AI products without warning or oversight. Management launched a feature atop the widely-visited Politico homepage that automatically published AI-generated headlines and snippets during the Democratic National Convention and the vice presidential debates in 2024, promptly making obvious errors each time.

Then, again without consulting the newsroom, Politico began offering AI-generated “reports” to premium subscribers that were full of mistakes, factual errors and misrepresentations of staffers’ work.

Unlike many newsrooms, however, Politico journalists had a clearcut legal mechanism for fighting back: A union contract that prohibits the undisclosed and unsupervised use of AI. Per the contract, Politico’s leadership is required to give the staff 60 days notice before deploying AI products, for one thing. For another, they’re supposed to ensure that AI products both adhere to all editorial guidelines that human journalists do and are subject to human oversight. After Politico refused to admit wrongdoing, its journalists’ union, the PEN Guild, filed an official grievance and took them to arbitration.

In a ruling handed down this week that the union is hailing as a “landmark,” it just won a major victory. The arbitrator ruled that Politico officially violated the collective bargaining agreement by failing to provide notice, human oversight, or an opportunity for the workers to bargain over the use of AI in the newsroom.

“If the goal is speed and the cost is accuracy and accountability,” the arbitrator wrote in his decision, “AI is the clear winner. If accuracy and accountability is the baseline, then AI, as used in these instances, cannot yet rival the hallmarks of human output, which are accuracy and reliability.” He also confirmed that the report-building product contained “erroneous and even absurd” AI-generated materials.

This is an important ruling on a number of fronts. First and most immediately, it means that Politico has to engage the newsroom over its AI use, and bargain with the union about how it will do so. AKA Politico has to get input from the reporters, writers, and editors actually doing the journalism on how they want (or don’t want) to see AI used in their workplaces. Any AI integration must be democratic, in other words, just how industry advocates are always saying it should be.

Second, it stands to set a meaningful precedent for how journalists and workers can successfully push back against undisclosed, reputation-damaging, and labor-threatening AI products. Politico is owned by the multinational conglomerate Axel Springer, which also owns Business Insider, BILD, and Morning Brew, and is one of the most aggressively pro-AI in media. This kind of organizing is one of the most effective—and for now, perhaps one of the only—ways to help pump the brakes on management’s overzealous use of AI.

“This ruling is a clear affirmation that AI cannot be deployed as a shortcut around union rights, ethical journalism, or human judgment,” Ariel Wittenberg, the unit chair of the PEN Guild, said. “This is a win for our members at POLITICO fighting to ensure that AI strengthens our newsroom rather than undermining it.”

Now, the PEN Guild are not kneejerk anti-AI reactionaries, or even fundamentally opposed to the technology. They’ve said all along they want AI to work for journalists, not against them—to make sure it’s not generating bad information, trashing their reputation, or eroding their working conditions.

“One of my favorite lines in the arbitration decision talks about how while it is understandable management might want to ‘give the people what they want’ in launching AI products, ‘It is also understandable that journalists would want to hold the line against publication of substandard reporting’,” Wittenberg told me.

She continued:

We are going to continue holding the line. This ruling is a great example of the important role unions play in ensuring workers have a say over working conditions--including the rollout of new technologies. I hope it emboldens our colleagues at other news shops across the country fighting AI deployments that similarly degrade ethical standards, and I hope it sends a message to managers at POLITICO and news executives everywhere that adopting new technology cannot come at the cost of accuracy and accountability.

As such, by working to establish and uphold some common sense guardrails for AI, the union is functionally doing management a favor; both sides, after all, should want journalism that’s accurate, fair, sustainable, and well-edited. Unfettered AI use would only run the site’s readership and reputation into the ground. I hope Wittenberg is right, and we do indeed see more efforts like this take shape next year.

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To that end, it’s worth noting the NewsGuild, one of the nation’s largest newspaper unions, and the umbrella org to which PEN Guild belongs, has launched a week of action, starting December 1st. It’s called, fittingly, NEWS NOT SLOP. Sign the petition to keep journalism human-first and slop-free here, and, if you’d like, join a town hall with top journalists, union organizers, and yours truly, to discuss AI in the newsroom, and how to stop it all from going off the rails.

A quick word about DeleteMe, who’s the sponsor of today’s newsletter:

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HOUSEKEEPING:

NEXT WEEK, I’ll be in San Francisco for a Substack live event, where I will be debating over the question of whether robots should take our jobs. I will, perhaps unsurprisingly, be arguing the “no” side. Tickets are free but apparently in limited supply; if they “sell out” let me know as I can likely get some passes. I could probably use the backup, seeing as how this is a Substack event in San Francisco, and they may just try to automate me in realtime.

AI RESISTANCE ACTIONS:

A CALL FOR ARTISTS TO SUPPORT THE AI COPYRIGHT TRANSPARENCY ACT

Next Monday, the California legislature is holding a hearing on AB-412, the AI Copyright Transparency Act, at Stanford University. As has been documented in this blog, AI has been a bonesaw to the creative industries, and *especially* to visual artists. This act is one of the best hopes artists have for protecting their livelihoods amid the AI onslaught. If you’re in SF, and you’re a working artist—or simply want to support a world in which such a thing can exist—artist trade groups are asking that you show up.

I’m going to try to be there myself.

More details, courtesy of the Concept Art Association:

Because we ended up with such a broad and diverse coalition supporting our bill to protect artists and creators, we get a special legislative hearing on the matter. This is an ALL-HANDS-ON-DECK MOMENT!!! Big tech has decided to make AB-412 their #1 target! They know what’s at stake with our bill!!!

This hearing is going to be held in the heart of Silicon Valley. We want as large of a turnout there for the creative industries as we can get. AI models have been built upon a foundation of mass copyright theft. Billions of copyrighted works were taken without anyone’s consent, credit or compensation. Transparency for AI models not only affects us all, but it is essential. If we show up en masse for one another, even while the hearing is being conducted right there in Big Tech’s backyard, the need for our bill will be undeniable.

RSVP and get more details here.

A DELETE SPOTIFY EVENT IN NEW YORK CITY

After I published my post on how to quit Spotify, Nick Plante, a gen Z activist who runs in the Luddite Club circles in New York, reached out with word of one of his upcoming events: An in-person, mass Spotify deletion. Perfect. It’s this Saturday at Boshi’s Place, a music venue in Brooklyn. More details here.

Per Plante, “there will be informational zines, stations for playlist transferral and reflection, a presentation, musical celebration, and a grand finale with piñata.”

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Last but CERTAINLY not least, I’m pleased to share this interview with Nathan Grayson. Grayson is a great veteran games journalist—he’s worked at the Washington Post, Kotaku, and beyond—author of the book STREAM BIG about the rise of Twitch, and, most saliently for our purposes today, the co-founder of Aftermath, the worker-owned video games website that just celebrated its second birthday.

In honor of that hallmark, and at the end of a wild year in games, we logged onto Signal to chat AI, labor, and journalism in the gaming world. It’s been lightly edited for length and clarity.

BLOOD IN THE MACHINE: Happy birthday to Aftermath! Thanks for being one of the few shining lights in a decaying media landscape currently flooded with shit. How does it feel?

Nathan Grayson, co-founder of Aftermath: Good on a personal level, bad in the “general state of the world” sense. I’m extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished and how much the site has grown—we’re on the verge of hitting subscriber targets that will allow us to pay ourselves livable salaries and hire another person—but it also feels weird to stand atop what feels like a solid foundation while so many publications and institutions are crumbling beneath our feet. For the first time in my career as a journalist, I can’t be laid off; that’s an incredibly freeing feeling. But much as we’d like to provide tons of other writers and reporters with similar security, we’re still a fledgling organization. At the very least, Aftermath is a much more serious business than it was two years ago, but we’ve still got a lot of growing to do.

One of the best things that Aftermath does, IMO, is report not just on video game culture, but on the labor side, and on working conditions in the games industry. What’s the current status there, and how is Aftermath planning to continue covering it?

Things are in an interesting spot. On one hand, you have more union activity than ever in the US video game industry thanks to the legally binding neutrality agreement Code Workers of America struck with Microsoft shortly before the latter’s deal to purchase Activision Blizzard went through in late 2023, which has resulted in thousands of unionized workers at multiple studios across Microsoft’s portfolio. On the other, Microsoft has ruthlessly laid off around 4,000 game workers since the beginning of 2024, a microcosm of an industry that seems hell bent on cutting its way to “growth” heedless of long-term consequences. The suits running major companies don’t value talent, and unions aren’t big enough yet to truly mount an offensive. All they can do right now is staunch the bleeding, and the wound—self-inflicted, in many ways—is looking awfully bad.

Aftermath will continue to cover labor in the games industry by doing what we’ve always done: center workers first and foremost. The publication is fully worker-owned, so we’ve got to practice what we preach and show solidarity wherever possible. That does not mean uncritically covering unions—while useful, they are far from perfect, and every union has its quirks—but it does mean recognizing and conveying that we’re all part of the same struggle. Things might look bleak right now, but there are more of us than there are of them, and that will always remain true.

What’s your take on the AI situation in the games industry right now, as a front row observer?

To hear some tell it, every major studio is leaning on AI now, while others swear vehemently that they’ll never touch it. Recognizing how unpopular AI is in creative fields, execs have taken to claiming that their companies only use AI for behind-the-scenes processes—research, organization, mocking up various ideas—but then players keep discovering AI artwork in games like Call of Duty. Meanwhile, the likes of Ubisoft, Square Enix, and Krafton have announced intentions to go all in on AI, regardless of how many workers their initiatives end up displacing. And then of course, there’s Microsoft, which is shoehorning AI into every element of its business— including games—like it made some kind of Faustian bargain with the robot devil. It is crucial to understand, however, that gamers generally dislike AI! A lot! Also, many of the aforementioned companies also embraced NFTs, and look how that turned out.

What are some pieces BLOOD readers should check out to get a sense of what Aftermath is all about / that you’re proudest of?

Trying To Get A Job In Video Games Right Now Is Like Crawling Through Hell

The Right’s Charlie Kirk Cancellation Spree Has Emboldened Gaming’s Worst

Months After Microsoft Layoffs, Zenimax Unions Never Stopped Fighting For Impacted Workers

Games Media Can’t Ignore BDS Xbox Boycott

The Politics, Theology, And Hype Behind The First Gamer Saint

Anything else you want to add?

We’re having a sale on subscriptions right now! $1 for your first month, which is a phenomenal deal if you want to come see what we’re about before deciding whether or not to stick around. I know subscription fatigue is a thing—I’m already subscribed to too many websites and podcasts to count—but every subscription really does count for a publication like ours. We are not The New York Times or The Washington Post (both of which, arguably, no longer deserve your subscription money anyway); we’re five people and two regular contributors doing our best to cover a gargantuan, multi-billion-dollar industry.

We believe in holding power to account even if that comes at the expense of access, and independence is the only way to ensure that we’re able to unflinchingly speak our minds and lift up voices that deserve to be heard.

Go check them out, and support them if you can. *I* will add that Aftermath is also selling this great DESTROY AI hoodie designed by artist Kim Hu, which is perfect for the stylish luddite in your life. Alright alright. That’s it for today. More soon. Hammers up.

In honor of the only made-up consumer holiday with CYBER in its name (and therefore the best one) I’m going to try out my first sale on subscriptions for BLOOD IN THE MACHINE. Yes, the BITM business development team (me after the morning coffee, reading emails) has consulted with the editorial department (me after lunch, ignoring emails), and has decided to institute a 20% sale on all subscriptions, this week only.

Use this link to purchase a subscription—ideally an annual one, since the Substack and Stripe fees make a mess of things otherwise, but whatever works—or hit the button below to enjoy a PERMANENT 20% OFF on Blood in the Machine. You will get full access to paywalled stuff, all published and future Critical AI Report material, and the knowledge that you are helping a 100% independent, occasionally wearied, yet improbably optimistic tech journalist pay rent and continue this work.

Isn’t that better than, say, another pair of AirPods or a printer that’s going to crap out in a few months anyway?

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The sale ends Sunday, December 7th.

Thanks as always to everyone who reads, shares, and supports this work, and pardon the spammy email; they won’t happen often, promise. More very soon. Hammers up.

I finally cancelled Spotify. I’d been meaning to do this forever, and frankly I’m embarrassed it took me so long. Spotify has been driving down wages for artists far longer than the AI companies, reducing payouts for musicians over the years until most are now making a statistically meaningless amount from the platform; many estimates put the figure as low as $0.003 per stream. In 2024, Spotify stopped paying artists for songs that had fewer than 1,000 streams, despite the fact that 81% of musicians on the platform don’t cross that threshold.

Stories abound of successful artists with millions of monthly listeners who can’t afford to take a vacation, a break, or pay rent. The pop star Lily Allen says she makes more money selling pics of her feet on OnlyFans than she does from Spotify royalties. Meanwhile, Spotify just raked in nearly $700 million in quarterly profits. It’s rank exploitation. Don’t take it from me, take it from Bjork. Earlier this year, she succinctly described Spotify as “probably the worst thing that has happened to musicians,” thanks to how the company, and the streaming model it normalized, has so completely corroded artists’ incomes over the last decade or so.

Meanwhile, the company declines to label the AI songs that are overrunning the platform and even boosts them into Discover Weekly playlists, incentivizing their spread. Founder and CEO Daniel Ek used his Spotify fortune to invest in a lethal military tech startup, prompting the most recent round of artist boycotts from the platform. I could go on, but that will probably do—Spotify is everything that’s wrong with Silicon Valley’s engagement with culture and labor condensed into a single platform. Plus, the audio quality sucks.

So why didn’t I go sooner? I justified staying by telling myself I’d use Bandcamp to buy the albums and songs I listened to a lot, which I did, while using Spotify for convenience. That, and the same reasons I still use Gmail: I felt locked in (all those saved songs and playlists) and that the costs of switching would be too high (I would surely lose access to countless songs by switching over). But I am here to tell you today that both of those counts are absolutely false.

I’ve spent the last few days nursing a cold, and figured that I’d use some of that time to test out Spotify alternatives and finally take the plunge. I am extremely glad I did; it’s been a minute since I’ve felt something approaching genuine delight in discovering a new tech service.

So, in time for Black Friday—some of the Spotify alternatives have specials and sales going right now—here’s the Complete BLOOD IN THE MACHINE Guide to Getting Off Spotify.

As always, this work is made possible by the percentage of readers who chip in $6 bucks a month (or $60 a year). It is for you, dear readers, that I spend my sick days listening to new Geese tracks, Prince reissues, and Black Sabbath remasters on various streaming platforms (and not at all for myself), and I very much appreciate your support. If you can afford to, and you find value in this work, please consider joining the ranks of the hammer wielders. Many thanks, and onwards.

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A complete guide to quitting Spotify

First, download Bandcamp if you have not done so already. The best way to support artists is to purchase their music directly, and even if the company has been through some rough waters lately, Bandcamp remains the most convenient way to buy music online and keep it in one place.

Second, I would recommend considering what’s important to you in a streaming platform. Audio quality? Library depth? Fairest payments to artists? Recommendation algorithm? It not being owned by a vampiric billionaire or operated by an extractive tech monopoly?

While you’re thinking about that, let’s assuage those two concerns about switching that you likely share with me.

You are not locked into Spotify even a little bit

Your music library is much, much more portable than you think. It will cost you from $0-10 to have a service like Soundiiz automatically transfer your playlists from one service to another. It’s so easy. The platform that I wound up switching to had a deal that let me do this for free. The permissions Soundiiz asked for were not at all onerous, and it took like 5 minutes. Total. I had around 200 playlists, hundreds of albums and artists saved, and several thousand songs and albums favorited. It all ported over seamlessly.

If you’re worried about your meticulously compiled playlists, I would say: Do not at all be. They’ll port over fine. And nearly every single song will still be here, because:

Spotify’s library is not that much better than anyone else’s

This was honestly the biggest surprise. On most streaming services I tried, I found nearly everything I was looking for. That surprise could be due to a long outdated misconception I had, or because AI has fried my brain for the last two years, but I was fully expecting Spotify to at least beat the competition in song selection. But nope, not really. There just wasn’t much deviation, and when I transferred my playlists, I only lost at most a song or two on each. And I listen to some admittedly pretty weird stuff! I did not really expect to find, say, Fluisteraars albums everywhere; either the world has suddenly gotten into Dutch experimental black metal, or it’s simply become easier for artists to upload songs to more platforms.

Okay, so you can transfer streaming libraries nice and easy, and selection isn’t really going to be an issue. Before we break down the alternatives, let’s talk about artist royalties. Most companies publish statements about how they calculate payments, but very few publish the actual rates they pay (there’s one exception, which we’ll get to in a second here), so it’s up to independent auditors to try to track down real numbers. Most streamers also send the payments to the rightsholders, so for musicians on record labels, there are further cuts scooped out.

I found this YouTube segment from the independent musician Benn Jordan really interesting. Since he’s indy, he gets the payments directly, and he put together this breakdown of what the streamers paid him.

Okay, with all that in mind, here’s a dive into the streaming platforms I’ve tried, and my choice of best, most artist-friendly streamer.

Apple Music

Apple Music is the closest thing there is to a straight-up Spotify clone, from my survey, anyway. I used a free trial, and it was fine. It had (nearly) all the music I wanted, audio quality was fine, and the user interface is intuitive. If you use lots of Apple stuff you’ll know what to expect and you probably already have an Apple Music account. I was a little curious to see if the notoriously prude Apple would censor graphic album art like the gory stuff on Cannibal Corpse covers, but I can report here that it did not. Apple pays artists $.006 a stream, which, while quite actually twice as much as Spotify, still kind of sucks. Plus, Apple is Apple, and you’re still handing your music money to a tech giant run by Tim Cook, who was most recently spotted at the White House’s investment forum for Saudi Arabia.

Tidal

Tidal was pretty good, actually. Artist pay is $0.008, which is better than Apple, and it seemed to demonstrate a little genuine appreciation of music; there was a contest running on the home page for undiscovered artists when I logged on. The audio quality is noticeably better than Spotify and Apple, and the user interface is OK, even if it’s a little inert. However, Tidal is also the most volatile major music streamer. It has a wacky history; it started in Norway, was bought by Jay Z, who is still a minority stakeholder, and at one point was partially owned by the now defunct telecom Sprint. It was eventually bought by Block, formerly Square, the Jack Dorsey-led payment processing company, and laid off 10% of its staff in 2023. The company is apparently currently without a CEO, so it is presumably de facto being led by Dorsey, a man who once said of Elon Musk, “I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.” As a result, I do not trust Tidal.

YouTube Music

You have to work pretty hard to be worse than Spotify on all counts. In my admittedly brief tour of YouTube Music, audio quality was bad, it was unappealing to use, and it somehow pays artists even less than Spotify ($0.0027 per stream). Next.

Pandora

I was a little surprised that Pandora, a true mainstay of the 00s’ “music is on the internet now” novelty era, was still around. Alas, it also pays artists complete garbage ($0.0027), and since all the major streamers do the vibes-based playlist thing now too, I’m not really sure what Pandora’s value proposition is.

Deezer

The French streamer apparently pays a bit better than the pack ($0.007), and it seemed fine, too, foregrounding its offerings of Pandora-but-pure-mood playlists like ‘Flow’ and ‘Love’. It would be a suitable alternative, perhaps, if it wasn’t for what, in my opinion, is the hands-down best music streamer there is right now.

Qobuz

I spent about 20 minutes on the unfortunately named Qobuz, and I was sold.

First, the artist pay is the best in the biz (except, for some reason, for Peloton’s in-house streaming service). It’s $0.0138, which means it’s more than a penny a stream. Receiving Qobuz’s pay report, the indy musician and analyst Jordan says, “was the first time I looked at streaming royalties and felt fairly compensated.” (The company is also the first to publish its own average payout report, and make its figures public—it cites $0.01873 as its average. A thousand streams means the artist makes ~$19.)

Second, the audio quality is great. I listened to a little bit of everything to test it out, and especially after the flat, compressed sound of Spotify, I didn’t want to stop. It’s got an icon for when albums are available in 24-bit/96 kHz, high resolution format, and it kills. On Qobuz, the Replacements’ Let It Be is raw and crackling, the Flaming Lips’ Soft Bulletin is lush and beautifully layered. Master of Puppets sounds huge. The (great) new Robyn track Dopamine is crisp and prismatic. Qobuz’s album of the week was a remastered drop of Prince’s Around the World in a Day; it’s majestic. Also that new Geese album everybody likes really is good and sounds great steaming, too.

Third, and the thing that really resonated with me the most, perhaps, was that the people who run Qobuz actually seem to… like music? On the app, along with its Discover and Playlists tab, there’s a Magazine tab with interviews and features. I’m not sure I’ll spend a ton of time reading them, but after years of the algorithmic sludge and pop-up payola recommendations of Spotify, it was refreshing to read thoughtful articles celebrating, say, the post-rock icons Tortoise, Quincy Jones’ catalog, and a Kantō speaker system. I also love how Qobuz lists the record label along with the song title, artist, and it’s clickable, so you can go right to the label to find other bands and so on. There’s *also* no streaming number listed, perhaps because it would be rather low given the relative size of Qobuz’s platform, but I found it refreshing as there is therefore no way to snap-evaluate a song based on its stream count.

This was a nice way to encounter the artists who’ve bailed on Spotify, or, those, like Joanna Newsom, who’ve never relented and let Spotify stream their music in the first place. I bought some of Newsom’s albums on Bandcamp way back when, but I only realized now just how little I’ve listened to them because she wasn’t on Spotify, and how shitty that is. I gave King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and Massive Attack a spin, too, since they and dozens others have ditched Spotify over Ek’s investments in Helsing, a German military tech and drone company.

So yeah, I’m having a great time with Qobuz, both because the product is genuinely better than Spotify, and because it feels like sweet release to be free of that shitpit. There are shortcomings, of course—it’s not Siri-compatible, so it won’t work with CarPlay hands-free. It takes longer to load songs and the UI is clumsy on mobile. It isn’t as seamless as some other apps. (I also listened mostly on my laptop, as opposed to mobile, and that’s worked great for me.) But those are minor things. More importantly, let’s not have any illusions here: Qobuz, while operated by music biz folks who seem driven (or see an opportunity) to put artists and music at the forefront and de-emphasize the algorithm, is owned by a multimedia conglomerate SA Xandrie, and has completed multiple $10 million plus VC rounds. It’s not some scrappy artists’ collective that can be counted on to keep musicians’ pay decent and AI sidelined. But for now, Qobuzz is great.

And there you have it: An official Blood in the Machine endorsement for ditching Spotify, and trying out a more ethical, better-sounding alternative.

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Other BITM-approved gifts for Black Friday and beyond

Friend of the blood, artist, AI critic, and fellow ludd Molly Crabapple has a beautiful new set of illustrated cards out in a set called Can You See The New World Through The Teargas? from OR Books.

The designer Bart Fish has been publishing a great series of strikingly visualized critiques of AI at Power Tools. He’s publishing them as a zine, too; you can order one for a pay-what-you-can donation here. They look amazing:

Finally, the e-reader edition of Blood in the Machine: The Book is, I’m told, on sale at Amazon. Under normal circumstances, that’s not exactly the ideal place to get it, but seeing as how Amazon is certainly taking a loss on the sale here, so by all means, get it for cheap.

OK! That’s it folks. Have a nice holiday weekend, keep that hammer high, and see you all again soon.

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You can spend hours reading through eye-popping Nividia earnings reports and lengthy columns expounding on the transformative powers of the technology and analysts’ takes on what may be the biggest bubble of our generation. That’s to say nothing of the breathless proclamations of tech executives, of course, or the federal government’s own enthusiastic overtures. But then you flip on Saturday Night Live and the first sketch they run after the monologue reminds you that a lot of the general public’s experience of AI is actually more like the one depicted here:

That is, as slop. Encountering awful AI slop (and startups with skin-crawling pitches like ‘what if we use AI to reanimate dead family members’), is an experience universal enough that Glen Powell acting out Sora-esque output gets top billing at SNL. Slop has broken through; slop is everywhere; slop is mainstream.

And it’s not just that everyone, regardless of demographic, has watched a discomfiting AI-generated video or heard about a bad AI startup. AI slop is on TV ads, it’s in video games, it’s on the pop charts. There is a tangible, tactile, and unavoidable slop layer that has encrusted pop culture and much of modern life.

If the slop explosion began in earnest in 2023, with the unleashing of ChatGPT and Midjourney, and it reached critical mass in 2024, then now, in 2025, we’re seeing that slop hardening into the outer shells of our cultural institutions and social spheres, like a layer of so much automata-inflected sedimentary rock. And I’m not one to pass up a metaphor, so let’s go all in why don’t we. Remember middle school geology? The US Geological Survey notes that sedimentary rock is “formed from pre-existing rocks or,” like slop, “pieces of once-living organisms.” The USGS also helpfully notes that sedimentary rocks have “distinctive layering or bedding.” You know it when you see it.

Now, in 2025, whenever we go to read a blog, flip on the TV, stream music, or pick up a PS5 controller, we are likely to encounter the slop layer. This agglomeration of content living and dead, marked by a faintly unpleasant aesthetic homogeneity, that evokes in us a weary inability to discern what’s real and what’s not. We wade through this tide of automated mediocrities and the ethical breaches they represent and consider the credibility of its component parts. Whether we want to or not, and mostly we do not, we must engage the slop layer.

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A quick word before we go on: Instead of the usual entreaty to subscribe or to become a paid subscriber if you enjoy or find value from this work—which will continue to constitute oh 97% of my livelihood, and please do that if possible—I’m trying something new. That is, this is a sponsored post, from a good company offering a good service.

As you read this, or rather, immediately before you read this, when you were on Google or Facebook, browsing or shopping etc online, a host of mostly invisible companies were compiling data profiles of you. Today’s edition of BITM is sponsored by DeleteMe, whose raison d’etre is hunting down and, yes, deleting the data that brokers have hoovered up about you over the years and made available to their clients. DeleteMe is Wirecutter’s top-rated data removal service, and I’ve used it myself, to locate and eradicate 100 or so sites that were listing and selling personal info like my home address and phone number. If you’re interested in taking DeleteMe for a spin, sign up here and use the code LUDDITES for 20% off an annual subscription. OK! Onwards we go.

The slop economy has been going full steam for a year or two now. In 2023, 404 Media’s Jason Koebler wrote in a report about the rise of AI content on Facebook that the “once-prophesized future where cheap, AI-generated trash content floods out the hard work of real humans is already here.” In 2024, declared that the slop era had arrived. Pumped out primarily by content farmers, web marketing opportunists and AI boosters, the flood of slop was, for a while, largely contained within social media platforms, email spam filters, and clickbait websites. Now, those walls are being breached.

OpenAI’s launch of the AI video generator Sora 2 made slop easier than ever to produce; major copyrights holders sounded the alarm. called it the AI Slop-pocalypse.

Then, last week, an AI-generated country music song by “Breaking Rust” notched the top spot on a(n admittedly obscure) Billboard chart (Digital Country Music Song Sales), and has racked up millions upon millions of views on Spotify.

It’s a generic, pretty terrible song that’s nonetheless not too out of step with the performatively masculine/hip hop-inflected/uncomfortably Imagine Dragon-adjacent trendlines in modern country pop. Once you hear it as slop, it’s impossible to unhear it as such. The top-voted comments on YouTube seem to agree:

The song gained popularity on Spotify, where it seems to have been recommended by the algorithm in Discover Weekly mixes, and where it was likely nodded along to in anonymity by millions who didn’t know or care who was behind the song. (This being a reminder that platform consolidation, and the social media networks and streaming services that want for cheap, voluminous content, produced the ideal conditions for generating the slop layer.) So it’s not like the song is an actual hit, it just blends unnervingly into the background, condensing the work of unnamed human recording artists into inoffensive, key-appropriate pap. It’s part of the slop layer.

The same week that Breaking Rust was racking up Spotify plays, gamers were discovering that the newest installment of the blockbuster video game franchise Call of Duty was loaded with AI-generated art. The games blog FRVR explains (and also cites my 2024 WIRED piece on AI in the gaming industry, thanks FRVR):

Call of Duty has already been criticized for its reliance on AI-generated artwork in the past. 2023’s Modern Warfare 3 included an AI-generated calling card in its $15 cosmetic Yokai Wrath bundle, and Black Ops 6—last year’s entry—was lambasted for its use of a generated image of a zombie Santa, which infamously had six fingers instead of five.

This year, the shame gloves are off, and Activision has pushed customers face-first into the up-chuck of machine-generated visuals. There is an extreme amount of AI artwork used within the base version of the game, despite the fact that last year’s Black Ops 6 made over $1 billion in its first 10 days on sale—the highest-grossing CoD game ever.

One interesting thing about the slop in the Call of Duty game is that it *doesn’t even bother to disguise itself as slop*. Some of it’s made in the Ghibilified style that is all but shorthand for AI-generated slop, as this gamer flagged:

A particularly exposed chunk of the slop layer right there. Meanwhile, the hit new game Arc Raiders used generative AI instead of voice actors, causing an outrage of its own.

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Speaking of outrage, artists and Disney fans were taken aback when CEO Bob Iger announced an incoming content deal that will allow Disney+ subscribers to mass produce their own Disneyified slop. Here’s the Hollywood Reporter:

“The other thing that we’re really excited about, that AI is going to give us the ability to do, is to provide users of Disney+ with a much more engaged experience, including the ability for them to create user-generated content and to consume user generated content — mostly short-form — from others,” Iger continued.

Nestled in that comment is a CEO’s dream; users paying corporations for the privilege of voluntarily producing cheap content that obviates the need to hire human artists to create more original works. The trade-off is of course that the vast the new Disney UGC will be pure slop, but so it goes.

Then there’s this AI-generated Coke ad, which began airing last week, too, and which the Verge’s Jess Weatherbed accurately described as a “sloppy eyesore.”

As Weatherbed noted, this is not Coca-Cola’s first rodeo in the slop arena, as it stirred controversy by making a bad AI-generated ad last year, too. And yet, these

blunders are seemingly worth the risk for Coca-Cola, with the company’s Chief Marketing Officer, Manolo Arroyo, telling The Wall Street Journal that its latest holiday campaign was cheaper and speedier to produce compared to traditional production. “Before, when we were doing the shooting and all the standard processes for a project, we would start a year in advance,” Arroyo told the publication. “Now, you can get it done in around a month.”

And therein we have the common denominator between all this slop, and I regret to inform you it’s not particularly revelatory: It’s cheap. It’s cheap as dirt to turn on the slop spigot to try to juice post views on Facebook or X or yes Substack, or to crank out a shitty robot country song. Every piece of Ghiblified video game art from a triple AI studio or AI-generated article on a media outlet’s website is the visual representation of slashed labor costs, the aesthetics of digital deskilling.

This is underlined by a study that found that if one trains a large language model exclusively on the output of professional writers, that model will be able to emulate the works of famous authors as well as said writers. The paper concludes that “the median fine-tuning and inference cost of $81 per author represents a dramatic 99.7% reduction compared to typical professional writer compensation.”

The slop layer would be offensive enough if it was limited to creative labor, but I’m afraid it coats even our social spaces now. What are chatbots but the automation of human interaction, or slop friends? Many people are now even channelling their sexual impulses through a particularly toxic brand of slop, as evidenced by the enormous and horrifying leak of user data from an erotic chatbot service that let its customers create deepfakes of celebrities, crushes, even their teachers. Others are being asked, a la Glen Powell to render AI-generated avatars of loved ones; slop memories.

The Atlantic writer Charlie Warzel recently described AI as “a mass delusion event,” noting the degree to which the technology has driven us to question more frequently whether something is real and what purpose it serves. And while it’s true that generative AI has been the purveyor of a great many delusions, many of them tragic, the broader and shallower effect may be a great cheapening. The slop layer is enshittification made total and constant.

It’s playing a Call of Duty sequel and staring at obviously AI art on a load screen, while your ChatGPT companion flatters you on an app on your phone and the statistical mean of a new country song autoplays on the speakers. It’s the replicated cultural artifacts, social interactions, and sexual fantasies all lathered onto reality, embedded with the telltale sediments of their plagiarism and automation.

This raises yet another question that feeds into the interminable AI bubble discourse: What if everyone gets sick of squirming? What if we cross a threshold where living in a perpetual, ambient uncanny valley produces a sustained backlash? It may even eventually become too obvious that the most ubiquitous export of the AI boom is a pervasive layer of slop that’s made everything look and feel worse, a feeling that could speed a downturn should investor’s bullish sentiment finally crack. But there’s a chance it doesn’t, and that is of course the fear. In the event that it does not, and this is the harder question, we’re all faced with asking how we might navigate, or confront, the slop layer that’s growing and hardening around us. Do we tolerate its creeping repugnance? Do we accept it as the latest encroachment of technological capitalism? Or do we reject it?

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To that end, a couple notes and ideas for fighting/excavating the slop layer.

Fighting the slop Layer

Deana Igelsrud, the legislative & political advocate for the Concept Art Association, passes along word that a crucial hearing will be held for AB-412, proposed California legislation that would force AI companies to alert copyright holders when their works are used to train large language models, and give them the chance to opt out and a mechanism for obtaining compensation.

On December 8, 2025, the Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee will be hosting a joint informational hearing on the topic of AI and Copyright at Stanford University. I’ll follow up on this email with an agenda as soon as it is finalized – in the meantime, some basic information is included below:

WHERE: Stanford University - Paul Brest Hall, 555 Salvatierra Walk, Stanford, CA 94305.

WHEN: Monday, December 8^th at 10 AM.

WHO: Artists, creatives, and copyright owners who want to make their voices heard.

Over the course of this hearing we will learn about AI and copyright from a variety of artists, academics, technical and legal experts, policymakers, and representatives from the tech industry. At the end of the hearing there will be an opportunity for members of the public to speak for 1-2 minutes each. If you’re passionate about these issues, we’d love to see you there. No registration is required ahead of the event.

Excavating the slop layer

Meanwhile, has an intriguing plan for excavating the slop layer, or at least helping to preserve the livelihoods of artists and creative workers it’s beginning to bury: A slop tax. I love it, check out the proposal here:

Heavy Machinery

The Slop Tax, a Brief Introduction

The following is a sneak peek into a larger project. I am looking for insights, feedback, and other contributions to support this idea. So in that way it’s a bit of teaser— a blueprint, if you will …

Read more

3 months ago · 34 likes · 8 comments · Mike Pepi

OK, that’s it for today. Thanks for reading everyone. Hammers up.

The proposed EO, which leaked this week, would create a framework for penalizing US states that pass, or have already passed AI laws, mostly by threatening litigation and the withholding of federal broadband funds. It would also serve to concentrate power in the hands of Trump’s AI and Crypto Czar, the venture capitalist and PayPal mafioso David Sacks—further fusing the Trump administration to Silicon Valley’s executive leadership, and entrenching a modern tech oligarchy.

Before we get to it, a quick note that this work is made possible by readers who chip in $6 a month—an amount equivalent to a decent latte or beer'—or $60 a year. I’m able to keep the vast majority of this reporting and writing free and open to all thanks to you god-tier humans who are paid supporters. If you’re a regular reader, and you’re able, consider joining them so I can continue to do this work. Many thanks, and hammers up.

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Readers of this website knew it would only be a matter of time before this push to roll back state AI laws was renewed.

After all, earlier this year, with its key allies firmly embedded in the Trump administration, major Silicon Valley AI companies undertook a hard lobbying push to pass a ban on state level AI legislation in the omnibus budget bill. That effort was documented in detail in these pages, and it ultimately came up just short; as in *one* vote short, when Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn voted nay on the amendment to protect her state’s regulation of AI in the Nashville music industry.

The new effort is once again premised on sliding language stopping state level AI lawmaking into an unrelated bill, which should give you an idea of just how unpopular and contentious this all is (even within the GOP caucus, more on that in a second).

Here’s Bloomberg:

Billionaire GOP donors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have been calling Republican leaders to urge them to include the AI regulation preemption language in the defense bill, the people said. Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Meta Platforms Inc. and OpenAI LLC also have been lobbying the federal government to block state AI regulations…

Senate Majority Leader John Thune confirmed Wednesday that Republican leaders are trying to include the preemption in the defense bill. He said negotiators are trying to work out a limitation on state AI regulation that still “is consistent with ensuring that states have some role in terms of how those companies operate in their states.”

House and Senate leaders so far haven’t coalesced around a specific AI provision for the defense legislation and multiple proposals are circulating, said people familiar with the matter. People who have been speaking with lawmakers and White House officials described the situation as fluid… Sacks has been holding in-person meetings with Republican lawmakers to hash out language that could make it through the House and Senate, according to the people.

This is seen as the GOP’s last chance this year to get a bill like this across the finish line, and perhaps their best chance period, as next year begins a Congressional election cycle that will politically complicate the vote. This remains, after all, a remarkably and unambiguously antidemocratic project, one that’s anathema to the spirit of federalism many Republicans claim to cherish.

Which is, in fact, why there is vocal opposition from figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mike Davis.

“There will be a tremendous conservative grassroots backlash against Republicans who sell out their constituents to help big tech,” GOP congressman and Trump ally Mike Davis told Bloomberg. “If big tech wants federal preemption, they need to protect the four C’s: conservatives, children, communities and creators. Otherwise, this is simply AI amnesty.”

In other words, the state AI law ban taking shape is ominous and darkly reflective of this technopolitical moment, but its path to passage is far from assured. Still, given that the last go round came down to a single vote, and surely Blackburn’s now-more-prepared colleagues can promise her some pork/exemptions, I wouldn’t bet against it.

ELIMINATING STATE LAW OBSTRUCTION OF NATIONAL AI POLICY

1.39MB ∙ PDF file

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As for the executive order, which you can read in full at the link above, it continues the Trump admin’s designation of AI as a concern of national security first and foremost (“our national security demands that we win this race”) and proceeds on those grounds. Once again, the arch goal is not economic prosperity, or jobs, or even innovation—it’s dominance. “It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America‘s global AI dominance through a minimally burdensome, uniform national policy framework for AI,” as the EO puts it.

From there, the EO chiefly does three things:

1. Establishes an “AI Litigation Task Force” whose “sole responsibility” is to challenge state AI laws. This is pretty wild, if dubiously efficacious. It’s basically an open threat to use federal resources to harangue states that pass AI laws and get them tied up in court, as a means of deterrence.

2. Threatens to withhold federal funding for broadband in states that have AI laws that do not pass what the EO calls an “Evaluation of Onerous State AI Laws.” Specifically, the order is concerned with laws that “require AI models to alter their truthful outputs” aka what the administration considers anti-discrimination laws, in line with this summer’s earlier Anti-woke AI executive order. But, you might ask, who is to serve as the arbiter of what qualifies as “truthful output”? That brings us to:

3. Anoints David Sacks, Trump’s AI and Crypto Czar as a key intermediary for arbitrating all of the above efforts. Which effectively means that a venture capitalist and Silicon Valley power broker will officially hold even more sway in deciding which states and state lawmakers to target and even punish for embarking on efforts to regulate AI.

In short, since executive orders are legally limited in what they can actually do, this essentially serves as official notice that the Trump administration, taking marching orders direct from Silicon Valley VCs and AI executives, will sue, pester, penalize, and attempt to withhold funding wherever possible if states pass AI laws. It’s intended to induce a chilling effect, in other words.

It’s not clear how well it will work. Plenty of blue state lawmakers may relish the chance to challenge Trump as his administration tries to meddle in the democratic process, especially in an arena as inflammatory as AI. What remains notable to me about all of this is how willing Silicon Valley elites are to *openly* engage in this agenda. On the vibe front, we’ve gone from “we’re the key allies of Obama’s hope and change project” to “we’ll publicly ally with Trump to stymie the democratic process if it saves us from complying with a few regulations” in less than a generation.

There’s little need for aspirational messaging anymore, not when Silicon Valley enjoys such direct access to the levers of power. To that end, little underscores the status of this new nexus better than the fact that the same week that Trumpworld made public its plans to help the tech industry clear out the regulatory weeds, oh half of the beneficiaries of that effort were all at the White House attending a dinner for the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

That’s Trump’s AI czar and noted VC David Sacks, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, at the White House this week, for the Saudi investment forum. In context of the EO described above, perhaps it serves as a handy visual cue. Let’s say California passes a law that says you can’t use AI tools to, I don’t know, automate a hiring process unless they’re shown to be nondiscriminatory. (That’s just hypothetical because Gavin Newsom vetoed the one that did that, anyway.) Brockman or Musk might turn to Sacks and say, hey, OpenAI and XAI have enterprise products that do that, and everyone knows nondiscriminatory is code for ‘woke’, can you have the AI Litigation Task Force take a look at that? And thus these guys have their very own (again, dubiously efficacious) framework for lodging complaints, exerting their will, and harassing states and lawmakers they don’t like.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is talking openly about the federal government “backstopping” its investment in AI data center infrastructure as the bubble continues to inflate, the US owns a stake in Intel, and so on; the Silicon Valley-state nexus draws tighter still, AI law bans or not.

So, as the year draws to a close, it’s on much the same note that it started—with an emboldened tech oligarchy quite comfortable advancing openly antidemocratic aims and demonstrating unambiguous allegiance to the Trump administration, in exchange for a shot at enacting a deregulatory regime it once thought beyond the scope its wildest dreams. This time, it might just get it.

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Okay okay that’s it for today. Forgive any typos or less-than-stellar sentences. I’ve got a decently nasty cold that has once again waylaid some of my more ambitious writing and reporting plans. But provided I rest up properly, I’ll have another piece up on Sunday, and be back in action at full speed next week. Thanks all, take it easy out there.