Brian Merchant

Counterpoint: No I will not

Even If You Hate AI, You Will Use Google AI Search | WIRED wired.com

I discuss the fiery opposition to an AI data center in Michigan, proposed to help train nuclear weapons, via @404media.co and @mjgault.bsky.social's reporting, in which a pastor's wife suggests brushing up on the OSS's Simple Sabotage Field Manual at a town hall meeting.

'We Will Fight to Our Very Last Breath:' Township Leaders Vow to Fight Nuclear AI Data Center 404media.co

(from this WIRED writeup of the debacle) www.wired.com/story/anthro...

Anthropic Is Still at Odds With the White House Over Claude Fable 5 wired.com

NPR has a 'Word of the Week' series, and this week it's LUDDITE I spoke with Emma Bowman about who they really were and about the new luddites organizing against big tech + AI A fun one and, since it's airing on All Things Considered, maybe the biggest-audience luddite rehabil…

Get with the times — here's what a 'Luddite' means today npr.org

deeply insulted that I didn't make the cut for even a derogatory archetype here bambamramfan.github.io/ai-compass/

The AI Compass bambamramfan.github.io

It was a pleasure to chat with the great @hypervisible.blacksky.app about the backlash to Meta's AI glasses, and to luxury surveillance in general. www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-revolt...

bloodinthemachine.com

Across the US, workers are souring on AI. The tech industry has insisted that AI would make workers’ lives easier and more productive, that the more people understood and used AI, the more they would like it. Something closer to the opposite has happened.

bloodinthemachine.com

Wrote about the college kids booing AI, and how, in a moment rife with economic precarity, affordability crises, and collapsing job prospects, AI has become a new avatar of American capitalism

bloodinthemachine.com

The backlash to data centers, Flock, Meta glasses, and AI, is loud, animated, bipartisan, and wielding real power. It's the most popular and united political movement in the nation right now, and it's still growing. So of course Silicon Valley is in complete denial.

bloodinthemachine.com

Last week, IT employees at the University of California system across the state formed the largest tech worker union in the United States. This is how they now plan to confront tech industry layoffs, rein in AI, and push for tech for the common good:

bloodinthemachine.com

This Anthropic/White House spat is funny. Anthropic spent months declaring that its model is so powerful at finding bugs it threatens the world's digital infrastructure. The WH says OK it's banned then Now Anthropic and its allies have to say actually you know it isn't "uniquely good" at that stuff

I'm in Paris, and the entire time I've been here I've seen advertisements for Le Monde's special issue TOUT LE MONDE DETESTE L'IA (All the World Hates AI). I've seen graffiti on metro ads marking them as AI SLOP, and a big scrawl at one stop that read F*CK IA.

My kingdom for a good, entirely AI-free web browser

An author just emailed me a pitch for his new book, RECLAIM YOUR MIND, that was 100% AI-generated.