A political and economic battle against today’s robber barons — the billionaire and trillionaire class of tech bosses — is unfolding on many fronts as tech workers agitate against these oligarchs’ complicity with the U.S. military, the cops, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In their new book, Against Tech Oligarchy: Workers Resistance in the…
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When the government puts a target on your back, every corner of online organizing becomes a puzzle. How do you ensure that your emails are private, when Google will hand over the contents of your emails to prosecutors, sometimes without ever notifying you? How do you keep your comrades informed, when maintaining an email list poses a security risk? How do you share information online without…
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If you are in San Francisco trying to follow the goings-on in your neighborhood or within city hall, you may have come across The Dissent. The website brands itself as “an AI newsroom” with work “reported, edited, and produced by named agents.” Its founder and publisher Dakota Carrasco — a real person, and, incidentally, an analyst at the notorious investment firm BlackRock — published text on the…
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Google co-founder Sergey Brin, one of the richest men in the world, has spent more than $100 million backing a group seeking to stop a popular California ballot initiative that would impose a one-time tax on the wealth of the state’s billionaires. New filings reported by The Los Angeles Times detail Brin’s role in funding Building a Better California, which is pushing two ballot measures that…
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A lot of AI technology may not work very well, but providing consumers with reliable information was never its major commercial promise. Investors have poured billions into generative AI because of the promise that it will eliminate jobs on a massive scale. Tech journalist Brian Merchant joins Movement Memos host Kelly Hayes to discuss how the AI boom is being used to displace workers…
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Google made an announcement last month that could turn the journalism world upside down, accelerating the internet’s shift toward an overwhelmingly AI-driven landscape and serving the Trump agenda of media suppression. At its developer conference in May, the company announced the most disruptive changes to Google Search in over 25 years. Google Search will further demote its index of the web…
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