@docmattmoudi
📝 ‘Migrants in the Digital Periphery’ for Uni. Of California Press, ‘Resisting Borders+Tech’ @haymarketbooks. Assistant Professor @Cambridge Digital Humanities. Research/advice @Amnesty Tech. Views=own
*promethean gap widens*
Facial Recognition Error Prompts Police to Arrest Asian Man for Burglary 100 Miles Away
UK police run about 25,000 monthly searches against around 19 million police mugshots held on the UK-wide police national database.
Sorry I'm not more open-minded about LLMs, it's just some fucking maniacs shoveled out a bunch of useless bloatware featuring that technology, did not give me any chance to opt out, reorganized the entire economy around it, zeroed out gains made by green energy, and made it impossible to buy RAM
Important story:
"The chair of the competition watchdog’s cloud inquiry has quit, saying he is frustrated at the slow pace of action against Microsoft and Amazon, while also citing concerns about its wider independence."
The Govt recently confirmed Amazon's former UK chief as head of the CMA.
Iran’s assault on the UAE is forcing a new question for tech firms: if data centers are strategic assets, are they now military targets? https://restofworld.org/2026/amazon-uae-data-center-fire-iran-strike/?utm_campaign=row-social&utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=social
I would like to remind people that AI has already been used to kill people
OpenAI and Microsoft supplied Israel with AI models to track and kill people in Gaza which led to increased civilian deaths
apnews.com/article/isra...
Important piece from @catebrown.bsky.social, just as UN officials warn that this particular dystopian biometric hellscape will be 'built on the graveyards of countless unidentified Palestinians'.
Appalling display of neo-colonial management, with webs of complicity that have webs of their own.
Palantir's covid-era entanglements with the NHS by NoTechForTyrants and Privacy International: privacyinternational.org/sites/defaul...
Palantir's current involvement with ICE and CBP: www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ne...
More from @amnesty.org on what states and companies must do to stop fueling Israel’s genocide, apartheid and unlawful occupation, here: www.amnesty.org/en/documents...
@zackpolanski.bsky.social is right; Palantir has powered ICE's terror against migrant communities for a decade; Palantir also sells AI tools to Israel for use in their objectives in Gaza amidst a genocide.
As per @amnesty.org states must divest from Palantir and offer no safe harbour or platform!
(2/4) - Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence (ed. by Mizue Aizeki, Matt Mahmoudi, and Coline Schupfer w/ foreword by Ruha Benjamin)
- Empire of AI by Karen Hao
- The Palestine Laboratory by Anthony Loewenstein
- Instead of Education by John Holt
- Give Children the Vote by John Wall
the luddites would have beaten every ai server farm into small pieces with large hammers i can tell you that much
an actual case of 'tech for good' but none of the so called "AI/tech for good" proponents that often shout the loudest nowhere to be seen
LOUDER 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽
The surge of AI slop, deceptive synthetic videos & images flooding our feeds, is driven in large part by Agentic AI Accounts (AAAs). aiforensics.org/work/agentic...
Key findings:
-Over 43,000 mostly AI-made posts generated 4.5 billion views
-More than 65% of accounts were created in early 2025
1/
Classic reply.
We spoke to Flock safety, the manufacturer of these cameras, about privacy concerns.
"How is that being addressed?" ABC7 News reporter Luz Pena asked.
"If you're not involved in a crime, you shouldn't be concerned about privacy," said Lily Ho, Public Affairs for Flock Safety.
"I refuse." This is it. There's no reason we should accept a narrative of an already settled future which marginalizes humans and individual agency. No one wants this. No one asked for it.
A little advent calendar of #ComputerSaysMaybe episodes coming your way.
The first is an episode beautifully cut by our team to give you an overview of my time at @mozilla.org Festival in Barcelona, including some interviews with amazing folks.
www.themaybe.org/podcast/comp...
I cannot even begin to describe how deeply cursed this is… sure, why don’t we treat AI with the same predatory neocolonial kick-away-the-ladder resolve of the BW institutions..
“We are in a Bretton Woods moment […] In 1944, democratic nations came together to create a financial system based on democratic values.”
- A first year International Relations college student’s takiest take for an essay / Lehane’s pitch for “OpenAI for Countries”
title: Cheap science, real harm: the cost of replacing human participation with synthetic data author: Abeba Birhane abstract: Driven by the goals of augmenting diversity, increasing speed, reducing cost, the use of synthetic data as a replacement for human participants is gaining traction in AI research and product development. This talk critically examines the claim that synthetic data can “augment diversity,” arguing that this notion is empirically unsubstantiated, conceptually flawed, and epistemically harmful. While speed and cost-efficiency may be achievable, they often come at the expense of rigour, insight, and robust science. Drawing on research from dataset audits, model evaluations, Black feminist scholarship, and complexity science, I argue that replacing human participants with synthetic data risks producing both real-world and epistemic harms at worst and superficial knowledge and cheap science at best
I wrote this brief talk on why “augmenting diversity” with LLMs is empirically unsubstantiable, conceptually flawed, and epistemically harmful and a nice surprise to see the organisers have made it public
synthetic-data-workshop.github.io/papers/13.pdf
Absolutely thrilled to be a part of @ghostdoc2026.bsky.social a landmark documentary and critical viewing for anyone thinking about/using AI! The film is directed by Valerie Veatch and premieres at #SundanceFilmFestival in Jan ‘26. Follow them here or sign up for updates at ghostinthemachinedoc.ai
film preview image of a hand holding fake eyes, with the Sundance Film Festival logos.
Hello, we’re Ghost in the Machine, a landmark documentary that’s mandatory viewing for anyone thinking about or using AI.
We’re thrilled to announce that we’ll be premiering at #SundanceFilmFestival next month. We hope you’ll join us in person or online, and follow along here.
"theft tech" is a term my pal @astra.bsky.social thought of just today when we were working on our book about these End Times Fascists.
We were thinking about what should happen when this this bubble busts, as we all know it will.
Remember: they have bunkers. We don't. 2/3
the full quote here
english.elpais.com/culture/2024...
ICE’s growing use of Nvidia’s cutting-edge AI tools underscores its shift to pursuing aggressive immigration enforcement under Trump. This piece shows how private tech giants fuel state-led crackdowns, deepening concerns over authoritarianism.
By @sambiddle.com in @theintercept.com
buff.ly/C3eEMQK
FRT cannot continue being the alibi for the NYPD’s gross violations of New Yorkers’ human rights and must be banned ✊🏽