LOLLL [Catches breath] Lollllllllll
Plus: Carole Speaks Truth to Power (And Jon Stewart)
Dear Citizen,
Are you enjoying the Broligarchy’s most predictable breakup? The Trump-Elon split is here, and it’s delicious. Steve Bannon calling for Musk to be deported? ✅ Kanye West trying to make peace? ✅ The Epstein files? ✅ It would be funnier if Elon’s legacy in government wasn’t disease, starvation and death, but still…
Here’s what else to know about this week.
# ONE WATCH: You Tell ‘Em Carole #
Our fierce founder Carole Cadwalladr was interviewed on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart this week, took a clear message to the masses: “I think what is happening in America is they are building a techno-authoritarian surveillance state.”
It’s a must watch!
Want more? She’s everywhere! Here’s Carole yesterday on Democracy Now. The takeaway? The AI super scam is not inevitable. It’s ILLEGAL.
# ONE ACTION: Meta? Invading Our Privacy? In This Economy? #
Oh, Meta! Out with their antics again. Meta is quietly turning private AI chats into public content — and too many people don’t realize it’s happening. Meta’s “AI Discover Feed” is discovering a little more than we’d like - your private data.
Want the feed shut down, and all AI interactions private by default? Sign this petition from the Mozilla Foundation here.
# ONE READ: AI’s Loud (Carbon) Footprint #
Is AI really using that much energy? In a stunning investigation, the MIT Technology Review’s James O’Donnell and Casey Crownhart went deep into the numbers, and its…well…
Let’s say you’re running a marathon as a charity runner and organizing a fundraiser to support your cause. You ask an AI model 15 questions about the best way to fundraise … Then you make 10 attempts at an image for your flyer before you get one you are happy with, and three attempts at a five-second video to post on Instagram. You’d use about 2.9 kilowatt-hours of electricity—enough to ride over 100 miles on an e-bike (or around 10 miles in the average electric vehicle) or run the microwave for over three and a half hours.
Holy Sam Altman. The whole piece is a terrific, terrifying and urgent call to arms.
That’s it for this week.
The Citizens Team
*PS - Join our Signal Chat if you haven’t already!
AI likely already compiled the medical data of US citizens to reveal the links between industrial farming - Onsant chemicals -gut biomes - and disease. Cancer for US-men (lifetime) is nearly one to one. Glyphosate, used on salad organic girl lettuce as a desiccant, almond tree stumps as weed killer, defoliants for mechanized crop harvesting, and pesticides on wheat, corn, and soy, for decades, is inescapable correlation to illnesses and death. The multi trillion dollar liability lies in that data, and Big Ag/Chem is somehow involved in TechBro -UK Brexit -Onsanto mess. EU had Agricultural Wall. UK weakening EU wall with GMO allowances. CANCER RESEARCHERS DISMANTLED. Authoritarianism is the escape from AI correlations that that the US is the land of illness and death simply due to eating in the USA.
Thank you Carole for your continuing work shining a light on this rising tide of techno authoritarianism. You are right when you say we can do something to prevent this potential dystopia from becoming reality. We have the numbers. AI technology could be used for good and to steer us into a new renaissance, but we the people have to take control and not sleepwalk into handing complete control over to the Silicon Valley elite. It’s happening and we need to act now in whatever way we can.