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Fiction vs Reality: My Texts with Michael Shellenberger by Renee DiResta
For several months earlier this year, I’d been chatting with Michael Shellenberger about the Twitter Files. He’d reached out to me in a Twitter DM on December 30th, telling me he wanted to better understand social media content moderation and transparency policy. Via phone, email, and text, we discussed topics ranging from state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, to the basics of content moderation (he was unfamiliar), to online speech. We talked about public trust
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Neither artificial, nor intelligent by Hidde de Vries (@hdv@front-end.social) is a web enthusiast, accessibility specialist and conference speaker from Rotterdam (The Netherlands). Previously, he worked for W3C (WAI), Mozilla, the Dutch government and others as a freelancer.Buy me a coffee Follow @hdv on Mastodon
Large Language Models (LLMs) and tools based on them (like ChatGPT) are all some in tech talk about today. I struggle with the optimism I see from businesses, the haphazard deployment of these systems and the seemingly ever-expanding boundaries of what we are prepared to call “artificially intelli...
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All the Miserable Young Liberals by Damon Linker
PLUS: For paying subscribers, I weigh in on The National’s excellent new single

Leave it to the so-called centrists to once again quickly conclude that there’s absolutely no reason why young liberals might be miserable and that they have no justification for their outrage and misery and that of course none of this is anything close to the fault of centrists it’s just all in their heads.

I don’t know guys, that whole war on trans people conducted by the state which you absolutely provided fucking ammo for and gave legs to seems to be a pretty good reason to be (1) miserable and (2) outraged and (3) enough fuel for the rest of us to do everything in our power and within the law to ensure you share the same fate as the right-wingers you’ve decided to ally with, which is lose everything.

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A Florida School Banned a Disney Movie About Ruby Bridges. Here’s What That Really Means. by Charles M. Blow
This month, an elementary school in St. Petersburg, Fla., stopped showing a 1998 Disney movie about Ruby Bridges, the 6-year-old Black girl who integrated a public elementary school in New Orleans in 1960, because of a complaint lodged by a single parent who said she feared the film might teach children that white people hate Black people. The school banned the film until it could be reviewed. So I decided to review the film myself.
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What the Republican Push for ‘Parents’ Rights’ Is Really About by Jamelle Bouie
Ultimately, then, the “parents’ rights” movement is not about parents at all; it’s about whether this country will continue to strive for a more equitable and democratic system of education, or whether we’ll let a reactionary minority drag us as far from that goal as possible, in favor of something even more unequal and hierarchical than what we already have.