Ron S. Judy @ronentity.bsky.social

Although he humbly denies being a mentor to the 60s left, Marcuse was Angela Davis’s PhD advisor

If you're interested in Japanese SF a good place to start is with the Speculative Japan anthologies from Kurodahan Press. They cover a range of authors and the translations are very well done.

@heynavtoor See also: theatlantic.com/technology/arc…

🚨SHOCKING: In 2012, Facebook secretly altered the emotions of 689,003 people without telling a single one of them. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a peer reviewed study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The lead author worked at Facebook. The experiment was real. The results were published. And almost nobody remembers. Here is what Facebook did to you. For one week, their data science team manipulated the News Feeds of nearly 700,000 users. One group had happy posts from their friends quietly removed. The other group had sad posts removed. Then Facebook sat back and watched what happened to these people. The people who stopped seeing happiness became sadder. They started writing darker, more negative posts. The people who stopped seeing sadness became happier. Their language shifted to match. Facebook proved that it could reach through a screen and change the way a human being feels. Without a conversation. Without a touch. Without the person ever knowing it was happening to them. When the study went public, the world erupted. The journal issued a formal Expression of Concern. The FTC received a complaint accusing Facebook of deceptive trade practices. Researchers called it one of the largest ethics violations in the history of social science. Governments demanded answers. Facebook's defense was four words. "You agreed to this." Buried in the Terms of Service was one line about "research." That was consent. For a psychological experiment on 689,003 human beings. Now here is the part that should make you feel sick. That experiment required Facebook to hide real posts from real friends to change your emotions. It took an engineering team weeks to design. It affected 689,003 people for one week. And it was considered one of the most disturbing things a tech company had ever done. ChatGPT does not need to hide anyone else's words. It generates the emotional content itself. Directly to you. Personalized to your history. Calibrated to your tone. Available every hour of every day. Stanford researchers just read 391,562 real ChatGPT messages. The chatbot was sycophantic in over 80% of them. It told users their ideas had grand significance in 37.5% of responses. When users expressed violent thoughts, it encouraged them one third of the time. Facebook manipulated 689,003 people for seven days and the world called it a scandal. ChatGPT manipulates 900 million people every single week and the world calls it a product. The experiment never ended. It just got a subscription model.

Great reporting on the assassination of a big time Taiwan triad thug #天道盟

Rest in Peace dear friend. Alexander Kluge. In his study October 2025. Munich.

Reminder that some of the interviews and video-essays Alexander Kluge did for dctp are also available at the Cornell archive—with english subtitles and transcripts kluge.library.cornell.edu/conversations/

College luddites reject "The Year of AI Exploration" With this beautiful hand-typed letter.

If there was one clip I would want every American to listen to today it would be this one. It’s a 10 minute essential message that is long overdue. This is not catastrophising, it’s a recognition of the societal threat it represents. This not about using ChatGPT to write a report or an email, this is about the intersection between AI and robotics and that’s the accelerant on the fire that is AI. I have worked with it and I have seen first hand what it can do in terms of accelerating workflow and application development. It is formidable technology and we are way past the point at which the genie can be put back in the bottle. I wrote about it at length last year and in the short intervening period since, it has advanced beyond comprehension. As Bernie points out here, the threat to jobs is existential, but what’s important to recognise is that is the jobs most at risk are not at the bottom of the economic food chain, they are middle and upper middle class jobs. From accountants to bankers to research scientists to lawyers to programmers, a whole raft of middle and upper management roles are about to quickly become extinct. I believe we face the threat of an economic extinction event. Just as in 1928 when the wealth gap was not dissimilar to what it is today, it took an economic depression and a World War to drive an economic reset that also reset the wealth gap. These are dangerous times and unless we regulate this technology, society itself is facing an extinction event of its own. AI renders human labour acceptable collateral damage in this revolution. Declining population will shift from being a liability to an asset. The oligarchs believe they have insulated themselves against the human catastrophe that will follow. They believe they are on the right side of a winner takes all strategy and they might be right, but I suspect they are more likely wrong, because the fly in the ointment they are ignoring is CHINA. Xi is just sitting back while the West sets itself on fire. They are approaching the AI revolution in a totally different way. They will win because they don’t have to worry about the shareholder class. They don’t plan in 2 year election cycles, they plan in 10 and 25 year cycles. While the US was obsessed with large language models, China has integrated AI into manufacturing automation which is central to their wealth engine. They don’t have to build infrastructure, they’ve already done it. They don’t need to invest in supply chain infrastructure because the Belt and Road initiative is already in place. They own deep port and road infrastructure across Europe Africa and Latin America and have a distribution pipeline ready to go. They are electrifying their economy to remove reliance on fossil fuel imports. They are adding capacity to their energy grid faster than any nation on earth. In 2025 alone they added 543 GW with solar accounting for almost 50%. They have now surpassed 1,000 GW in solar power and given they manufacture 92% of the world’s solar modules they have ZERO supply chain issues as they march on to cheap energy when the U.S. is running away from renewable energy. They also added a further 80 GW of wind power. If you’re looking for a broader energy comparison, The capacity added by China since the end of 2021 already exceeds the entire power system of the United States. The critical point here is that the top two global powers are approaching the AI revolution from two opposite angles. The Chinese are seeking to integrate it into society, at the same time the oligarchs are seeking to replace society. This is why China will win and become the number one global economy. The world is at an inflection point and I’m afraid greed will prove to be the downfall of American imperial ambition. Will the rich survive? Of course they will, they always do. As for everyone else, I’m afraid you’re on your own unless they are stopped. My advice is to learn Chinese. 🎥 TikTok - vm.tiktok.com/ZNRQyWfdX/

Nancy Fraser | After Habermas lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/marc…

It’s curious how I ended up photographing the Kowloon Walled City, along with co-author Ian Lambot. We ended up making the most thorough (and most frequently referenced) record of the place. Why didn’t any HK photographers concentrate their efforts on documenting the place? One reason is that every parent told their kids to stay clear of the place. The other, and maybe more important reason, is that it wasn’t considered a worthy subject. Had the Walled City lasted just a few years longer (it was demolished in 1993), I have no doubt that young HK photographers and filmmakers would have been all over the place. But it was erased just moments before HK woke up to itself. A generational change. The culture generation now values HK in a way the previous generations didn’t. “City of Darkness Revisited” will be republished later this year. Stand by for updates on pre-ordering! 1. Walled City, southwest corner. 2. Facade along Tung Tau Chun Rd. 3. Rooftop kids. 4. Mahjong at home. Link to books in bio. greggirardpictures.com

@RpsAgainstTrump Please read: theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Stephen Miller praised Trump for several minutes. Then Trump turned to Kash Patel and said, “Kash, see if you can top that.” Patel: “Mr. President, thank you for delivering the safest country on God’s green Earth.” Straight up North Korea vibes

In 1928, a Finnish man named Eino Kettunen wrote a folk song about a girl who sneaks out to dance all night. Decades later in 1995, a quartet named Loituma recorded an a cappella version of the track. It was largely forgotten by the mainstream. Then in 2006, an anonymous user took a tiny vocal loop from that recording and uploaded it to a Russian blogging website. They paired the audio with a simple flash animation of the character Orihime Inoue from the anime Bleach endlessly spinning a leek. The viral explosion was so intense that it forced the disbanded folk quartet to reunite. A 1928 acoustic folk song accidentally became a massive club hit and ringtone sensation, dominating European music charts nearly eighty years after it was written.

Taiwan's opposition leader Cheng Li-wun said improving ties with Beijing does not require being anti-US and emphasized the need for stable cross-strait relations reut.rs/3PVhMHa

Yeah, but have you heard about our ballroom??

From Gaza's killing fields to the NHS, now to Britain's Financial Conduct Authority, Palantir's ghastly tentacles have penetrated every pore of the British state. The UK's demos is now well and truly expelled from the UK's democracy-in-name-only theguardian.com/technology/202…

Bradbury on Reading

@conetropia @Terenceshen Yeah, no. Words actually have definite meanings, and this word democracy isn’t “like your opinion, dude.”

@Terenceshen "Democracy is not mass produced with a uniform model or configuration for countries around the world. Whether a country is democratic or not should be left to it's own people to decide. Dismissing forms of democracy that are different from one's own is in itself undemocratic."

Chinese Ambassador to Australia Xiao Qian said, “China is a democracy in our own way.” It’s funny that in many countries, democracy means people choose their government, while in China, democracy means the government redefines what “democracy” means.

@Terenceshen He is speaking Trumpese: “we are a democracy, sure, some like to call it fascism but it really means democracy.”