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the soviet dystopia that inspired 1984 — it’s so good i reread it every year.

Ghost rooms, River Irwell, Manchester

NEWS: C20 Society has strongly recommended the listing of 10 Cabot Square in Canary Wharf, following a consultation with Historic England. The 1988-1991 office building was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) in a Neoclassical Chicago style, and is the finest example of this type of architecture remaining in Canary Wharf. The building is currently subject to a planning application that if consented would see it largely demolished, with only the foundations and structural frame retained. C20 has also formally objected to the Howells-led scheme. SOM began masterplanning Canary Wharf in 1985 for property developers Olympia and York as a future financial centre for London. They set strict guidelines for planning and architecture that were commonplace in North America but a first in the UK, including requiring the use of natural stone for building bases and a prohibition on reflective glass cladding. Olympia and York’s requirement for Canary Wharf was that it was ‘quintessentially Postmodern in its desire for a development that looked rooted in place and time, that is, it had not only to look as if it was an established part of London but that it had evolved over time’. 10 Cabot Square has further interest in its relationship to César Pelli’s One Canada Square, which was the tallest building in the UK from 1991 to 2012. One Canada Square is emblematic of the wider Canary Wharf development, and is of particular interest for its careful form and façade grid, with a particularly Italianate, platonic postmodernist style. 10 Cabot Square, on the other hand, is resolutely American in its stylings, with Sullivan-like ornament and a high-quality façade system of brick and stone clad panels, meeting more traditionally British features such as the arcades, ‘inspired by enclosed passages off Piccadilly’. The building is an exceptionally well-designed synthesis of the early Chicago skyscraper and its London context.

Yesterday Meta told every US employee their computer will now record mouse clicks, keystrokes, and screenshots while they work. All of it goes into training an AI to do their job. In 30 days, 8,000 of these same employees are being laid off. Reuters got the memo. The wording is the company's own: the recordings will be used to build "AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously." Reuters also confirmed the May 20 date and the number, 8,000 people, exactly 10% of Meta's global workforce. Meta is spending $115 to $135 billion on AI infrastructure this year, almost double the $72 billion it spent last year. The entire business only generated $115.8 billion in cash for all of 2025. Meta is now planning to spend more on AI in 2026 than the whole company brings in. Part of the bill went to a company called Scale AI. Meta paid $14.3 billion for 49% of it last June, mostly to bring in CEO Alexandr Wang. Scale's whole job is to tag and clean the human-written data that AI models learn from. Meta wanted Wang because their old data supply ran dry. The public internet is almost out of fresh material to feed these models. A group called Epoch AI ran the math and projects the world will burn through its supply of high-quality human-written text on the web somewhere between 2026 and 2032. The industry calls this the "data wall." Google and OpenAI are stuck on the same side of it. So Meta turned inward, to the most expensive training material money can buy: their own employees doing their own jobs. Mouse movements teach the AI how to move around a screen, click by click. Keystroke logs hand it the exact shortcuts and rhythm an experienced worker uses, the muscle memory of the job. Screenshots show what a finished task should look like. The people being recorded in April are the raw material for the AI that replaces them in May. This is not just a Meta thing. Amazon laid off 16,000 corporate workers in January. Oracle let go of up to 30,000 of its people, about 18% of the company, on March 31. The cash they saved goes toward $156 billion in AI data centers. The whole pattern across big tech is identical. Record profits and record AI spending, paired with the biggest workforce cuts since the pandemic. The thing they are building is a software worker that opens the dashboard, reads the numbers, drafts the email, books the meeting, and never needs a coffee break. The training data for that worker is a senior Meta employee doing all of that, on Meta's payroll, one month before their last day.

Trump says his presidential library in Miami will be a hotel