More Blockchain Garbology Since I published “Blockchain Is Garbage,” I’ve had many requests for collections of the best critical arguments about Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, blockchain, and more recent developments like NFTs, the metaverse, web3, and so on. This is my attempt to provide a curated, annotated selection of the best critical…

Overwhelming evidence shows that the blockchain/cryptocurrency space is mostly fraudulent Note: Amy Castor and David Gerard provided extensive commentary, editorial help, and in some cases the actual words used in this piece. I have been writing about cryptocurrencies since at least 2013. From the beginning it has been clear to me how pervaded the entire space is with false claims…

Elon Musk’s claim to be a “free speech absolutist” makes sense only if you believe that there are two kinds of people Fascism talks a lot about free speech. Many who oppose fascism point out the irony that in all societies where fascism has taken hold, fascist leaders do not…

Its Current Astrology Ad Campaign Shows that Facebook Knowingly and Deliberately Welcomes Hate In a series of appearances in early October, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen repeated a claim those of us paying attention have heard many times before, so much so that Facebook already has a standard approach to rebutting…

Many colleges and universities in the US have defied their faculty, staff, and students in bringing students back to campus during a pandemic, and they can’t explain why. Could this be the straw that finally breaks the back of neoliberal education anti-management? When the COVID-19 crisis started, many of us…

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a talk delivered at The White West III: Automating Apartheid (Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria, Feb 13–14, 2020). A fuller version with complete references is in preparation for the conference proceedings. Abstract In the developed world, blockchain promoters insist the technology will solve what…

Calls to Limit the Use of Bad Technologies Only by Law Enforcement and Governments, Largely Via “Ethics” and Self-Regulation, Exacerbate Rather than Ameliorate the Anti-Democratic Harms of Digital Technology Recently, more of us have started to realize just how destructive digital technologies can be. That’s good. …

Artificial General Intelligence and White Supremacy — It may seem improbable at first glance to think that there might be connections between the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and white supremacy. Yet the more you examine the question the clearer and more disturbing the links get. Inspired in part by some recent work mentioned below, conversations with Chris Gilliard, a Twitter thread by Ash, ongoing work by Dale Carrico, and some other recent research mentioned below, I decided to try to see where the threads might lead.