– Tech journalist Steve Lohr, reminiscing the last major American antitrust trial (1998). Once again “a tech giant is accused of using its overwhelming market power to unfairly cut competitors off from potential customers,” Lohr writes, noting Google is not quite as audacious though (a Microsoft exec famously planned to “cut off Netscape’s air supply”).

– Canadian tech critic, author, and Tech Won’t Save Us host Paris Marx, pushing against the notion that better tools like Satlas, the Allen Institute for AI’s machine learning-powered forest monitor, will lead to climate action. “Our data has been getting better for decades,” Marx argues, “and emissions have kept rising that whole time.”

– Tech reporter and Platformer founder Casey Newton, parsing the drama around the proposed cage fight between the two Silicon Valley giants in show sports terms. “As a connoisseur of pro wrestling, I’m quite familiar with the character Musk is playing here: the big talker who can’t back it up in the ring,” writes Newton. “Wrestling promoters have made a lot of money with cowardly heel champions [like Flair] who go to great lengths to avoid having to face their adversaries in combat.” In the real world, the Musk vs Zuck feud moves markets and, Newton argues, deserves a lot more skepticism.

– Signal Foundation president and AI Now Institute co-founder Meredith Whittaker, discussing AI ethics with Credo AI’s Navrina Singh, and Distributed AI Research Institute’s Alex Hanna at the Bloomberg Technology Summit. “AI is a surveillance technology,” Whittaker insists. “The Venn diagram of AI concerns and privacy concerns is a circle.”

– New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose, summarizing the dilemma faced by Reddit, Twitter, and other platforms currently “locking down” their application programming interfaces (APIs) to protect their vast archives (of user-generated content) from being scraped by OpenAI, Google and other companies developing AI language models

– Security engineering expert Ross Anderson, on the dangers of model collapse as AI trains on AI-generated content. In a new paper, Anderson and team demonstrate a rapid degenerative AI feedback loop where “true underlying data distribution” is forgotten. “This will make it harder to train newer models by scraping the web,” Anderson warns, “giving an advantage to firms that already did, or that control access to human interfaces at scale.”

– LA Times tech columnist Brian Merchant, channelling media scholar David Karpf’s critique of Apple’s “anti-metaverse,” where people disappear into a “totally immersive computer on their face”—alone. “If the world keeps getting worse,” Karpf says, “this will eventually have a lot of appeal.”

– Tech reporter Molly Roberts, on Apple’s newly announced Vision Pro mixed-reality goggles. “We will be able to be not present while also being present—to fail to pay full attention to what’s around us without technically having to look away from it,” Roberts writes. “Welcome to the future.” [quote edited]

– American media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, on his Silicon Valley disillusionment. “It’s not just Look what they did to my song,” the former techno-optimist tells journalist Malcom Harris. “It’s that the song itself is corrupt.”

– Verge Senior Writer Elizabeth Lopatto, questioning the shelf life of a fawning 2015 profile that claimed Silicon Valley venture capitalists a16z had their finger on the pulse of the tech sector

– TikTok moderator turned labour organizer James Oyange, heralding the newly-formed African Content Moderators Union. Spurned by widespread PTSD and wages as low as $1.50 USD an hour, Oyange promises to challenge ByteDance, Meta, OpenAI, and other tech companies that offshore content moderation to Africa.

– Writer and arts editor Niklas Maak, condemning the largely inoffensive, un-critical works on view at “Dimensions: Digital art since 1859,” a Leipzig exhibition curated by notoriously pro-business cultural manager Walter Smerling and sponsored by American surveillance software contractor Palantir [quote translated from German]

– American writer Joanne McNeil, critiquing Silicon Valley’s ethics shell game, as tech leaders call for an AI moratorium. “Good work can be done and good people can be hired,” McNeil continues. “Doesn’t change the purpose and ultimate goals of these departments.”

– American writer Joanne McNeil, recalling a more innocent era of social media. In the first episode of Main Accounts, her new podcast on the rise and fall of MySpace in the 2000s, McNeil engages journalists Julie Angwin and Taylor Lorenz about the social network’s spyware-adjacent origins and its infamous 2005 sale to News Corp.

– Tech critic Edward Ongweso Jr., on the ChatGPT launch. “The correct analysis is they lied. They lied about its capabilities, they rolled out what was possible, and they’re going to keep lying,” he adds, describing how OpenAI cynically overhyped a half-baked product to capture the public’s attention—and drive up their valuation.