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Pro-Palestinian Protesters Interrupt Microsoft’s 50th Anniversary Event

April 6, 2025 Al Jazeera. , , , , ,
A pro-Palestinian protest by Microsoft employees has interrupted the company’s 50th anniversary celebration, the latest backlash over the tech industry’s work to supply artificial intelligence technology to the Israeli military. The protest began on Friday as Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman was presenting product updates and a long-term vision for the company’s AI assistant product, Copilot, to an audience that included Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and former CEO Steve Ballmer. “Mustafa, shame on you,” shouted Microsoft employee Ibtihal Aboussad as she walked towards the stage and Suleyman paused his speech.

American Lumpen Development: The Data Center Boom

March 5, 2025 Hanna Eid, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
In the Marxist view of economics, the development of the productive forces is a key element which defines the overall development of a certain country or place. This generally means urbanization paired with real industrialization and the reduction of the urban-rural gap through land reform and an agricultural policy that promotes food sovereignty and self sufficiency. All of this paired with schools, hospitals, mass public transit and other markers of the development of social and cultural life can provide people with jobs and livelihoods that are the building blocks for socialist development.

US Tech CEOs Admit They Want AI Monopoly And ‘Unipolar World’

February 3, 2025 Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , , , , , , , , ,
The CEO of Anthropic, a US AI company backed by Amazon and Google, argued that the government must impose heavy restrictions on China in order to maintain a monopoly on artificial intelligence technology. If the US government can block China from getting advanced semiconductors, we will “live in a unipolar world, where only the US and its allies have these models”, wrote Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Calling for more aggressive sanctions on China, Amodei warned, “Well-enforced export controls are the only thing that can prevent China from getting millions of chips, and are therefore the most important determinant of whether we end up in a unipolar or bipolar world”.

ICE Is Swiftly Expanding Its Sprawling Surveillance Apparatus

January 31, 2025 Maurizio Guerrero, Scheer Post. , , , ,
The U.S. federal agency in charge of detaining and deporting immigrants is poised to expand to unprecedented levels the sprawling surveillance apparatus left by the Biden administration. Within days of President Donald Trump’s victory in November, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) posted several notices on the federal procurement website seeking contractors to provide technological tools to enlarge, transform, and modernize the agency’s capabilities to track, monitor, and surveil noncitizens.

Chris Hedges Report: Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

January 30, 2025 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. , , ,
The year 2008 signaled to many the weak foundations of modern capitalism in the hands of the greedy, untethered financial sector—the “vampire squid” investment banks as journalist Matt Taibbi called them. Rising from the ashes of the crash, these banks used government money—”socialism for the bankers”—to enrich themselves and Big Business. This money never got to the masses. Instead shares were bought back in traditional capitalist industries and an emerging powerful bloc—the Jeff Bezos’s, the Microsoft’s, the Google’s of the world—invested in what guest Yanis Varoufakis calls, “cloud capital.”

China’s Shocking DeepSeek AI Pops US Big Tech Monopoly Bubble

January 29, 2025 Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , , , ,
China is making enormous progress in the development of artificial intelligence technology, and it has set off a political and economic earthquake in the West. The stocks of US Big Tech corporations crashed on January 27, losing hundreds of billions of dollars in market capitalization over the span of just a few hours, on the news that a small Chinese company called DeepSeek had created a new cutting-edge AI model, which was released for free to the public. The UK’s leading newspaper The Guardian described DeepSeek as “the biggest threat to Silicon Valley’s hegemony”.

How The Chinese Beat Trump And OpenAI

January 27, 2025 Moon Of Alabama. , , , , ,
The hype around Artificial Intelligence, the now failed U.S. attempt to monopolize it, and the recent counter from China are a lesson in how to innovate. They also show that the U.S. is losing the capability to do so. In mid 2023, when the Artificial Intelligence hype gained headlines, I wrote: 'Artificial Intelligence' Is (Mostly) Glorified Pattern Recognition Currently there is some hype about a family of large language models like ChatGPT. The program reads natural language input and processes it into some related natural language content output. That is not new. The first Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity (Alice) was developed by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in the early 1960s. I had funny chats with ELIZA in the 1980s on a mainframe terminal. ChatGPT is a bit niftier and its iterative results, i.e. the 'conversations' it creates, may well astonish some people. But the hype around it is unwarranted.

Exposing Big Tech’s Complicity In Genocide

January 2, 2025 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. , , , , , , , , , , , ,
The vast censorship and suppression campaign launched by American tech companies since October 7, 2023 has been both systemic and deliberate. Instagram, Facebook, X as well as other tech platforms and companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple have actively worked to stifle information regarding the genocide in Gaza. Dissent against policies or individuals who enable these decisions is often met with swift reprimand in the form of job loss. Joining host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report are three courageous individuals who chose to put their careers on the line to fight against Big Tech suppression of voices fighting for Palestinian lives.

Why I Confronted Nancy Mace

November 26, 2024 Evan Greer, Touch Grass. , , , ,
On Thursday of last week, I was tossed out of a tech conference in Washington, DC because I stood up and spoke out against a vile bigot––and sitting member of Congress––who had been invited to speak. I would do it again. I want to be clear that the goal of my protest wasn’t to convince haters to stop spreading hate. It was to spark a conversation among tech policy advocates and philanthropists about what our strategy is going into the next four years. Will we cozy up to bigots, authoritarians, and wannabe fascists who have goals that are incompatible with basic human rights, just because they pretend to be “against Big Tech”?

Venezuela In The Crosshairs Of Technological Imperialism

September 5, 2024 Misión Verdad Orinoco Tribune. , , , , , , , , , ,
In August, Venezuela’s re-elected president, Nicolás Maduro, signed a decree blocking access to social media platform X, formerly Twitter, for 10 days. President Maduro said of its owner, tycoon Elon Musk, “He has violated the rules by inciting hatred, fascism, civil war, death, confrontation among Venezuelans, and has violated all Venezuelan laws.” Musk, who also owns the Starlink satellite broadband network, expressed his support for the far-right Venezuelan opposition and insulted the president, which is a sign of the determination of the new global elites to carry out regime change in Venezuela. This action was accompanied by other attempts implemented through various technological platforms such as Apple, Google, and Meta.

How US Big Tech Monopolies Colonized The World: Welcome To Neo-Feudalism

August 19, 2024 Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
US Big Tech corporations have essentially colonized the world. In almost every country on Earth, the digital infrastructure upon which the modern economy was built is owned and controlled by a small handful of monopolies, based largely in Silicon Valley. This system is looking more and more like neo-feudalism. Just as the feudal lords of medieval Europe owned all of the land and turned almost everyone else into serfs, who broke their backs producing food for their masters, the US Big Tech monopolies of the 21st century act as corporate feudal lords, controlling all of the digital land upon which the digital economy is based.

World Of Warcraft Developers Form Blizzard’s Largest, Most Inclusive Union

July 27, 2024 Ash Parrish, The Verge. , , , , ,
More than 500 developers at Blizzard Entertainment who work on World of Warcraft have voted to form a union. The World of Warcraft GameMakers Guild, formed with the assistance of the Communication Workers of America (CWA), is composed of employees across every department, including designers, engineers, artists, producers, and more. Together, they have formed the largest wall-to-wall union — or a union inclusive of multiple departments and disciplines — at Microsoft. This news comes less than a week after the formation of the Bethesda Game Studios union, which, at the time of the announcement, was itself the largest wall-to-wall Microsoft union.

Technocapitalism: Our Dystopian Present—And Future?

April 20, 2024 Chris Hedges, The Real News Network. , , ,
We are living through an incipient technological revolution. AI, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, commercial space travel, and other innovations are rapidly transforming everything from the workplace to the financial architecture of the global economy. While many of these technologies hold vast potential to benefit the social good, the multinational corporations and financial oligarchy that drive innovation and own its products are solely motivated by private profit. The consequences are unfolding all around us. As technology and the power of the oligarchy advances, the misery and disenfranchisement of the majority grows.

CHIPS Ahoy For Stock Buybacks R Us!

March 27, 2024 Les Leopold, Scheer Post. , , , ,
Intel, the largest chip maker in America, with 2023 revenues of $54 billion, has just been awarded an $8.5 billion grant from the federal CHIPS and Science Act, plus $11 billion in favorable loans. In addition to badly needed microchips, Intel produces totally useless stock buybacks. On its website the company proudly proclaims to have spent $152 billion on stock buybacks since 1990. That’s not a typo — $152,000,000,000. Which is why I call it Stock Buybacks Я Us. Intel took $152 billion of its revenues, some portion of which could have been used for R&D and building new microchip facilities in the U.S.

Global Censorship In The Name Of Democracy

March 23, 2024 Alan MacLeod, Mintpress News. , , , ,
A report from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) outlines how the government agency has been encouraging governments, tech platforms, establishment media outlets and advertisers to work together to censor huge swaths of the Internet. The 97-page “disinformation primer,” obtained by conservative firm America First Legal under the Freedom of Information Act, purports to be fighting fake news. However, much of the organization’s focus appears to be on preventing individuals from finding information online that challenges official narratives and leads to increased questioning of the system more generally.
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