If the AI bubble hasn’t crested yet, I think this week gave us the image that will define the ridiculous enthusiasm of this cycle. Attending Computex in Taipei, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang signed a woman’s boobs as the value of his company continued to soar to such a degree it even surpassed Apple’s market capitalization to become the second most valuable company in the world.

I’ve been saying for a while that Nvidia is clearly overvalued and will drop quite a bit once this cycle ends, but nothing could make me more convinced of that than seeing a tech CEO being treated like a rockstar. He’s not a “cool” CEO; he’s just another billionaire tech mogul.

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My reaction is the same as the man between Huang and the woman who seems to be disgusted by the whole sight. And we’re not the only ones to feel that way.

The Wall Street Journal was the latest publication to throw some cold water on all the AI enthusiasm this week, as columnist Christopher Mims warns that “significant disappointment may be on the horizon” with the rate of AI improvement slowing, reality beginning to set in around what those tools can actually accomplish, and the high cost of AI applications continuing to be a problem. [archive]

According to Mims, AI companies are running out of data to train their models on: they’ve already used up the internet and “there aren’t 10 more internets’ worth of human-generated content for today’s AIs to inhale.” Sequoia also estimates companies have spent $50 billion buying chips from Nvidia to power their AI ambitions, but have pulled in a mere $3 billion in revenue. This isn’t the 2010s when companies could get away with losing billions of dollars a year and still keep chugging along.

Despite some figures that suggest a lot of employees are now using AI tools at work, Mims cites clarifying numbers that show “there is a massive gulf between the number of workers who are just playing with AI, and the subset who rely on it and pay for it.” That’s because some researchers have found that “AI isn’t nearly the productivity booster it has been touted as.”

The AI moment won’t be what Silicon Valley wants us to believe it is. Thank you to Jensen Huang for the image that will illustrate the peak of the bubble.

Sorry for the delay in this week’s roundup! I was at a retreat in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York and didn’t get it done before I left. However, the one day delay meant I could pull a different tweet to highlight at the end of the newsletter that’s a further signal of Silicon Valley’s fascist alignment. Not a good thing, but at least an instructive one.

In the roundup, there are some important pieces of Israel’s information campaign against US lawmakers, Musk lying to investors, and a break down of who really runs his companies. Plus, plenty of other important labor details and other news you might have missed during the week.

I don’t have any other media to share this week other than the interview I did on my podcast Tech Won’t Save Us with Joseph Cox about his new book Dark Wire. It’s a fascinating tale of how the FBI made its own encrypted phone network to read the messages of criminals around the world, then carried out the largest ever sting operation with law enforcement agencies the world over.

Have a great week!

— Paris

Every now and then, Elon Musk needs to take a break from lying about his companies’ future roadmaps to get lauded for doing absolutely nothing to solve a larger global issue. This time, instead of promising to save Thai kids stuck in a cave or send ventilators to hospitals being swamped with Covid patients, he claims to have the fix for global water shortages.

No surprise, Musk’s solution is firmly technological. He’s not interested in talking about whether we should be planning our communities differently to address water scarcity or targeting companies who have massive water demands to fuel their profit margins. No, Musk’s approach is flippant in the face of political and social considerations.

According to Musk, water shortages are “very solvable” because existing studies are obsolete and price estimates are outdated. All we need is more energy and better transport infrastructure, then we can desalinate whatever water we need because it’s become “very inexpensive.” Phew, good to know it’s all so easy, Mr. Musk!

“We've got a great water future ahead of us, and a great sustainable energy future ahead of us,” he told the attendees of the World Water Forum in Bali, Indonesia, where he appeared to promote Starlink’s launch in the country. With a good hydroponics facility, “I think you can basically turn any part of the world green, including the entire world.”

But does Musk really have a solution? New Atlas acknowledged costs have come down, but pointed out Musk missed a huge roadblock to the supposedly easy solution he outlined: money for capital expenditure. New desalination plants cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and the cost of solar energy and battery storage has to be added on top of that. “This isn't a tech problem, it’s a very familiar money problem — and while it might be an easy one for a techno-optimist like Musk to overlook, it's a towering issue blocking progress for developing nations.” 

The billionaire blinders strike again!

Another great roundup this week with pieces on what Jack Dorsey really wants from “decentralized” social media, a nuanced look at the smartphone debate, and the broader impacts of California’s Prop 22 law. Plus, the usual labor updates and other news you’ve come to expect.

Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I spoke to Nora Kenworthy about the problems with normalizing the reliance on GoFundMe for access to healthcare and how it further saps the energy for structural solutions.

Finally, I’m back from doing events and media in Copenhagen and Berlin. You can see a recording of my talk at re:publica about data centers. I was on Denmark’s public broadcaster to talk about the AI debate and on the Transformator podcast to talk about AI and other tech issues. More to come!

Have a great week!

— Paris

The media can’t get enough of Malcolm and Simone Collins, the couple who’ve made themselves the face of the tech-aligned pronatalist movement that advocates having more kids using genetic screening technologies to (theoretically) choose the best possible embryos. The Collinses have been profiled countless times by various publications over the past few years, providing their movement with (I would argue) far more mainstream attention than it deserves, but also slowly unearthing the dark side of their beliefs.

This most recent profile by Jenny Kleeman in The Guardian revisits their attempt to put a tech makeover on eugenics. Malcolm disagrees with that framing, arguing eugenics is about state-backed program, ignoring how “liberal” eugenics is very much a thing with its own deep problems. That only becomes more clear when Kleeman notes how cozy their movement has become with elements of the far right which push the great replacement theory. She quotes Malcolm talking about the “really horrible optics” of “importing people from Africa.”

The real contribution of Kleeman’s piece is the insight she provides on how the Collinses treat their kids. Their three kids have toys and iPads, but Malcolm and Simone argue heating their freezing home in winter is a “pointless indulgence” and say that “pronatalist parenting is intrinsically low-effort parenting” where they claim to be sacrificing what they can give their kids in order to have more of them. Malcolm says he doesn’t like babies. Simone takes care of them for the first 18 months, then hands them off the Malcolm for regular care so she can pop out another.

The big moment of the story happens when Malcolm takes Kleeman out for Thai food with two of the boys. When one hits the table with his foot, “Immediately – like a reflex – Malcolm hits him in the face,” Kleeman describes.

It is not a heavy blow, but it is a slap with the palm of his hand direct to his two-year-old son’s face that’s firm enough for me to hear on my voice recorder when I play it back later. And Malcolm has done it in the middle of a public place, in front of a journalist, who he knows is recording everything.

Later, Malcolm explains they hit their kids because Simone saw that tigers in the wild hit their cubs with a paw to shape their behavior. Think of that what you will. But the whole story just adds to the questions we should be asking about this pronatalist movement — not just the broader ideology behind it, but what it means for the kids being spawned as instruments in some supposed political project.

Not long after the profile was posted, none other than the Collinses themselves turned up in my mentions on Twitter to defend hitting their kids. “EVERYONE under anyone else's authority (kids, employees, citizens, etc.) is subject to misguided social experiments,” they replied. “We take this unavoidable reality seriously and are therefore very intentional about our approaches.”

Effective altruists will apparently even point to numbers and charts to defend physical abuse of children now. Not even laughing at their cringe Reddit posts can distract from the growing concern over what they’re doing and the question of how much having all these kids is driven by a desire to go viral by carving out a weird tech niche of their own.

This week in the roundup: your usual recommended reads, labor updates, and other stories you might have missed. There are a number of stories on Google’s AI Overviews disaster and the tech industry’s growing embrace of Donald Trump (after many previously said they wouldn’t support him again). I’d also really recommended the open letter from Kenyan AI workers to Joe Biden.

Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I spoke to Gil Duran about Balaji Srinivasan’s plan for tech-aligned “Grays” to take over San Francisco by allying with the police, then “ethnically cleansing” the city of “Blues,” meaning liberals and leftists. It’s a good discussion of how extreme the industry’s billionaires are becoming.

I did some Danish media this week, which I’ll share as it comes out over the next few weeks, and wrote a piece for The Independent about the problems with the legalization of Uber in Newfoundland and Labrador. I was also on WNYC’s On the Media to talk about AI hype and Sam Altman’s manipulation of the press, and did an interview with WDR in Germany on the Hyperloop. Also, just a final reminder that I’m speaking at re:publica in Berlin on Monday.

Have a great week!

— Paris

Apple is a juggernaut, but it’s having a hard time charting a path forward. Earlier this year, it canceled the Apple Car and released the Vision Pro to poor results. In recent months, CEO Tim Cook has been jetting around Asia not just to shore up its supply chain, but also to try to find new markets for sales growth as Chinese consumers turn toward domestic brands.

In Business Insider, I wrote about the troubles Apple is facing [pl / es / archive]. After a series of category-defining hardware products under Steve Jobs, the company has struggled to replicate it under Cook and there’s nothing on the horizon to suggest that will change anytime soon. Instead, Cook’s strategy has been to push up prices and build a larger services business to try to make more money off existing customers, all while doing much more to keep investors happy.

When Apple released its quarterly earnings in early May, it had a sweetener to distract investors from its continuing stagnation and the increasingly worrying picture for the company’s sales in China: Cook announced a larger dividend and a $110-billion share buyback, the biggest in its history. It might keep investors happy for now, but it’s not a good sign for those looking for a long-term strategy.

Almost perfectly on cue, news leaked this week that Apple seems to be planning a “Slim” version of the iPhone 17 that will be even more expensive than the iPhone Pro Max, which built on the price hike that followed the release of the iPhone X in 2017. To me, it’s a further signal that Cook doesn’t have a real plan other than trying to keep squeezing existing customers for more money once again. But how long can that go on?

Apple aside, there are plenty of great recommended reads, labor updates, and other news items in this week’s roundup. I particularly liked the pieces calling Facebook the “zombie internet” and the longread on Silicon Valley going back to Saudi Arabia and the UAE with hat in hand for more money. Plus, if you’re a paid subscriber, don’t forget to check out the new reading list for the coming months.

Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I spoke to Paolo Gerbaudo about the Chinese automaker BYD, how its vertically integrated production model works, and why it’s presenting a big threat to US automakers. It was a fascinating conversation.

Just a reminder that I’m speaking on May 23 and 24 in Copenhagen, and on May 27 in Berlin. I may also be doing another event in Berlin on May 25 — if you might want to attend that, keep an eye on my social media.

Have a great week!

— Paris

One of the reasons tech coverage can be so positive toward tech companies comes from bias; from people liking those companies or believing in a broader ideology that tech ultimately does good in the world (if they think it does much bad at all). Those biases often go unacknowledged, even though they can be crucial to how a journalist or an entire outlet approach a company.

I still think Apple gets more of a pass than it deserves because of how well it cultivated fandom for so long. Its keynotes weren’t just product updates; they were events that journalists got a front row seat to and where they could clap along with executives and fans alike. For a while, I was guilty of that too. As I wrote about in March, I was an Apple fanboy, and while some of my first articles about tech were about Apple changing its product line to charge higher prices to take advantage of inequality, for a while I still believed it was the lesser evil in Silicon Valley.

I’m reflecting on this topic this week because I’ve found myself confronting one of my own biases. I’ve been closely following the story about Paramount Global and whether it will agree to an acquisition deal. A couple weeks back, it was announced that Sony might join Apollo in its bid for the company and it was confirmed this week with a $26 billion offer. Immediately I found myself hoping it would happen.

Despite that fact I believe consolidation has been a negative force in entertainment — I’ve even written as much about film and video games — I’ve long held a soft spot for Sony. Playstation was my first video game console, and I still have a fondness for its electronics. When I moved last year and needed to buy a new television, I didn’t look at reviews of televisions generally — I looked at reviews of Sony televisions. My setup contains a Sony TV, Sony soundbar, Sony Blu-ray player, Sony Playstation 5, and an Apple TV.

I don’t actively cover the entertainment industry, so I’m not so concerned about that bias around Sony creeping into what I write — and even if I did, I can acknowledge how that knee-jerk reaction to favor a Sony takeover of Paramount goes against my broader views that it would be a bad move. But I can think of plenty of examples where those views do shape people’s coverage, and thus readers’ understanding of issues in the tech industry. In my view, it’s a dangerous thing.

Anyway, those thoughts aside, there are some great pieces in the roundup this week on the far-right politics of tech billionaires, along with other recommended reads, labor updates, and other news you might have missed. I’ll also be releasing a book list for paid subscribers looking at interesting tech books coming in the next few months in the coming days.

Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I spoke to Nicole Lipman about Chinese fast fashion giant SHEIN and how it’s basically taking over the industry, but in the process only exacerbating the problems with how our clothes are made.

If you’re in Austria, I’ll be speaking at Art Meets Radical Openness in Linz on Wednesday. Later this month, I’ll also be in Copenhagen to speak about AI at ENIGMA.

Have a great week!

— Paris

For the past few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about a piece by Joanna Nelius in The Verge. For the past year, she’s been using the Light Phone 2, one of those barebones smartphones that has no app store and very limited functionality. Sure, it took some getting used to, but she described a motivation I think a lot of people can relate to.

If I felt anxious or bored, reaching for my smartphone was an automatic reaction, to the point where I sometimes didn’t realize my phone was in my hand until I was 10 cat videos deep on Instagram. I’m the kind of person who likes to retain control over my faculties, so that terrified me. By making the Light Phone my primary phone, I hoped to separate myself from easy access to social media and change my relationship with how and when I accessed the internet.

I don’t know about you, but I have a similar tendency that I don’t particularly like. I’ve been intrigued by the Light Phone and similar concepts for a while, but always avoided taking the plunge because of a feeling I simply need a smartphone because of my job, the travel I do for it, and how smartphone ownership increasingly feels like a necessity in our societies.

Nelius’ piece makes me reflect on whether it’s time to try it. She writes that she still keeps a smartphone in her bag, and can connect it to data through a hotspot from the Light Phone if she ever needs it in a pinch. That’s a potential workaround. I’m already in the process of making my way through my watch lists and cancelling most of my streaming services. So maybe that’s the next step.

Anyway, this week in the roundup there are all your usual recommended reads, labor updates, and other news you might have missed. There are some pieces in there about notable tech company quarterly earnings this past week (like Tesla and Meta), as well as some interesting stuff on how Europe is taking a slightly different approach to China than the US.

Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I interviewed Meghan O’Gieblyn about the roots of transhumanism and how it secularized a lot of ideas that were initially taken from Christian theology. Instead of achieving the resurrection through spiritual means, transhumanists see it as a project of science and technology.

Also, just a head’s up that I’ll be speaking at AMRO in Linz, Austria on May 8 and at re:publica in Berlin on May 27. I should have some more events to announce in the coming weeks.

Have a great week! 

— Paris

If anyone still believes Silicon Valley is some sort of haven for progressive values or a better form of capitalism, this week hopefully disabused them of that notion. Tech companies are profiting immensely from relationships with the Israeli government and military, to such a degree that Google fired 28 people earlier in the week after they protested a major cloud contract the company has with the Israeli government. There was a moment when South African apartheid became untenable and companies were forced to cut ties with it. We can only hope that day comes soon for the Israeli apartheid regime.

In this week’s roundup, you’ll find the usual recommended reads, labor updates, and other news you might have missed. There are some really great pieces on the growth of SHEIN, transformations in Hollywood, and why AI-generated ebooks are flooding Amazon.

Instead of commentary this week, I’m going to direct you to a piece by journalist Jacob Silverman where he gives more detail on the 91 people who were on the transition team as Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2022. The full list of names was revealed in a case where six ex-Twitter employees are suing for not receiving the severance stipulated in their contracts. It tells us a lot more about the people Musk pulled from the rest of his empire to begin remaking Twitter to serve his personal and political goals — and could fuel more shareholder scrutiny of how Musk shares resources among his companies.

Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I interviewed Alex Shephard about the popularization of sports betting and how it’s leading to a spike in gambling addiction. The piece I wrote a few weeks ago about Musk’s alliance with the global far right was also translated into Italian by Internazionale.

Have a great week!

— Paris

I know I said there would be less Elon content this year, so you’ll have to forgive me for all the times he’s turned up in Disconnect over the past few weeks. Sometimes it’s easiest to use him to illustrate a broader point (like on the Mars stuff) or he’s doing things that simply can’t be ignored (like his alliance with the growing right-wing axis in global politics).

Today’s issue is picking up on that latter point because the meeting between Musk and Argentine president Javier Milei finally happened on Friday, and it was pretty wild to see how it went and some of the things that supposedly happened around it. You may have also heard that Musk is preparing for a fight with the Brazilian government over his desire to ensure Twitter/X can be a platform for the promotion of far-right politics. Expect a piece on that soon.

On the media front, I was interviewed by WOZ in Switzerland about Silicon Valley billionaires and on CBC’s St. John’s Morning Show about my home province’s decision to legalize Uber and the terrible way they’re going about it. I was also quoted in a piece in Truthout about the proposed TikTok ban.

Finally, over on Tech Won’t Save Us, Ed Ongweso Jr. and I tore into Kara Swisher’s Burn Book, how it misrepresents her legacy as a booster of Silicon Valley, and the problem of access journalism.

Have a great week!

— Paris

In a week filled with bad news for Tesla, the media still managed to do plenty of Musk hagiography, showing just how little some people have learned about the mistakes that were made in covering him so uncritically for so many years. He can cause so much harm today because he was built up into such a powerful figure with the media’s help.

I’ll have more on a couple of those stories below the break, along with the usual recommended reads, labor updates (an interesting Japanese story in that section this week), and plenty of other news you might have missed.

Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I spoke with NBC News reporter Kat Tenbarge about an incredibly important issue: how new AI tools are making it much easier to create fake explicit images not just of celebrities, but of regular people too, and the incredible harm that’s already having in high schools and beyond, especially for women.

Have a great week!

— Paris

This week was one of the rare times we get to celebrate some good tech news: a former tech billionaire being sent to prison for a very long time.

The last one was Elizabeth Holmes, who finally reported to prison for her sentence of 11 years and three months in May of last year. Bankman-Fried will not only spend more than double that time behind bars, but the collapse of his company to his guilty verdict and sentencing was much quicker. We can only hope the see more follow in their footsteps.

Along with the usual recommended reads, labor updates, and other news you might have missed, I’ll be taking a look at some of the other tech folks hit with fraud charges and why more should face the same.

Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I spoke to Zach Weinersmith about the new book he co-wrote with Kelly Weinersmith called A City on Mars. We get into the difficulties of settling the Moon and Mars, and why tech billionaires and space boosters often make it seem much easier than it would be in reality.

Finally, a few small updates about the newsletter. On our website, you’ll see hyperlinks are underlined in yellow now to help with readability. I’ve also added a translations page where I’ll be keeping a list of translated Disconnect articles. If any editors want to talk about translating a piece, get in touch!

Have a great week!

— Paris

I don’t know about you, but I can’t believe Elon Musk’s interview with Don Lemon dropped less than a week ago. It feels like so much has happened since then — especially in Apple land. While I hope the interview revealed to even more people how much of a thin-skinned moron Musk is, based on the responses I saw on social media it seemed divided into two camps: the people who already know he’s an idiot seeing that in the interview and his cult pretending Lemon was the real loser somehow. The day the cult ends can’t come soon enough.

Along with the usual recommended reads, labor updates, and other news in the roundup, this week I’m giving an overview of what’s going on with the Apple antitrust case that US Department of Justice brought forward on Thursday. It won’t be resolved anytime soon, but it could have some significant ramifications in the US smartphone and app market because of the iPhone’s dominant position. If Apple’s restrictions are loosened, what could the future hold?

Before we get into that, just a quick head’s up that I interviewed Jacob Silverman over on Tech Won’t Save Us this week about the proposed US TikTok ban, the issues with how lawmakers are trying to justify it, and what it tells us about how US tech policy promotes its geopolitical power. It was a fascinating chat!

Have a great week!

— Paris

Are we starting to see a new wave of tech worker activism, fueled by Silicon Valley’s participation in Israel’s campaign against Palestinian civilians paired with their irresponsible deployment of AI products? It certainly looks like it. I have a few comments on that this week.

Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I spoke to Dharna Noor about the deception involved in promoting plastic recycling to the public instead of actually reducing the amount of plastics being created by industry. It’s an interesting discussion about an industry-sponsored push that began in the 1970s.

Have a great week!

— Paris

I have to admit, it’s hard to write or even think about anything but Dune: Part Two right now! I’ll be seeing a for a third time not long after this finds its way into your inbox, and I truly think it’s an incredible achievement by Denis Villeneuve. I’ve long been a fan of his films and admired the visual aesthetic he’s been honing over years, but Dune: Part Two does feel like a tangible step up from his previous work.

If you do want to hear me talk more about Dune while pairing it with tech criticism, you can tune into the livestream I’m hosting along with Ed Ongweso Jr. and Brian Merchant on Friday at 11am PT / 2pm ET / 7pm GMT. You can set a reminder over on YouTube.

With that said, this week I have some comments on the long-awaited announcement from Apple that it’s finally ditching its car project, along with the usual recommended reads, labor updates, and other tech news you might have missed.

As I’m sure you saw, I reviewed Kara Swisher’s Burn Book this week and how it misrepresents the role she played in Silicon Valley. Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I interviewed Ben Wray about the failure of the European Union’s Platform Work Directive and what that means for gig workers’ rights in Europe. We also discussed Uber’s first annual profit. That same day CEO Dara Khosrowshahi unlocked his $136 million in stock options.

Finally, I also spoke to Molly Taft for a piece she wrote in The Guardian about Shell’s latest effort to use tech solutions to cover how it’s still boiling the planet with all its fossil fuel production.

Have a great week!

— Paris