If coders are the unacknowledged legislators of our time, then OpenAI’s engineers are now rewriting the Constitution. Who watches the watchmen? — As the generative pre-trained transformer language model ChatGPT-3 takes the internet by storm, with 100 million monthly active users in January just two months after its launch, questions are rapidly rising about the ways the tool may transform politics, along with complaints about whether it may be biased, either against…

The real story isn’t Chinese balloons or a UFO cover-up; it’s why we’re wasting taxpayer billions on colonizing space — Was it just a week ago that the shootdown of a couple of balloons floating over America sent the country into a tizzy over China and fed a fresh wave of speculation about UFOs? Before the moment drops down the memory hole, we should consider how weird and revealing it…

He was an unreconstructed 1960s radical who kept his political commitments til he died — I am a very late member of the Baby Boom generation, born in 1962. My first musical tastes involved a membership in the Partridge Family fan club that I shared with my younger sister. But I can date precisely when I woke up to the real music of my youth…

You can’t understand this without looking at the larger project of people involved in the Meme Wars of the last decade — It’s been quite a few weeks over at Twitter, where Elon Musk has been busy replatforming big chunks of the alt-right and deplatforming reputable journalists and leftwing accounts, along with handing selective access to Twitter’s internal data to a claque of iconoclastic anti-woke writers. In part one of this post…

The latest in an ongoing battle to control the narrative about democracy in America — If you are a “very online person” or even just a somewhat online person, you’ve probably heard something about “The Twitter Files” in the last ten days or so. I tried to stay away, I really did. But while there’s very little to the stories tweet-threads that have been published…

There’s been a surge in youth voting since 2018, and if it continues it’s going to upend next week’s US election — According to a new national poll from the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School, 40% of 18–29 year olds say they are definitely going to vote in the mid-terms. That is on track to match or maybe even surpass the record level of turnout from young people in 2018. …

Chasing crazy dreams, our would-be Big Tech Emperors are hastening the destruction of any kind of healthy democracy — Five years ago, when Facebook hit two billion global users, no one imagined that we would start referring to the company in the past tense as something that used to matter, with a slumping valuation now lower than Home Depot, the big box store. Nor did anyone think that Twitter…

Support for Trumpism, like support for Nazism, is built on a edifice of self-deception, as former GOP campaign guru Tim Miller’s new book makes clear — If you’ve ever wondered how so many professional Republicans, people who work in politics on a daily basis, have justified their support for Donald Trump and the larger miasma of manipulation, prejudice, lying, cruelty and incompetence that is Trumpism, make time for Tim Miller’s book Why We Did It.

Door-knocking is the best way to earn votes, but for all their vaunted tech savvy, Democrats’ core tools and voter data are a mess — Sunday I spent the afternoon walking the hills of ex-urban Woodbury, NY, about an hour north of New York City, knocking on doors with about 30 other volunteers from my local Indivisible group, NYCD16-Indivisible, along with a smattering of other grassroots activists from Westchester county. …