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#SiliconValley

10 posts10 participants1 post today
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Flipboard Tech Desk

What is Donald Trump's plan for AI? @brianmerchant read his Action Plan and executive orders and watched his speech. Here's what he learned. "Broadly speaking, the plan is that the Trump administration will help Silicon Valley put the pedal down on AI, delivering customers, data centers and power, as long as it operates in accordance with Trump’s ideological frameworks; i.e., as long as the AI is anti-woke," Merchant writes for his Blood in the Machine newsletter. "It’s above all a blueprint for consolidated control, a vision where worker power withers, citizens become subservient to AI; to its corporate masters and federal overseers, where fossil fuels are ushered again into prominence at the height of the climate crisis, and democracy is sidelined in favor of automation technologies. It is, in summary, pretty grim!"

flip.it/tMtohZ

Blood in the Machine · Trump's AI Action Plan is a blueprint for dystopiaBy Brian Merchant
#Tech#Technology#ArtificialIntelligence
Dave Rahardja

Some stark and painful numbers from the San Jose State University’s “Pain Index” report about #siliconValley #sfba (Santa Clara and San Mateo counties):

Out of the around 893k households in Silicon Valley…

• 0.01% (NINE HOUSEHOLDS), own 15% of the wealth here.
• 10% (89k households) own 71% of the wealth.
• The poorest 50% (446k households) own merely 1% of the wealth.
• 201k households have $5000 in assets or less.
• 110k households have ZERO ASSETS.

#inequality #injustice

sfgate.com/local/article/worse

Miguel Afonso Caetano

"Economic inequality has reached a staggering milestone in Silicon Valley: just nine households hold 15% of the region’s wealth, according to new research from San Jose State University. A mere 0.1% of residents hold 71% of the tech hub’s wealth.

The findings come from the 2025 “Silicon Valley Pain Index”, a report published by SJSU’s Human Rights Institute each year since 2020. The report aims to quantify “structured inequalities” in Silicon Valley, and measures “pain” as “both personal and community distress or suffering”.

This year’s index reports that the wealth divide has widened in Silicon Valley at double the rate of the whole United States over the past decade. The nine wealthiest households in the valley control $683.2bn – a $136bn increase over the past year.

At the same time, 110,000 households reported nearly none or no assets.

The cost of living in Silicon Valley has risen as well: renters must earn $136,532 to afford an apartment – the highest in the nation.

The report ranked San Jose No 4 in “impossibly unaffordable” cities worldwide (after Hong Kong, Sydney and Vancouver). Yet, no cities in Silicon Valley have raised the minimum wage in the past three years. The report finds that 54,582 low-income households do not have access to an affordable home in San Jose and that homelessness grew 8.2% from 2023."

theguardian.com/us-news/2025/j

The Guardian · Nine households control 15% of wealth in Silicon Valley as inequality widensBy Cecilia Nowell
#USA#California#SiliconValley
The Open Buddhist University

🗣️ You will love this conversation (A free, 99-minute podcast from 2018)

Tags: #Internet #MediaStudies #Power #Future #SiliconValley #Economics
buddhistuniversity.net/content

The Open Buddhist University · You will love this conversationThe danger in utopian thinking is that it can easily turn you into a pointless vandal. The more useful thing is to think of betterment as a process rather than thinking that we just have to get rid of the bad people and then everything will be okay. If you could have enough utopianism to question the world as it is and imagine how it could be better, I think that’s a wonderful thing, but if you take it too far, you actually undermine yourself. So, I would say, a like “homeopathic utopianism” I will support.
TinJar

theguardian.com/technology/202

#SiliconValley seems to have finally wised up to the fact that trying to lure consumers through actual good products is for losers. They now have only two ideas - force-feed consumers to rip them off directly and sign ginormous contracts with governments to rip off taxpayers (aka consumers).

The Guardian · xAI announces $200m US military deal after Grok chatbot had Nazi meltdownBy Nick Robins-Early
#democracy#humanrights#development
Miguel Afonso Caetano

"Does anyone really believe that would not have happened if there were just some different executives at Google? The structural forces of capitalism, of the public market, of the demand for growth at all costs would have bowled them over too.

Indeed, we’ve already run the experiment on whether a set of companies and executives claiming they’d be better than the old guard will really deliver on that promise. That was exactly the narrative the tech industry sold to the world when it was a bunch of startups and scrappy founders fighting to displace the dominant firms they were going up against. They promised they would “do no evil.”

That narrative was valuable in selling themselves and their products to the public, with ample help from a credulous media that loves to chase money and power. Years later, we can see it was an effective marketing campaign that allowed them to evade regulation and taxation that applied to traditional industries for far longer than they should’ve gotten away with.

The tech oligarchs are just as bad as — if not worse than — the executives and monopolists that preceded them, and a new crop of founders won’t change the way that vast wealth and power tends to corrupt those who wield it.

There are certainly exceptions to these rules. Wikipedia remains a non-profit entity and Signal seems to be resisting the pressure to pursue growth at all costs. But they’re few and far between, and it’s not better founders that will change that. It requires upending the structural forces that push companies and the people who run them to cast all other considerations aside in the pursuit of power and profit."

disconnect.blog/p/better-found

Disconnect · Better founders won’t fix Silicon ValleyBy Paris Marx
#Capitalism#BigTech#SiliconValley
Paris Marx

Tech billionaires are turning the world on its head. We must challenge their power, but we also need to be clear that the individuals aren’t the sole problem.

There are structural forces at play that would pressure anyone in their position to do much the same. They must be dismantled.

disconnect.blog/p/better-found

Disconnect · Better founders won’t fix Silicon ValleyBy Paris Marx
#tech#siliconvalley#power
Continued thread
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65dBnoise

#SiliconValley capitulation to #technofascism shown Snyder that this is even possible? No. That's why his proposal is sad, as it is 𝐝𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐚𝐥.

To understand why the #US has slipped into oligarchy and fascism one needs a political theory that dares to explain the historic data in political terms, and not simply describe the present and be apologetic for being political. And political guts to call out the betrayal by the Democratic party leadership and ask for a new organization and

6/

Miguel Afonso Caetano

"In May, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University released a paper showing that even the best-performing AI agent, Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro, failed to complete real-world office tasks 70 percent of the time. Factoring in partially completed tasks — which included work like responding to colleagues, web browsing, and coding — only brought Gemini's failure rate down to 61.7 percent.

And the vast majority of its competing agents did substantially worse.

OpenAI's GPT-4o, for example, had a failure rate of 91.4 percent, while Meta's Llama-3.1-405b had a failure rate of 92.6 percent. Amazon's Nova-Pro-v1 failed a ludicrous 98.3 percent of its office tasks.

Meanwhile, a recent report by Gartner, a tech consultant firm, predicts that over 40 percent of AI agent projects initiated by businesses will be cancelled by 2027 thanks to out-of-control costs, vague business value, and unpredictable security risks.

"Most agentic AI projects right now are early stage experiments or proof of concepts that are mostly driven by hype and are often misapplied," said Anushree Verma, a senior director analyst at Gartner.

The report notes an epidemic of "agent washing," where existing products are rebranded as AI agents to cash in on the current tech hype. Examples include Apple's "Intelligence" feature on the iPhone 16, which it currently faces a class action lawsuit over, and investment firm Delphia's fake "AI financial analyst," for which it faced a $225,000 fine.

Out of thousands of AI agents said to be deployed in businesses throughout the globe, Gartner estimated that "only about 130" are real."

futurism.com/ai-agents-failing

Futurism · The Percentage of Tasks AI Agents Are Currently Failing At May Spell Trouble for the IndustryBy Joe Wilkins
#AI#GenerativeAI#AIAgents
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Aral Balkan

“The modern-day system of colonialism and sharecropping being constructed by the new East India Company that is Silicon Valley isn’t uncouth or stupid enough to put people in physical shackles. It doesn’t want to own your body, it is content with owning your simulation. And yet, as we have already seen, the more data they have about you – the higher the fidelity of your simulation – the closer they are to owning you.

…

If this doesn’t sound like democracy, it is because it is not. Surveillance Capitalism isn’t compatible with democracy.

The system we live in today can best be described as a corporatocracy; a feudalism of corporations.

Ours is a neo-colonial age of multinational monopolies.

A digital imperialism, if you will.”

– Me, The Nature of the Self in the Digital Age, 2016

ar.al/notes/the-nature-of-the-

#BigTech #SiliconValley #colonialism #technology #feudalism #imperialism #corporatocracy #capitalism j12t.social/@j12t/114798595701

ar.alAral Balkan — The nature of the self in the digital age
happyborg

@Remittancegirl

Yes, though I think they're related in that traits can be innate or acquired.

I think we're all vulnerable to that, some are lucky not to be, or lucky enough to be forced to wake up and see it.

Good to hear *your* voice.

I watched an old episode of #SiliconValley last night where Gilfoil created an AI chatbot of himself to avoid tedious interactions. Very funny, and not at all funny now we've reached this point. Plus, begins with Richard addressing Congress and nailing it.

Aral Balkan

“International Business Machines, and its president Thomas J. Watson, committed genocide by any standard. It was never about the antisemitism. It was never about the National Socialism. It was always about the money. Business was their middle name.”

– Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust

The more things change…

huffpost.com/entry/ibm-holocau

#IBM #Holocaust #BigTech #SiliconValley #Google #Microsoft #israel #genocide #apartheid #settlerColonialism #capitalism #neoliberalism #complicity infosec.exchange/@onrust/11477

HuffPost · IBM's Role in the Holocaust -- What the New Documents RevealNewly-released documents expose more explicitly the details of IBM's pivotal role in the Holocaust.
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