Disconnect | Paris Marx | Anti-copyright activists fought the film and music industries. Now they’re fighting artists who want to stop generative AI.

The latest tariff measures won’t be the last. The US elite is determined to strangle the Chinese economy, not only to ‘protect’ its weakening industrial sectors, but also eventually bring about ‘regime change’ in China itself. The US reckons it still has time as China and the so-called BRICS nations are still well behind the economic and financial power of the US-led imperialist bloc.

The great science fiction fear has always been of AI escaping human control and the machines taking over, as in The Matrix films. The story of Lavender suggests, on the contrary, that the real danger arises when the awesome data-crunching capacities of AI are put in the hands of human beings. Derek Sayer on Israel’s human targeting software and the banality of evil.

Peoples Dispatch | Past efforts to ban the enormously popular app in the United States have failed. Recent success could be linked to the popularity of the Palestine solidarity movement

Paris Marx | The Disconnect | The benefits of the internet are eroding. The AI boom is only accelerating their demise.

Jacobin | Apple’s battle with Epic is a reminder that today’s tech companies behave like 19th-century monopolists. Installing democratic control over these modern throwbacks to Gilded Age robber barons is the only way to curb their power.

The Development of Productive Forces in Contemporary Capitalism

By Jane McAlevey | If national union leaders acquiesce to the creation of a third category of worker in exchange for sectoral bargaining, collective begging will replace collective bargaining.

As SpaceX and Blue Origin make headway with low-earth orbit satellites, old concerns about Canadian data privacy re-emerge

Analysis by transport group says battery electric vehicles are superior to their petrol and diesel counterparts

Naomi Klein | Tech giants like Google and Facebook appear to be aiding and abetting a vicious government campaign against Indian climate activists.

On Thursday, Australians woke to find Facebook had banned all news on the platform. Liberal PM Scott Morrison has refused to back down over the laws that triggered the move. Beneath the rhetoric, Morrison’s stand is about serving the interests of News Corp, not saving democracy.

Upon its launch ten years ago, Germany's Industry 4.0 program promised a fourth industrial revolution changing the way we work. Yet for all the talk of novelty, it followed age-old capitalist imperatives: using labor-saving technology not to lessen our workload but subject us to even tighter workplace discipline.

A handful of Big Tech corporations now wield more power than most national governments. It’s time to subject them to democratic control – before their power erodes democracy.

Spearheaded by the advancement of AI and automation, a new social conflict is looming large—one between the creative class and the current capitalist elites. Akin to the clash between the emerging bourgeoisie and aristocracy in seventeenth/eighteenth-century Europe, this conflict can stoke up social tensions and radically transform urban space. What will the changing production and consumption economies herald for the disciplines of urban planning, architecture, and design?

Exclusive-access contracts are leaving incarcerated persons and their families no choice but to pay exorbitant private company fees to access books and communicate with one another.

CellHawk helps law enforcement visualize large quantities of information collected by cellular towers and providers.

Paris Marx | Billionaires like Elon Musk want to project the same capitalist logic that is destroying Earth into outer space – they won’t succeed, but their ego trips might prevent us from using technology to improve human life.

Antitrust lawsuits against companies like Facebook stand little chance of effectively breaking them up. Bringing Big Tech into public ownership is the only way to fight monopolization under surveillance capitalism.

We should be concerned about the power big tech firms have in our lives. But antitrust lawsuits against tech monopolies are just a Band-Aid for the real problem: the need to free the social networks we use from private profit and the drive to sell our data.