owen mccormack retweeted
The big five US monopoly tech companies have spent $1.6 trillion on data centres and chips in the last 3 years.
In the past week, these same companies have lost $900 billion in market value.
ft.com/content/c695558e-11e6…
owen mccormack retweeted
Of all the propagandists out there delighting in the mass slaughter of Palestinians and Lebanese over the last months, few are more irredeemably vile than Douglas Murray
owen mccormack retweeted
What happened with that viral Red Baron Pizza worker is not a feel-good story, it's a feel-bad story. Everything about it says horrible things about where our society is headed.
Some obnoxious prick films a guy working his fingers to the bone for a "prank" hoping to get social media clicks, and the worker flips out at him because his shitty, abusive job had stretched him a hair's breadth from snapping. The video goes viral because people sympathize with a father shouting at a creepy live-streamer about how his shift was supposed to end an hour ago and he needs to get up at five in the morning to do it all again so his family doesn't get evicted from the home he's struggling to pay for, and then a fundraiser is launched which winds up giving the man half a million dollars.
Sounds like a happy ending, until you look at it. None of the other Red Baron workers are getting fundraisers to help them make ends meet; they're all toiling and suffering along with everyone else in similar socioeconomic positions, just as the man in the video would have been if he hadn't gone viral. Turns out the guy who set up the fundraiser for the Red Baron employee was himself a homeless veteran of the US military, who received his own far less successful fundraiser when this revelation came out. When you zoom out, this is just a story about how incredibly bleak life is for ordinary people in the heart of the US empire.
And yet capitalism proponents have seized on this story as an example of the system working perfectly while portraying it as a victory in their weird culture war theater. Conservative media platforms like The Daily Wire, The New York Post and Barstool Sports have framed the worker as a people's champion standing up to an entitled coastal liberal while working hard for his employer as Judeo-Christian God intended. Red Baron posted on social media that they are part of their employee's "fan club" and that he is their "employee of the month", causing conservative figures like Laura Loomer, Benny Johnson, Kevin Sorbo and Tim Burchett to swoon with approval.
They want you focusing on this one particular instance where it all worked out fine so that you don't think about the exponentially greater number of instances in which it doesn't. Billionaire corporations are exploiting workers around the world for appallingly meager wages, causing a combined amount of suffering too vast for the human mind to comprehend. People resonated with that worker pouring his heart out into that click slut's Meta glasses because so many of us have been there and know what it's like to be stretched to the breaking point just trying to feed your kids.
The capitalist class squeezes the life out of workers, and then they manipulate working people's thoughts at mass scale so they don't understand what's happening to them. They tell them their suffering is because of immigrants, or welfare recipients, or an amorphous cabal of "elites" who always conveniently belong exclusively to the opposite political party. They feed them media convincing them that the system is working fine and that if they can't hack it it's because something is wrong with them. They offer them the occasional "feel-good" viral story about someone who got lucky, like feudal serfs listening to fairy tales imagining that they too might one day marry a prince or discover that they are a member of the royal family who was lost at birth.
They pour all this energy into convincing workers to accept the status quo because they are at all times acutely aware that as soon as the workers stop accepting the status quo, it's over for them. The most under-discussed political reality in the world is that there are a whole lot more people suffering under the status quo than there are people profiting from it, and that the sufferers are fully capable of overturning the status quo by force whenever they decide to.
Our entire society is built around the need to manipulate our attention away from this political reality. All our mainstream culture. All our news media. All our politics. All our education systems. It's all designed to direct our gaze away from the reality that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and that they need us infinitely more than we need them.
They don't want us to look at this reality. They don't want us thinking about it.
But we really, really should.
looking forward to Mick Clifford's hot take on the bombing plans by three far right goons; prob something like " sure ye could only fill a mini cab with the number of active bombers they are so insigificant"
Momentum; labour is turning left, it's time for all socialists to join and defeat Reform and build
Me; but they just banned Andreas Malm from entering the UK?
Momentum; " I was talking, don't interrupt "
Not AI
Aerial footage showing the vast extent of the destruction inflicted by the israelis on Jabalia refugee camp, north Gaza | via @EyeonPalestine
owen mccormack retweeted
This all feels very much Starmers Labour Government 2.0.
An extraordinary attack on free speech from Andy Burnham.
theguardian.com/uk-news/2026…
“The design principle of forcing reality to match optimal engineering calculations had become standard practice”. In other words, if the world rejects your model of mathematical rationality, then you must remake the world so it fits inside your model"
The review essay I wrote about @beenwrekt's book is finally out. Come read about how machine learning is a technology of ignorance, which requires humility of its creators and users, but is instead defined by unbridled hubris.
owen mccormack retweeted
One way or other, AI will implode leaving a financial black hole and 'they' (companies, investors, govts) will try to get us to pay the price, like 2008. Last time we were caught out; the more AI resistance there is this time, the more we'll be ready to say "screw you, no way".
owen mccormack retweeted
Wonder how all those British commentators who worked themselves into such a lather with @ZackPolanski and the Green 'Zionism is Racism' motion, are squaring their convictions with the awkward fact that Netanyahu would actually have packed his bags by now and conceded if, well, Zionism wasn't racist & it was OK for mainstream Israeli parties to enter coalitions with moderate Palestinian ones.
As it is, we are probably in for another massively racist and genocidal government, quite possibly led by Netanyahu...
Seems electoral deadlock between the " kill them all NOW" parties and the " kill them all a bit slower" parties. Nitemare time for RTE and MS commentators if the acceptable face of genocide doesn't win.
owen mccormack retweeted
Hasan Piker: “Trans people are 1% of the population. They shouldn’t be talked about endlessly. Muslims are 1% of the population. They shouldn’t be talked about endlessly. It’s not a Guatemalan migrant that made your housing more expensive. It’s your landlord, it’s hedge funds buying out all of these homes and rising up their prices. A transgender person is not the reason your energy costs are skyrocketing. It’s the wars we’re waging, the data centers sucking up the energy needs. This is just the truth”
The most memorable anti social incident that comes to my mind in that area recently was Arnotts hired thugs choking a man to death. Maybe we should.remove Arnotts itself?
"Their chat bots are breaking people, their image generators are breaking reality and their data centers may break the world if their ambition is realised" Paris Marx on the Zuckerburgs, Musks, Bezos etc of this world; hyperscalebook.com/
owen mccormack retweeted
Sure, Anthropic may have stolen all the world's intellectual property, destroyed the education system, incited mass layoffs among the corporate class, devalued all art and destroyed social trust but somehow they also managed to lose $80 billion in the first half of 2026
owen mccormack retweeted
This is the most likely AI apocalypse scenario, imo.
"Speculative data center debt is being repackaged and sold to pension and retirement funds, university endowments, and other institutional investors in a manner eerily reminiscent of the subprime bubble."
ourfinancialsecurity.org/res…
