CPH Daily Bulletin 7/11/2025
9/15
#SiliconValley venture capitalist helps lead controversial race to start mining ocean floor
"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."
https://www.disconnect.blog/p/better-founders-wont-fix-silicon
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.
https://www.disconnect.blog/p/better-founders-wont-fix-silicon
The Register: Folks aren’t buying the PCs that US vendors stockpiled to dodge tariffs . “Total PC shipments in the US will increase by just 2 percent this year, thanks to Trump’s tariffs and little appetite from consumers for spending on ‘big-ticket’ items, despite the looming end of Windows 10 support.”
Labour is selling the nation out to the Tech Bros without even a vote on the matter.
Quislings and Appeasers to fascists and fascist enablers.
They want our Youth dangerous and isolated, they want Fascism on every phone screen and Labour isn't going to stop them
The Nazi affiliated Substack duking the stats so users think their audience is steadily increasing and stick around on the platform?
Would Tech Bros be so duplicitous?
Of course they would, we're all rubes to them!
@_elena @molly0xfff everything the Tech Bros make is a con.
https://www.europesays.com/uk/248099/ VC behind ‘996’ work culture debate defends 7-day work weeks #Business #Entrepreneurs #Entrepreneurship #Founder #SiliconValley #StartUp #StartUps #UK #UnitedKingdom #VentureCapital
https://www.europesays.com/us/48533/ VC behind ‘996’ work culture debate defends 7-day work weeks #Business #Entrepreneurs #Entrepreneurship #Founder #SiliconValley #StartUp #StartUps #UnitedStates #UnitedStates #US #VentureCapital
Silicon Valley is reeling from 'Soham-gate' - Indian engineer Soham Parekh allegedly held five full-time jobs at once without telling his employers.
If somebody murdered all the Tech Bros we'd all have such a big party on their graves.
I wish there was some way they could know and understand this sentiment on a deep level, I suspect they still think we are in love with them and their words.
No matter how much money they have, they can't make most of us think they're cool.
#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/
A paraitre...
"Apocalypse Nerds", essai sur le #technofascisme
Lire aussi : Comment les leaders de la Silicon Valley sont devenus "technosécessionnistes" https://usbeketrica.com/fr/article/comment-les-leaders-de-la-silicon-valley-sont-devenus-technosecessionnistes
FYI @danahilliot
https://www.europesays.com/de/247976/ Sieben Jobs gleichzeitig: Software-Entwickler täuscht Silicon-Valley-Firmen #100137924 #100312362 #100633310 #Business #Companies #Companies&Markets #Deutschland #Germany #Indien #KI #Markets #Märkte #Mumbai #SanFrancisco #Schwindel #SiliconValley #Software #SuhailDoshi #Unternehmen #Unternehmen&Märkte #Viertagewoche
"As I say in the book, Andreessen’s manifesto runs almost entirely on vibes, not logic. I think someone may have told him about the futurist manifesto at some point, and he just sort of liked the general vibe, which is why he paraphrases a part of it. Maybe he learned something about Marinetti and forgot it. Maybe he didn’t care.
I really believe that when you get as rich as some of these guys are, you can just do things that seem like thinking and no one is really going to correct you or tell you things you don’t want to hear. For many of these billionaires, the vibes of fascism, authoritarianism, and colonialism are attractive because they’re fundamentally about creating a fantasy of control."
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/06/13/1118198/agi-ai-superintelligence-billionaires/
#AI #AGI #SuperIntelligence #Billionaires #SiliconValley #EffectiveAltruism #Rationalism #LongTermism #Extropianism #Accelerationism #Futurism #Singularitarianism #Transhumanism
AI has ignited an investor frenzy in Silicon Valley and beyond. @Techcrunch provides this list of powerhouse startups that have attained unicorn status in 2025.
"The intoxicating buzz around artificial intelligence stocks over the last few years looks concerningly like the dot-com bubble, top investor Richard Bernstein warns.
The CIO at $15 billion Richard Bernstein Advisors wrote in a June 30 post that the AI trade is starting to look rich, and that it may be time for investors to turn their attention toward a more "boring" corner of the market: dividend stocks.
"Investors seem universally focused on 'AI' which seems eerily similar to the '.com' stocks of the Technology Bubble and the 'tronics' craze of the 1960s. Meanwhile, we see lots of attractive, admittedly boring, dividend-paying themes," Bernstein wrote.
Since ChatGPT hit the market in November 2022, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 have risen 54% and 90%, respectively. Valuations, by some measures, have surged back toward record highs, rivaling levels seen during the dot-com bubble and the 1929 peak.
While Bernstein said he's not calling a top, trades eventually go the other way, and the best time to invest in something is when it's out of favor — not when a major rally has already occurred."
"There is, in other words, a record-breaking store of federal funds dedicated to policing, detaining, and deporting people who live in this country. As has widely been pointed out, this bill makes ICE the single largest federal law enforcement agency in the country by a significant margin. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council notes that ICE now has “more money per year at its disposal over the next four years than the budgets of the FBI, DEA, ATF, US Marshals, and Bureau of Prisons combined.”
And here is one thing that you can bet with 100% certitude that those agencies will do with that money: Purchase high-tech “AI-powered” systems for surveilling, monitoring, and tracking the nation’s population, in the name of ferreting out non-citizens.
The betting part is cheating a little bit, because ICE and CBP et al already have large contracts with tech companies like Palantir, Anduril, and Cellebrite to do exactly that. But this budget bill has opened the floodgates in a way that the tech companies willing to operate in this space have only dreamed of. With tens of billions of dollars to spend by 2029, when much of the funding is to be cut off—and the Trump administration closer than ever to Silicon Valley—I think we can expect to see a good deal of it invested in AI and surveillance systems whose manufacturers promise to expedite and accelerate Trump’s deportation program.
In fact, that’s already what’s happening."
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-budget-bill-opens-the-floodgates
"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."
“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
https://ar.al/notes/the-nature-of-the-self-in-the-digital-age/
#BigTech #SiliconValley #colonialism #technology #feudalism #imperialism #corporatocracy #capitalism https://j12t.social/@j12t/114798595701343934
