I do think it is a requirement of intellectuals to speak a kind of truth. Maybe not truth with a capital T but, anyway, some kind of truth, the best truth they know or can discover—to speak that truth to power.

Over the decades, the internet transformed from military project to academic tool to the corporate marketplace it is today. These forces, each in turn, shaped what the internet was and what it could do. For most of us billions online today, the only internet we have ever known has been corporate—because the internet didn’t flourish until the capitalists got hold of it.

If a company is run primarily for profit, you’ll get entirely different outcomes than if it’s run for the public good—despite what the true believers in the “invisible hand” of the market preach. Social media provides the best example, and the experience of what happened with social media is a bad omen for what might happen (and is happening!) with AI. Two words—“maximize engagement,” code for “maximize profits”—were all that was needed to send social media into the abyss of spleen-venting hostility where it now wallows.

a view of intelligence that stresses both indeterminacy and the interactive relationship between ourselves and our environments

ecological reason