Ben Landau-Taylor
@benlandautaylor
Investigating power, society, and industry with @0xthestudents
23 Following 16.6K Followers
Attention San Francisco: I will be giving a talk explaining why there has been massive popular demand for theories about how technology is about to destroy the world, from climate change to AI apocalypse, next Thursday evening for @palladiummag.
Tickets are limited. Get yours here:
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I'm hearing "If the AI guys invested in local communities like the Robber Barons building libraries, then people wouldn't oppose the data centers." But, importantly, that didn't work. People still call them "Robber Barons". Carnegie dealt with armed strikers seizing steel mills in deadly pitched battles, not just mean tweets and guys with signs at city meetings. This stuff goes deeper than shelling out for a new hospital.
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I immediately block everyone I see doing moves like this in anybody's replies, and it's made this website nicer. There are fewer unpleasant people on here than you might think. If you're less famous than Paul Graham then you can clear away a big fraction of them.
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You can grab an academic journal in almost any field, read two random articles from 1976 and two random articles from 2026, and immediately see how much worse it's become.
Outsider: I have investigated this academic field and found that it is mostly fake.
Insider: This essay adds nothing to the discourse. All of these so-called "problems" are discussed in Hamilton and Schwartz’s "Our Entire Field Is Mostly Fake" (2009). You absolute buffoon.
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