mastodon 4.5.18
MayFirst on the internal US significance of the federal administration declaring Italian Autistici/Inventati a terrorist organisation
https://mayfirst.coop/posts/2026/autistici-statement/
And here's a story of A/I from then until now, with a call to defence in the next three weeks
https://sabotmedia.noblogs.org/the-server-called-paranoia-defend-autistici-inventati-before-september-25/
Lovely work from @Bonfire for jacobin.de
Really nice case write up too https://bonfirenetworks.org/case-studies/jacobin/
Nope, actually it's real intelligence. Can you tell the difference? Same global-marginal people who do contract work training LLMs? Or different ones?
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/sep/14/kenya-shadow-scholars-paid-to-write-essays-for-uk-students
There is a secret industry that generates billions of dollars a year. Its workers are bright, industrious and completely anonymous. Their job is writing essays to order for students – in the UK and elsewhere – to help them get good degrees.
These are “shadow scholars”, highly educated Kenyans who earn a living by working for essay mills. They are contracted to ghostwrite essays, PhD dissertations and other academic papers for students across the world, who pay a fee then pass off the work as their own.
The role is not unique to Kenya. There are similar writers in India, Pakistan and any other number of countries, including the UK, but Kenya has been identified as a hotspot, with an estimated 40,000 ghostwriters working in Nairobi alone.
Hey @opencollective@mastodon.opencollective.com
What this business with Persona?
I'm in four collectives that use OpenCollective for funding. We want absolutely nothing to do with Peter Thiel/Palantir/Persona.
Will you please post some clarification of relationships and intentions, soon. Thanks 🙏
General secretary of the UK's Public Services trade union, on the British war economy, new Prime Minister and all. Just need to put this out there, it's kind-of, duh, same-old same-old. And worsening.
https://www.stopwar.org.uk/article/against-the-warfare-state
Three weeks in the Welsh Borders. My Italian partner says: How strange and perverse, that medieval buildings should have been reduced to ruins! In Italy they all are perfectly preserved.
But the policing of a Roman/Saxon/Norman boundary, and the Tudor decimation of establishments of the Church of Rome... plus the C20 under-development of rural Wales ...
Thus bees, butterflies, house martins and buzzards all seem to be well, and hazels are cropping heavily.
**Decentralism**
Without (I think) a single reference to The Digital, here's more than a hundred interesting clips on Decentralism.
https://centerforneweconomics.org/envision/library/decentralism-file/
Curated by the Schumacher Center. Thus a US bias? But Kautsky & Kropotkin are there for example; also Lao-Tse and Aristotle 🤫
Open Collective have ceased using Persona. 🙏 Here's part of their rather full response https://opencollective.com/opensource/updates/on-kyc-checks-and-persona
Finally, we will halt the use of Persona for identity verification until we are able to implement the alternative arrangements described above.
Thank you to everyone in our community who shared their perspective. We hear you, and we are grateful to be a part of a community that cares so deeply about transparency and accountability. Openness is at the heart of everything we do.
The Free Knowledge Institute now has a fediverse presence @fkinstitute@social.coop Worth following?
FKI is beginning to expand scope, with a focus on resistance in European cities and regions to 'the digital coup' that has been globally enacted by stealth, the last 25 years, in internet space.
Contra-infrastructure(ing) & federating. In the commons. Of course the fediverse is an aspect of this.
@dvdjaco@mastodon.social @Wtebbens@social.coop @mike_hales@social.coop are at work here; meet.coop is our shared background. More soon.
Here's a deep dive into the politics of protocols - including the ActivityPub protocol that Mastodon instantiates
https://connectedplaces.online/the-purpose-of-protocols/
Funded by NLnet.
It says the protocol design community
> has developed exceptional sophistication about technical architecture and individual rights while remaining largely inarticulate about collective governance.
It notes
> ActivityPub delegates governance to the instance level and assumes that local accountability will produce acceptable outcomes at the network level, though nothing in the protocol ensures this. ATProto relies on competition between service providers as a sufficient governance mechanism, which presupposes that the market conditions for meaningful competition will materialize. Matrix has gone furthest toward institutional governance, placing a foundation in the role of commons custodian.
Is a heavy read but worth studying by social.coop ppl for example . What must the coop provide, that the protocol neglects?
Uneven datafication
Azadeh Akbari
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/29768640261439961
This is quite chewy but pretty interesting I think. Uneven development is an important, strategically significant frame for global struggle, and uneven datafication extends it usefully, within a politics of decoloniality and resistance to Big Tech?
> it is vital to emphasise historicity, plural temporalities, epistemic violence and coloniality in analyses of datafication.
They also note:
In addition, we will be identifying alternative providers for identity verification services, both in the US and in Europe, in order to give our European users the additional peace of mind that their identity documents do not pass into American processors.
March against the machines
https://pulltheplug.uk/
Saturday, February 28, 2026, 12:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Start at the Open AI office
York House, Fora, 221 Pentonville Rd, London, N1 9UZ
> Let People Control AI
> We call on the UK government to fund binding Citizens’ Assemblies on AI and implement their decisions.
> We all know best what role we want AI to play in our lives. By bringing together juries of ordinary people, informed by experts, to make binding decisions about AI, we can take back control from a handful of American tech companies overshadowing every aspect of our lives.
> If the UK government prefers to listen to industrial lobbyists over its own citizens, we will take matters into our own hands and set up our own Citizens’ Assembly on AI.
Who? Bears hallmarks of Extinction Rebellion?
I'd forgotten this image I made in 1974. Prefiguring AI? At the time, it was just depicting the professional-managerial class, as post-Fordism begins to unroll. Anyway, now an actual machine stands in that place - pull the plug?
From Mike Hales (1974), 'Management science and "the second industrial revolution"', *Radical Science Journal*, #1, January 1974, p26.
Launch of Dictionary of Radical Alternatives platform, March 24th
https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/events:2026_dictionary_launch
Alongside the terrible flood event in Nepal, arising from melting permafrost and thawing glaciers
https://theconversation.com/when-a-mountain-falls-how-ice-and-rock-triggered-nepals-catastrophic-flood-and-why-climate-change-is-raising-the-risks-290779
here's a report on climate migration in the second largest city of Bangladesh
https://theclimatewatch.com/climate-migrants-comprise-30-40-of-chattogram-slum-population-study/
@Wtebbens@social.coop
Mesh networks in Russia
https://theins.press/en/society/293619
Google data centre politics in Uraguay. Stealing the people's water.
https://logicmag.io/land/exposing-googles-seizure-of-water-in-drought-impacted-uruguay-a-conversation/
UK government national wildfire alert, across mobile phone networks.
A source has disclosed that Elon Musk is to name his next space vehicle Ark Fleet Ship B, in honour of the Golgafrinchans.
A key feature of its design, powered by the secret Nihilism Drive, rumoured to be similar to Gen AI, is that it is capable of going relentlessly round in circles until it disappears up its own arse and turns into nothing.
Bon voyage, Elon. The sooner the better.
