Brian Merchant @bcmerchant Twitter profile

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Brian Merchant

3 months

2023 was the year AI exploded into the mainstream. It was also the year workers, artists and activists stood up against bosses and tech giants using it degrade their jobs and communities. I wrote about the rising movement of new Luddites for @TheAtlantic :

The New Luddites Aren’t Backing Down

Activists are organizing to combat generative AI and other technologies—and reclaiming a misunderstood label in the process.

www.theatlantic.com

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Last Seen Profiles

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

8 months

Fahrenheit 451 was never my favorite Bradbury/dystopian fiction because it felt a little too blunt, too far-fetched in its metaphor— the state deploying high-tech 'firemen' to burn books to maintain its censorship regime? A bit on the nose. Currently reevaluating that assessment

Jonathan Riley

@realJonRiley

8 months

Missouri Republicans at a literal book burning. They think flamethrowers should be legal but history books should be destroyed.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

2 years

At least try. Call it the No More Dead Children Act. Ban every automatic and semiautomatic weapon from consumer sale. Generous buybacks for banned guns and ammo. Extensive background checks, minimum age to purchase 21 for hunting rifles. At least try

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

2 years

Every so often you get numb to living in generally dystopian times, and then a new wave of the global pandemic hits, a school shooter kills his classmates with a gun his dad bought on Black Friday, and a theocratic court moves to throw out reproductive rights all on the same day

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

3 years

extremely cool to be so relieved that the man filmed in HD video murdering someone was found guilty of murder

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

4 years

Uber didn't want its white collar employees to have to wash their hands in the same sink as its gig worker drivers. This really tells you everything you need to know about Uber. Every single thing.

Uber Office Had Separate Bathrooms for Drivers and ‘Employees’

"This was a mistake and we regret it," Uber said.

www.vice.com

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

3 years

the font change is whatever, but changing the Follow button from filled in if you follow to filled in if you don't, the precise opposite of the design expectation you taught users for years and years, is the kind of pointlessly confusing nonsense we've come to expect here. bravo

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

4 years

The symbolism of a billionaire-owned, for-profit space company launching astronauts high above the heads of thousands of people protesting state brutality and oppression amid a global pandemic and economic collapse should not be lost on anyone

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

8 months

this is the funniest thing anyone could ever say about the left at literally any point in history

TheBlaze

@theblaze

8 months

Tucker: "The Left, to their great credit, are masters of organizing. They are willing to put aside their differences for the sake of achieving a common goal. They don't argue with each other in public. They know there's strength in numbers. Organizing is the path to power."

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

5 years

So far in Davos -a room full of billionaires laughed tauntingly at @AOC ’s 70% marginal tax prop. -Bill Gates scoffed at notion the system was broken, hinted critics were communists -Tony Blair laughed at idea his cohort was responsible for any global malady Uh, keep it up guys

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

10 months

a story in 4 parts

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

1 year

Nice. When we were unionizing at Vice because some full-time staffers in NYC were making $25k a year, someone dropped the news that Shane Smith had bought the Entourage mansion in our organizing thread on a key week of the drive. If I recall, there was only one ‘no’ vote.

VICE

@VICE

1 year

That blanket NDA you signed years ago to get severance? It's void now, according to the National Labor Relations Board.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

6 months

Every one of her points is completely valid. No one should have to surrender their entire waking life to work and in fact Gen Z's disgust with mandatory, in-office 40 hour workweeks is a tremendous opportunity to instigate change.

🌈 Tess T. Eccles-Brown, PhD

@TTEcclesBrown

6 months

Gen Z girl finds out what a real job is like 🔊

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

10 days

This whips

Karla Ortiz

@kortizart

10 days

Wanted to share this amazing essay from artist Dave Palumbo. Who btw is an incredible artist so he definitely knows what he’s talking about! So well written, and I agree so much with this. Worth a read:

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

1 year

From the Wall Street Journal's explanation of why Silicon Valley Bank failed:

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

6 months

I hope we all fully absorb the fact that the man who's spent all year trying to convince the world that the AI that his company is building is so powerful that it may destroy humanity—the man more responsible than any for AI mania—has been sacked by his own board for being a liar

Eva

@evacide

6 months

OpenAI has just booted Sam Altman as CEO and removed him from the Board of Directors and they are not being shy about their reasons.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

2 years

The outrage among certain web3 folks over the “doxxing” of the bored ape guy is very telling, since it is all in service of the idea that you should be able to run a multibillion dollar company [that has already been plagued by scams and theft] entirely anonymously

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

4 years

Every police dept in the US has facial recognition-equipped drones, semi-autonomous tanks and enough firepower to win a small war and they keep tweeting out shit like ‘the protestors had caches of attack pebbles at hidden locations’

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

1 year

So last night, a friend called me. He was weeping. He'd just lost his job at a tech startup. The culprit? The fed turned off the free cash spigot. This is a wakeup call to crypto, NFT, and web3 guys: It's time to start doing long Twitter threads relentlessly promoting AI.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

11 months

For $3500 I will personally come to your house and move your couch closer to the TV

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

11 months

how this is going to go, over and over and over

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

3 months

The video on the left was one of ~20 shared by OpenAI in its announcement of Sora, its text-to-video generator. It claims the video was, as this viral tweet notes, "generated by Sora." The video on the left is from Shutterstock, with whom OpenAI has a partnership.

Eduardo Borges

@duborges

3 months

This video was generated by Sora. That's the new model by OpenAI. The most advanced text-to-video tool created so far. I'll share the videos here. Absolutely insane. Prompt: This close-up shot of a Victoria crowned pigeon showcases its striking blue plumage and red chest. Its…

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

4 years

Amazing.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

1 year

To clarify—this is an opinion piece by Andy Kessler, the WSJ's 'Inside View' column on tech and markets, not the paper's editorial board, as @moorehn pointed out. But still! The WSJ published what is basically an argument in favor of racial purity at a bank's board of directors!

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

4 years

I mean, it's been obvious forever, but this puts so fine a point on it that it's impossible to see it in any other light: This is a company predicated on exploiting one class to benefit another. Period.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

3 months

media layoffs in 2024 LA Times (20% of staff) TIME (15% of staff) Pitchfork (all of it, pretty much) Sports Illustrated (all of it) National Geographic Business Insider (8%) NBC News it's still January

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

9 months

This is actually a good example of what AI systems like ChatGPT excel at—giving managers and administrators the ability to automate top-down, controversial and harmful decision-making while shielding themselves from accountability. A sort of authoritarianism accelerator

Popular Science

@PopSci

9 months

Administrators asked ChatGPT the specific language of Iowa’s new law, “Does [book] contain a description or depiction of a sex act?” If ChatGPT said yes, the book was removed from the library.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

25 days

Once again, the worry is not that AI will write better or more interestingly than you, Stephen King, it's that it will be used to degrade the economic conditions for writers in general — and those less successful than you won't be able to pay rent.

Column: What Stephen King — and nearly everyone else — gets wrong about AI and the Luddites

Is it foolish to believe that authors should resist having their works used to train AI without getting paid for it? Stephen King thinks so, but he misunderstands some important history.

www.latimes.com

Stephen King

@StephenKing

27 days

I’m not worried about AI, because I got my mojo working.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

2 years

Google, 1998: Our mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible" Google, 2004: "Don't be evil...a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains" Google, 2021: "Achieving the mission of the DoD, together"

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

4 years

It's hard to tell because so much of the news is focused on the pandemic + the healthcare crisis, but massive worker strikes are incoming, have hit, or are in progress at -Instacart -Amazon warehouses -Whole Foods -PA sanitation dept. -Maine shipyards -Bus drivers + more

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

4 years

This is such a perfect example of modern innovation in action — wireless charging, which saves us like 0.001 seconds every time we plug in our phones, uses up to *50% more energy*. Nearly imperceptible convenience, at massive social cost

Wireless Charging Is a Disaster Waiting to Happen

We crunched the numbers on just how inefficient wireless charging is — and the results are pretty shocking

debugger.medium.com

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

7 months

Apple cancelled Jon Stewart's show, which was looking into a segment on AI and China. Very admirable Stewart walked rather than "align" with Apple's views and demand for control—but it's yet another reflection of big tech's power to control what we see.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

6 months

Few truisms are more central to 21st century Silicon Valley than "Our technology will be worth a lot less if we have to compensate people fairly for their labor"

neil turkewitz

@neilturkewitz

6 months

“Andreessen Horowitz is warning that billions of dollars in AI investments could be worth a lot less if companies developing the technology are forced to pay for the copyrighted data that makes it work.” This is NOT from the @TheOnion

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

1 year

Can't help but feel partly responsible. Years ago, I wrote a story about Amazon using more fossil fuels than other big tech cos; we published it on Motherboard. Turned out Vice was about to close a multimillion $ deal w Amazon the same day and they walked

Vice Is Said to Be Headed for Bankruptcy

The company, which was once valued at $5.7 billion, has been struggling to find a buyer this year.

www.nytimes.com

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

3 years

Uber and Lyft's pitch was always that they'd reduce congestion, emissions, car ownership and the total costs that cars impose on society. A new paper shows that the complete opposite has happened—taking an Uber costs society ~60% more than your own car.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

5 years

Both @AOC & @AnandWrites deserve immense credit for forcing the issue here & exposing the quality of response from elites. AOC is making bold, risky policy moves with moral clarity & Anand's writing/crusade to expose the WEF set is legitimately gutsy

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

www.amazon.com

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

7 years

As Irma heads for Florida, remember that Gov. Scott's climate change denial has explicitly and seriously hindered his state's preparedness.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

1 year

Writers and artists standing up to AI are the modern-day Luddites—and for all our sakes, we’d better hope they win. I've been researching and writing about the Luddites for oh 3-4 years, and it's a good time to discuss the parallels and the stakes, which get higher every day.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

4 years

This is what Uber thinks of the lower class workers who are generating the profits for the salaried employees: They're too disgusting to share a bathroom with

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

1 year

@patbits I literally said 'what the fuck' aloud to no one as I read this

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

26 days

This entire framing is a bait & switch—few artists feel threatened by generative AI due to its ability to create quality work. They're threatened because too many clients don't care about the quality of the output, and AI will erode rates for creative work across the board.

Nick Davidov

@Nick_Davidov

28 days

The best developers do not feel threatened by Devin Great filmmakers don’t feel threatened by Sora The best artists do not feel threatened by Midjourney The best musicians don’t feel threatened by Suno The best voice actors do not feel threatened by ElevenLabs I actually talked…

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

2 years

No half assed compromises on a bill that won’t pass anyway—remember no federal gun control legislation has passed since before sandy hook—make it a moral issue to vote against. Make noise. This would be popular, too.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

4 years

I might actually lose it. I sat w my son while he did his 1st day of virtual school today while ash rained down outside the window. And Democrats can’t even put ‘we should end fossil fuel *subsidies*’ into its platform because it’s afraid of upsetting industry interests

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

8 months

Snark if you want but this is a big deal. It's been generations since a sitting president has joined a picket line -- has never happened in my lifetime -- and it doesn't happen without workers standing up across the country

President Biden

@POTUS

8 months

Tuesday, I’ll go to Michigan to join the picket line and stand in solidarity with the men and women of UAW as they fight for a fair share of the value they helped create. It’s time for a win-win agreement that keeps American auto manufacturing thriving with well-paid UAW jobs.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

3 years

Simply incredible—all 5 of the "third party" privacy and consumer groups Facebook said it consulted before rolling out its Ray Ban AR camera glasses to ensure privacy was "baked in" from the start are *funded by Facebook*. Every single one of them.

Ryan Mac 🙃

@RMac18

3 years

I've now confirmed all five groups were funded by Facebook. The LGBT Technology Partnership said in an email to me today: "FB provides corporate support currently and has provided corporate support in the past. In addition, FB sponsors our PowerOn Awards."

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

2 months

So when *the CTO* of OpenAI is asked if Sora was trained on YouTube videos, she says “actually I’m not sure” and refuses to discuss all further questions about the training data. Either a rather stunning level of ignorance of her own product, or a lie—pretty damning either way!

Tsarathustra

@tsarnick

2 months

OpenAI CTO Mira Murati says Sora was trained on publicly available and licensed data

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

3 years

Moviepass ruled because it was one of the few batshit tech ideas that delivered incredible and unsustainable benefits to users, failed spectacularly, and actually unloaded all of its losses onto investors, as it should be

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

2 months

Yes, and the real tell is that there many other policy tools available: If the fear is TikTok is sending user data to the CCP, then pass data transparency rules and enforce a no-tracking option on social apps. But *US* tech giants would throw a fit, so that's off the table.

Jason Koebler

@jason_koebler

2 months

Banning TikTok means the US government unconstitutionally infringing upon the speech of more than a hundred million Americans and countless businesses

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

2 months

The nightmare begins — Google is incentivizing the production of AI-generated slop. If you are a news outlet who has accepted this meager deal, and especially if you are publishing AI-generated articles without disclaimers, you should be deeply ashamed.

Alex Kantrowitz

@Kantrowitz

2 months

This is sad. Is this the web Google wants?

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

3 months

I know I'm a curmudgeon, but am I really the only one who's not that impressed by these videos, given what we know about how the models work? I.e., there is probably a clip/set of pics in the dataset that looked almost exactly like this, and it's just regurgitating some frames?

Tom Warren

@tomwarren

3 months

this could be the "holy shit" moment of AI. OpenAI has just announced Sora, its text-to-video AI model. This video isn't real, it's based on a prompt of "a cat waking up its sleeping owner demanding breakfast..." 🤯

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

1 year

It will be rather telling if elite financiers and investors can swiftly cobble together $44 billion to wildly overpay for a beleaguered social media network at the behest of Elon Musk, but cannot find a way to stabilize a bank integral to the entire Silicon Valley economy

Dan Primack

@danprimack

1 year

Why Silicon Valley is kinda screwed if no one buys SVB this weekend, and deposits remain frozen (or mostly frozen): 1/ Many companies need to meet payroll next Wednesday. Plus other expenses. 2/ Lines of credit tied up too. 3/ Many VC funds keep $$ in SVB, or SVB is an LP.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

3 years

Amazon, one of the world’s most powerful companies and the epitome of modern capitalist exploitation, is publicly melting down because workers in one of its hundreds of warehouses are on the verge of uniting to demand basic rights and dignity. Imagine if we all did that

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

8 months

the left, famously good at avoiding infighting

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

1 year

He’s done it, he’s perfected the website. Proof: the top 4 tweets in his replies right now

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

4 years

So to recap, gig app delivery workers currently not guaranteed a minimum wage or benefits are required to make deliveries with bags telling customers to vote for the proposition that would ensure they are never guaranteed a minimum wage and benefits

Sam Harnett

@SamWHarnett

4 years

DoorDash has sent several million pro-prop 22 food delivery bags to restaurants. DoorDash gig workers then have to deliver food to customers in bags with prop-22 ads on the side.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

1 year

This is also a good a wake up call to everyone who enjoys living in a world where written materials are comprehensible, accountants do due diligence, and programs are built with good code—because mgmt is going to *try* to replace it all of with subpar, unreliable ChatGPT output

GREG ISENBERG

@gregisenberg

1 year

So... late last night, a friend called me in tears She just lost her copywriting job at a 1000+ person company The culprit? ChatGPT. This is a wakeup call to lawyers, accountants, consultants etc (read this to stay ahead):

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

3 months

The six million dollar question is what *this* was trained on. If copyright battles are promising to be fiery right now, wait till we find out that this was trained on Hollywood film footage

OpenAI

@OpenAI

3 months

Introducing Sora, our text-to-video model. Sora can create videos of up to 60 seconds featuring highly detailed scenes, complex camera motion, and multiple characters with vibrant emotions. Prompt: “Beautiful, snowy…

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

2 months

So the board of the most heralded, future-forward tech company in the world now includes: -The lawyer who defended Oliver North in the Iran-Contra affair -The CEO of a gig app co. with a litany of labor complaints and violations -A board member of Pfizer -Larry Summers

Sam Altman

@sama

2 months

i'm very happy to welcome our new board members: fidji simo, sue desmond-hellmann, and nicole seligman, and to continue to work with bret, larry, and adam. i'm thankful to everyone on our team for being resilient (a great openai skill!) and staying focused during a challenging…

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

3 years

know what makes me want to spend more time on this website? accidentally unfollowing people I was sure I had already followed and then following them again, making them think I had only just now followed them love it

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

2 months

Disappointed in everyone I know for not immediately sending me this video of the crowd booing this generative AI promo video at SXSW insisting "you know your business is gonna be disruptive" and "you need to stop resisting" because it is giving me life right now

Marcelo Pico

@MarceloJPico

2 months

You love to hear it

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

4 years

The most crushing blows of last night, whether Biden pulls it out or not: 1) Prop 22 won. A gig underclass is cemented in California, and will soon be scaled up 2) Democrats abject failure. Doing this badly in these conditions means your party and program need a total overhaul

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

1 year

ha I guess severance didn’t have anything to do with it in my case, though they did have a big NDA back in the day — never a bad time to tell that story!

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

4 years

To put things in perspective: After decades of layoffs, there were 88K newsroom jobs by the end of 2019, counting digital. According to the NYT, there have been ~36k lost jobs since then. There is now approximately one mid-sized town worth of journalists covering the entire US.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

5 years

Honestly, researching this story flat out shocked me. The lengths that Google, Microsoft, Amazon & other tech companies are going to help the oil industry accelerate the climate crisis—and the profits they're reaping in the process—is astonishing.

How Google, Microsoft, and Big Tech Are Automating the Climate Crisis

In a deal that made few ripples outside the energy industry, two very large but relatively obscure companies, Rockwell Automation and Schlumberger Limited, announced a joint venture called Sensia....

gizmodo.com

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

4 years

As shops, restaurants + bars close—some for good—Amazon creates 100k precarious jobs. And it decrees a limit to 'essential' items, crushing countless small businesses Coronavirus is speeding a disastrous trend: the total Amazonification of the economy

Coronavirus Is Speeding Up the Amazonification of the Planet

As restaurants, bars, and local shops close down, platform-based monoliths are vacuuming up the customers and the jobs

onezero.medium.com

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

2 months

I can't with the TikTok panic mongering—what do you think Instagram and Facebook is showing American kids? Acting like TikTok is a Chinese conspiracy to destroy our youth when it is merely outcompeting the US apps that have been doing this stuff for years is darkly comical

Brendan Carr

@BrendanCarrFCC

2 months

In America, TikTok pushes videos to kids that promote self-harm, eating disorders, and suicide. In China, the version of TikTok available there, the app shows young kids science experiments, museum exhibits, and other educational material.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

11 months

Starting to feel more confident that we're going to see a crypto/web3-style collapse with generative AI services, only it will be more disastrous because instead of a niche core of diehard investors, it will impact all of the firms whose managers embraced it across the economy

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

1 year

Only a true Business Genius could find a way to create what is quite literally a mark of shame that costs $8 a month

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

4 years

Uber and Lyft must *immediately* reclassify their drivers as employees and not independent contractors — and provide benefits accordingly, a California judge has ruled. If this stands, it may be the most significant legal ruling in gig economy history .

Uber and Lyft must classify drivers as employees, judge rules, in blow to gig economy

Preliminary injunction in California follows state’s lawsuit against companies over new labor law

www.theguardian.com

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

3 years

If there is any remaining doubt that Amazon's ambition is to be an old school monopoly run by a modern robber baron whose success depends on crushing labor, just consider this: They hire the literal Pinkertons to suppress workers. The PINKERTONS.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

3 years

What a deeply weird day. The world's richest man rode a remarkably phallic rocket into almost-space, thanked his underpaid workers for enabling his self-serving thrill ride, landed, then gave $100 million to an already wealthy cable pundit to promote courage and civility

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

1 year

This is just such a disaster on every count, it’s so embarrassing for 60 minutes to have bought this hook line and sinker without ever having consulted a credible AI scholar or tech journalist

60 Minutes

@60Minutes

1 year

One AI program spoke in a foreign language it was never trained to know. This mysterious behavior, called emergent properties, has been happening – where AI unexpectedly teaches itself a new skill.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

3 months

Very impressed with the Vision Pro's uncanny ability to lower the bar for what constitutes "amazing"

GregsGadgets

@GregoryMcFadden

3 months

Using map direction with Vision Pro is actually amazing 🤯

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

2 months

Just incredible. The CEO of VICE is giving up on one of the most popular global media brands, firing its journalists and shutting down in order to "transition to a studio model" which means... what? Posting brand stuff to Instagram?

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

5 years

Jeff Bezos: I want to build glorious space colonies to save humanity when we "run out of energy" Also Jeff Bezos: I will not even bother to listen to my own employees who want me to do the minimum amount to preserve life on earth

Jeff Bezos Wouldn’t Even Come On Stage to Listen to His Employees Who Want Amazon to Address...

At Amazon’s shareholder meeting today, employees and investors voted on a wide-ranging spate of proposals, from banning the practice of selling facial recognition technology to adopting a serious...

gizmodo.com

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

1 year

An AI should be quite good at things like analyzing market demand for projects, managing budgets and operation costs, and optimizing finances—funny how no one ever suggests using AI to replace studio executives

sucks

@powerbottomdad1

1 year

oh no. a writers strike. whatever shall we do. if only there was some kind of machine that could endlessly pump out textual content so we didn't have to rely on these flaky humans,,,

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

4 years

Jeff Bezos is worth ~$116 billion. This is approximately 0.00059% of his fortune. If you had $50,000, this would be the equivalent of donating less than $30. And winning headlines for it

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

1 month

Because everyone has come to understand that tech like this is not “magical” but a nonconsenual harvesting of artists’ works that has been synthesized into bland automated aural mush that will be used to erode real artists’ pay. Hope this helps

tobi lutke

@tobi

1 month

is the craziest, most magical thing on the internet right now. How is not everyone talking about this

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

5 years

I challenge anyone to find a story that better encapsulates 2019 so far than two fully-employed government workers surviving on all-Soylent diets so they can afford to feed their infant because the president demands a multibillion dollar monument to xenophobia in the desert

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

2 months

One of the most insidious impacts of the gig app co's is they used war chests of venture capital to lower the cost of sending delivery workers to everyone's door on demand for so long that now many feel entitled to it—even if it means the worker doesn't make minimum wage

Sean Morrow

@snmrrw

2 months

this woman's argument against a minimum wage for gig workers is that she had to pay too much to get a single cup of coffee delivered to her doorstep.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

4 years

Uber CEO on Monday: "Gig workers deserve better." Uber CEO on Wednesday: "If I must give gig workers even modest and standard employee benefits I will freeze out every single one I employ in California during a time of unprecedented desperation"

Uber CEO Threatens Future Shutdown in California Over Labor Law

Dara Khosrowshahi, chief executive officer of Uber Technologies Inc., threatened to temporarily shut down service in California if it loses a drawn-out fight over a state law seeking to reclassify...

www.bloomberg.com

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

10 months

@dmunjal yes but you think that you'd make the switch with ample time in advance *before* you make your big splashy pitch and announcement lol -- he's just making it redirect here, it's not like it's some crazy reveal

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

1 year

Annnnnnd there it is — it's subtle, but unmistakable. In the same memo in which he dispatches the News team, Buzzfeed's boss heralds the company's future as being "creators..." and "AI." Even if he's not replacing jobs outright, the calculus of mentioning it here is clear.

Ben Mullin

@BenMullin

1 year

BREAKING: BuzzFeed news is shutting down. @peretti ’s memo:

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

4 years

Nobody is going to want to hear this, but the gray area is gone. It is 100% unethical to shop on Amazon. They are failing to protect workers, firing organizers + dissenting voices + crushing 3rd party sellers who need their platform. Cancel Prime, no more Whole Foods. It's done

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

10 months

A big reason Hollywood is coming apart right now is that executives fell for Silicon Valley’s magical thinking — and just like so many tech co’s that fail to deliver on promises of endless growth, they’re taking it out on workers

Column: Hollywood is on strike because CEOs fell for Silicon Valley's magical thinking

Inspired by the success of Netflix, Hollywood studios pursued Silicon Valley-style hypergrowth with tactics borrowed from the likes of Uber and Lyft.

www.latimes.com

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

5 months

Wouldn't be surprised if we woke up tomorrow and tried to log on to find nothing but a blank page here, Twitter having vanished into the ether, its final purpose fulfilled

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

2 years

The future is clearly a decentralized autonomous internet where nobody ever knows who exactly is profiting enormously off of it

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

1 year

to the great credit of derek mead, who was EIC of motherboard at the time, and rocco castoro who was VICE's, they never flinched and supported the story regardless. good times

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

7 months

It’s pub day for Blood in the Machine, the book I’ve been working on for over five years. It tells the story of a chapter in history too often papered over—how workers rose up at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution when entrepreneurs used machines to take or degrade their jobs.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

3 months

What the hell is this

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

27 days

This is fascinating, and don't think I've seen it before—a tech co advertising its services as "100% LLM-Free" as a selling point. Will have to look closer at the company, but another sign of the changing tide with regard to generative AI, perhaps...

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

4 years

To everyone who is saying that classifying drivers as employers will kill Uber/Lyft's business model.... good? Any model that fundamentally relies on underpaying and exploiting workers to function needs an overhaul!

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

1 year

@Any_And_Every my first offer, for a senior position, was $30k

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

3 months

@rainisto I'm just saying let's pump the brakes on the hype train a bit here — they have automated video editing in a somewhat interesting way but it's not a radical departure from the vast amount of source material that's been hoovered up to make it possible

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

3 months

If you simply cannot build your tools—which you intend to profit directly off of, at great scale—without compensating or getting permission from those whose work is integral to creating those tools, you should not be building them at all

neil turkewitz

@neilturkewitz

3 months

Anthropic, like OpenAI before it, makes the unintentional—but compelling—case for banning general purpose AI models: “If licenses were required to train LLMs on copyrighted content, today’s general-purpose AI tools simply could not exist.”

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

4 years

a) yes I should not have used the word ‘profit’ lol as Uber has never ever been anywhere close to profitable—but the reason they have any revenue at all is thanks to drivers b) I feel like there should be a hashtag here, suggestions welcome

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

2 months

Big tech really has won. Google monopolized search & socials promised reams of traffic. So digital media orgs began catering to their whims; tailoring stories to SEO, pivoting to video—and letting big tech horde the ad revenue. Now we're just handing the stories directly to them

Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

2 months

Just incredible. The CEO of VICE is giving up on one of the most popular global media brands, firing its journalists and shutting down in order to "transition to a studio model" which means... what? Posting brand stuff to Instagram?

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

1 year

@doctorow @bigblackjacobin @parismarx @jathansadowski @veenadubal @dellsystem @bentarnoff @gavinmuellerphd @libshipwreck @mollycrabapple In his latest (excellent) piece for the New Yorker, the GOAT Ted Chiang defended the Luddites, too.

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

4 years

My feed is alternating between posts between news of an assassination that could start world war 3 and pics of Dr. Phil's wacky house and I think I'm starting to dissociate

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

3 years

Jeff Bezos just announced that he's going to try to build the first commercial space station and his vision is literally for a suborbital "mixed used business park" and I'm going to lose my mind

Jeff Bezos Reveals Plans to Build a Space Station Called 'Orbital Reef'

The station is envisioned as a "mixed-use business park"... but in space.

www.vice.com

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Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant

21 days

The coming deluge of unimaginative AI pop culture mashups and shorts—these guys, and the tools themselves, seem only really able to imagine stuff like ‘what if Star Wars character but rap plus Scarface’—is going to overexpose already overexposed IP to such an excruciating degree

Eckler by Design ✦

@daniel_eckler

24 days

C3PO x Childish Gambino 🤖 👑 100% AI (Official Music Video) @openAI + @runwayml + @suno_ai_ + @resembleai + @fable_motion + @midjourney + @topazlabs

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