"A Special Prosecutor must be appointed. This cannot be allowed to happen again in the United States of America! Let the work begin!"

Crockett said that here power "comes from the Constitution. And it is clear that I have power. And somehow, because we got a thug sitting in the White House, he has decided to ignore my power." 

It's long past due for a broader look into what happened in 2020 and the lie of 'the most secure [election] in American history.'

Anxiety Attack Tyler Durden Fri, 06/20/2025 - 16:20

Last week, the Trump White House hosted PragerU CEO Marissa Streit to launch a patriotic exhibit called “The Founders Museum,” a joint effort involving the White House, PragerU, and the Department of Education.

That seems a rather odd thing for an “antigovernment extremist group” to do, yet that’s exactly the label the Southern Poverty Law Center applies to PragerU. According to the SPLC, this nonprofit, best known for its five-minute educational videos, secretly works to “protect white supremacy” and belongs on a “hate map” with chapters of America’s most notorious hate group, the Ku Klux Klan.

The SPLC’s ire against PragerU comes as no surprise. After all, the SPLC has a long track record of putting mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits on its “hate map,” and PragerU’s videos spread far and wide, encouraging Americans to defend family values, free markets, systems based on merit rather than identity—in short, the virtues of America.

This patriotism explains why PragerU is celebrating America’s 250th anniversary at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, so why does the SPLC hate it so much?

SPLC’s Beef With PragerU

As I wrote in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC gained its reputation by suing Klan groups into bankruptcy. Now, it uses a “hate map” to suggest that mainstream conservative nonprofits are somehow akin to the KKK. This map inspired a terrorist attack in 2012.

We're going through something similar to the Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion afterward, I tell @prageru's @marissastreit.

The Left's NGOs are rebranding the woke revolution, and the SPLC is trying to prevent anyone from stopping it.https://t.co/u7MRZJohrv https://t.co/hPIUANVxnl pic.twitter.com/zarjPlm8B2

— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) June 17, 2025

Back in 2018, the SPLC insinuated that PragerU has connections to the alt-right movement, even while admitting that PragerU published a video condemning the alt-right. Dennis Prager—who has been recovering in the hospital as the SPLC attacks him—eviscerated this disgusting attack at the time.

When the SPLC added PragerU to the “hate map” in May, it also published its “Year in Hate and Extremism” report, which mentions PragerU in two sections—the “anti-student inclusion movement” and the opposition to the Left’s diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda.

“In 2024, [DEI] initiatives became ground zero for hard-right mobilizations to whitewash American society and protect white supremacy,” wrote SPLC research analysts Maya Henson Carey and R.G. Cravens.

Carey and Cravens frame DEI as “essential in ensuring pluralism … and promoting democracy.” Such programs “promote teaching accurate histories of American inequalities as structural.” This sentence smuggles in the notion of critical race theory, which teaches that American society is fundamentally unjust and oppressive against certain races, classes, LGBTQ+ identities, and more.

Critical race theory inspired The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which attempted to redefine America’s Founding—placing the real beginning of America with the arrival of the first slaves, rather than the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

PragerU naturally disagrees with this. Yes, America has struggled to live up to the ideals of the declaration, but critical race theory effectively denies the real progress of abolishing slavery and defending civil rights. It also encourages Americans to judge each other by the color of their skin, not the content of their character.

“The antigovernment group PragerU calls DEI ‘an affront to America’s core values’ that must be ‘cast … into the dustbin of history alongside all the other racist and discredited ideas of the past,’” the SPLC noted. Right-thinking Americans agree with PragerU on this score.

Fighting the Left’s Takeover of Education

The SPLC also attacked PragerU as part of an “anti-student inclusion movement,” including Moms for Liberty (which has been on the “hate map” since 2023).

The SPLC uses this framing to suggest that the parental rights movement is the aggressor in the cultural battles over education, while conveniently ignoring the Left’s ideological seizure of the classroom. In fact, the SPLC runs its own program—long called “Teaching Tolerance” but now rebranded as “Learning for Justice”—pushing critical race theory, transgender identity, and other leftist social causes in schools. The retreat away from tolerance is instructive.

When the parental rights movement calls for putting an end to classes teaching that blacks are inherently oppressed and whites inherently oppressors, for removing pornographic books from school libraries, and for parental opt-outs to LGBTQ+ lessons, the SPLC says that amounts to “promoting far-right ideological narratives.”

The SPLC claimed that PragerU is a “significant actor in this disinformation ecosystem,” and that it “specializes in promoting far-right propaganda through professionally produced media.”

“Critics have accused PragerU materials of promoting nationalism, anti-DEI narratives and the whitewashing of historical events as patriotic education,” the SPLC noted. “These narratives play into broader moral panic campaigns that portray public schools as battlegrounds for the nation’s cultural future.”

So, SPLC’s attack on PragerU boils down to two things: PragerU fights the SPLC’s woke agenda in schools and PragerU loves America too much.

By claiming that PragerU’s great sin is being insufficiently negative about America’s history and telling kids about the virtues of our Founding, the SPLC effectively admits there’s really nothing to justify PragerU’s presence on the “hate map.”

Americans should be grateful that PragerU, not the SPLC, is advising the White House’s celebration of America’s 250th anniversary.

The post INSANE: Leftist Group Accuses PragerU of Trying to ‘Protect White Supremacy’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Only 16% Of Americans, 19% Of Trump Voters Want US To Join Israel's War On Iran Tyler Durden Wed, 06/18/2025 - 18:50

U.S. Reportedly Scrapping Alcohol Limits In Favor Of Vague "Drink In Moderation" Guidance Tyler Durden Wed, 06/18/2025 - 20:30

Chokepoint Watch: GPS Jamming Impacts Tankers Across Strait Of Hormuz Tyler Durden Mon, 06/16/2025 - 09:25

Only Bitcoin & Gold Can Stop Governments From Destroying The Currency Tyler Durden Tue, 06/17/2025 - 07:45

Tennessee Sues US Department Of Education Over Hispanic Student Funding Tyler Durden Thu, 06/12/2025 - 12:40

“You need to be careful with my mom,” one of the couple's other foster children told investigators.

President Trump has responded to Elon Musk's apology after the former "first buddy" admitted late Tuesday he had gone "too far" in his personal attacks on the commander in chief.

We Need A 'Kill Switch' On Foreign Powers Tampering With Our Electric Grid Tyler Durden Sun, 06/08/2025 - 19:50

“Gay Advocates Can Shift Same-Sex Marriage Views,” read the New York Times headline. “Doorstep visits change attitudes on gay marriage,” declared the Los Angeles Times. “Cure Homophobia With This One Weird Trick!” Slate spouted.

Driving those headlines was a December 2014 study in Science, by Michael J. LaCour, then a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Donald Green, a professor at Columbia University.

Researchers praised the “buzzy new study,” as Slate called it at the time, for its robust effects and impressive results. The key finding: A brief conversation with a gay door-to-door canvasser could change the mind of someone opposed to same-sex marriage. 

By the time the study was published, David Broockman, then a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, had already seen LaCour’s results and was keen to pursue his own version of it. He and fellow graduate student Joshua Kalla had collaborated before and wanted to look more closely at the impact canvassing could have on elections. But as the pair deconstructed LaCour’s study to figure out how to replicate it, they hit several curious stumbling blocks. And when they got a hold of LaCour’s dataset, or replication package, they quickly realized the results weren’t adding up. 

The two graduate students found themselves in somewhat uncharted territory for how to share their critique. They wrote up their findings, recruiting help from Yale statistician P. Aronow. They shared the report with Green, the senior author on the paper, who confronted LaCour with the critique.

Then, the trio posted the report with its unassuming title, “Irregularities in LaCour,” online. 

It was “like our personal Cuban Missile Crisis,” Broockman said in an interview with Retraction Watch last month. “There was basically this period between when our little PDF report went online and our little world exploded.” 

Their revelations about “statistical irregularities” and false statements triggered the paper’s downward spiral, cataloged in nearly real time on Retraction Watch and widely reported elsewhere, culminating in the paper’s official retraction 10 years ago this week.

A decade later, Broockman, Kalla and Green continue to study persuasion in politics, among other topics. Their involvement in one of the most widely publicized retractions had some lasting effects on how they approach research. And the intervening years have also brought some welcome changes to research and data practices in their field. 

‘There’s no rule book for this’

After Broockman and Kalla’s report went public, their peers were unsure how to react. “A lot of the fears we had felt like they were starting to come true,” said Broockman, now an associate professor at Berkeley. “People were like, ‘is this the right thing to do? Was this the right procedure?’” he said. “We were like, ‘there’s no rule book for this.’”

The same is true today. Post-publication peer review has gained more prominence since 2014, thanks to data sleuths, PubPeer and other efforts to police the literature. This week, a team of sleuths published a series of 25 guides on how to spot integrity issues. But a post on PubPeer is unlikely to draw attention beyond certain circles, and formal investigations trigger processes that move at an academic pace. 

“I think there’s still a cultural problem in academia — and there was at the time — there’s just a lot of costs associated with criticizing existing research,” Broockman said. “The stories that you’re worried people are going to tell about you, I think that remains a big deterrent for people to come forward with whatever issues they have. I think academia has made a little bit of progress on that and could make more.”

When Broockman and Kalla spoke with us, news had just broken that MIT called for the withdrawal of an AI study done by an economics graduate student. Kalla hadn’t been familiar with the research — which had not yet been published but was posted as a preprint — or the university’s announcement. But he had read Stuart Buck’s May 18 newsletter recounting his critique of the study — and the backlash Buck faced for asking questions about it. 

“He got pushback for not following proper etiquette, for not being kind and understanding and kind of wrong to be questioning the research paper,” said Kalla, now an associate professor at Yale University. “I don’t know if the norms have changed over the last 10 years, but Stuart is raising some of those same concerns that we had 10 years ago.”

Sometimes, no matter which option a person chooses, there’s pushback, Broockman said.

“I think it’s a problem that so many people’s first instinct in these circumstances is to criticize the person raising the issue,” he said. “That’s really problematic. I think Stuart’s post shows that this remains a problem.”

Kalla said he encourages early-career researchers to take a direct, respectful approach when critiquing anyone’s work. “The key advice I give to graduate students is to have that kind of respect and curiosity, since oftentimes there aren’t the smoking guns that David and I had 10 years ago,” he said.

‘The hero here is open data’

In 2014, publishing datasets, code and documentation with research papers was relatively uncommon. But that’s ultimately what led Broockman and Kalla to realize the “irregularities” they had found with LaCour’s study execution were something more.  

“The hero here is open data. That’s what led us to do this,” Broockman said. “This is one example – it’s an extreme example – of why open data is important.”

“Ten years ago, the idea of pre-analysis plans, the idea of open data, the idea that you need to have reasonable sample sizes and studies, that was much more like a fringe, vanguard thing,” Broockman said. “My sense is that in the three main social science quantitative fields of psychology, political science and economics, I think we won that war. I think that’s pretty universal now.”

Kalla was somewhat less certain. “I’m not sure if I would say the war is totally over. I think there’s definitely still lots of pushback, especially around both pre-analysis plans and statistical power,” he said. “There’s a perception that our job is to publish and to keep our jobs, and not necessarily to do the best research possible. And sometimes these scientific best practices come at odds with those competing goals.” 

Kalla and Broockman are meticulous researchers by nature, but their involvement in the Science retraction amplified that trait. “I think given the prominence of this retraction, I always feared people are going to double check my work,” Kalla said. “So I think that that made me always be careful, to try extra hard to make sure everything is buttoned down, everything is double and triple checked.” 

Green acknowledged he didn’t do his due diligence as a coauthor, telling us at the time: 

Convinced that the results were robust, I helped Michael LaCour write up the findings, especially the parts that had to do with the statistical interpretation of the experimental design. Given that I did not have IRB approval for the study from my home institution, I took care not to analyze any primary data — the datafiles that I analyzed were the same replication datasets that Michael LaCour posted to his website.  Looking back, the failure to verify the original Qualtrics data was a serious mistake.

The study and its fallout prompted him to make changes in his collaborations. “My data-related collaborations now involve teams of people (rather than single individuals) working on data collection and data analysis,” Green said last month by email. “Research materials are shared and date-stamped.  Replication materials work from basic inputs to final outputs.” And, he added, he no longer supervises doctoral students from other schools.

Trust but verify

A year after the LaCour retraction, Broockman and Kalla published a study finding that 10-minute, in-person conversations between door-to-door canvassers and voters in South Florida could “substantially reduce transphobia” and that the gender identity of the canvasser didn’t matter. (The irony of the finding’s similarity to LaCour’s, and its publication in Science, wasn’t lost on the media either.) 

Since then, they’ve conducted “at least nine or 10 replications in various forms related to different issues,” from work on transphobia to immigration rights, Kalla said. “This style of non judgmentally exchanging narratives through door-to-door canvassing can durably reduce people’s prejudicial views towards these various out groups.”

Most recently, they posted a preprint of a study on how endorsements and special interest groups affect voter behavior in primaries and general elections. By surveying 31,000 respondents during 2024 elections in 27 congressional districts, they found “primary voters actually struggle to identify which candidates match their views. So they rely on other cues—especially from interest groups who might help drive polarization,” Broockman posted on Bluesky.

Just as they’ve stayed on theme with their research, so too have their opinions on the infrastructure for research. Shortly after the LaCour retraction, Broockman and Kalla wrote an editorial in Vox reacting to coverage citing “a growing number” of retractions. They cautioned retractions were a sign that the system is strong, not weak. They wrote at the time:

The fact that we are especially likely to see and hear about the errors scientists make does not suggest scientists are especially prone to making mistakes. Rather, it shows that scientific errors are increasingly likely to be detected and corrected instead of being swept under the rug.

Has that view changed? “When scandals like this MIT thing this week come out, those should make people more confident in academic research, because they show there is an ecosystem to catch this stuff,” Broockman said in our recent interview. “I think we should be wary of proposals to over-regulate academic research, to solve for these rare events.”

He continued: “But if we’re going to not over-regulate the doing of the research, that means we need the fire alarm — and that’s what you guys [Retraction Watch] are — and we need the researchers doing the research knowing that there’s a reasonable chance they will get caught.”

He likened blatant fraud cases like LaCour’s to “the airplane crashes of academic research” — they get a lot of attention, but in terms of what  affects more people, “they attract far disproportionate attention,” he said. “If I were making a top five list of ways academia is not producing research that is as truthful as it could be, I don’t think fraud would be in my top five.” Issues like p-hacking, selectively including data, and deviating from research plans are all smaller infractions that are bigger issues, he said.

Carelessness has a large effect in the literature, too. “For me, the biggest takeaway is, sure, fraud happens,” Kalla said. “I think the bigger concern in research is sloppiness.” He and Broockman are systematic in their collaborations, carefully checking each other’s code and work. “And I think that extends to collaborations with other people as well. The trust-but-verify mentality,” Kalla said, “and definitely not in a skeptical, hostile, fraud based way. It’s very easy to make mistakes.”

Green also continues to study U.S. public opinion and political behavior, branching out to study the influence of mass media in low- and middle-income countries. “Several of my field experiments since then have focused on how narrative entertainment shapes beliefs, attitudes, and behavioral intentions,” he said. Those include studies on how a Tanzanian radio drama influenced attitudes on early and forced marriage, and the influence of a media campaign on violence against women in Uganda.

Coda

Ten years on, Green, Broockman and Kalla say the study and its demise still come up periodically, but far less often than it did in the year or two immediately after. 

“My sense is that this episode is discussed fairly widely when scholars and instructors assess the replication crisis in social science, in part because the case illustrates both why research might fail to replicate (in this instance, due to fraud) as well as the norms and institutions that have emerged to expose replication failures (such as the availability of replication data that in this case exposed how fabricated data were grafted onto an existing dataset),” Green said. 

He talks about it indirectly in his undergraduate textbook, but “students seem to be less and less familiar with the episode as time passes,” he said. “I suppose that a senior now would have been in elementary school when it happened.”

Every once in a while a student will ask Kalla about the case, he said, and Broockman said it mostly comes up when he’s talking to researchers in other disciplines, but not so much anymore. 

For Broockman, the story has an added personal note: Eight years ago, it came up on a first date — with the man he’s now engaged to. “He had listened to the ‘This American Life’ episode about all of this,” he said. “So maybe that served me well.”

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"You can run, you can’t hide. We are coming after you federally. If you assault a police officer, if you rob a store, if you loot, if you spit on police officers, we’re coming after you."

The company said that it had removed its vehicles from downtown Los Angeles, and would not be serving that area "out of an abundance of caution."

"I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien," Bannon said.

Mayor Eric Adams announced the speed limit for out-of-control electric bike riders would be reduced to 15 mph — but locals doubt whether it will make the streets any safer. The new speed limit for e-bikes, electric scooters and pedal-assist commercial bicycles comes as it’s become a fact of life for pedestrians to have to...

Observers are saying that foreign flags at the protests give President Trump and Republicans easy talking points as they take a hard line against the anti-ICE protesters.

Remaking K–12 Classes For A Healthier America Tyler Durden Tue, 06/03/2025 - 17:40

Today's links

• AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers: A reverse-centaur in the loop.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers (permalink)

On a recent This Machine Kills episode, guest Hagen Blix described the ultimate form of "AI therapy" with a "human in the loop":

https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/405-ai-is-the-demon-god-of-capital-ft-hagen-blix

One actual therapist is just having ten chat GPT windows open where they just like have five seconds to interrupt the chatGPT. They have to scan them all and see if it says something really inappropriate. That's your job, to stop it.

Blix admits that's not where therapy is at…yet, but he references Laura Preston's 2023 N Plus One essay, "HUMAN_FALLBACK," which describes her as a backstop to a real-estate "virtual assistant," that masqueraded as a human handling the queries that confused it, in a bid to keep the customers from figuring out that they were engaging with a chatbot:

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-44/essays/human_fallback/

This is what makes investors and bosses slobber so hard for AI – a "productivity" boost that arises from taking away the bargaining power of workers so that they can be made to labor under worse conditions for less money. The efficiency gains of automation aren't just about using fewer workers to achieve the same output – it's about the fact that the workers you fire in this process can be used as a threat against the remaining workers: "Do your job and shut up or I'll fire you and give your job to one of your former colleagues who's now on the breadline."

This has been at the heart of labor fights over automation since the Industrial Revolution, when skilled textile workers took up the Luddite cause because their bosses wanted to fire them and replace them with child workers snatched from Napoleonic War orphanages:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#thats-fronkonsteen

Textile automation wasn't just about producing more cloth – it was about producing cheaper, worse cloth. The new machines were so easy a child could use them, because that's who was using them – kidnapped war orphans. The adult textile workers the machines displaced weren't afraid of technology. Far from it! Weavers used the most advanced machinery of the day, and apprenticed for seven years to learn how to operate it. Luddites had the equivalent of a Masters in Engineering from MIT.

Weavers' guilds presented two problems for their bosses: first, they had enormous power, thanks to the extensive training required to operate their looms; and second, they used that power to regulate the quality of the goods they made. Even before the Industrial Revolution, weavers could have produced more cloth at lower prices by skimping on quality, but they refused, out of principle, because their work mattered to them.

Now, of course weavers also appreciated the value of their products, and understood that innovations that would allow them to increase their productivity and make more fabric at lower prices would be good for the world. They weren't snobs who thought that only the wealthy should go clothed. Weavers had continuously adopted numerous innovations, each of which increased the productivity and the quality of their wares.

Long before the Luddite uprising, weavers had petitioned factory owners and Parliament under the laws that guaranteed the guilds the right to oversee textile automation to ensure that it didn't come at the price of worker power or the quality of the textiles the machines produced. But the factory owners and their investors had captured Parliament, which ignored its own laws and did nothing as the "dark, Satanic mills" proliferated. Luddites only turned to property destruction after the system failed them.

Now, it's true that eventually, the machines improved and the fabric they turned out matched and exceeded the quality of the fabric that preceded the Industrial Revolution. But there's nothing about the way the Industrial Revolution unfolded – increasing the power of capital to pay workers less and treat them worse while flooding the market with inferior products – that was necessary or beneficial to that progress. Every other innovation in textile production up until that time had been undertaken with the cooperation of the guilds, who'd ensured that "progress" meant better lives for workers, better products for consumers, and lower prices. If the Luddites' demands for co-determination in the Industrial Revolution had been met, we might have gotten to the same world of superior products at lower costs, but without the immiseration of generations of workers, mass killings to suppress worker uprisings, and decades of defective products being foisted on the public.

So there are two stories about automation and labor: in the dominant narrative, workers are afraid of the automation that delivers benefits to all of us, stand in the way of progress, and get steamrollered for their own good, as well as ours. In the other narrative, workers are glad to have boring and dangerous parts of their work automated away and happy to produce more high-quality goods and services, and stand ready to assess and plan the rollout of new tools, and when workers object to automation, it's because they see automation being used to crush them and worsen the outputs they care about, at the expense of the customers they care for.

In modern automation/labor theory, this debate is framed in terms of "centaurs" (humans who are assisted by technology) and "reverse-centaurs" (humans who are conscripted to assist technology):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

There are plenty of workers who are excited at the thought of using AI tools to relieve them of some drudgework. To the extent that these workers have power over their bosses and their working conditions, that excitement might well be justified. I hear a lot from programmers who work on their own projects about how nice it is to have a kind of hypertrophied macro system that can generate and tweak little automated tools on the fly so the humans can focus on the real, chewy challenges. Those workers are the centaurs, and it's no wonder that they're excited about improved tooling.

But the reverse-centaur version is a lot darker. The reverse-centaur coder is an assistant to the AI, charged with being a "human in the loop" who reviews the material that the AI produces. This is a pretty terrible job to have.

For starters, the kinds of mistakes that AI coders make are the hardest mistakes for human reviewers to catch. That's because LLMs are statistical prediction machines, spicy autocomplete that works by ingesting and analyzing a vast corpus of written materials and then producing outputs that represent a series of plausible guesses about which words should follow one another. To the extent that the reality the AI is participating in is statistically smooth and predictable, AI can often make eerily good guesses at words that turn into sentences or code that slots well into that reality.

But where reality is lumpy and irregular, AI stumbles. AI is intrinsically conservative. As a statistically informed guessing program, it wants the future to be like the past:

https://reallifemag.com/the-apophenic-machine/

This means that AI coders stumble wherever the world contains rough patches and snags. Take "slopsquatting." For the most part, software libraries follow regular naming conventions. For example, there might be a series of text-handling libraries with names like "text.parsing.docx," "text.parsing.xml," and "text.parsing.markdown." But for some reason – maybe two different projects were merged, or maybe someone was just inattentive – there's also a library called "text.txt.parsing" (instead of "text.parsing.txt").

AI coders are doing inference based on statistical analysis, and anyone inferring what the .txt parsing library is called would guess, based on the other libraries, that it was "text.parsing.txt." And that's what the AI guesses, and so it tries to import that library to its software projects.

This creates a new security vulnerability, "slopsquatting," in which a malicious actor creates a library with the expected name, which replicates the functionality of the real library, but also contains malicious code:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_sabotage_supply_chain/

Note that slopsquatting errors are extremely hard to spot. As is typical with AI coding errors, these are errors that are based on continuing a historical pattern, which is the sort of thing our own brains do all the time (think of trying to go up a step that isn't there after climbing to the top of a staircase). Notably, these are very different from the errors that a beginning programmer whose work is being reviewed by a more senior coder might make. These are the very hardest errors for humans to spot, and these are the errors that AIs make the most, and they do so at machine speed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

To be a human in the loop for an AI coder, a programmer must engage in sustained, careful, line-by-line and command-by-command scrutiny of the code. This is the hardest kind of code to review, and maintaining robotic vigilance over long periods at high speeds is something humans are very bad at. Indeed, it's the kind of task we try very hard to automate, since machines are much better at being machinelike than humans are. This is the essence of reverse-centaurism: when a human is expected to act like a machine in order to help the machine do something it can't do.

Humans routinely fail at spotting these errors, unsurprisingly. If the purpose of automation is to make superior goods at lower prices, then this would be a real concern, since a reverse-centaur coding arrangement is bound to produce code with lurking, pernicious, especially hard-to-spot bugs that present serious risks to users. But if the purpose of automation is to discipline labor – to force coders to accept worse conditions and pay – irrespective of the impact on quality, then AI is the perfect tool for the job. The point of the human isn't to catch the AI's errors so much as it is to catch the blame for the AI's errors – to be what Madeleine Clare Elish calls a "moral crumple zone":

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

As has been the case since the Industrial Revolution, the project of automation isn't just about increasing productivity, it's about weakening labor power as a prelude to lowering quality. Take what's happened to the news industry, where mass layoffs are being offset by AI tools. At Hearst's King Features Syndicates, a single writer was charged with producing over 30 summer guides, the entire package:

https://www.404media.co/viral-ai-generated-summer-guide-printed-by-chicago-sun-times-was-made-by-magazine-giant-hearst/

That is an impossible task, which is why the writer turned to AI to do his homework, and then, infamously, published a "summer reading guide" that was full of nonexistent books that were hallucinated by a chatbot:

https://www.404media.co/chicago-sun-times-prints-ai-generated-summer-reading-list-with-books-that-dont-exist/

Most people reacted to this story as a consumer issue: they were outraged that the world was having a defective product foisted upon it. But the consumer issue here is downstream from the labor issue: when the writers at King Features Syndicate are turned into reverse-centaurs, they will inevitably produce defective outputs. The point of the worker – the "human in the loop" – isn't to supervise the AI, it's to take the blame for the AI. That's just what happened, as this poor schmuck absorbed an internet-sized rasher of shit flung his way by outraged social media users. After all, it was his byline on the story, not the chatbot's. He's the moral crumple-zone.

The implication of this is that consumers and workers are class allies in the automation wars. The point of using automation to weaken labor isn't just cheaper products – it's cheaper, defective products, inflicted on the unsuspecting and defenseless public who are no longer protected by workers' professionalism and pride in their jobs.

That's what's going on at Duolingo, where CEO Luis von Ahn created a firestorm by announcing mass firings of human language instructors, who would be replaced by AI. The "AI first" announcement pissed off Duolingo's workers, of course, but what caught von Ahn off-guard was how much this pissed off Duolingo's users:

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/25/0347239/duolingo-faces-massive-social-media-backlash-after-ai-first-comments

But of course, this makes perfect sense. After all, language-learners are literally incapable of spotting errors in the AI instruction they receive. If you spoke the language well enough to spot the AI's mistakes, you wouldn't need Duolingo! I don't doubt that there are countless ways in which AIs could benefit both language learners and the Duolingo workers who develop instructional materials, but for that to happen, workers' and learners' needs will have to be the focus of AI integration. Centaurs could produce great language learning materials with AI – but reverse-centaurs can only produce slop.

Unsurprisingly, many of the most successful AI products are "bossware" tools that let employers monitor and discipline workers who've been reverse-centaurized. Both blue-collar and white-collar workplaces have filled up with "electronic whips" that monitor and evaluate performance:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/#virtual-whips

AI can give bosses "dashboards" that tell them which Amazon delivery drivers operate their vehicles with their mouths open (Amazon doesn't let its drivers sing on the job). Meanwhile, a German company called Celonis will sell your boss a kind of AI phrenology tool that assesses your "emotional quality" by spying on you while you work:

https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/publications/processmining-algomanage

Tech firms were among the first and most aggressive adopters of AI-based electronic whips. But these whips weren't used on coders – they were reserved for tech's vast blue-collar and contractor workforce: clickworkers, gig workers, warehouse workers, AI data-labelers and delivery drivers.

Tech bosses tormented these workers but pampered their coders. That wasn't out of any sentimental attachment to tech workers. Rather, tech bosses were afraid of tech workers, because tech workers possess a rare set of skills that can be harnessed by tech firms to produce gigantic returns. Tech workers have historically been princes of labor, able to command high salaries and deferential treatment from their bosses (think of the amazing tech "campus" perks), because their scarcity gave them power.

It's easy to predict how tech bosses would treat tech workers if they could get away with it – just look how they treat workers they aren't afraid of. Just like the textile mill owners of the Industrial Revolution, the thing that excites tech bosses about AI is the possibility of cutting off a group of powerful workers at the knees. After all, it took more than a century for strong labor unions to match the power that the pre-Industrial Revolution guilds had. If AI can crush the power of tech workers, it might buy tech bosses a century of free rein to shift value from their workforce to their investors, while also doing away with pesky Tron-pilled workers who believe they have a moral obligation to "fight for the user."

William Gibson famously wrote, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." The workers that tech bosses don't fear are living in the future of the workers that tech bosses can't easily replace.

This week, the New York Times's veteran Amazon labor reporter Noam Scheiber published a deeply reported piece about the experience of coders at Amazon in the age of AI:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/business/amazon-ai-coders.html

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is palpably horny for AI coders, evidenced by investor memos boasting of AI's returns in "productivity and cost avoidance" and pronouncements about AI saving "the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years":

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andy-jassy-8b1615_one-of-the-most-tedious-but-critical-tasks-activity-7232374162185461760-AdSz/

Amazon is among the most notorious abusers of blue-collar labor, the workplace where everyone who doesn't have a bullshit laptop job is expected to piss in a bottle and spend an unpaid hour before and after work going through a bag- and body-search. Amazon's blue-collar workers are under continuous, totalizing, judging AI scrutiny that scores them based on whether their eyeballs are correctly oriented, whether they take too long to pick up an object, whether they pee too often. Amazon warehouse workers are injured at three times national average. Amazon AIs scan social media for disgruntled workers talking about unions, and Amazon has another AI tool that predicts which shops and departments are most likely to want to unionize.

Scheiber's piece describes what it's like to be an Amazon tech worker who's getting the reverse-centaur treatment that has heretofore been reserved for warehouse workers and drivers. They describe "speedups" in which they are moved from writing code to reviewing AI code, their jobs transformed from solving chewy intellectual puzzles to racing to spot hard-to-find AI coding errors as a clock ticks down. Amazon bosses haven't ordered their tech workers to use AI, just raised their quotas to a level that can't be attained without getting an AI to do most of the work – just like the Chicago Sun-Times writer who was expected to write all 30 articles in the summer guide package on his own. No one made him use AI, but he wasn't going to produce 30 articles on deadline without a chatbot.

Amazon insists that it is treating AI as an assistant for its coders, but the actual working conditions make it clear that this is a reverse-centaur transformation. Scheiber discusses a dissident internal group at Amazon called Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, who link the company's use of AI to its carbon footprint. Beyond those climate concerns, these workers are treating AI as a labor issue.

Amazon's coders have been making tentative gestures of solidarity towards its blue-collar workforce since the pandemic broke out, walking out in support of striking warehouse workers (and getting fired for doing so):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/14/abolish-silicon-valley/#hang-together-hang-separately

But those firings haven't deterred Amazon's tech workers from making common cause with their comrades on the shop floor:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/19/deastroturfing/#real-power

When techies describe their experience of AI, it sometimes sounds like they're describing two completely different realities – and that's because they are. For workers with power and control, automation turns them into centaurs, who get to use AI tools to improve their work-lives. For workers whose power is waning, AI is a tool for reverse-centaurism, an electronic whip that pushes them to work at superhuman speeds. And when they fail, these workers become "moral crumple zones," absorbing the blame for the defective products their bosses pushed out in order to goose profits.

As ever, what a technology does pales in comparison to who it does it for and who it does it to.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• The CIA Secretly Ran a Star Wars Fan Site https://www.404media.co/the-cia-secretly-ran-a-star-wars-fan-site/

• Atomic Highway – Post Apocalyptic Roleplaying https://archive.org/details/atomic-highway-ebook-v-2/mode/1up

• THE SILICON VALLEY EFFECT https://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/SJIL_61-1_Arun.pdf

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Bulk of American calories comes from sweet drinks https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/05/050527111920.htm

#20yrsago Chicago’s Bean sculpture is free to photograph, at last https://memex.craphound.com/2005/05/27/chicagos-bean-sculpture-is-free-to-photograph-at-last/

#15yrsago Man single-handedly building a metro rail https://englishrussia.com/2010/05/24/the-most-unusual-metro-in-the-world/

#15yrsago Canada’s copyright minister: superinfringer https://memex.craphound.com/2010/05/27/canadas-copyright-minister-superinfringer/

#15yrsago Pinkwater’s ADVENTURES OF A CAT-WHISKERED GIRL, sequel to Neddiad and Yggyssey https://memex.craphound.com/2010/05/27/pinkwaters-adventures-of-a-cat-whiskered-girl-sequel-to-neddiad-and-yggyssey/

#10yrsago Real estate bubble drives urban blight https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-are-there-so-many-shuttered-storefronts-in-the-west-village

#10yrsago IRS leaks 100K taxpayers’ data to identity thieves https://theintercept.com/2015/05/27/data-breaches-wreak-havoc/

#10yrsago Swiss cops’ dawn raid snags top FIFA officials https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/27/sports/soccer/fifa-officials-face-corruption-charges-in-us.html

#5yrsago The Toronto Star's new owners donated to far-right Tories https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#plutewatch

#5yrsago How to pay artists while fighting censorship and Big Tech https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#pay-artists

#5yrsago Ammosexuals point their guns at their crotches https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#youll-shoot-your-eye-out

#5yrsago Twitter's porn filters are dampening discussions of "cumgate" https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#cumgate

#5yrsago West Virginia's governor Jim Justice: billionaire, deadbeat https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#injustice

#5yrsago Hertz's bankruptcy was caused by private equity looting https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#hertz-uranus

#5yrsago Facebook shelved research that showed they were sowing division https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#joel-kaplan

#5yrsago Youtube is automatically blocking criticism of the Chinese Communist Party https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#communist-bandit

#1yrago Against Lore https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/27/cmon-do-it-again/#better_to_remain_silent_and_be_thought_a_fool_than_to_speak_and_remove_all_doubt

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Seattle: Cascade PBS Ideas Festival, May 31
  https://www.cascadepbs.org/festival/speaker/cory-doctorow

• Virtual: Fediforum, Jun 5
  https://fediforum.org/2025-06/

• PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025

• PDX: Picks and Shovels with bunnie Huang at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
  https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0

• Tualatin Public Library, Jun 22:
  https://www.tualatinoregon.gov/library/author-talk-cory-doctorow

• London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1
  https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/

• Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059

• Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4
  https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Kick 'Em In the Dongle (Understood)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16148346-kick-em-in-the-dongle

• The Big Story
  https://www.seekyoursounds.com/podcasts/the-big-story/cory-doctorow-explains-who-broke-the-internet

• Keynote (Pycon)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydVmzg_SJLw

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Latest books (permalink)

• • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello. This is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Recently, Kash Patel, who’s been under fire by the Left in a variety of ways, the new FBI director, he announced that he is shutting down the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., where there’s about 1,500 employees, as I understand it.

There was a lot of outrage. But remember that this was not his original decision. It was the decision during the Biden administration of then-FBI Director Christopher Wray that this 50-year-old building was unsuitable. It was decrepit.

But what was more interesting, in addition to thinking he was going to shut down the building, we don’t know where he wants to relocate the headquarters.

I would prefer—I think some of you—if he put it in Kansas City or somewhere away from the proverbial deep state in Washington. He also said he didn’t understand, of the 35,000 employees, why a third were in Washington. Washington, as dangerous as it can be, does not account for a third of all crimes.

So, he’s trying to disperse or recalibrate the FBI. And are we going to lament the closure of that office and what it represents symbolically? I don’t think so.

Robert Mueller, a former FBI director, was the head of the Special Counsel’s Office. Remember that? And he had the dream team—the all-stars, a hunter/killer team—with the Left. He was almost giddy about that they were gonna get President Donald Trump on Russian collusion. Forty million dollars, 20 months later, they didn’t find anything.

We found all sorts of improprieties within that investigation. Andrew Weissmann and others cleaned their cellphones so that no one could see their text messages. We had Peter Strzok and Lisa Page dismissed from the investigation because of their notorious and now infamous tweets.

We had Robert Mueller go before the House Intelligence Committee and claim that he didn’t know what the Steele dossier was nor what Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS was. That was impossible. Those were the two catalysts that prompted his own appointment.

His successor was James Comey. He’s in the news right now for that weird tweet where he said he was walking on the beach and he saw “8647”—get rid of Trump; or maybe, you know, kill Trump; or whatever “86” can mean, it can mean a lot of stuff—and he didn’t understand it. But he’s also got a novel coming out right now about a supposed right-wing celebrity who threatens people and then something happens to the people he threatened. Was this a stunt for his book? I don’t know, but it’s in line with his character.

He went before the same House Intelligence Committee on 245 occasions. He pled either “I don’t know” or “I can’t recall” or “I don’t have that information” or “I shouldn’t give you that information.” Two hundred and forty-five times.

He was the one that set up Michael Flynn and bragged about how naive Michael Flynn was not to have an attorney when he sent agents in to ambush him on the Logan Act. My gosh, nobody ever invokes that.

He was the person who lied to Donald Trump and said, “We don’t have an investigation of you, Mr. President.” And then he went out and recorded that conversation. He did have an investigation. And then he had a third party leak it to The New York Times.

He was the one who hired Christopher Steele. He was an FBI contractor. They used the Steele dossier, which was fraudulent, to get FISA court warrants to, I think, unproperly and unlawfully spy on people like Carter Page. That same office gave us Kevin Clinesmith, the FBI lawyer who doctored a FISA email to spy on Carter Page.

That same office then gave us the successor to James Comey, interim Director Andrew McCabe. He lied four times, the inspector general said, to federal authorities and three of them were under oath, which was a basis for his firing.

He was followed by Christopher Wray. Why was he spying on parents at school board meetings? Why was he spying on what they called “radical-traditional Catholics”? Why did they go after abortion protesters, but not in the same way people who were protesting pro-life?

And why did they do the Mar-a-Lago raid? Why did they go in there with props and special files and scattered the files on the ground, where they were not there when they came, and then take pictures of them and add a little “classified”? Why did they take away 13,000 documents? And out of the 13,000 documents, they only found 102 that were classified, 0.007%. I could go on with Christopher Wray. This is what he gave us.

He had the chief counsel, James A. Baker, of the FBI working with Twitter and Facebook to suppress news of Hunter Biden’s laptop. The laptop was authenticated by Christopher Wray’s FBI. They kept it silent while 51 supposed intelligence authorities said that it was Russian disinformation. Why didn’t the FBI say, “No, it’s not. We’ve authenticated it for over a year”? Why? Why? Why?

Add it all up—Mueller, Comey, McCabe, Clinesmith, Christopher Wray, Strzok, Page—and I think it’s been a very good but overdue thing to close down that Washington office and close a sad chapter in the history of a once-great agency.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

The post Kash Patel Shuts Down the Deep State’s Nerve Center appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The tech world just got another jolt, and this time, it's Microsoft in the spotlight. The news about Microsoft layoffs is making the rounds, and it’s not a small shake-up. The company is cutting about 7,000 jobs. Why? Because it’s betting big on AI. That’s right—real people are losing their jobs while the company shifts gears to chase artificial intelligence. It's part of a broader shift we’re seeing across the industry, where automation and cost-cutting often outweigh long-term employee retention.

Microsoft Layoffs: A Big Hit to the Workforce

Microsoft announced that 7,000 roles are getting the axe across departments like sales, support, and engineering. These layoffs represent roughly 5% of its global workforce. This isn’t new for them—Microsoft has done layoffs before—but this one is bigger than most in recent memory. According to the company, the move is part of a longer-term strategy aimed at reducing layers to become more efficient and focused. What’s especially jarring is the number of teams affected all at once. Some have said entire departments are being dissolved or absorbed into AI-focused groups to implement organizational changes and position the company for success.

Not Just Numbers on a Chart

Frank Shaw, who handles communications for Microsoft, said the company is “prioritizing AI and cloud services” and moving away from older roles. Corporate speak aside, this means a whole lot of people are being shown the door. Most of these cuts are hitting their Washington State offices, where many employees are based—where Microsoft has a massive footprint. In Redmond alone, Microsoft employs tens of thousands of people, many of whom have deep roots in the community. Layoffs on this scale could shake the local economy, hitting everything from housing to small businesses that rely on Microsoft employees.

The AI Trade-Off

Artificial intelligence is cool, sure. It’s fast, efficient, and can do things most people can’t. But here’s the truth: investing in AI is expensive. Microsoft is spending billions to stay ahead, especially in its partnership with OpenAI. Increasing investments in AI have been a significant focus for Microsoft, with spending rising alongside metrics like operating margins and net income. According to financial disclosures, Microsoft has committed over $10 billion to this collaboration. So, to afford all that? They’re cutting jobs. The company is flattening its org chart, removing levels of management, and getting rid of jobs they think won’t help them grow in the AI era. The hope is to move faster and stay lean, but that efficiency comes with real human costs.

July and June Could Be Hard Months

Internal emails show the layoffs will roll out slowly, starting in June and wrapping by July. Significant layoffs were also implemented in January. That means a lot of uncertainty for thousands of employees. Some already know they’re out. Others are still waiting. Either way, it’s weeks of tension, rumors, and low morale. Being in limbo like that takes a toll—even on people who survive the cuts. Some managers have reported that morale has dipped significantly, even among teams not directly affected. The slow rollout has caused confusion and speculation across departments.

The Spokesperson Spin

Microsoft spokesperson, Frank Shaw, says these organizational changes will best position the company for the future. That’s the corporate line—just like we hear every time a big company does mass layoffs. But the reality is that these “strategic shifts” come at a cost that can’t be softened with buzzwords. These are real people with bills, kids, careers. No clever phrase makes it better. The lack of transparency around which departments are targeted has only added to employee frustration. Some staff say they’re learning more from news articles than from internal briefings.

Success at What Cost?

Let’s not forget—Microsoft is doing well. Like, really well. Microsoft shares closed at $500, highlighting a peak in the company's stock value. They posted a 17% jump in revenue recently, pushing quarterly earnings over $60 billion. Microsoft shares just hit their record highest price ever, and analysts continue to raise price targets for the stock. Investors are thrilled. So if they’re flush with cash, why the cuts? Simple: it’s about being lean, fast, and focused on the AI future. But it still feels wrong to claim victory while putting thousands out of work. The optics are tough—especially when executive bonuses are expected to rise this year.

Welcome to the Dynamic Marketplace

They keep calling it a dynamic marketplace, but let’s be honest—it’s cutthroat. Companies are moving fast, making bold calls, and leaving people behind. Microsoft is just one of many trying to stay ahead. They are embedding AI capabilities into their core platforms, such as Microsoft 365 and Azure, to enhance business operations and drive growth. They want success in a dynamic world, and they think AI is the ticket. Maybe it is. But if that future leaves thousands behind, is it really a win? The pressure to adapt quickly is real, but there has to be a better balance between innovation and stability.

A Trend, Not an Outlier

Microsoft isn’t the only one making cuts, as they plan to lay off thousands of employees as part of a broader organizational restructuring. Significant financial reporting and market performance were highlighted on a Monday, with stock trading metrics showing notable highs.

Meta, Amazon, Google—name a tech giant, and they’ve probably done layoffs in the past year. In just the first month of 2025, the industry saw more than 30,000 jobs disappear. Some say it’s a market correction after over-hiring during the pandemic. Others believe it’s a redirection of capital toward technologies like AI. Either way, the trend is clear, and more layoffs are likely coming. The entire tech landscape is shifting under our feet.

What Comes Next?

For Microsoft, the roadmap is all about AI. On May 13, 2025, Microsoft announced layoffs impacting 3% of its workforce, a significant move amidst ongoing organizational changes. They’re plugging it into everything—Office, Teams, Windows, you name it. Their tools like Microsoft Copilot are being marketed as productivity game-changers. They’re betting that smarter tools will drive future growth and keep enterprise clients locked into their ecosystem. It might work. But only time will tell if losing 7,000 people in the process was a smart move—or a big mistake dressed up as innovation. Employees and analysts alike are watching closely to see if the gamble pays off.

The Human Toll

Behind every number is a person. Someone who showed up to work, worked overtime, trained new hires, and believed in the mission. Now, they’re packing up their desk. Some are parents. Some are new grads. Others were just months from retirement. When you’re laid off, it’s not just a job you lose—it’s stability, identity, and a sense of direction. Stories are surfacing online from those affected—some caught off guard without severance, others scrambling to find new roles in an already saturated job market.

Lessons From the Layoffs

If you work in tech, you’re probably watching all this closely. The big lesson? Job security doesn’t really exist—not even at a place like Microsoft, where recent layoffs have reduced layers of management to streamline operations. Roles are shifting, AI is moving in, and the skills that mattered last year might not matter tomorrow. Staying flexible and constantly learning? That’s the new normal. Upskilling in AI, data analytics, and cloud infrastructure is becoming essential, not optional. Employees are realizing they need to adapt quickly or risk being left behind.

Final Thoughts

Yes, Microsoft had its reasons for the cuts. Yes, they want to grow. Amy Hood, Microsoft CFO, emphasized the company's focus on operational efficiency and management structure, highlighting the strategy to improve performance and agility by reducing layers of management. But can we really call it growth if it sidelines thousands of people? AI might change the game, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of compassion. The company may say this is about the future, but it’s people who make up the present. And right now, they’re hurting. There’s a fine line between evolution and erosion—and it’s worth asking whether Microsoft has crossed it.

Weekly Reflection

As we move through 2025, one thing is clear: the tech industry is changing fast. But behind every buzzword and bold decision are people who helped build these companies. Layoffs can be strategic, but they’re also deeply personal, affecting the total headcount of employees and the overall workforce. Let’s not lose sight of that. In chasing innovation, companies need to remember the people who helped get them there in the first place. Compassion isn’t a weakness—it’s a responsibility. Let’s hope Microsoft and others don’t forget that in the race to automate everything.

Also Read: How Artificial Intelligence Will Dominate the Future of E-commerce

The post Microsoft Layoffs 7,000 as AI Restructuring Begins appeared first on Dumb Little Man.

Springsteen previously called Trump administration "corrupt, incompetent and treasonous" during Manchester concert.

"So my life expectancy is maybe the summer. I expect to be checking out from this domain sometime this summer."

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said he would sign the executive order on Monday morning to pursue what is known as "most favored nation" pricing or international reference pricing.

Be Not Enticed To Tyranny: Oppose The Surveillance State Tyler Durden Wed, 05/07/2025 - 03:30