NOTE: This piece represents excerpts from a longer-form investigation. For the full investigation, available via PDF, is here: AirisLabs_FinalAirisLabs_Final.pdf4 MBdownload-circle Airis Labs is an Israeli AI facial recognition startup that we have followed since their stealth phase. Their product scrapes massive amounts of video from
Only a few days after President Donald Trump called for the annihilation of an entire civilization with the implicit threat that he, as the Commander in Chief, would have unilateral authority to use nuclear weapons to do so, everything seemed to have somehow returned to a tense and surreal "
Does anybody except the advertising industry even want advertising to exist anymore? This is a question that I now think about more or less every time I see an ad (which is way too often). Our online experience is now: ads at the top of, and mixed into your search
The increasing centralization and privatization of technology is strangling our ability to use technology the way we want. There are plenty examples of this, from social media companies’ increasingly restrictive content moderation policies, to nation and state governments imposing bans on entire apps and services. We have, in a very
If you're interested in reducing your reliance on big tech companies, this is the place to start. Many activists, technologists, and researchers have tested and recommended alternatives to some of the increasingly evil tech companies that control our online experience. This page seeks to collate those resources and
Staying safe online (hereinafter OPSEC, “operational security”) is like every other sphere of information online: social media discourse about it is flooded with disinformation, exaggerations, and paranoia (some warranted, some not). We have found during our time in activist spaces that many people hear something about being “secure” or “insecure,
Nobody ever thinks about data centers. Well, that isn’t quite true, IT administrators probably think about data centers a lot. Beyond them, though, it is easy to understand why data centers have not occupied space in most people’s minds. The cloud, after all, is to most of us
It is not a mistake that you and I, and people across the world, are retreating into caves of isolation, hearing only what we want to hear and growing farther and farther apart from one another. While the Internet allows us to perform tasks without going places, access knowledge with
Consider this post to be an introduction to why we at The Beltway Breaker are doing this. While we won't get too personal, we want to outline why we think it is necessary in this day and age to gather a small group of like-minded friends and
We have gathered here resources not just in the realm of technology activism, but also personal recommendations for how to both keep yourself safe online, and remove the corporate bullshit from your technology experience. Of note, any recommendations we provide are only suggestions - every individual has a balance of security
To the point: Why is there so much conservative, reactionary, fascist AI-generated content online, and what do we do about it? The fact that AI content may be entirely slop is of no concern to those who create, promote, and distribute it. Capitalism, if it ever did at all,
AI
The world fascism constructs in its propaganda is nonsense; or worse, the removal of sense. Fascism ultimately relies on the flooding of the public sphere with this propaganda, similar to the way that capitalism relies on ubiquitous advertising and hawking. Capitalism and Fascism both create a world in which your