Paris Marx

@parismarx.com

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canada-france border crossing in fortune, nl
Until Canada gets off U.S. tech platforms and services, the government, major companies, and even much of the modern military hardware the government is procuring from the United States is in jeopardy. The U.S. government can request Canadian data stored in the servers of U.S. cloud companies, it has weaponized our use of those services to expand its surveillance apparatus, and it can even suspend access to any of those services at a moment’s notice. The libertarian framing of the internet as a place of freedom and expression was a potent mask for a project U.S. lawmakers always understood was imperial in nature: to defend its government’s power and geopolitical position. Now it has countries around the world exactly where it wants them. They have to choose: will they act quickly to take back that power, or accept the subservient position the United States has designed for them?
As the global power of the United States is threatened, so, too, is their global market share. If the U.S. government can’t push other countries around, it’s easier for those countries to crack down on U.S. tech companies or even get rid of them. More still, as Chinese tech companies become more globally competitive, U.S. tech executives need the United States to contain China to protect their bottom line. The new political orientation of Silicon Valley is a far cry from Barlow’s declaration three decades ago, but it’s a more honest description of the relationship that has long existed between the tech industry and the U.S. government. It may have taken different faces in different moments, but the global expansion of the tech industry has always been part of the U.S. imperial project.
In a 22-point manifesto posted to the company’s X account on April 18, Karp argued that Silicon Valley “owes a moral debt” to the United States and needs to defend not just its power, but to build weapons to help its military. Western pluralism, in his view, was a fatal mistake, as some cultures had simply “proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.” There was no point in trying to put them on the same level as the West. Rather than trying to push the government away, Karp and his new alliance of openly right-wing billionaires were explicitly championing the essential nature of the alliance between Silicon Valley and the Trump administration. It’s a political bet as much as it is a statement of how the politics of the tech industry have shifted.
As countries became dependent on the products and services of U.S. tech companies, it wasn’t just the companies themselves that prospered. Their profits flowed back to the United States and the U.S. government gained leverage over those countries; leverage it began to openly flaunt once Donald Trump returned to office. The imperial nature of the project Washington and Silicon Valley had been collaborating on for decades was revealed for all to see, and the tech billionaires behind it shifted their rhetoric to reflect it.
Barlow wanted the internet to be akin to a virtual hippie commune, and he felt that meant governments had to be kept far away. But by casting government as the enemy, he left the door open to another powerful societal force to shape the course of the internet’s development: corporations. Barlow’s framing, which came to define much digital rights activism, conflicted with the way many in government saw the potential the internet offered to maintain the power of the United States. In 1989, several years before the effort to privatize the internet would kick into high gear, then Senator Al Gore was pushing a bill that would direct more money into funding high-performance computing technologies. He was interested in the field, but he saw another benefit to spurring innovation in the sector. “The nation which most completely assimilates high-performance computing into its economy will very likely emerge as the dominant intellectual, economic, and technological force in the next century,” he told his fellow senators when introducing his bill.
On the eve of Alberta's pipeline application, Carney concedes emissions will be higher 'We can't afford to restrain the growth of an important part of our energy mix, oil and gas, to meet a short-term goal,' Carney said
Elon Musk: I'll Put a Man on Mars in 10 Years, published in April 2011
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how the digital services and platforms we’ve come to rely on over the past couple decades have affected how we act, how we see ourselves, and how the world around us even functions. I feel like we’re all becoming familiar with that when it comes to things like social media apps, which is part of the reason the efforts to regulate them are getting so much attention. But there are so many smaller, pernicious ways our lives have been transformed by the screens and apps that have been pushed on us in recent years — and in most cases we don’t take the time to consider how they affect us.
Once I arrived in Lisbon, I wanted to stop using Bolt, but I found it hard to give up that sense of control. I downloaded a local taxi app and when I used it I was flooded with worries that weren’t previously there: Would the driver even find me? Would I know how long it would take them to get there? Were there even many taxis in the area? Would I be able to easily pay in the car? They were mostly foolish concerns, but were borne of giving back a certain degree of autonomy to the driver and the anxiety of being in a place I wasn’t familiar with. Back in Canada, using taxis was no problem. I deleted the Bolt app — it wouldn’t work there anyway — and simply went back to the companies I was used to relying on. I didn’t think twice about it. But a few weeks later in Copenhagen, I needed to get a ride somewhere and my mind immediately went to downloading Bolt again. The sense of security it claimed to provide had worked its way into my psyche. I didn’t give in, but I was fascinated by the staying power it had over me.
When you open the app, you can see the cars plying the roads of the digital map on your screen. You choose which kind of driver you want, and can send them specific instructions. You watch them make their way toward you, until you enter the vehicle where very frequently you control the music and might even be offered snacks and amenities — all in the hope you’ll give the driver a good rating at the end. They likely won’t even try to speak with you unless you strike up a conversation. I’ve had some drivers tell me they can drive around for hours with customers not saying a word to them — an incredibly dehumanizing experience. All of these design decisions and impositions on workers are designed to give drivers the illusion of control, authority, and ultimately of power. It doesn’t matter that Uber has been known to fake the vehicles shown on the screen, has fought being covered by disability legislation, has been sued for failing to address sexual abuse by drivers, has tracked customers, and even used the data it holds to push up fares while driving down driver pay. Once you get used to that feeling of control, it’s hard to quit — something I found myself even after I left South Africa.
That changed when I went to South Africa. After having a number of people warn me about my safety and advise me not to use taxis, paired with how the malaria meds I was on were messing with my mental health, I finally gave in. I couldn’t bring myself to download Uber. Having written about its exploitative business model for a decade, that was still a bridge too far. So instead I opted for Bolt, the European alternative. It didn’t take long for me to see how so many people have been seduced into abandoning taxis for ride-hailing services over the past decade and a half — their attacks on workers’ rights, harms to transportation networks, and exploitation of customers be damned.
The industry wants us to feel this is all inevitable; that we have no means to fight back agains this wave of supposed progress. But around the world, regular people were showing that wasn’t true. They were taking matters into their own hands, and pushing back some of the most powerful companies in the world. As the tech industry abandons its climate targets and any pretense of having the public good in mind, these are stories we need to hear and learn from. In Hyperscale, I explain how we got to this place and why this scale of development is inherently unsustainable. I tell the stories of attempts to fight back in different parts of the world and, maybe most importantly, I show that we don’t have to go down this path. We can develop technology in a very different way that puts the public good at the forefront, not shareholder profits or billionaire dreams.
Hyperscale by Paris Marx. Coming October 20, 2026. An eye-opening account of how the data center boom is pushing our planet past its breaking point
Why? It’s all so a bunch of unimaginably wealthy tech companies can try to force us to use their chatbots and image generators regardless of whether we want to, and build massive data centers that are needed to power the technology. All those data centers need a specific kind of memory, and with all the demand major manufacturers are shifting production to the products that the data centers need instead of those that go into consumer electronics. There are already ample reasons to oppose their project: from the harmful effects of chatbots to the ways data centers are forcing up energy prices and throwing climate targets to the side. But now they’re even making our computers, game consoles, and our phones more expensive all in the name of their pursuit of power and profit.
When Valve finally disclosed the Steam Machine price, Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais helped explained how much things have changed in a short period of time. “Things that were a year ago, two years ago, commodity things, you’d just pay the normal price for it and it’s all good,” he said, “now you have to negotiate really hard just to secure a few thousand. And there's so many more people in line in front of you.” He suggested the company doesn’t even have long-term contracts, but essentially has to see what it can buy month by month.
Valve announced its Steam Machine would start at $1049, though many buyers will end up paying more than that, while Microsoft hiked prices of Xbox consoles by another $100-150. Those are staggering prices, but they only affect a certain segment of video gamers. The real blow came when Apple finally gave into increasing component costs, increasing the prices of Macs, iPads, HomePods, and Apple TV by up to 20%. iPhones were left out of this round, but that’s unlikely to remain the case when new models are announced in the fall. Outgoing CEO Tim Cook had signaled price increases were coming, telling the Wall Street Journal on June 17 that price increases were “unavoidable.” But the amount of the hike and how soon they came seemed to take people by surprise. And this will not be the end. Industry analysis suggests memory and chip prices are going to keep going up for the next few years, and that will force up the prices of all manner of electronics with it. The sub-$500 laptop is already disappearing as cheaper computers becoming completely uneconomical.
The Conscientious Objector, Patron Saint Holly Herndon
Chris Pavlovski Everyone needs to start uploading shorts to Rumble. We are closer than you might think. Taylor Lorenz I tried uploading my videos on Rumble and my content is defacto banned, people can't even search and find my name Chris Pavlovski What is your Rumble username or a link to one of your videos? That should not be happening.
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If you use AI to generate Lord of the Rings imagery, I hope you know that Tolkien wrote a trilogy about how much he personally hates you
If anyone needs better literacy on AI, it is not the public, but Carney himself. Canadians may not know exactly how a large language model functions, but they can see how the chatbots and image generators they’ve made possible have changed society for the worse in just a few years. At this point, I’d put far more trust in the data centre protesters and the concerned parents to craft a real AI strategy than in the prime minister.
This isn’t just a problem in the public sector. As Carney’s strategy seeks to boost business adoption of AI from 12 per cent today to 60 per cent in eight years, there are growing reports in the United States of companies pulling back on AI spending as the growing costs are not delivering the expected benefits or efficiencies. In May, the president of Uber even admitted that AI spending was becoming “harder to justify” as the company burned through its annual AI budget in just four months. It’s clear that Carney and Solomon have bought the industry narrative hook, line and sinker. They seem to firmly believe that chatbots are the foundation of the next industrial revolution, but that claim is based more on faith — and the hype needed to boost the valuations of AI companies — than on hard data. In fact, it requires actively ignoring the stories of the very real harms of the technology that continue to pile up.
There’s so much more than a literacy gap leading Canadians to push back against having generative AI forced on them in so many areas of their lives. The government itself should know better. It has already tried to roll out a chatbot to give Canadians tax advice, only for the auditor general to find it provided incorrect information 66 per cent of the time. More recently, its use of generative AI in immigration was found to have denied a woman’s permanent residency application after the system made up parts of her submission. Just weeks before Carney stood in front of medical workers from the University Health Network in Toronto to announce his strategy and talk about how beneficial AI will be in health care, the auditor general of Ontario had released a scathing report on AI scribes. Those chatbots, used to transcribe conversations between doctors and patients, are currently used by over 5,000 doctors in the province. But the technology sold as a means to save time had been regularly registering incorrect information and making up details about patients’ health. It was so bad that the AI scribes were recording the wrong drug prescribed to patients 60 per cent of the time.
The centrepiece of the strategy revolved around the concept of AI literacy. Carney acknowledged that trust needs to be established, which at this point is an understatement. Recent polling from the Angus Reid Institute suggests 68 per cent of Canadians want to see strict regulation of artificial intelligence, even if it slows development. But the prime minister is not seriously trying to address the concerns of those in the streets who oppose data centres, or of parents concerned about what chatbots might mean for their children. Instead, the government is positioning the disconnect over the exuberance of industry — not to mention Carney himself and Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon — and the public’s skepticism as the product of a knowledge gap. The plan seeks to invest millions to educate Canadians on how to use AI, in effect increasing their “literacy” of the technology. They will give chatbots to every university student, train 90,000 young people to be advocates of the technology in small and medium-sized businesses, and equip more than 3,000 educators to provide AI training accessible by all Canadians.
By early June, the Vancouver School Board started rolling out chatbot accounts for students aged 13 and over, despite the research suggesting it could affect students’ critical thinking skills and cognition, not to mention ongoing media reports about the effects chatbots have had on teens’ mental health. Those details should have been red flags for administrators; they certainly were for some parents. A group called Parents for AI Caution in Education Spaces is now seeking signatures to demand a two-year pause on the rollout of chatbots in Vancouver schools until there’s better data on the technology’s effects on students. Those ideas are spreading, not just in British Columbia but across Canada. But you might not get that impression if you listen to the federal government.
Dear Paris Marx, I hope you're doing well. My name is Dua Lipa, and I'm reaching out from Service95, the editorial platform and book club I founded. I recently came across Road to Nowhere and found its examination of the promises and realities of modern technology both insightful and timely.
banner saying trillionaire convention over a slaughterhouse with the ghost of chairman mao next to it
In short, it learns from other jurisdictions while moving the ball forward in other ways for its peers to learn from too. There is still work to be done and issues to work out, but policy experimentation rather than endlessly debating the perfect solution while getting nowhere is the way to actually make progress on reining in the power of major tech companies. I feel more than ever that the voices that act primarily to criticize and delay action are helping the tech companies avoid accountability, even though they often claim to be doing otherwise. Taking on the power of the US tech giants will be a marathon, not a sprint, but getting to the finish line requires us to actually start the race. Now that we have, we can improve as we go. Doing so requires us to push our governments to do better, but we shouldn’t ignore the signs that they are receptive to expert voices — and of learning from one another. It should have happened years ago, but we should take what we can get, and make sure we don’t make the same mistake of waiting far too long to take on the harms of AI chatbots too.
These developments make me more hopeful than I expected to be upon seeing the Canadian legislation. There are still a lot of questions that need to be answered about how precisely the different aspects of the plan will work, but to me it shows that the perfect is the enemy of the good and ultimately leaves the major tech companies off the hook for the harms they’re causing. There are clearly problems with social media age limits, but the experimentation with that policy got the ball rolling and also got the public engaged in talking about the issue. Just six months after Australia’s implementation of its age limit, we’re already seeing other countries learn from their experience and improve their own social media legislation in response, including by focusing more on those design and algorithmic interventions.
The media focused on the higher age limit — it’s been happening in other parts of the world and is easier for people not well-versed in tech policy to understand, including many journalists — but it was not really the centerpiece of the legislation. If anything, the age limit serves as a stick to get companies to comply with a broader set of design standards meant to make their platforms safer for younger users. Unlike in the Australian legislation, if platforms make those changes, they can win an exemption from the age limit. One of the problem is that the focus is on changing how platforms operate for younger users, when many of those “safer by design” standards should apply regardless of a user’s age to reduce the addictiveness, mental health impacts, and broader antisocial nature of what we call “social” media. The Canadian legislation also targets various types of harmful content that can spread on platforms, including those that sexualize children or incite violence, proposes the creation of a Digital Safety Commission that sounds not unlike Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, and begins to extend some of those standards and responsibilities to AI chatbots.
So many of the features of modern social media platforms were made to keep us engaged and feed us regular dopamine hits, from the infinite scroll of content to like buttons and incessant notifications. Algorithms have been designed over many years to surface content that will keep us hooked, often pulling in things that are sensational and extreme in place of posts from friends or family to ensure we spend more time with our screens, and as a result, looking at ads. There’s no question that has negative implications for young people — but it does for everyone else too. As I watched the effort to ban youth from social media spread around the world, this was precisely my concern: that the more effective policy would be sidelined for the easier and more populist one. That instead of targeting how the platforms function, we would simply kick off young people and call it a day. I saw that repeated as the debate around age limits finally came to Canada in recent months.
I’ve been quite clear from the beginning that I’m not inherently opposed to making it harder for young people to access social media platforms, given the negative personal and social effects they have. After years of handwringing, I felt we needed to start taking swings — even if they were imperfect ones. The question for me has always been more centered around whether the policy is effective and is delivering the outcomes we actually want. That’s where I’ve been worried that putting so much focus on age limits was leading us in the wrong direction.
Since Australia took up the cause of higher age limits on social media in 2024, the push for such policies has spread like wildfire. A ban on under-16s came into effect down under in December 2025, and since then another 41 countries have either implemented their own or begun taking actions in that direction. There’s no denying the policy is a controversial one. On one side, you have parents and advocates of children’s safety pointing to the harms of social media addiction and the type of content that can be pushed at teens when they use the platforms. Pushing back against them are privacy advocates and digital rights campaigners who worry about how all that data to verify people’s ages is going to be used and whether it makes sense to limit young people’s access to online spaces altogether.
Agentic AI spurred a boom in mobile app releases, but there is no sign of these apps gaining traction
68% say government must heavily regulate AI, even if it slows development 74% doubt any government can keep pace with AI 68% would oppose a large AI data centre near their home 79% support taxing companies that replace workers with AI
Graph showing more than 12 gigawatts of planned data center capacity in Alberta, compared to low hundreds of millions of megawatts in other provinces.
I’m reminded of a conversation I had with science-fiction author Tim Maughan a few years back where we discussed the complex infrastructures that govern our lives, and which had become more apparent to people as supply chains broke down during the pandemic. But it’s not just the infrastructures; it’s how digital technology and algorithms have made them infinitely more complex, to such a degree that they can even be hard for humans to comprehend exactly what is happening in some supply lines or financial trades because so much has been given over to computers. We’re building a world that is harder for us humans to understand, where things move faster than the speed at which we can follow them, and where the quantity of information or data we’re expected to process feels designed for computers rather than humans. My desire to pull back is not going to solve that; it’s simply an admission that I can’t keep up — at least not with all of it — and I need to find a more deliberate way to be informed without being overwhelmed. Better filtering how I experience social media — and to what degree I even use it at all — is just one part of that.
Every single day we’re flooded with so many stories we’re supposed to keep track of: the latest in the Trump saga, what’s happening with negotiations in the Strait of Hormuz, the new locations where bombs have dropped through the Middle East or in Ukraine, the newest ridiculous statement from our tech overlords about how AI is the future, the most recent stats on the environmental consequences of their hubris, any number of influencer dramas we’re supposed to know to engage in online discourse, and truly, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Unlike in decades past, we don’t just get these updates from the morning paper or the evening news broadcast: they’re never-ending, finding themselves not just in our feeds or our inboxes, but so often pushed to the computers constantly tethered to our beings so we can never escape the firehose of information. For a while now, I’ve been finding it stressful to try to keep up, but I think I’m finally arriving at the moment where I give up and simply accept that there’s no point in even trying.
For months I’ve been wondering what a social media feed would look like without all the Americans. It’s certainly no major observation that US discourse often dominates those platforms, at least in the English language, and even those of us outside the country itself are still sucked into the hour-by-hour developments of their dysfunctional political and social system in a way they would never pay attention to our own countries. On a platform like X or Threads, that would be quite difficult to achieve. But for all Bluesky’s problems, it does allow users to build their own custom feeds. So, the other night I took a half hour and did just that: made a feed with all the people I was following who are not based in the United States. I called it simply “Non-US follows.” To say it’s a more peaceful feed would be an understatement.
Non-US follows. Accounts I follow not based in the United States.
213. The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” [187] The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization. For this reason, it is worthwhile pausing to reflect on some aspects of how we, each in our own way, can cooperate in building the civilization of love. Without presuming to exhaust this theme, I would like to propose five paths toward daily and public responsibility: the need to disarm words, building peace through justice, adopting the perspective of victims, cultivating a healthy realism and reviving dialogue and multilateralism.
world book encyclopedia with a shark on the spine
And that’s exactly what Google users should do. There’s no denying that some Google services are more difficult to replace than others — trust me, I’ve been working on it — but for most of them, it’s easier than you might expect. Sure, it will take some adjusting and there will be some moving pains, but unless you want to be forced into the Gemini lifestyle, it’s time to make a plan to get off Google and start packing your virtual boxes for greener pastures. As I mentioned, I’ve been at this for a while — I wrote a whole guide to help people get off US tech. I replaced Gmail with Proton Mail, started using Qwant to replace Search, dropped Chrome for Vivaldi, experimented with Here WeGo to replace Maps, and replaced a bunch more services with alternatives in the Proton suite: Drive, Calendar, Pass, Authenticator, and most recently Meet. In short, deGoogling is possible if you’re willing to put in the work and accept some compromises. I’m not all the way there, but I’ve made a good dent.
Google made its ambitions quite obvious in its I/O announcements in 2023. On Tuesday, it laid out the next stage of its plan. The company made it clear there will be no escape from its generative AI products as AI hype continues to grip Silicon Valley, despite public sentiment very clearly turning against it and the data centers needed to power it. Search is the center of Google’s business and its power, and the company is taking a serious risk with the part of its business that drives more than half of its revenue. While there will still be a box on google.com, it will no longer be a directory to the web. Now it will be the portal to Google’s suite of services, but especially its various generative AI tools it wants to force its users to become reliant on. In part that’s to try to win the AI war against its competitors, but it’s hard not to imagine it’s also a play to build user dependency on generative AI before it has to further jack up its prices.
Long before Google introduced AI Overviews, it had added Featured Snippets to its search engine. Those snippets took sections from external websites and displayed them for the user, meaning they might get the answer they were looking for without having to leave Google. It was already a pain point for many publishers, but Overviews took that to the next level. Instead of just pulling from one source, Google began pulling from many and using its AI tools to output a few paragraphs bringing together tidbits from each of them. Just ignore how the prevalence for the AI system to output false answers — or hallucinations, in industry speak — meant Google was generating millions of inaccurate Overviews every hour. Its ambition was clear: it wanted more users to spend more time on Google and far less visiting other parts of the web.
Google’s power came from its dominance of search, and now that OpenAI had its own interface for people to find information, Google was supposedly in trouble. Microsoft’s Bing couldn’t steal significant market share from the king of search in the past, but expert commentators were certain that was about to change with ChatGPT. How wrong they were. In November 2022, Google controlled 92% of the search market. By last month, it hovered around 90%. Not the decimation all those smart tech watchers predicted. That should have been obvious. As I argued at the time, those claiming to foresee a decline of Google had it all wrong: ChatGPT wasn’t a threat to Google; the release of the chatbot by a company outside the top echelons of the tech industry set it free.
9 of 20 AI scribe programs had hallucinations, 12 of 20 had incorrect information, 6 of 20 had incomplete information.
Set Up Your Phone’s Always-On Display So You’re Unlocking It Less Often Break the pattern of unlocking your phone for one thing and then getting sucked into something else. Set up your lock screen to show all the information you need at a glance.
sea of tranquility by emily st john mandel
Yes, the currently airing sixth season of For All Mankind will be the final season of the show. Apple TV officially confirmed that Season 6 will conclude the multi-generation alternate-history sci-fi series.
a happy elephant
Out of a possible 100, the platforms received the following scores* TikTok 56 (+0 points) Instagram 41 (-4 points) Facebook 40 (-5 points) Threads 39 (-1 point) YouTube 30 (-11 points) X 29 (-1 point) * With 2025 Score Comparison