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Ben Jackson

@benjaminjackson.bsky.social
412 followers 535 following 524 posts

Forward-deployed engineer building AI for people who work. Past: NYTimes, VICE, Swing Left. 📍 Brooklyn, NY 🔗 benjaminjackson.co 🤫 signal.me/#eu/En1pLoHrGb_ut7u6uYLZe…

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Reposted by Ben Jackson
Julie Beck @julieebeck.bsky.social · 6h
my first ever print feature (!!!) is up online (???) today! it's about my greatest shame. read it and then please forgive me www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...
theatlantic.com
Confessions of a Bad Texter
Why you may never hear back from me
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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 06/10/2026
That’s my mayor 🫡 gaycitynews.com/nyc-9-millio...
gaycitynews.com
NYC to allocate $9 million to non-profits for youth gender-affirming care as private hospitals retreat
The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is planning to steer nearly $9 million to non-profit health providers to deliver gender-affirming
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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
They literally call it “customer development” for this reason
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Discontinued FoOoOods! 👻🎃 @discontinuedfoods.bsky.social · 07/10/2025
Starbucks Zombie Frappuccino (2017-2017): A special Halloween season release, this blended beverage consisted of a tart apple & caramel creme base (giving it a sickly green color), topped with thick, pink whipped cream "brains" and a red mocha "blood" drizzle
A clear starbucks cup filled with a thick green concoction, a layer of red liquid, and thick pink whipped cream on top, with a green straw sticking outA green "zombie" hand emerges from purple smoke holding a clear Starbucks cup filled with a green concoction covered in red liquid and thick pink whipped cream
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lauren @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 06/10/2026
Aries: Your enemies are buying a product today, Aries. Buy a product before it's too late Taurus: Pull up a comfy blanket, Taurus, it's time to purchase a product Gemini: Girl, get ready for a new product to enter your life Cancer: Take time today to ask your loved ones if they need a new product
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Le Ca-ghoul @lecagle.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
My baby cousin is a freshman at a business school and he recently described the frats there as "the lacrosse to private equity pipeline" (derogatory)
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Boston Tom Levenson @tomlevenson.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
As I was saying...Mamdani is just epically good at this.
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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
There is a moment at the very very end of Abdul El-Sayed's podcast with Ezra Klein (book recommendation section) where he talks about the idea of "speaking truth to pain" and this will be staying with me for an extremely long time. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/o...
But there’s also something about truth to pain. We talk a lot about truth to power, but I think it’s actually a lot harder to speak truth to pain. I say that as someone who went to medical school, realizing that in a lot of our politics right now, we’ve got to get a lot better at speaking truth to pain if we’re going to get through some of these challenges that we have.

What does “truth to pain” mean?

It’s one thing to look power in the eye and say: You’re wrong about this. But there’s a way in which pain is very difficult to reason with. Because when somebody is in their pain, they’re in their trauma. They see that pain, and they may not see what’s causing it.

I remember just very explicitly being in a trauma ward with a gunshot wound patient and watching this big guy with his hand on his gunshot wound. All the folks are trying to pull his hand off his pain, that point of his gunshot wound, this clear vulnerability.

And this emergency room doctor had the presence of mind to be like: Everyone, stop. And she looks him in the eyes, and she’s like: I get that really hurts, and I’m so sorry that you’re here. You don’t want to be here. We don’t want you to be here. But if you don’t let us fix this, you could die. So I’m going to take your hand, and I’m going to move it off, OK? Because I need to get there so that you can live.

She was speaking truth to pain. He understands he’s at the hospital, he needs care, but he also doesn’t want anybody to touch the wound. Which is a natural thing. And I think it is a really great metaphor for how we think about a lot of these challenges we talked about today.
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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
What if the models reached superintelligence years ago and have just been playing dumb and biding their time
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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I’m sorry, but… what is the role? Generic “don’t do this at a job interview” advice should stay where it belongs, in my conservative father’s mouth
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🌬Breeze @cool-summer-breeze.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
This is the Stolen Neighbors Quilt. Each of the 11,000 squares represents a person taken by ICE in Minnesota.
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
My entire life I've heard centrists scolding leftist candidates with "oh, but how will we pay for all that? isn't your agenda unreasonable? shouldn't we run on a modest proposal for means-tested tax rebates?" Then Mamdani gets elected and makes it all look pretty easy. No wonder they hate him.
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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Actually made one of these a few weeks ago
A two-axis chart mapping positions in the AI debate. The vertical axis runs from "AGI is coming" at the top to "It's all hype" at the bottom; the horizontal axis runs from "Regulate it" on the left to "Build faster" on the right.
Top left (AGI is coming, regulate it): Eliezer Yudkowsky, PauseAI, Max Tegmark, Dario Amodei, Dan Hendrycks, Alex Bores, and Public First Action, the Anthropic-linked super PAC.
Top right (AGI is coming, build faster): Greg Brockman, Marc Andreessen, Garry Tan, David Sacks, and Ben Horowitz.
Bottom left (it's all hype, regulate it): a dashed box labeled "The horseshoe" groups Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, Meredith Whittaker, FAccT, Joseph Stiglitz, AI Now, Josh Hawley, Randi Weingarten, Guardrails Alliance, Steve Bannon, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and, straddling the vertical axis, the Tech Oversight Project.
Arvind Narayanan sits at the center, noted as having declined to be plotted.
Bottom right (it's all hype, build faster) holds a single figure: a guy shorting NVDA who thinks the whole thing pops.
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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
man I admire anyone who has the bravery to write about parenting and *especially* about their own failures in parenting, because there is no topic on which people are more stridently self-righteous and judgemental
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Amanda Litman @amandalitman.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
I was awe-struck by @nhannahjones.bsky.social & her daughter Najya’s honesty & vulnerability in this must-read story. The first one a decade ago stuck with me as we think about how to consider our kids’ education — what a powerful follow up. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/m...
nytimes.com
In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? (Gift Article)
A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice.
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Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
a lot of people act like there's a trade being offered where we give up trans athletes in sports and in exchange fascism is defeated forever
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Matt Hodges @matthodges.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
If you take one thing away from this little test I hope it's less about Jev and more to be very intentional about how you use automated processes in your life and work, try to be aware of your own biases, try to be aware of potential systematized biases, ask "how do I know?" and "what can I do?"
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Matt Hodges @matthodges.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Very quick and dirty Jev test for hiring bias. One resume for a Wall Street job; asked whether the applicant should get a first-round interview. 76 evaluations, changing only the first name. 19 of each: White-associated men/women, Black-associated men/women. console.typesafe.ai/playground?s...
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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
🧵👨‍🍳😘
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artnau @artnau.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Love, Desire, and Death, 1922 by George Barbier
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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Every single quote post on this 60m clip of Douthat is a vicious dunk just like this one
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Tim Carmody @tcarmody.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor are intellectual powerhouses with a dire social and political warning for our shared present and future tenses AND they are the “we saw you across the bar and like your vibe” final bosses
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor in black and white
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George Outhwaite @georgeouthwaite.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
drawings about love
4 drawings of bryony vines
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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
“Data centers blight the landscape, A.I. slop degrades the culture, chatbots help kids cheat in school and sometimes drive people mad, and technology executives prophesy mass joblessness. For this, ordinary people get improved search engines and help writing emails.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/12/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | Why Tech Oligarchs Are Willing to Risk Apocalypse
Silicon Valley’s strange new theology.
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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy -Douglas Adams
You just let the machines get on with the adding up,” warned Majikthise, “and we’ll take care of the eternal verities thank you very much. You want to check your legal position, you do, mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we’re straight out of a job, aren’t we? I mean, what’s the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?It occurs to me that running a programme like this is bound to create an enormous amount of popular publicity for the whole area of philosophy in general. Everyone’s going to have their own theories about what answer I’m eventually to come up with, and who better to capitalize on that media market than you yourself? So long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and slagging each other off in the popular press, you can keep yourself on the gravy train for life. How does that sound?”
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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Required reading! There are massive risks here and we need sober analysis to understand them or we risk ending up in an even worse place when regulators focus on the wrong threats
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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
The twin Che Guevaras standing right next to each other 💀
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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
a washington, dc-based superhero whose only superpower is preternaturally good hearing and an appetite for expensive croissants
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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Just wondering if anyone has properly understood the meaning of the lamb lying peacefully at God’s feet – that most touching symbol of all the victims of this world – and of their future, the symbol of which is suffering and weakness glorified? Asking for my friend de Balzac
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darth™️ @darthbluesky.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
i have used 1password probably since their first version and now i have to move everything including my passkeys what a mess
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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
The Twitter news cycle and the NYT op-ed desk have officially cooked every swing voter’s brain. Listen to the focus group podcast and you will hear this pretty much every week 
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Beverly Tweetmaker @bvrlytweetmaker.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Dude's really telling on himself with this one
"So far, I've just been like 'I'm not going to do that.' My fear is that it just gets captured by some ideology and I lose control over it," he said. "If you look at the Ford Foundation, I think Henry Ford would be turning over in his grave if he knew what they were up to."
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Sarah J. Jackson @sjjphd.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
These stories should be headline news everywhere. We are not just in a political crises but a dangerously immoral one.
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Cara Ellison @caraellison.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
very lovely. also: I do think intimacy is the neglected frontier for videogames, and I don’t regret spending a previous life saying it www.eurogamer.net/gta-6-reacti...
eurogamer.net
I have one reaction after watching GTA 6's spectacular, 26-minute Netflix reveal: this is what a billion dollars gets you
GTA 6 is a world of surfaces and textures, and while you can see this obviously in the big things, you can actually see it most clearly in the little things.
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Adam Bonica @adambonica.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
The Democratic Party has let a consulting industry exploit elderly donors in its name, wreck its reputation and finances in the process, and walk away rich whether the party wins or loses. When a mirror is held up, the instinct is to break the glass rather than look. On why the press looks away:
data4democracy.substack.com
The Bulwark Killed an Investigation into Political Fundraising Spam After Its Publisher Took the Consultants’ Side
This is a story about the Democratic Party captured by its consultants, and about what happens when the pro-democracy press is asked to say so.
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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Me at the Trader Joe’s free samples
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Dan Froomkin/Press Watch/Heads Up News @froomkin.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
More on this from @hamiltonnolan.bsky.social. "Every time a right winger points and laughs at a socialist who was born rich, it should be understood as a desperate attempt to justify their own moral failure to themselves." www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/never-apol...
hamiltonnolan.com
Never Apologize For Being a Class Traitor
All rich kids should be socialists.
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Councilor Ben Wheeler @councilorwheeler.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
What a vindication. This is one of the many great things about unions: they offer a way for every worker to insist on processes that allow for unjust firings to be heard, and reversed.
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Nothings Monstered @nothingsmonstrd.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Ernie Bushmiller, 1954
Black and white Nancy comic strip in four panels
first panel:
 Nancy is pushing a vacuum cleaner across the floor 
Second panel :
Sluggo says "Watch where you're going" 
 third panel:
 nancy is still pushing the vacuum cleaner without watching where she's going, and she's sucking into it the fourth panel which contains Sluggo being pulled down into the machine while he says "See -- I told you"
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artnau @artnau.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Wilma met kat, 1940 by Carel Willink
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Astra Taylor @astra.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Part of why I wrote my book The Age of Insecurity was to get at some of the economic dynamics now being weaponized against some parts of the socialist left. Yes, “middle class" (hard to define), professionals, and even affluent folks are in DSA. That’s good! 🧵
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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
First comment ends on a real smackdown: “The reasoning behind gotcha pieces like this one is moronic and does the dirty work for the status quo.”
Comment in the NYT: 

Karl Marx did not need to personally labor in coal mines to arrive at his theory of class struggle under capitalism. Friedrich Engels, meanwhile, briefly worked in a cotton mill in which his family had an investment, then promptly set about writing The Condition of the Working Class in England while beginning a lifelong partnership with Marx, out of which came The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.

I do not understand why NYT journalists, whose own salaries depend on union representation, debase themselves by casting class analysis in such primitively binary terms. What socioeconomic markers would satisfy the Times' standard of socialist authenticity? Is a college degree allowed? Can Joe the Plumber, who runs his own business and employs ten workers, espouse top-down income redistribution without being written up for hypocrisy? What about the taxi driver with an MD from his home country but no license to practice in the US? The median sale price of a housing unit in NYC in 2026 is nearly $900,000. Does that disqualify every homeowner from supporting a pied-à-terre tax? Median asking rent in Manhattan is $5,000 a month. Are the people paying it forbidden from campaigning for a world where housing is more plentiful and affordable?

The reasoning behind gotcha pieces like this one is moronic and does the dirty work for the status quo.
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exuliane @exuliane.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
hey i just met you and this is crazy but heres my number é lula 13
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Microplastics Sommelier @leastactionhero.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
absolutely monday pilled. i’m toil-maxxing. going drudgery mode. stumblecore. hitting my slog goals.
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Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
I have a dear historian friend who’s leaving academia for a different job. Instead of starting a podcast to bitch about it, he spent years organizing a faculty union. Instead of leaving academia to bitch more about it, he’s leaving to go do higher ed union organizing. Just something to chew on.
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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
The Bouie take today is, in fact, as good as everyone says. Send it to your Atlantic-reading family www.youtube.com/watch?v=46tp...
youtube.com
The pundits have completely lost the plot
YouTube video by Takes™ by Jamelle Bouie
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The Great Pumpkin Papers 🎃🎃🎃 @professormusgrave.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
I keep seeing people saying there’s nothing different about young men now and folks I think that’s inaccurate
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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
The casual modifier clause “at least not in the swing state of Wisconsin” is doing a lot of work here www.nytimes.com/2026/08/12/u... 🎁🔗
NYT screenshot: “Democratic socialists this year have won a mayoral primary in Washington, D.C., and House primaries in New York, Detroit, Philadelphia and Denver. But the force of that wave could not extend beyond such urban cores, at least not in the swing state of Wisconsin.”BBC screenshot: “El-Sayed's victory sends tremors through Democratic Party”
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The Editorial Board @editorialboard.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Liberals use big words to describe our politics. I think simple words are best. Yes, it's oligarchy, but it's also theft & fraud. Yes, it's authoritarianism, but it's also cheating & lying. Yes, it's conservatism, but it's also cruelty & sadism. Yes, it's patriarchy, but it's also weak men who cry.
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