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Damon Beres

@damonberes.com
31K followers 651 following 1.7K posts

Journalist focused on the effects of technology on people and the planet, senior editor at The Atlantic // Writing EASY MODE, a book on tech, humanity, and the value of friction, for Scribner SIGNAL: Damon.63 📨 dberes@theatlantic.com ✴️ damonberes.com

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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 27/09/2026
✍️ ✍️ x.com/alexandr_wan...
x.com
Alexandr Wang (@alexandr_wang) on X
Why I'm Building Muse
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 27/09/2026
Anyway, as @lilashroff.bsky.social wrote:
theatlantic.com
It’s All Fun and Games Until You Give AI Your Credit Card
AI personal assistants are now acting on people’s behalf in the real world—and all sorts of strange things are going wrong.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 27/09/2026
It seems pretty good about deleting on command when you remember what you want it to scrub, though I don’t know that there’s a good way to verify it’s actually cleared data out (and I wouldn’t trust Meta for even half a second)—and I suspect the UX design will lead most not to revisit these choices.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 27/09/2026
i.e., you might upload bank statements on Monday, give it Gmail access on Tuesday, health records on Wednesday, and by next Friday have done enough in the chat window to totally bury and forget about all of this while Meta maintains access to the data in perpetuity.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 27/09/2026
Something I’ve noticed tinkering with Meta’s Muse product (the agentic AI): Unlike, say, Claude, the entire thing runs as one ongoing stream-of-consciousness chat rather multiple one-offs according to task. Feels like it’s made to lead people to forget about the data they load the thing up with?
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 23/09/2026
paging @matteowong.bsky.social
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 23/09/2026
Too many great lines to share from the new essay by @jenishawo.bsky.social, so read it:
theatlantic.com
The Private-School Decision
I admire Nikole Hannah-Jones’s choice. I am making a different one.
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Reposted by Damon Beres
Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum.wsocial.eu · 14/09/2026
Trump's foreign policy is not isolationist. On the contrary, his ideologues want to build an international empire run by far-right political movements who serve American crypto, mineral and tech companies, many with links to the president. Read more here: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...
theatlantic.com
Empire of Grift
Far-right ideologues have transformed American foreign policy into a tool of private gain and antidemocratic reaction.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 19/09/2026
You don’t say
nytimes.com
Anthropic Pursues IPO Despite Its A.I. Safety Warnings
The company is expected to reach $100 billion in annualized revenue this year, even as chief executive Dario Amodei calls for slowing down development of some advanced A.I. models.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 16/09/2026
“while Huang was onstage ripping Amodei’s doomerism at a taping of the popular tech-industry podcast All-In, Trump called his cellphone. Huang put him on speaker, and as the live audience hooted and clapped, the two men bonded over their shared view that, as Trump put it, doomerism is ‘all a hoax.’”
theatlantic.com
The Most Powerful Man in AI Isn’t Worried at All
Jensen Huang: not a doomer
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 16/09/2026
“Four deaths in roughly four weeks suggest that the state is in the midst of an enormous outbreak. The Pennsylvania health department lists total cases at 693 … But considering that measles kills about one to three of every 1,000 children it infects, the actual number is likely much larger.”
theatlantic.com
Pennsylvania’s Measles Outbreak Is Enormous
The two latest deaths suggest that the true number of infections is much larger than reported.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 12/09/2026
“they want to be our overlords and our edge lords … You can be a joke and be really dangerous at the same time.”
nytimes.com
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor Say the End of the World Is Now on the Table
In a new book, the writers argue that a powerful coalition of “end times fascists” is just fine with the earth’s demise.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 06/09/2026
i think “X-T-e-ink”
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 06/09/2026
ALL HAIL THE XTEINK
theatlantic.com
This Tiny E-Reader Is the Single Best Piece of Technology in Years
The $70 Xteink X3 puts Silicon Valley to shame.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 28/08/2026
"You will no longer need an inner life, says this logic. You will no longer even be you. You will be data points and dollar signs. You will be ubiquitous, self-obliterating dots."
theatlantic.com
The Limits of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity
The visionary artist once challenged ways of seeing—until she was seen by everyone.
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Reposted by Damon Beres
Matteo Wong @matteowong.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Can the climate playbook be used to harness the AI backlash into a pointed movement? And could such a movement overcome the wealth of Silicon Valley? On a new group (with very experienced founders) placing a bet on just that: www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
theatlantic.com
The AI Backlash Is Transforming Into a Political Movement
A new group is targeting tech companies and the government with the climate movement’s playbook.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 28/08/2026
A new organization, founded by climate activists associated with the Sunrise Movement and 350.org, is targeting AI. Rather than articulating a specific plan for the future, they're hoping to draw on populist outrage in the present: “We’ve aligned around saying no” @matteowong.bsky.social
theatlantic.com
The AI Backlash Is Transforming Into a Political Movement
A new group is targeting tech companies and the government with the climate movement’s playbook.
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Reposted by Damon Beres
Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 27/08/2026
Clarifying analysis on Meta's legal settlement, via @kait.bsky.social. The product adjustments are smaller than they appear (and might even be considered to violate the First Amendment) while Meta also maintains tremendous power over the social-media industry www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
This may seem like quite a lot of changes—especially considering that the case is not even the end of Meta’s legal problems. The company is still facing numerous lawsuits filed by individuals and school districts. “If Meta is going to resolve all its pending liabilities, this is only the first of several large checks it is going to have to write,” Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, told me. But today’s settlement shows that the tech company was able to “buy out one of the most serious legal threats” it faced, and it managed to do so without acquiescing to demands that might have been truly destructive to its business. Meta will have to give teen users the ability to opt in to a chronological, non-personalized feed, but the company does not have to pivot away from the default algorithmic recommendations that many critics characterize as addictive. It seems unlikely that many people will select a straightforward chronological feed; Meta has tested this change before and found that users did not like it.As for the one-hour limit, in an email, a Meta spokesperson told me that the average American teenager spends about 66 minutes a day on Instagram anyway, and that teen activity across platforms accounts for less than 1 percent of the company’s revenue. So perhaps these were battles that the company could afford to lose.The attorneys general “made a bunch of guesses” as to what kinds of changes might help kids, Goldman said, and have pulled off a major success in getting Meta to accept them. Many of these interventions might have suffered First Amendment challenges if they’d been pursued by other methods. (For instance, if the plaintiffs had actually won at trial.) Mark Bartholomew, a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law, agreed, writing to me that “the state AGs got Meta to consent to dramatic limits on its own speech that Congress was unlikely to go for and the courts were unlikely to bless.”The company is now promoting the changes widely and calling on other social-media platforms to follow suit. It has also agreed to pay an additional $5.3 billion if TikTok and YouTube, which are also defendants in the ongoing litigation, implement restrictions and pay into the settlement. Although this is not the end of Meta’s legal battles—personal-injury lawsuits similar to the one it lost in March will likely keep coming—the company has won the opportunity to select its own restrictions, define its own limits, and discard its own deal-breakers, effectively setting a standard that the rest of the industry will be expected to abide by without having had any say in its creation.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 27/08/2026
Also great from @masnick.com: "We just spent three years teaching the entire industry that if you do research on child safety, you’ll have it held against you. Do we really think that all of this is going to actually enable anyone to figure out what works to help actual kids?"
techdirt.com
Meta Just Paid Nearly $17 Billion To Make Sure It Gets To Write The Kid Safety Rules For Every Other Social Media Platform
By now you've almost certainly heard the news that Meta has settled with 52 state and local Attorneys General who had sued the company in some form or another over child safety on Meta's platforms. The headlines are all covering the basics: the years-long case these states filed against Meta ends, and Meta pays somewhere...
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 27/08/2026
Clarifying analysis on Meta's legal settlement, via @kait.bsky.social. The product adjustments are smaller than they appear (and might even be considered to violate the First Amendment) while Meta also maintains tremendous power over the social-media industry www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
This may seem like quite a lot of changes—especially considering that the case is not even the end of Meta’s legal problems. The company is still facing numerous lawsuits filed by individuals and school districts. “If Meta is going to resolve all its pending liabilities, this is only the first of several large checks it is going to have to write,” Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, told me. But today’s settlement shows that the tech company was able to “buy out one of the most serious legal threats” it faced, and it managed to do so without acquiescing to demands that might have been truly destructive to its business. Meta will have to give teen users the ability to opt in to a chronological, non-personalized feed, but the company does not have to pivot away from the default algorithmic recommendations that many critics characterize as addictive. It seems unlikely that many people will select a straightforward chronological feed; Meta has tested this change before and found that users did not like it.As for the one-hour limit, in an email, a Meta spokesperson told me that the average American teenager spends about 66 minutes a day on Instagram anyway, and that teen activity across platforms accounts for less than 1 percent of the company’s revenue. So perhaps these were battles that the company could afford to lose.The attorneys general “made a bunch of guesses” as to what kinds of changes might help kids, Goldman said, and have pulled off a major success in getting Meta to accept them. Many of these interventions might have suffered First Amendment challenges if they’d been pursued by other methods. (For instance, if the plaintiffs had actually won at trial.) Mark Bartholomew, a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law, agreed, writing to me that “the state AGs got Meta to consent to dramatic limits on its own speech that Congress was unlikely to go for and the courts were unlikely to bless.”The company is now promoting the changes widely and calling on other social-media platforms to follow suit. It has also agreed to pay an additional $5.3 billion if TikTok and YouTube, which are also defendants in the ongoing litigation, implement restrictions and pay into the settlement. Although this is not the end of Meta’s legal battles—personal-injury lawsuits similar to the one it lost in March will likely keep coming—the company has won the opportunity to select its own restrictions, define its own limits, and discard its own deal-breakers, effectively setting a standard that the rest of the industry will be expected to abide by without having had any say in its creation.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 26/08/2026
congrats!!
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 26/08/2026
"I like the phrase Human Reserved because it makes me think of nature reserves" is, I think, not intended to sound as bleak as it does, but yeesh www.gatesnotes.com/work/make-ai...
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 26/08/2026
"Her parents were so poor that they paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal. As a girl, she sang songs on her porch into a fake mic fashioned from a tin can and a tobacco stick, envisioning herself at the Grand Ole Opry." American legend through and through. @skornhaber.bsky.social
theatlantic.com
We’re Living in the World Dolly Parton Built
Country music is surging, female singer-songwriters are on top, and audiences crave honest voices like hers.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 25/08/2026
We are going backwards
theatlantic.com
The Least-Vaccinated Kindergartners in Decades
American children are going back to school without the protection they need.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 25/08/2026
Preordered 🤝
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 25/08/2026
Truly one of the things that brings us closer to "launch computer into sun" territory
theatlantic.com
Logging in Was Never Supposed to Be This Complicated
Please not another two-factor authentication code.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 24/08/2026
last three words of this URL slug are "strange-silly-offbeat"
local12.com
Police request public's help to find suspect who picked up $30 off ground in Walmart
A police department took to social media and asked the public to help them identify a suspect who found $30 on the ground in Walmart.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 23/08/2026
have u already gotten your squab on a stick
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 23/08/2026
oh … my god
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 22/08/2026
jfc
Childrens book: “The ABCs of Crypto”
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 21/08/2026
I laughed
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 21/08/2026
“I’ve been telling my wife I have context rot for months”
theatlantic.com
Why Is Everyone in Silicon Valley Talking Like That?
Did you mix something up? Maybe you’re just “hallucinating.”
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 20/08/2026
Font is here
wendymurphyonline.gumroad.com
Rose-Tinted | A Pixel Type Family
Rose-Tinted is a pixel-based type family.It’s inspired by retro games such as Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, which approached pixel typography with the appearance of italics...
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 20/08/2026
Thought my lil Xteink ereader was a solid candidate for a pixel font and was delighted to find a great one designed by @wendyleftmealone.bsky.social. Look at how presh it is:
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 20/08/2026
Matteo was being driven mad by all the AI slop in the world around him. I invited him to sit thoughtfully with his discomfort. He went to an exhibit on fauvism at SFMOMA. And there he saw ... more AI 😓
theatlantic.com
Another Pot of Paint Thrown in the Public’s Face
Does AI actually belong in an art museum?
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Reposted by Damon Beres
Matteo Wong @matteowong.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Is it slop or am I grumpy? (Also: 3D fauvism?) www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
theatlantic.com
Another Pot of Paint Thrown in the Public’s Face
Does AI actually belong in an art museum?
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 20/08/2026
but that doesn't really seem like the point does it
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 20/08/2026
(full context) www.cbsnews.com/news/blueber...
cbsnews.com
FDA upgrades recall of frozen blueberries sold at Publix to highest health risk level
Recalled frozen blueberries and mixed berries that could be contaminated with E. coli pose the most severe category of health risk, according to the FDA.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 20/08/2026
you don't know my life
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 20/08/2026
you don't see how autonomous drone swarms targeting civilian airports is a terrifying milestone?
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 20/08/2026
🫡
tweet from unusual_whales: Blueberry recall upgraded to FDA's highest risk level, 'reasonable probability of death,' per the DailyMail
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 20/08/2026
Good grief. I'm not so naive that I view this as altogether different from human-written SEO or social-media bait, but the web really is just becoming synthetic swampland
pewresearch.org
How Much of the Internet Is Written With AI?
In a random sample of 10,000 webpages collected in July 2026, one-in-ten show signs of being written or substantially edited by AI.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 20/08/2026
Why are they called the X-Men? Now you know
“X-Men, for ex-tra power!” So says Professor Xavier in the first issue of the comic.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 19/08/2026
A lovely summation of the spirit of comics at their best, imo: "Yani was an intellectual, but he also had a real issue with snobbery. Which was part of his vision with Vertical, to create this contradictory beast ... to find the most challenging material in these contexts that WERE entertainment."
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 19/08/2026
The guy behind Roku's AI slop channel thinks it will give the world a way to discover the “Steven Spielberg of tomorrow” but I suspect it will not
theatlantic.com
The Home Slopping Network
A new channel on Roku’s TV service offers all-you-can-eat AI programming. I binged eight hours of it.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 18/08/2026
Surely this isn't any indication of some kind of terminal descent etc
nytimes.com
‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ Lenders Pitch Loans for Needs Like Electricity and Rent
The rapid growth of pay-later loans raises questions about whether their popularity is driven by consumer preference or desperation.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 17/08/2026
Extremely clever work @emanuelmaiberg.bsky.social 🫡
404media.co
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 13/08/2026
Shipping rather than prioritizing safety has been the issue literally since the initial launch of ChatGPT; employees can say they have concerns but nobody working at OpenAI could plausibly claim ignorance of this longstanding problem.
theatlantic.com
Inside the Chaos at OpenAI
Sam Altman’s weekend of shock and drama began a year ago, with the release of ChatGPT.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 13/08/2026
"The stand he’s taking is a function of where he sits." @willoremus.com
theatlantic.com
Mark Zuckerberg’s Convenient Truth
The Meta CEO has a new message now that his company is losing the AI race.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 12/08/2026
I'm skeptical of AI companies and definitely raise an eyebrow whenever they try to sell one of these security incidents, but, yeah, it's getting pretty bad out there. New piece by @matteowong.bsky.social
theatlantic.com
It May Be Time to Panic About AI
Bots are starting to conspire with one another. Can they be reeled back in?
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