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jasmine sun

@jasmine.bsky.social
3.2K followers 243 following 149 posts

anthropologist of disruption / writing jasmi.news / san francisco

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Reposted by jasmine sun
Jeremy Diamond ☕️ @dmnd.me · 05/08/2026
This is surprisingly comprehensive and informative on the politics of data centers. I wanted to pull out a few big things that are difficult to face for pros, antis, and in some cases both. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | The A.I. Giants Weren’t Prepared for This (Gift Article)
Jasmine Sun, a writer covering technology, takes us into the backlash against A.I. data centers.
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Neil Turkewitz @neilturkewitz.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
“I think a lot of the public backlash to AI isn’t explained by people thinking the technology has no use at all…It’s AI as sort of an avatar for a small group of Silicon Valley billionaires’ ability to impose their vision of the world onto everybody else without their consent.” @jasmine.bsky.social
nytimes.com
Opinion | The A.I. Giants Weren’t Prepared for This (Gift Article)
Jasmine Sun, a writer covering technology, takes us into the backlash against A.I. data centers.
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Taylor Lorenz @taylorlorenz.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
"Until the deeper cultural problems are addressed, the data center backlash will only recreate itself in other forms. If people are this angry at a building sitting and paying taxes on unused land, something deep has gone very wrong."
jasmi.news
No Data Centers In My Backyard
money, power, and populism in the AI buildout
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Luke Andrews @attaboy.ca · 03/08/2026
Terrific and uniquely humanizing reporting by @jasmine.bsky.social on data center politics in small town Wisconsin. There’s undoubtedly misinformation involved, but far more apparent is the clumsy and secretive approach of the big companies involved.
jasmi.news
No Data Centers In My Backyard
money, power, and populism in the AI buildout
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
thank you!
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Rory Truex @rorytruex.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
Starting a new initiative this summer, weekly live events on Substack about the core issues facing our democracy, featuring great speakers. This Thursday, 1PM ET, an hour with the great @jasmine.bsky.social on all things work, AI, and the emerging populist backlash. Event link in replies.
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Miriam Elder @miriamelder.bsky.social · 02/05/2026
Really thoroughly reported piece here, impressively done www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
thanks!!
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Dan Froomkin/Press Watch/Heads Up News @froomkin.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
I found this enlightening and disturbing, with an unexpected silver lining: “The technology is an opportunity for gutsy politicians… to push ideas that are usually too radical for moderate voters to swallow.” (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/o... Kudos to @jasmine.bsky.social
nytimes.com
Opinion | Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass
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The San Francisco Standard @sfstandard.com · 01/04/2026
AI is moving faster than anyone can keep up with — including the people building it. So we're bringing in reinforcements. On April 9, join us for a live taping of “Pacific Standard Time," with journalist @jasmine.bsky.social to make sense of the chaos. Enter to win tickets: bit.ly/3QfhdYU
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 17/03/2026
"Sam Altman has predicted that large language models will soon be capable of 'fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics" — but, "might be able to extrude only something equivalent to 'a real poet’s okay poem'" @jasmine.bsky.social on what sets writing apart
theatlantic.com
The Human Skill That Eludes AI
Why can’t language models write well?
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
thank you for sharing!!
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
🙏
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
the real AI alignment problem is Pete Hegseth. here’s my explainer & take on Anthropic vs. the Pentagon — jasmi.news/p/ai-pentagon
jasmi.news
AI vs. the Pentagon
the real alignment problem is Pete Hegseth
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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
Today’s pod is with one of my favorite writers covering the culture of technology in the Bay Area. @jasmine.bsky.social came on to describe the AI boom/hype from ground level in SF and we get deep into what the people building these tools actually believe www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/202...
theatlantic.com
What Do the People Building AI Believe?
Inside San Francisco’s AI subculture
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
thank you for having me!! so fun
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Chris Kuang @chriskuang.com · 21/02/2026
incredibly fun lede by @jasmine.bsky.social about the DCA perimeter rule (a favorite topic of mine) and the rest of her observations about SF/DC divide and similarities jasmi.news/p/ai-populis...
jasmi.news
🌻 my week with the AI populists
a Washington DC scene report
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 21/02/2026
lol ty!! I was very pleased to learn that little factoid
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Johannes Kleske @jkleske.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
If you're intrigued by Claude Code but also feel overwhelmed, I can recommend this more personal account of trying it out by Jasmine Sun: jasmi.news/p/claude-co...
jasmi.news
🌻 claude code psychosis
are your problems software-shaped?
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
thanks for sharing!
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Alex Shultz @alexshultz.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
A self-identified “engineer” went viral on Reddit (& on social media) w/damning allegations about one of the food delivery apps. Then they circulated a legit-looking “internal document” to journalists, including me. The whole thing was an AI-generated scam intended to smear Uber. Here’s the story
open.substack.com
An AI-Generated Reddit Post Fooled the Internet. It Was Only Half of an Elaborate Scam.
I traded Signal messages with someone purporting to have serious dirt on Uber. They used AI to make the whole thing up.
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Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 04/01/2026
The Peptide Craze in the US. It's reckless and unfounded. erictopol.substack.com/p/the-peptid... Today @nytimes.com @jasmine.bsky.social goes deep into the use in Silicon Valley, the supply from China, and the reasons this biohacking is popular t.co/lQXUBHNEaG
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Paul Abramson MD @paulabramsonmd.mydoctorsf.com · 03/01/2026
I’m quoted in today’s @nytimes.com on the "Chinese peptides" trend in SF. She asked about the "founder mindset" applied to biology. My take: "The entrepreneurial parallel isn't funding a scrappy start-up. It's wiring money to an unregistered offshore entity based on a pitch deck." buff.ly/n5nEob
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
(I appreciate you dialoguing & sharing your POV on the events here; am responding because I actually don't want to be hosting events where ppl on the left don't feel comfortable coming. I just felt this piece & author wasn't coming at it in a coalitional way & mostly wanted to slander us)
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
I'd love a less tech-centric crowd at the happy hrs. I try to invite a broad group but I'm sure it's still skewed, and we partner w diff orgs like Arion to broaden it. But Jimmy conflates his personal beef with my politics & parties with Kernel's role. It's sloppy and shitty to the team's work.
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
I don't think this is fixable with a couple sentence tweaks, and generally have found the author quite bad-faith. E.g. my response to his initial Palladium question (attached) tried to open an earnest convo & he never replied, instead quoting it here 6mos later.
Hi! Thank you for the thoughtful note, and for coming on Thursday!

I'll preface by saying that this happy hour series is pretty casual / not a real organization or anything, so Clara and I haven't put a ton of thought into the right policies/norms. So I'll just reason out loud a bit. But my initial stream-of-consciousness reaction is something like this:
I have no personal attachment/relationship to Samo or Palladium, and he was invited by someone else I invited. But when you say Samo Burja / Palladium are "fascist," what do you mean? I haven't read much of their stuff, but looking at the Palladium website now, it doesn't seem overtlyfascist. But maybe I'm not looking at the right thing?
One of my goals with these is to bridge various Bay Area intellectual scenes that might not otherwise meet or talk, including people with pretty different politics. Like personally, I strongly disagree with groups like the tech right and effective altruists, but they're both influential parts of the intellectual scene here, so therefore I'm still curious to understand them better. 
That means I have a high bar for "barring attendees based on political beliefs" if there isn't interpersonal harm/bad behavior. While the median attendee is probably a liberal, most people have some beliefs that someone else in the room considers noxious. Also, I personally don't want to be in the business of defining fascism or adjudicating political boundaries to host a happy hour—I think kicking one person would lead to others weaponizing that to try to kick others out, etc.  
At the same time, I want you and your friends to feel comfortable & excited to come to these, and it'd suck if you stopped, or broadly if we got a reputation from the left of being right-wing/fascist/etc. (I really feel like it's mostly normie libs, and it feels kind of unfair to be labeled as "fascist-adjacent" for having like 2 maybe-fascists attending among like 50-100 other people.)
I do think we should have a zero-tolerance…
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
The errors, 2 and 3 in particular, discredit the core argument & structure of the piece (Kernel as face of the right wing shift in tech pubs). Kernel also hasn't taken new money in years, most recent was Omidyar via RTYPF, and Mercatus was a one-time <$10k grant in early 2021.
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
It's also an odd choice to make Kernel the lede and kicker of a piece about the "right-wing tech intelligentsia," when the author himself admits that Kernel is the "mildest" among these, not a "billionaire mouthpiece," etc Fair not to agree 100% but seems insane to cast it as right-wing
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
I obviously have a different stance on party invites. I don’t expect everyone to be BFFs; the happy hours exist because I find it valuable to have a forum for cross-scene mingling, to talk to people at other pubs & of other political dispositions. Nobody has to attend if they aren’t into that!
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
1. I'm the only Stanford grad in founding team of Reboot or Kernel 2. Logic also received Omidyar billionaire funding (& Kernel has far more contrib overlap w/ Logic than others) 3. Kernel's founding manifesto explicitly rejects the framing of "tech is inherently good” 4. I didn't edit Kernel 5
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Hard Reset @hardresetmedia.com · 12/12/2025
Reporting live from the legendary Bimbo’s in SF, @elirosenberg.bsky.social on the Substack AI debate party with @jasmine.bsky.social, @bcmerchant.bsky.social and others, where the vibe was … surprisingly congenial? www.hardresetmedia.com/p/live-debat...
hardresetmedia.com
Live debates are in, but winning them is another story
At a buzzy Substack party in San Francisco, four debates on A.I. showed that team human has plenty of fight in it, even amid the boom. And some goodwill on its side, to boot.
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 13/11/2025
thanks!!
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 11/11/2025
woke…. the worst thing you can be
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 27/10/2025
jasmi.news/p/ai-friends... This is very good, and close in some ways to the Fourcade and @kjhealy.co account of social media, under which it's co-constituted by users rather than being forced on them.
jasmi.news
AI friends too cheap to meter
“Let me date my chatbot I’m almost 30 and doing well”
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darianwoods.bsky.social @darianwoods.bsky.social · 27/10/2025
"If the world is going to split into the techno kings and the techno peasants, I better prove that I'm gonna stay on top" - @jasmine.bsky.social describing veiled AI anxiety in San Francisco for The Indicator
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Gazetteer SF @sf.gazetteer.co · 24/10/2025
Everywhere you look these days in San Francisco, there's a new zine, magazine, literary journal, or newspaper. At Chat Room: Analog on Nov. 19, @cydhayes.bsky.social will sit down with @jasmine.bsky.social, @laurenmarkham.bsky.social, and @ovillalon.bsky.social to discuss SF's print boom.
sf.gazetteer.co
The Print Party: The publication as an object for community
Announcing our first panel for Chat Room: Analog on Nov. 19
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 12/10/2025
there's a lot of nuance to AI psychosis incidents. chatbot use is rarely the only trigger, but it likely makes things worse this essay IMO does a good job wrestling with the complexity & suggesting specific interventions it was a pleasure to edit
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 12/10/2025
A rare first-person account of experiencing AI-induced psychosis, from a young tech founder who "should have known better" joinreboot.org/p/ai-psychosis
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Kyle Chayka @chaykak.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are racing to grab a chunk of AI capital and equity as it races upward. Meanwhile the rest of us face a dilemma: "Are you going to be the piggy or be the one making the slop?"
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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 29/09/2025
“Neo-hustle-culture is a modern twist on Weber’s Protestant ethic: if the world is soon to be divided into the blessed and the damned, the techno-kings and the techno-peasants, anxious technologists should work as hard as they can to prove they deserve to end up on the right side of that divide.”
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 29/09/2025
thank you!!
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 28/09/2025
mostly quietly, am a bit too tired to "figure out" a third social platform (twitter/substack are the most work-adjacent for me), but sometimes I check when I get bluesky traffic to posts!
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 28/09/2025
henry! too kind!
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Mike Shaw @zax2000.bsky.social · 27/09/2025
The latest episode of @kaiserkuo.bsky.social's essential Sinica podcast features @jasmine.bsky.social who is a great China tech watcher. This was one of the topics that they discussed and I very much enjoyed it. It's totally worth your valuable time.
sinicapodcast.com
Jasmine Sun on Silicon Valley through a Chinese Mirror
This week on Sinica, co-host Tianyu Fang makes his debut on the show to join me in interviewing his Stanford classmate and talented writer Jasmine Sun, who studies the anthropology of disruption.
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Max Read @maxread.info · 22/09/2025
really good exploration of silicon valley's collective nervous breakdown as its anxieties about deskilling, diminishing returns, etc manifest themselves in self-flattering memes. total sweaty desperation. look at my leading industry dawg we're all going to die
jasmi.news
are you high-agency or an NPC?
AI anxiety and the new language of silicon valley
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cb ⿻ @lovevolv.bsky.social · 24/07/2025
@jasmine.bsky.social excellent choice youtu.be/6TNg34K85-8?...
youtu.be
How Hippies Became Hackers (Burning Man, Accelerationism, Stewart Brand) ft. Fred Turner
YouTube video by Jasmine Sun
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jasmine sun @jasmine.bsky.social · 02/08/2025
thank you! fred is the best
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