iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Robin Z @firepile.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I like to tell people on here when I'm teaching with their materials so this is my yearly reminder that my AI in Fact and Fiction class is reading @timmaughan.bsky.social's "Be Good For Goodness' Sake" today, alongside Bradbury's The Veldt, as an intro to our discussions of surveillance capitalism

vice.com

Be Good for Goodness’ Sake

In a not-too-distant Christmas, Amazon's child-friendly surveillance elves will motivate your kid to be nice not naughty with the promise of nonstop streaming content and elfcoins.

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Peter Geoghegan @petergeoghegan.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

🔴 We asked Tony Blair's think tank about charging businesses £500k for political access at party conferences and why one of its sponsor's logos disappeared after our reporting last week on TBI's alleged cash for access scheme This is what they said

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Tim Maughan @timmaughan.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

cybersquatting! for profit! shit this really is dot com bust 2.0

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Counterpoint: It would be great if people read some of the things that have been written about AI surveillance of workers! press.princeton.edu/books/hardco... www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/hilke... www.cambridge.org/core/books/q... www.ucpress.edu/books/uberla... jacobin.com/2026/09/amaz...

press.princeton.edu

Data Driven

A behind-the-scenes look at how digital surveillance is affecting the trucking way of life

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Tim Maughan @timmaughan.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

incredibly niche PSA: if you’re trying to run the witcher 3 remaster on linux and you’ve got insane unstable frame time stutter, try logging out of your CDPR account. worked for me, now it’s buttery smooth courtesy of some geezer on reddit

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Monteiro @monteiro.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Using a chatbot ironically is still using a chatbot.

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Tim Maughan @timmaughan.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

holy shit look at those numbers. there’s no way we’re not getting another cyberpunk DLC before the sequel drops

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julie muncy @julie.radiantarray.io · 29/09/2026

i've been saying, one path forward for the mid-budget games industry is just... going and making expansions to popular old games. there's a market here. bring back the era of outsourced expansion packs. i'm so serious.

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Tim Maughan @timmaughan.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

i feel like everytime i look here i’ve lost someone else to “it’s a useful tool“ or “i just use it to summarise” or “lol edgy jokes about how i use it amirite” or some other fomo bullshit

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Jeff Sharlet @jeffsharlet.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I give up. I’m moving into a cave.

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Tim Maughan @timmaughan.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

i see you gathered before me… hungry, terrified…

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Julie S. Lalonde @julieslalonde.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

- I saw Fran Lebowitz speak earlier this year & she talked about how Oprah might have encouraged a lot of people to get into reading but she did so by referring to books as mirrors where you should see yourself reflected RATHER than viewing books as windows into the experiences of others.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

context. sentiment. inferences. People seriously cannot do these things anymore. That’s why they angrily demand you spell out every joke, every reference, super duper promise you mean something only this one prescribed way. They cannot do it for themselves or tolerate the any ambiguity.

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Tim Maughan @timmaughan.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

hahahaha “Beef (Season 1)” is some hilariously and subtly brutal shade

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Tim Maughan @timmaughan.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

oh c’mon man. the models are literally built from humans. of course the risks are also in the models. ppl can pretend all they want, but the main concerns - both ethical and reliability related - will always be due to the training data, and how it’s impossible for humans to truly comprehend it

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Tim Maughan @timmaughan.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

as much as its fun to believe “melania always looks angry because she hates trump“ its pretty obv the reality is more “melania always looks angry because she hates everyone that makes her do anything that isn’t about melania“ b/c she’s an infantile psychotic narcissist too

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Tim Maughan @timmaughan.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

man it got really easy and popular to dunk on the guy but he’s always been more fucking real than any of the successful artists you reckon are good

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Tim Maughan @timmaughan.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

getting systematically banned from every subreddit for posting “fuck letting a clanker anywhere near my [INSERT NAME OF HOBBY HERE], that looks sloppier than your dad’s cock”

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Tim Maughan @timmaughan.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

oh wow a science fiction book set in an empire

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Tim Maughan @timmaughan.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

this is why i never go on goodreads

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Tech Won’t Save Us @techwontsave.us · 25/09/2026

This month, we’re doing something special. @parismarx.com’s new book HYPERSCALE is out on October 20, so we’re bringing back DATA VAMPIRES. In Episode 4, Paris explores the future envisioned by the tech elite — and how hostile it is for the rest of us. Full ep: techwontsave.us/episode/347_...

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maple cocaine @maplecocaine.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The thing about trying to appeal to right wing bigots is that right wing bigots are all stupid idiots who get 100% of their news from propagandists so they will never actually find out that you were trying to appeal to them in the first place

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Tim Maughan @timmaughan.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

the lovely chet faliszeck on asha sharma’s greatest mistake - giving mathew ball a job “i’ll be honest, I don’t like the guy…i was going to get banned from linkedin for calling him by his real name. which is fucking twat” youtu.be/VPy5EO-UNDA?...

youtu.be

Xbox's Playbook

YouTube video by Chet Faliszek

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Tim Maughan @timmaughan.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

“But MSR has shifted its priorities…” and not even getting to be a call of duty support studio

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Tim Maughan @timmaughan.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

refusing to feel sorry that being “as famous as a novelist gets“ has made josh green sad, especially as i’ve never fucking heard of him

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Adventurism Time @flow.blacksky.app · 23/09/2026

2026 is entirely too "on the nose", but 'a big ugly barge blocking your view of the ocean with an AI view of an artificial ocean' has to be the poster child.

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Rachel Holliday Smith @rachelholliday.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

chat is this good www.axios.com/newsletters/...

1 big thing: Ø Link economy breaks
Total U.S. web traffic for top news sites
Visits to approximately 100 top sites;

Traffic to news sites is plummeting in the
U.S. as tech giants steer people away from search and toward AI.

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qdot @buttplug.engineer · 23/09/2026

Welp. It happened. Fly brain teledildonics with @buttplug.io I wonder what level of hell is now reserved for the things I have enabled, and if it is actually any worse than having to work with Bluetooth. Code at github.com/paoloo/flybr...

X post from paoloo:

ok, I got a little bit crazy and made the fly's brain ( https://paoloo.github.io/2026/09/19/running-an-actual-fly-brain/) manage a @buttplugio device because, why not? why not having a fly control your dildo?

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Tim Maughan @timmaughan.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

fuck yeah mike harrison booker prize shortlist let’s goooo

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The Onion @theonion.com · 18/09/2026

Trans Teen Hatches Nefarious Plot To Undergo Years Of Medical Treatments And Counseling To Win At Swimming theonion.com/trans-teen-hatches-nef…

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Puff the Magic Hater @mskellymhayes.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Google is killing journalism: "At Truthout, we anticipate a loss of roughly $500,000 in online revenue as a result of this massive traffic plunge in the next year alone."

truthout.org

We’re Already Living Through Journalism’s Dystopian Future

AI is devouring our industry and undermining access to factual information. We all have a duty to fight back.

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Tim Maughan @timmaughan.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

ok so just so we’re clear on the concerns that are taken seriously ❌ it’s terrible for the climate ❌ it’s fuelled by stolen data ❌ it threatens jobs/entire occupations ❌ it’s often just wrong ❌ it’s literally caused actual suicides ✅ one day it might extinct everyone by bioengineering a plague

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fates and furies Ω @fates-and-furies.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

They can actually be beneficial if the composting's done right.

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Sam Cole @samleecole.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

this is so fucking crazy. huge huge huge scoop www.404media.co/inside-proje...

In a dashboard available to the workers, human reviewers are able to select which “task” they want to take on. Once they click that, they are presented with the real ChatGPT user’s prompt. 404 Media has seen multiple real prompts but is not quoting any of them for source protection reasons. Some of the prompts indicate the ChatGPT user does not expect that a human may end up reading their conversation, because they ask ChatGPT to keep the content to themselves.

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Better Things Are Possible @internethippo.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Every other headline now is "Huge liar who's financially motivated to lie says"

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Tim Maughan @timmaughan.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

just completely exhuasted at how any forum or reddit thread on any of my hobbies - music, games, linux, self hosting etc - always ends up with basically someone saying "ask an AI" or "I vibe coded this" i just fucking can't, these are meant to be the things to help me mentally escape this shit

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Tim Maughan @timmaughan.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

hahahaha but also the markets are going to be a bloodbath on monday, and as is too often the case it won’t be those responsible taking the biggest hits

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ve, the ghost of info past @vortexegg.com · 12/09/2026

There’s a lot of people cosplaying at knowing how computers work

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Darran Marshall @dmarshall.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

"It turns out that he isn’t as orange as he looks." SDLP leader Claire Hanna reacts to Trump's comments on Irish unity. "I'm not sure if anybody has checked on the DUP. I suspect they're burning those Trump flags as we speak."

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Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

emanuel and i attempted to talk about how we talk about and report on AI. we included this in our subscriber NL this week it's an informal convo we had bc we've been slacking about how and if to cover the Anthropic stuff, as well as changing capabilities of AI www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMNB...

youtube.com

So... Is AI Going to Kill Us All???

YouTube video by 404 Media

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Tim Maughan @timmaughan.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

good. only make one season of everything. if it’s good and people like it, get the same cast/crew/creators to make something new. i guarantee they’ve got multiple ideas lined up already.

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Ben Werdmuller @werd.io · 11/09/2026

“It’s true, we really do earnestly believe that AI could sit on a throne of blood on a mountain of skulls in a castle of pain!”

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Alex Hanna @alexhanna.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I can't stop thinking about this skeet every time a Leftist mentions what Anthropic saw in the ether / that there's a new x-risk whistleblower / why Sustekever left OpenAI / that a big math person went on a talk show to talk about the end times

A skeet from Olufemi O. Taiwo that reads "Not being a mark is praxis"

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

And this is why when I was asked in 2024 to offer people a checklist for determining the authenticity of an image, I refused, citing that call to awareness as itself dangerous, and destructive of trust. www.artnews.com/art-in-ameri...

Our present situation demands a similar process for digital images—known as digital forensics—but the public at large cannot be responsible for this process. At some point, every person needs to accept that they cannot claim impartiality or universal expertise: I cannot tell if a bridge is safe to drive over or determine whether my lettuce contains E. coli. So I value agencies and organizations that employ experts who can. The same goes for the sources of information I consume, including those that provide images illustrating current events, who should be responsible for doing the provenance research outlined here. That’s as far as my own provenance research can go.

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 10/09/2026

Some folks will claim that this is hyperbolic, but what I wish people would understand is that tech initiatives like this serve as a means of eroding consent and lower the barrier for the persistent capture of people’s image, voice, data, or whatever else a gadget can glean.

pcmag.com

Apple's New Siri Recap Turns Every Apple Watch Into a Mass Surveillance Nightmare

Apple's always-listening AI feature promises neat summaries of your daily conversations, but it forces everyone around you into a nonconsensual recording experiment.

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Strategic Tape Reserve @strategictaper.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

A live music app where audience members can give real-time feedback (eg “fewer cymbals” or “do a funny synthesiser noise” or “play a song about the Hobbits”) to the artist, so musicians don’t have to try to guess how it’s going based on abstract vibes or crowd energy.

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