Tag: earth

The pharma CEOs aren’t safe in new trailer for Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia

The dark comedy is set to hit theaters on October 31st.

CEOs would be nothing without the labor of their (typically) underpaid employees, and the unfairness of that reality seems to be what’s causing all the chaos in director Yorgos Lanthimos’ upcoming film, Bugonia.

A remake of South Korean director Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 feature Save the Green Planet, Bugonia zooms in on the life of Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a conspiracy-minded beekeeper who works for a massive pharmaceutical company run by Michelle (Emma Stone). As one of the company’s many workers who spend their days laboring to make a fraction of Michelle’s salary, Teddy sees a lot of parallels between himself and the bees who live only to serve their queen.

Teddy knows that he, like a beehive’s drones, is expendable in the grand scheme of Michelle’s plans as a CEO. Teddy’s frustrations and delusions about an alien invasion convince him that Michelle probably isn’t a human. And that’s enough for him to hatch a plot to kidnap his boss under the auspices of saving the planet.

Though the trailer skews a little whimsical, it’s fairly clear that Lanthimos and writer Will Tracy are telling a dark story about people pushed to the edge by economic inequality. The movie also seems like it’s going to touch on how people not having proper access to quality mental health care is a very real societal problem, which is probably going to make Bugonia feel timely as hell when the film hits limited theaters on October 24th before its wide release on October 31st.

Big Easy’s Big Brother

We get into a secret partnership between the New Orleans Police Department and Project NOLA, a private nonprofit organisation that owns and operates an extensive network of cameras blanketing New Orleans. For years, Project NOLA has been running live facial recognition through their cameras and sending automated notifications to the police when a match is made using Project NOLA’s privately maintained list of “wanted people.” By going through an unofficial private partner, police have been able to sidestep and undermine legal prohibition on their use of AI technologies like facial recognition. We get into the history of using New Orleans as a testbed for policing technology, the dangerous precedent being set by this public-private relationship, and how this surveillance nightmare is on track to become even more expansive and unleashed thanks to potential policy changes.

••• Police secretly monitored New Orleans with facial recognition cameras www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025…-new-orleans/
••• A bad facial recognition match costs Jefferson Parish Sheriff Joe Lopinto’s office. See how much www.nola.com/news/jefferson_par…-728b3783cb93.html
••• New Orleans City Council proposed ordinance cityofno.granicus.com/MetaViewer.php…meta_id=741682

Standing Plugs:
••• Order Jathan’s new book: www.ucpress.edu/book/978052039807…c-and-the-luddite
••• Subscribe to Ed’s substack: substack.com/@thetechbubble
••• Subscribe to TMK on patreon for premium episodes: www.patreon.com/thismachinekills

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (bsky.app/profile/jathansadowski.com) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.x.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (bsky.app/profile/jebr.bsky.social)

 

Elon Musk Built an Al Super Computer in our Backyard

Elon Musk’s massive xAI data center is poisoning Memphis.

It’s burning enough gas to power a small city, with no permits and no pollution controls.

Residents tell us they can’t breathe and they’re getting sicker.

Slavery in the name of progress | A Wake-Up Call by Martin Scorsese

Surviving Progress explores the dangerous paradox at the heart of modern civilization: what we call “progress” might actually be leading us toward collapse.
Based on Ronald Wright’s concept of the “progress trap,” this documentary journeys through history, economics, biology, and politics to reveal how technological advancement, debt, overconsumption, and ecological destruction are threatening the future of humanity.
Ronald Wright’s bestseller A Short History of Progress inspired this cinematic requiem to progress-as-usual. Throughout human history, what seemed like progress often backfired.
Some of the world’s foremost thinkers, activists, bankers, and scientists challenge us to overcome progress traps, which destroyed past civilizations and lie treacherously embedded in our own.
With powerful visuals, expert commentary, and haunting parallels to the fall of past empires, the film challenges viewers to rethink growth, power, and sustainability. Are we too smart for our own survival, or is there still time to change course?

A Climate Warning From the Fertile Crescent

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/06/podcasts/the-daily/climate-change-iraq-middle-east.html

As the Middle East braces for another year of extreme heat, climate change is turning the soil to dust in the landscape that has long been known as the fertile crescent — and water has become a new source of conflict.

Alissa J. Rubin, who covers the Middle East, tells the story of Iraq’s water crisis and what it means for the world.

Guest: Alissa J. Rubin, a senior Middle East correspondent for The New York Times.

Background reading:

From 2023: A climate warning from the cradle of civilization.

LISTEN: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/06/podcasts/the-daily/climate-change-iraq-middle-east.html

Dignity

I read this when it came out in 2011, while we were still thinking about Occupy and 2008. Here we are in 2025, and it is still relevant. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor.

Dignity

A packet of hand-scrawled letters found in a stranger’s backpack tells of self-sufficient communities growing from the ruins of California’s housing collapse and the global recession. In unfinished Mojave Desert housing tracts and foreclosure ghost towns on the raw edges of the chaotic cities of the West, people have gathered to grow their own food, school their own children and learn how to live without the poisons of gossip, greed, television, mobile phones and the Internet. Encouraged by an enigmatic wanderer known only as “B,” the communities thrive as more families and workers are discarded by an indifferent system. But this quiet revolution and its simple rituals cannot stay unnoticed for long, because the teachings of “B” threaten an entire structure of power and wealth dependent upon people toiling their lives away to buy things they don’t need.

“But to understand the social mood as embodied by a group like Occupy, it may help to look at literature that captures its zeitgeist. One of the books that seems to have become a standard bearer for the Occupy movement is Ken Layne’s ‘Dignity.’ In a book that can only be described as a series of modern-day letters on the gospel of communal simplicity, you can see what kind of world some of the Occupiers might envision: communities occupying vacant suburban or exurban subdivisions, farming the land themselves, bartering with doctors and the like, and shunning modern technology.” — Minyanville.com

LINK: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11356422-dignity

The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares

To understand the deepening divide between AI boosters and doomers, it’s necessary to unpack their common origins in a bundle of ideologies known as TESCREAL.

The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares

LINK: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares/

Silicon Valley is run by people who genuinely think the world as we know it is going to end in the next few decades.

Silicon Valley is run by people who genuinely think the world as we know it is going to end in the next few decades. Many also WANT this to happen: they WANT the biological world to be replaced by a new digital world. They WANT "posthumans" to take the place of humans. A 🧵:

— Dr. Émile P. Torres (@xriskology.bsky.social) 2025-04-25T19:58:32.783Z

The Sunday Read: ‘The Strange, Post-Partisan Popularity of the Unabomber’

RIP Uncle Ted
RIP Uncle Ted

Episode Description
Online, there is a name for the experience of finding sympathy with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber: Tedpilling. To be Tedpilled means to read Paragraph 1 of Kaczynski’s manifesto, its assertion that the mad dash of technological advancement since the Industrial Revolution has “made life unfulfilling,” “led to widespread psychological suffering” and “inflicted severe damage on the natural world,” and think, Well, sure.

Since Kaczynski’s death by suicide in a federal prison in North Carolina nearly two years ago, the taboo surrounding the figure has been weakening. This is especially true on the right, where pessimism and paranoia about technology — largely the province of the left not long ago — have spread on the heels of the coronavirus pandemic and efforts to police speech on social media platforms.

Link: https://pca.st/07odumi7