Professor of democracy and international affairs. http://www.henryfarrell.net and newsletter at http://www.programmablemutter.com. Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (Holt, Penguin). https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250840554.
Today is the last day to submit a piece of #fiction #writing to our Protopian Prize fiction contest! 🕊️ Send us your visions from a future democracy or public AI-powered #society 🔮 We’re so excited to read about the futures you are dreaming up! ☁️
SHOOT IT INTO MY VEINS
Henry FarrellI remember seeing someone (very reasonably) complaining here a few days ago that there seems to be next to no visible thinking on left and center about how to join the dots on administration and democracy. This is the beginnings of an answer to that complaint donmoynihan.substack.com/p/rebuilding...
NEW: Beijing turns the screws as Brussels tests limits of restraint China's escalation dominance, Europe's reticence, and what it means for their brewing trade war A deep dive from me with plenty of exclusive details
EU-China trade: Beijing turns the screws as Brussels tests limits of restraintLatest sanctions suggest Chinese effort to ramp up pressure on Europe and strike fear into member states before crunch time in October.www.scmp.com
The “losing control” narrative creates the loss of control. Nobody is losing control of an emerging intelligence. They’re redirecting their own agency to it, as a way of diffusing responsibility, but the self-perpetuated intelligence myth has them convinced they have no choice.
Anna Mills"They don't realize the debate inside the companies is if AI will be advancing itself past our control in two years or four." www.pacingthefrontier.com
I actually know the answer to this and it's slightly insane. Google pulls from Wikipedia to determine if a place is a city, town, neighbourhood, whatever. Brighton's first line describes it as a "seaside resort" so Google Maps thinks it's a neighbourhood and doesn't display it in the "city" font.
Fmr CASBS director @mlevi.bsky.social & 2022-23 fellow @himself.bsky.social guest edited the Winter 2023 issue of Dædalus. The title of the issue mirrored the name of the flagship CASBS project (2018-23). The entire issue, featuring an all-star cast of essay writers, is open access ➡️ bit.ly/4gVrgxO
@resnikoff.bsky.social wrote a great piece about this. publiccomment.blog/p/the-party-...
The Party Should Throw Them a PartyA proposal for how to build a more durable Democratic coalitionpubliccomment.blog
This feels grimly accurate. I think for most people, engagement with the party feels like getting on Temu’s mailing list: Just a neverending stream of spam asking for cash and no other meaningful call to be part of anything that might generate any sense of identity or community.
FeildThere's nothing to "join" in the Democratic Party. It's a brand with products I spend my vote on once a year at the democracy store. Most people's experience of it is an endless stream of texts that read like scams, their reward for donating or signing a petition. No wonder DSA is growing
Admittedly a US thing, but I think folks should reflect that Kimi, the open-weight AI model by $20b-valued Moonshot AI everyone is freaking out about, was developed by someone who went to CMU and then didn't stay in the US mostly because visas would prevent him setting up a US business
Glad to share some thoughts in this important NYT piece. For various uses and risks, adversarial and otherwise, open Chinese models are functionally at par with US leaders. Only in narrow areas does a perceived current “US lead” now matter. 1/ www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/b...
China’s Moonshot AI Unveils Kimi Model, Threatening America’s LeadChina’s Moonshot AI unveiled a freely available artificial intelligence model that seemed to narrow the gap with cutting-edge offerings from U.S. tech companies.www.nytimes.com
"Oh happy marketplace of ideas, where the Scaife Foundation and Amazon Flex workers alike can try their luck, and hope for accidental success in influencing federal judges!" Very good @himself.bsky.social repost today, helpful if you too have That Friend Who Keeps Sending You Noah Smith Joints.
Noah Smith's Review of Power and Progress is Very, Very BadIt should have been disowned, not republishedwww.programmablemutter.com
Reading @greatdismal.bsky.social's Sprawl trilogy back in the day I wouldn't have guessed that the most depressingly prescient bit would turn out to be the sociopathic zillionaires like Josef Virek and the Tessier-Ashpools, but here we are.
Henry FarrellThiel sees tech entrepreneurialism and kingship as intimately bound together: acting outside the rules to build the future that no-one else has the long term vision to grasp. “There have to be CEOs and founders. Those people are expected to wear the crown.” www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-politi...