Hey, Americans - you need to start learning foreign languages.
why?
At this point - if you are staying in the US you need to have access to not just American news sources, ideally in a language that is not a primary concern of local censors.
If you are leaving the US, you will have an easier time adjusting to a new environment by speaking with people in their native language. And while thanks to colonialism there are plenty of english speaking countries, you are limiting the places you can go if you are not able to communicate in another language other than English.
Another aspect is your potential access to a different citizenship. Naturalisation may require knowing the language of the country you want to live in on a higher level. Fluency is not easily achieved and most people require years of practice. If you start now, there is a good chance you can do it. But if you never start, you never will.
At last, if you are learning languages you will gain not just practical abilities and access. Learning languages requires learning about other cultures and norms other than your own. It can be an act of solidarity and deconstruction hegemony. It also requires emotional growth by learning how to deal with frustration over not learning as fast as expected and rediscovering your confidence in a different language. It will help you as a person.
I am aware that i sound like a duolingo advertisement. But you have everything to gain if you start today. not having options and being forced to stay where you are and rely on the limited sources that you have now, makes you extremely vulnerable. Do the linguistic education equivalent of tiktok users switching to xiaohongshu/Red note and give yourself the power to choose where you can be and what you can learn by picking up a language.
The Trump-Musk crackdown is coming. Here's 20 lessons in how to survive it.
The entire list was inspired by the great writer and historian, Tim Snyder. His book ‘On Tyranny’ was the essential guide to the first Trump term. ‘Do not obey in advance’ his number one lesson from his work studying authoritarian regimes. In a great stroke of luck, he rang me while I was writing it and, after thinking for a moment, told me that he would enlarge that, now, to ‘Know who you are.’ Know what your values are, what you believe in. I’ve been thinking about that ever since.
The real reason Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos are supporting Trump.
Sigal Samuel at Vox:
There’s a dominant narrative in the media about why tech billionaires are sucking up to Donald Trump: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, all of whom have descended on the nation’s capital for the presidential inauguration, either happily support or have largely acquiesced to Trump because they think he’ll offer lower taxes and friendlier regulations. In other words, it’s just about protecting their own selfish business interests.
That narrative is not exactly wrong — Trump has in fact promised massive tax cuts for billionaires — but it leaves out the deeper, darker forces at work here. For the tech bros — or as some say, the broligarchs — this is about much more than just maintaining and growing their riches. It’s about ideology. An ideology inspired by science fiction and fantasy. An ideology that says they are supermen, and supermen should not be subject to rules, because they’re doing something incredibly important: remaking the world in their image.
It’s this ideology that makes MAGA a godsend for the broligarchs, who include Musk, Zuck, and Bezos as well as the venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. That’s because MAGA is all about granting unchecked power to the powerful.
“It’s a sense of complete impunity — including impunity to the laws of nature,” Brooke Harrington, a professor of economic sociology at Dartmouth College who studies the behavior of the ultra-rich, told me. “They reject constraint in all of its forms.”
As Harrington has noted, Trump is the perfect avatar for that worldview. He’s a man who incited an attempted coup, who got convicted on 34 felony counts and still won reelection, who notoriously said in reference to sexual assault, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
So, what is the “anything” that the broligarchs want to do? To understand their vision, we need to realize that their philosophy goes well beyond simple libertarianism. It’s not just that they want a government that won’t tread on them. They want absolutely zero limits on their power. Not those dictated by democratic governments, by financial systems, or by facts. Not even those dictated by death.
The broligarchs’ vision: Science fiction, transhumanism, and immortality
The broligarchs are not a monolith — their politics differ somewhat, and they’ve sometimes been at odds with each other. Remember when Zuck and Musk said they were going to fight each other in a cage match? But here’s something the broligarchs have in common: a passionate love for science fiction and fantasy that has shaped their vision for the future of humanity — and their own roles as its would-be saviors.
Zuckerberg’s quest to build the Metaverse, a virtual reality so immersive and compelling that people would want to strap on bulky goggles to interact with each other, is seemingly inspired by the sci-fi author Neal Stephenson. It was actually Stephenson who coined the term “metaverse” in his novel Snow Crash, where characters spend a lot of time interacting in a virtual world of that name. Zuckerberg seems not to have noticed that the book is depicting a dystopia; instead of viewing it as a warning, he’s viewing it as an instruction manual.
Jeff Bezos is inspired by Star Trek, which led him to found a commercial spaceflight venture called Blue Origin, and The High Frontier by physics professor Gerard K. O’Neill, which informs his plan for space colonization (it involves millions of people living in cylindrical tubes). Bezos attended O’Neill’s seminars as an undergraduate at Princeton.
Musk, who wants to colonize Mars to “save” humanity from a dying planet, is inspired by one of the masters of American sci-fi, Isaac Asimov. In his Foundation series, Asimov wrote about a hero who must prevent humanity from being thrown into a long dark age after a massive galactic empire collapses. “The lesson I drew from that is you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one,” Musk said.
And Andreessen, an early web browser developer who now pushes for aggressive progress in AI with very little regulation, is inspired by superhero stories, writing in his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” that we should become “technological supermen” whose “Hero’s Journey” involves “conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community.”
All of these men see themselves as the heroes or protagonists in their own sci-fi saga. And a key part of being a “technological superman” — or übermensch, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say — is that you’re above the law. Common-sense morality doesn’t apply to you because you’re a superior being on a superior mission. Thiel, it should be noted, is a big Nietzsche fan, though his is an extremely selective reading of the philosopher’s work.
[...]
The broligarchs — because they are in 21st-century Silicon Valley and not 19th-century Germany — have updated and melded this idea with transhumanism, the idea that we can and should use technology to alter human biology and proactively evolve our species.
Transhumanism spread in the mid-1900s thanks to its main popularizer, Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist and president of the British Eugenics Society. Huxley influenced the contemporary futurist Ray Kurzweil, who predicted that we’re approaching a time when human intelligence can merge with machine intelligence, becoming unbelievably powerful.
“The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems … and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a postbiological future,” Kurzweil wrote in 1999. Kurzweil, in turn, has influenced Silicon Valley heavyweights like Musk, whose company Neuralink explicitly aims at merging human and machine intelligence.
For many transhumanists, part of what it means to transcend our human condition is transcending death. And so you find that the broligarchs are very interested in longevity research. Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Thiel have all reportedly invested in startups that are trying to make it possible to live forever. That makes perfect sense when you consider that death currently imposes a limit on us all, and the goal of the broligarchs is to have zero limits.
Vox has an insightful article on the disastrous vision that broligarchs like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg subscribe to.
Exploit #1 by Tim Leong, Laura Hudson, Emiliana Pinna and Rebecca Good. Cover by Pinna and Good. Variant cover by Veronica Fish. Out in March.
"Don't bury the lede. Bury your enemies.
Kirby Kuo might be late to her true purpose in life--but no one would call the 30-something journalism intern out of time. When she uncovers a shocking secret about tech billionaire Cole Saxon, Kirby does what she has always wanted to do and publishes it. But the violence and vengeance that follows is like nothing she could have anticipated--pitting Kirby, her agoraphobic roommate, and the writing staff of the defunct magazine RIOT! to bring justice to a world where the rich get what they want without consequence. Exploit is a timely, biting satire of the state of the American tech oligarchy with a pop-punk edge."
Alarm caused by posts of Alex Karp, tech firm’s CEO, championing US military dominance and of AI weapons
The US spy tech company Palantir published a manifesto extolling the benefits of American power and implying some cultures are inferior to others – in what MPs have called “a parody of a RoboCop film” and “the ramblings of a supervillain”.
“Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive,” wrote Palantir in a 22-point post on X over the weekend, which also called for an end to the “postwar neutering” of Germany and Japan.
The post exhorted the US to reinstate a military draft, saying that “free and democratic societies” need “hard power” in order to prevail.
It also predicted a future dominated by autonomous weapons: “The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.”
The pronouncement is the most recent of a number of high-profile statements from Palantir and its chief executive, Alex Karp, which appear to indicate that Karp views himself as not simply the head of a software company, but a pundit with important insights into the future of civilisation.
It led to criticism from several MPs, who said that it raised yet more questions about the UK’s portfolio of contracts with the company. Palantir has built up more than £500m in contracts in Britain, including a £330m contract with the NHS, as well as deals with the police and Ministry of Defence. These deals have come in for increasing criticism.
“Palantir’s manifesto, which embraces AI state surveillance of citizens along with national service in the USA, is either a parody of a RoboCop film, or a disturbing narcissistic rant from an arrogant organisation,” said Martin Wrigley, a Liberal Democrat MP who is a member of the commons science and technology select committee.
“Either way it shows that the company’s ethos is entirely unsuited to working on UK government projects involving citizens’ most sensitive private data.”
It is unclear what inspired Palantir to publish the manifesto, which appears to reprise Karp’s book, The Technological Republic, published last year. That book laments a widespread “complacency” among “engineers and founders” who build photo-sharing apps as opposed to collaborating with governments to secure “the West’s dominant place in the geopolitical order”.
In an interview with CNBC in early March, Karp suggested that AI would “disrupt” the power of “highly educated, often female voters who vote mostly Democrat”,and instead empower “vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters”.
Rachael Maskell, a Labour MP, former NHS worker and critic of Palantir’s £330m contract to help run NHS England’s federated data platform, told the Guardian: “To post this is quite disturbing and in trying to ascertain Palantir’s commercial pitch from this, they are clearly seeking to place themselves at the heart of the defence revolution in the technological age. They are far more than a tech solutions company if they are trying to direct policy, politics and investment choices.”
“It is time that the government seriously understands the culture and ideology of Palantir, and how it will exit from its contracts at the earliest opportunity.”
Last month, the Guardian reported that Palantir was to be given access to highly sensitive UK financial regulation data, after the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) awarded the company a contract to investigate its internal intelligence data. MPs urged the government to stop this deal.
In a debate last week, MPs also demanded that the government scrap its NHS contract.
“There’s no shortage of bizarre and disturbing quotes from Palantir’s leadership,” said Tim Squirrell, the head of strategy at the campaign group Foxglove.
“This latest round of incoherent, comic-book villain worthy statements from Alex Karp demonstrates just how deeply embedded Palantir is in the Trump-Big Tech axis, fixated on US dominance and utterly unsuited to being anywhere near our public services.”
“Palantir’s ‘manifesto’ sounds like the ramblings of a supervillain,” said Victoria Collins, a Liberal Democrat MP. “A company that has such naked ideological motivations and lack of respect for democratic rule of law should be nowhere near our public services.”
A Palantir spokesperson said: “Palantir software is helping to increase NHS operations, reduce the time it takes to diagnose cancer, keep Royal Navy ships at sea for longer, and protect women and children from domestic violence.
“We are proud that support is being provided by the 17% of our workforce who are based in the UK – the highest proportion among the world’s 20 biggest tech companies.”
Joanna Maciejewska: "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes." Cartoon by Tjeerd Royaards. (pub. 18 February 2026)
Years ago I posted on reddit that I think in the future we'll have information capitalism. Basically, the companies that have the most data will have the most money and political influence and therefore they'll control our lives. I deleted the post soon after making it (Thanks to poor reading comprehension everyone thought I was suggesting we do information capitalism and they downvoted me and called me a psychopath) but hey look, I was right.
