the astrofinancial imaginary
06.03.2026 08:12
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the astrofinancial imaginary
We have a 4-year AHRC-funded PhD studentship on 'Rescue curation of space heritage' advertised!
Supervision by me, space scientist Lucie Green (@luciegreen.bsky.social), and curators of space and engineering at the Science Museum, Doug Millard and Ben Russell
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
To the surprise of some officials in Kyiv, no one from the U.S. bothered to ask Ukraine to share its expertise in how to defend against drones before starting the offensive in Iran, Simon Shuster and Nancy A. Youssef report. theatln.tc/AFPCstm6
I think one of the most staggering industry shifts in my 16 years as a tech reporter is that it’s not become a question of “should our product help the government kill and/or surveil people?” but “to what extent?”
www.anthropic.com/news/where-s...
This is a really key thing that people are just not getting: "VC" is simply *not venture capital* anymore. There is ZERO risk for A16Z and peers. They do not resemble the thing that regulators described when creating the category of venture capital. A cartel of ~4 firms runs the whole industry.
This is cool as hell: An app designed to ping people about nearby smartglasses.
Also cool: The creator was inspired by @404media.co coverage, a great illustration of why their journalism is so essential. This kind of work is funded by paid subscribers so become one of those if you can.
What's in a name? Our @dylangyauchl.bsky.social writes about why the term "tech industry" is incoherent and lends itself to serving Silicon Valley's techno-optimist PR campaign.
revolvingdoorproject.substack.com/p/the-techno...
"Algorithmic management is 'a way of organising work in which workers are directed, tracked and assessed—all at once, in real time—by a computer system[.]' Tendrils of this managerial regime are now creeping into offices, universities, even hospitals."
–Shane Boyle
proteanmag.com/2025/12/23/t...
Kyle Chan: "China’s strength across multiple overlapping industries creates a compounding effect for its industrial policy efforts."
open.substack.com/pub/highcapa...
The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.
A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.
Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.
This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.
SpaceX is now focused on “building a self-growing city on the moon,” Musk said on X. That goal could be achieved in “less than 10 years,” whereas colonizing Mars would “take 20-plus years.”
The SpaceX/xAI merger situation is actually pretty important and, I think, very bad. "Data centers in space" is a bit of a pipe dream, but SpaceX now dominates low-Earth orbit in a highly concerning way. Starlink is real and could monopolize a lot of things.Not Good!
www.404media.co/this-spacex-...
"Drawing on a 20.3-million-query audit of ChatGPT, we map systematic biases in the model's representations of countries, states, cities, and neighbourhoods. From these empirics, we argue that bias is not a correctable anomaly but an intrinsic feature of generative AI”.
ht: Dagmar Monett
I tasked the UMBRA-10 satellite over LC-39B to capture SLS on the pad.
The capture lasted 33 seconds (2026-01-20 04:20:43 - 4:21:16 UTC) so here it is turned into a short video.
New: meet ELITE, the Palantir app ICE is using to find neighborhoods to raid. Map interface; officers search for immigrants; click person to bring up individual dossier. This is clearest link between what Palantir is building and ICE's activities on the ground yet www.404media.co/elite-the-pa...
the exact same arguments were used to boost new space a decade ago
"Srinivasan himself has started a 'Network School' on an artificial island near Singapore, where techno-optimists can work their day jobs remotely while living in a hotel together and learning how to 'bootstrap'... a new society [ — ] 'society-as-a-service'"
This edition of Japan Daily Briefing looks at some things to watch this week, as well as the "radar lock" incident, a defense ministerial with Australia, and efforts by opposition parties to coordinate their candidates for the next general election.
open.substack.com/pub/observin...
Scoop: Provisions of the NDAA that would ensure military members’ right to repair their own equipment are set to be removed from the funding act, replaced by language that will require the military to pay subscription fees to defense contractors via “data-as-a-service.”
www.wired.com/story/subscr...
Every service is building its own “autonomous” systems. Without shared standards, they may as well be speaking different languages in combat.
Palantir update via www.wired.com/story/alex-k...
the most clear example is ABL Space Systems, which was previously in the commercial small launch market; it has now rebranded as Long Wall, and focuses on military applications like missile defence
circling back with some research contacts from my fieldwork in new space to find so many now work at defence companies, and so many of those fledgling new space companies are now more explicitly defense companies
Als je beter wilt begrijpen welke financiële, juridische, publieke en technologische krachten er achter de giga beurswaarde van Tesla zitten - het fundament van de rijkdom en macht van het zgn. 'genie' Elon Musk.
Vandaag gepubliceerd (open access):
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Google plans to build a large artificial intelligence data centre on Australia’s remote Indian Ocean outpost of Christmas Island after signing a cloud deal with the Department of Defence this year, according to documents reviewed by Reuters and interviews with officials www.afr.com/technology/g...
Curious about the role of VC influence in defence but no time to read my full research artice? I have a shorter version of the @finandsoc.bsky.social article on VC and military AI up now with @theconversation.com. Check it out! theconversation.com/the-silicon-...
good book though!
