Paris Marx

@parismarx

💥 PREORDER MY NEW BOOK HYPERSCALE 💥 🎙️ @techwontsave.us 📬 📖

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Paris Marx@parismarx· Jul 9

we can’t afford to restrain oil and gas, but we can afford the human and economic impact of more deadly and destructive natural disasters

On the eve of Alberta's pipeline application, Carney concedes emissions will be higher
'We can't afford to restrain the growth of an important part of our energy mix, oil and gas, to meet a short-term goal,' Carney said

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jul 9

oh we’re not falling for this again, are we?

Elon Musk: I'll Put a Man on Mars in 10 Years, published in April 2011

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jul 7

I’ve become interested in how digital platforms and screens change the way we live and see the world around us. So often, that feels theoretical. But using ride-hailing apps made it very real — I could see how in a short period of days I had developed a dependence. disconnect.blog/the-seductiv...

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how the digital services and platforms we’ve come to rely on over the past couple decades have affected how we act, how we see ourselves, and how the world around us even functions. I feel like we’re all becoming familiar with that when it comes to things like social media apps, which is part of the reason the efforts to regulate them are getting so much attention. But there are so many smaller, pernicious ways our lives have been transformed by the screens and apps that have been pushed on us in recent years — and in most cases we don’t take the time to consider how they affect us.

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jul 7

As someone who’s never used ride-hailing apps before, it was fascinating to me to see how even after leaving South Africa I felt a resistance to giving it up when I’d previously never had an issue relying on taxis. It showed clearly how design influences our choices disconnect.blog/the-seductiv...

Once I arrived in Lisbon, I wanted to stop using Bolt, but I found it hard to give up that sense of control. I downloaded a local taxi app and when I used it I was flooded with worries that weren’t previously there: Would the driver even find me? Would I know how long it would take them to get there? Were there even many taxis in the area? Would I be able to easily pay in the car? They were mostly foolish concerns, but were borne of giving back a certain degree of autonomy to the driver and the anxiety of being in a place I wasn’t familiar with.

Back in Canada, using taxis was no problem. I deleted the Bolt app — it wouldn’t work there anyway — and simply went back to the companies I was used to relying on. I didn’t think twice about it. But a few weeks later in Copenhagen, I needed to get a ride somewhere and my mind immediately went to downloading Bolt again. The sense of security it claimed to provide had worked its way into my psyche. I didn’t give in, but I was fascinated by the staying power it had over me.

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jul 7

The ride-hail user experience is designed to give you a sense of control. You are Big Brother controlling the driver tasked to get you from A to B. Never mind that reporting has called into question many aspects of that sense of control provided by the app’s design. disconnect.blog/the-seductiv...

When you open the app, you can see the cars plying the roads of the digital map on your screen. You choose which kind of driver you want, and can send them specific instructions. You watch them make their way toward you, until you enter the vehicle where very frequently you control the music and might even be offered snacks and amenities — all in the hope you’ll give the driver a good rating at the end. They likely won’t even try to speak with you unless you strike up a conversation. I’ve had some drivers tell me they can drive around for hours with customers not saying a word to them — an incredibly dehumanizing experience.

All of these design decisions and impositions on workers are designed to give drivers the illusion of control, authority, and ultimately of power. It doesn’t matter that Uber has been known to fake the vehicles shown on the screen, has fought being covered by disability legislation, has been sued for failing to address sexual abuse by drivers, has tracked customers, and even used the data it holds to push up fares while driving down driver pay. Once you get used to that feeling of control, it’s hard to quit — something I found myself even after I left South Africa.

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jul 7

Out of my element and suffering from bad malaria med side effects, I was convinced not to use taxis in South Africa. I wouldn’t download Uber, so I turned to Bolt instead. Immediately, the interface showed me how so many people have become hooked on these apps. disconnect.blog/the-seductiv...

That changed when I went to South Africa. After having a number of people warn me about my safety and advise me not to use taxis, paired with how the malaria meds I was on were messing with my mental health, I finally gave in. I couldn’t bring myself to download Uber. Having written about its exploitative business model for a decade, that was still a bridge too far. So instead I opted for Bolt, the European alternative.

It didn’t take long for me to see how so many people have been seduced into abandoning taxis for ride-hailing services over the past decade and a half — their attacks on workers’ rights, harms to transportation networks, and exploitation of customers be damned.

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jul 6

The industry is trying to sell us a particular narrative about data centers and the inevitability of generative AI. We know that’s not accurate, and in HYPERSCALE I tell the real story of how we got here, the people fighting back, and why an alternative is possible. disconnect.blog/why-i-wrote-...

The industry wants us to feel this is all inevitable; that we have no means to fight back agains this wave of supposed progress. But around the world, regular people were showing that wasn’t true. They were taking matters into their own hands, and pushing back some of the most powerful companies in the world.

As the tech industry abandons its climate targets and any pretense of having the public good in mind, these are stories we need to hear and learn from. In Hyperscale, I explain how we got to this place and why this scale of development is inherently unsustainable. I tell the stories of attempts to fight back in different parts of the world and, maybe most importantly, I show that we don’t have to go down this path. We can develop technology in a very different way that puts the public good at the forefront, not shareholder profits or billionaire dreams.

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jul 6

HYPERSCALE is hitting bookstores on October 20. Preorder it now! In the book, I dig into how the data center boom is pushing our planet past its breaking point, and the incredible efforts of people pushing back against the profit-driven interests of Big Tech. Get your copy: hyperscalebook.com

Hyperscale by Paris Marx. Coming October 20, 2026.

An eye-opening account of how the data center boom is pushing our planet past its breaking point

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jul 2

Higher consumer technology prices is just the latest negative side effect of the tech industry’s aggressive pursuit of generative AI — a technology not only working against our collective interests, but with questionable profitability. disconnect.blog/data-centers...

Why? It’s all so a bunch of unimaginably wealthy tech companies can try to force us to use their chatbots and image generators regardless of whether we want to, and build massive data centers that are needed to power the technology. All those data centers need a specific kind of memory, and with all the demand major manufacturers are shifting production to the products that the data centers need instead of those that go into consumer electronics.

There are already ample reasons to oppose their project: from the harmful effects of chatbots to the ways data centers are forcing up energy prices and throwing climate targets to the side. But now they’re even making our computers, game consoles, and our phones more expensive all in the name of their pursuit of power and profit.

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jul 2

Valve explained it basically can’t lock down memory on long-term contracts anymore, and that means it doesn’t know how much stock it will actually be able to manufacture. Who knows what that will mean for the price. disconnect.blog/data-centers...

When Valve finally disclosed the Steam Machine price, Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais helped explained how much things have changed in a short period of time. “Things that were a year ago, two years ago, commodity things, you’d just pay the normal price for it and it’s all good,” he said, “now you have to negotiate really hard just to secure a few thousand. And there's so many more people in line in front of you.” He suggested the company doesn’t even have long-term contracts, but essentially has to see what it can buy month by month.

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jul 2

Xbox consoles are going up again, and the Steam Machine costs more than $1000. Apple hardware just got even more expensive, and cheap laptops as a category are basically extinct. It’s not a great moment for anyone looking to buy digital tech. disconnect.blog/data-centers...

Valve announced its Steam Machine would start at $1049, though many buyers will end up paying more than that, while Microsoft hiked prices of Xbox consoles by another $100-150. Those are staggering prices, but they only affect a certain segment of video gamers. The real blow came when Apple finally gave into increasing component costs, increasing the prices of Macs, iPads, HomePods, and Apple TV by up to 20%. iPhones were left out of this round, but that’s unlikely to remain the case when new models are announced in the fall.

Outgoing CEO Tim Cook had signaled price increases were coming, telling the Wall Street Journal on June 17 that price increases were “unavoidable.” But the amount of the hike and how soon they came seemed to take people by surprise. And this will not be the end. Industry analysis suggests memory and chip prices are going to keep going up for the next few years, and that will force up the prices of all manner of electronics with it. The sub-$500 laptop is already disappearing as cheaper computers becoming completely uneconomical.

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jun 30

also funny the “patron saint” of the conscientious objector is an ai and crypto booster

The Conscientious Objector, Patron Saint Holly Herndon

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jun 22

on the thiel point, the irony being taylor appeared to want to start uploading to thiel-funded rumble. i guess she realized it would be a bad look, or they simply wouldn’t up her visibility.

Chris Pavlovski
Everyone needs to start uploading shorts to Rumble. We are closer than you might think.

Taylor Lorenz
I tried uploading my videos on Rumble and my content is defacto banned, people can't even search and find my name

Chris Pavlovski
What is your Rumble username or a link to one of your videos?
That should not be happening.

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jun 22

honestly the steam machine prices are not just ridiculous, but the decision to make it 1509 in canada instead of 1499 is a choice. either way, cad price is above a straight conversion from usd, which makes it feel like we’re shouldering more of the cost of ramageddon.

512 GB: $1,049 USD / 1,509 CAD / 1,039
EUR / 879 GBP / 1,609 AUD / 4,389 PLN
• 2 TB: $1,349 USD / 1,919 CAD / 1,359
EUR / 1,149 GBP / 2,109 AUD / 5,739
PLN
• 512 GB w/ Controller: $1,128 USD /
1,628 CAD / 1,108 EUR / 938 GBP / 1,728
AUD / 4,698 PLN
• 2 TB w/ Controller: $1,428 USD / 2,038
CAD / 1,428 EUR / 1,208 GBP / 2,228
AUD / 6,048 PLN

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jun 19

forgive me for bringing a Thread to bsky but this is what i think any time i see ai-generated lord of the rings stuff

If you use AI to generate Lord of the Rings imagery, I hope you know that Tolkien wrote a trilogy about how much he personally hates you

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jun 19

It’s not Canadians that need to become more literate on AI; it’s Mark Carney. He needs to see the reality of the technology and the harms it’s causing to the people he’s supposed to serve, not just buying industry narratives based on hype instead of reality. disconnect.blog/ai-oppositio...

If anyone needs better literacy on AI, it is not the public, but Carney himself.

Canadians may not know exactly how a large language model functions, but they can see how the chatbots and image generators they’ve made possible have changed society for the worse in just a few years. At this point, I’d put far more trust in the data centre protesters and the concerned parents to craft a real AI strategy than in the prime minister.

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jun 19

As the government pushes “AI for All,” companies are in the middle of pulling back on their AI spending because the return on investment simply isn’t there. They’re burning money and not seeing the benefits. disconnect.blog/ai-oppositio...

This isn’t just a problem in the public sector. As Carney’s strategy seeks to boost business adoption of AI from 12 per cent today to 60 per cent in eight years, there are growing reports in the United States of companies pulling back on AI spending as the growing costs are not delivering the expected benefits or efficiencies. In May, the president of Uber even admitted that AI spending was becoming “harder to justify” as the company burned through its annual AI budget in just four months.

It’s clear that Carney and Solomon have bought the industry narrative hook, line and sinker. They seem to firmly believe that chatbots are the foundation of the next industrial revolution, but that claim is based more on faith — and the hype needed to boost the valuations of AI companies — than on hard data. In fact, it requires actively ignoring the stories of the very real harms of the technology that continue to pile up.

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jun 19

Canadians’ skepticism is justified. Even as Canadian governments have sought to push chatbots on the public sector, they’ve been failing: giving incorrect tax information, making up parts of immigration applications, and recording incorrect medical information. disconnect.blog/ai-oppositio...

There’s so much more than a literacy gap leading Canadians to push back against having generative AI forced on them in so many areas of their lives. The government itself should know better. It has already tried to roll out a chatbot to give Canadians tax advice, only for the auditor general to find it provided incorrect information 66 per cent of the time. More recently, its use of generative AI in immigration was found to have denied a woman’s permanent residency application after the system made up parts of her submission.

Just weeks before Carney stood in front of medical workers from the University Health Network in Toronto to announce his strategy and talk about how beneficial AI will be in health care, the auditor general of Ontario had released a scathing report on AI scribes. Those chatbots, used to transcribe conversations between doctors and patients, are currently used by over 5,000 doctors in the province. But the technology sold as a means to save time had been regularly registering incorrect information and making up details about patients’ health. It was so bad that the AI scribes were recording the wrong drug prescribed to patients 60 per cent of the time.

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jun 19

But for Mark Carney and his AI minister, that opposition is unacceptable. Canadians must adopt AI, and they need to be taught why it’s so great for them: so the government is spending big to roll out AI education throughout society. disconnect.blog/ai-oppositio...

The centrepiece of the strategy revolved around the concept of AI literacy. Carney acknowledged that trust needs to be established, which at this point is an understatement. Recent polling from the Angus Reid Institute suggests 68 per cent of Canadians want to see strict regulation of artificial intelligence, even if it slows development. But the prime minister is not seriously trying to address the concerns of those in the streets who oppose data centres, or of parents concerned about what chatbots might mean for their children.

Instead, the government is positioning the disconnect over the exuberance of industry — not to mention Carney himself and Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon — and the public’s skepticism as the product of a knowledge gap. The plan seeks to invest millions to educate Canadians on how to use AI, in effect increasing their “literacy” of the technology. They will give chatbots to every university student, train 90,000 young people to be advocates of the technology in small and medium-sized businesses, and equip more than 3,000 educators to provide AI training accessible by all Canadians.

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jun 19

Canada is seeing growing opposition to the rollout of generative AI tools and to the data centers that power them, in the face of growing evidence of the social harm the technology causes. disconnect.blog/ai-oppositio...

By early June, the Vancouver School Board started rolling out chatbot accounts for students aged 13 and over, despite the research suggesting it could affect students’ critical thinking skills and cognition, not to mention ongoing media reports about the effects chatbots have had on teens’ mental health.

Those details should have been red flags for administrators; they certainly were for some parents.

A group called Parents for AI Caution in Education Spaces is now seeking signatures to demand a two-year pause on the rollout of chatbots in Vancouver schools until there’s better data on the technology’s effects on students. Those ideas are spreading, not just in British Columbia but across Canada. But you might not get that impression if you listen to the federal government.

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jun 17

my inbox is filled with ai-generated scams trying to get me to pay to have my books featured in fake book clubs it’s annoying, but i got a good laugh at this one claiming to be dua lipa

Dear Paris Marx,
I hope you're doing well.
My name is Dua Lipa, and I'm reaching out from Service95, the editorial platform and book club I founded.
I recently came across Road to Nowhere and found its examination of the promises and realities of modern technology both insightful and timely.

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jun 12

banner saying trillionaire convention over a slaughterhouse with the ghost of chairman mao next to it

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jun 12

This shows that in one sense Australia’s social media age limit works. Not so much at forcing youth off the platforms — it’s still too early to know the full effect on that front — but at kicking off an experiment that other jurisdictions are quickly learning from. disconnect.blog/social-media...

In short, it learns from other jurisdictions while moving the ball forward in other ways for its peers to learn from too. There is still work to be done and issues to work out, but policy experimentation rather than endlessly debating the perfect solution while getting nowhere is the way to actually make progress on reining in the power of major tech companies. I feel more than ever that the voices that act primarily to criticize and delay action are helping the tech companies avoid accountability, even though they often claim to be doing otherwise.

Taking on the power of the US tech giants will be a marathon, not a sprint, but getting to the finish line requires us to actually start the race. Now that we have, we can improve as we go. Doing so requires us to push our governments to do better, but we shouldn’t ignore the signs that they are receptive to expert voices — and of learning from one another. It should have happened years ago, but we should take what we can get, and make sure we don’t make the same mistake of waiting far too long to take on the harms of AI chatbots too.

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jun 12

There are still questions about the Canadian legislation, in part by design. You don’t want every measure written in legislation because it would need to be rewritten every time the platforms change, needlessly constraining the digital safety regulator. disconnect.blog/social-media...

These developments make me more hopeful than I expected to be upon seeing the Canadian legislation. There are still a lot of questions that need to be answered about how precisely the different aspects of the plan will work, but to me it shows that the perfect is the enemy of the good and ultimately leaves the major tech companies off the hook for the harms they’re causing.

There are clearly problems with social media age limits, but the experimentation with that policy got the ball rolling and also got the public engaged in talking about the issue. Just six months after Australia’s implementation of its age limit, we’re already seeing other countries learn from their experience and improve their own social media legislation in response, including by focusing more on those design and algorithmic interventions.

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jun 12

When I saw the Canadian discussions picking up, I was concerned because it seemed like the focus was on an age limit. But the legislation itself shows otherwise. There is an age limit in it, but there’s a much great focus on changing the way the platforms function. disconnect.blog/social-media...

The media focused on the higher age limit — it’s been happening in other parts of the world and is easier for people not well-versed in tech policy to understand, including many journalists — but it was not really the centerpiece of the legislation. If anything, the age limit serves as a stick to get companies to comply with a broader set of design standards meant to make their platforms safer for younger users. Unlike in the Australian legislation, if platforms make those changes, they can win an exemption from the age limit.

One of the problem is that the focus is on changing how platforms operate for younger users, when many of those “safer by design” standards should apply regardless of a user’s age to reduce the addictiveness, mental health impacts, and broader antisocial nature of what we call “social” media. The Canadian legislation also targets various types of harmful content that can spread on platforms, including those that sexualize children or incite violence, proposes the creation of a Digital Safety Commission that sounds not unlike Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, and begins to extend some of those standards and responsibilities to AI chatbots.

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jun 12

Social media is not what it once was. The platforms have morphed over time to prioritize profits and engagement, regardless of what that means for users, and their very design has been shaped by the need to keep people looking at their screens. disconnect.blog/social-media...

So many of the features of modern social media platforms were made to keep us engaged and feed us regular dopamine hits, from the infinite scroll of content to like buttons and incessant notifications. Algorithms have been designed over many years to surface content that will keep us hooked, often pulling in things that are sensational and extreme in place of posts from friends or family to ensure we spend more time with our screens, and as a result, looking at ads. There’s no question that has negative implications for young people — but it does for everyone else too.

As I watched the effort to ban youth from social media spread around the world, this was precisely my concern: that the more effective policy would be sidelined for the easier and more populist one. That instead of targeting how the platforms function, we would simply kick off young people and call it a day. I saw that repeated as the debate around age limits finally came to Canada in recent months.

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jun 12

I’ve never been fully opposed to a higher age limit on social media. For me, the question has always been about effectiveness. Social media harms don’t just affect young people. If age limits come at the expense of design regulation, we’re not making progress. disconnect.blog/social-media...

I’ve been quite clear from the beginning that I’m not inherently opposed to making it harder for young people to access social media platforms, given the negative personal and social effects they have. After years of handwringing, I felt we needed to start taking swings — even if they were imperfect ones. The question for me has always been more centered around whether the policy is effective and is delivering the outcomes we actually want. That’s where I’ve been worried that putting so much focus on age limits was leading us in the wrong direction.

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jun 12

Since Australia started talking about a higher social media age limit, the policy has spread like wildfire. It addresses very real concerns about social media platforms, but it’s never been clear it’s the right way to approach the issue. disconnect.blog/social-media...

Since Australia took up the cause of higher age limits on social media in 2024, the push for such policies has spread like wildfire. A ban on under-16s came into effect down under in December 2025, and since then another 41 countries have either implemented their own or begun taking actions in that direction.

There’s no denying the policy is a controversial one. On one side, you have parents and advocates of children’s safety pointing to the harms of social media addiction and the type of content that can be pushed at teens when they use the platforms. Pushing back against them are privacy advocates and digital rights campaigners who worry about how all that data to verify people’s ages is going to be used and whether it makes sense to limit young people’s access to online spaces altogether.

Paris Marx@parismarx· Jun 8

How useful are all those vibe-coded apps at the end of the day? “The marked increase in mobile app releases over the past year has not been accompanied by any increase in downloads — most of the new apps fail to capture even a modest audience.” www.ft.com/content/8e9a...