Quinn Norton is a writer who likes to hang out in the dead end alleys and rough neighborhood of the Internet, where bad things can happen to defenseless little packets. She writes about hackers, humans, bodies, technologies, and internets.
"Useless in terms of… tactical details" -Stratfor
What We are Quietly Losing in All the Tumult Last week the ghouls of DOGE came to gut NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) by firing all the probationary employees, because they were the easiest to fire. It was terrible, but it won’t be their last visit. I wanted to take a moment to focus […]
The Other Half of the AI relationship Part 2: Pareidolia as a Service When trying to understand AI, and in particular Large Language Models, we spend a lot of time concentrating on their architectures, structures, and outputs. We look at them with a technical eye. We peer so close and attentively to AI that we […]
How Vance unsettled the Europeans While Musk was ripping through the US government like a 10 tonne toddler on cocaine, Vice President JD Vance was dispatched to the Munich Security Conference last week to tell Europeans how to run their democracies. His 19 minute speech, coupled with Trumps’ announcement that peace in Ukraine would be […]
A Normal Person’s Explainer on What Generative AI is and Does Part 1 – In the Beginning was the Chatbot “Are you comfortably seated? Yes, well, let’s begin.” *Clears throat theatrically* “Our experience, in natural theology, can never furnish a true and demonstrated science, because, like the discipline of practical reason, it can not take […]
Why Trump Won The making of the electorate Trump just won, and thusly the United States we have now, started decades ago in school. The Conservative Takeover of America was not secret, it was worse than secret; it was boring and bureaucratic. The conservatives worked slowly, patiently, and persistently to not merely change our institutions, […]
A Cold War History and a Too-Hot Future It is hard to overstate the significance of the square at the heart of Kyiv, Ukraine, now called the Maidan Nezalezhnosti. The stones of the Maidan have silently endured generations of trouble and fights over what Ukraine should be. Every few decades, starting with the collapse of […]
Take a deep breath, because here we go again. The French legislative election is on Sunday. As the clock turns over to early Saturday morning, we entered Silence électoral, or the blackout period, when media coverage and campaigning stops ahead of Election Day. (I, being an American resident in France posting to a website in […]
The Tories are Exhausting. This Thursday the 4th of July the UK will be overcast in the low 60s with some intermittent rain, and all the parliamentary seats will be up for grabs as the UK turns out for yet another insane British snap election. This one was called by Rishi Sunak, the Almost Certainly […]
Whatever happens today, the Union is done. It has been for a long time, maybe even from the start. But we have reached the point where the longer it goes on, the more harm it will inexorably do. It’s time, past time, to admit it didn’t work, it never worked, and that the Constitution and […]