I have written much about my memories of 9/11: My story of surviving the day; recording what I witnessed; a meditation on the Yahrzeit; then five years on; ten; and twenty years and what I recalled still. Now twenty-five years after I must write of my regret.  All this time, I had convinced myself of […]

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The story of labor and the Linotype is unexpected in many aspects. For this Labor Day, I’ll share a bit on the subject from my book Hot Type. (Links to buy the hardback and audiobook versions and signed copies are here). Printers waged their first strike against publishers in occupied New York in the winter […]

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With the release my new book, Hot Type, this week, I will post some good bits in hopes of enticing you into reading it. Here, from the introduction, is a preview of the many delightful rabbit holes I explored building the story of the invention of the first successful typesetting machine, the Linotype, and with it, […]

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On this week’s Intelligent Machines, we cohosts had a spirited disagreement about Anthropic’s watermarking of text, as required by EU regulation. The company just released more detail about how it will work, and now I’m upset for a different reason than I first thought. I’m angry as a writer. Anthropic’s method will alter its models’ word choices in a pattern […]

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In response to the spectre of Chinese open-weight AI models haunting America, Dean Ball, OpenAI’s director of strategic futures [are there directors of strategic pasts?], issued a warning more shrill even than the New York Post’s alerts about Mamdani’s bus-and-grocery socialism.  One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely […]

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California is about to hand out $20 million — half from Google, half from the state — to news organizations, and it is wasting a golden opportunity. Instead of building a new and more competitive landscape of news, instead of creating services to benefit the entire news ecosystem, instead of investing in innovation, instead of embracing new […]

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In an urgent and provocative essay in Die Zeit, journalist Georg Diez calls for a redefinition of progress in the time of AI. Taking lessons from the genesis of progressivism — a response to the Industrial Revolution and the (first) Gilded Age — we cannot now surrender the power to decide society’s future to present technologists. “A notion of […]

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I am delighted that Montclair State University (MSU) has won its bid to take over New Jersey public television, for in this moment I see an opening to reimagine and reinvent public media in a new image — as the public’s media.  And nowhere better for that to happen than in New Jersey, where threads have been […]

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Artificial Intelligence, though more than a half-century old as a technology, has occupied front-of-mind cultural consciousness for only a few years, since ChatGPT. Yet AI is already profoundly disliked and distrusted in both media meme and apparently in public opinion. The techlash against the internet and then social media took at least two decades to ferment, while […]

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Eddie Glaude, Jr., holds a mirror up to America. Look, he tells us, look! How often I have heard him on television, invited to the camera by Nicolle Wallace to lament another American tragedy and sin: racist murders, the shooting deaths of mere babies, the abuse of immigrant children, the bigotry of the president. Do […]

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I am terribly saddened at word of the death of Donald Newhouse, the last great gentleman of the newspaper business. Soft-spoken, unassuming, humble, kind, and generous, Don Newhouse was at the same time a publisher of vast experience, universal respect, and great strength. I had the great privilege of working for him via his sons, […]

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Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, Magnifca Humanitas, is a learned, wise, eloquent, and useful document that is only partly about artificial intelligence. Its lessons should be helpful to many modern institutions — including my own, journalism. For those expecting the Pontiff to declare holy war on AI and Silicon Valley, they will be disappointed. Those who wish to […]

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We will not see Ted Turner’s visionary likes again. He broke free of the bounds of broadcast scarcity and recognized the opportunity to use satellite and cable to build national–then international–networks and brands: not just CNN but his “superstation.” He invented 24-hour news. Out of nonstop, round-the-clock news came a host of good–and bad–outcomes. We […]

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Sam Altman just published a set of principles for OpenAI, in which he asserts, “AI will dwarf what people could do with steam engines or electricity.” Uh, history would like a word, Sam. Sam believes that his talkative tool will dwarf powered transportation, powered industry, lighting, electronic communication, amplification, even computation. This is the hubris […]

The post Technology Does Not Belong to the Technologists appeared first on BuzzMachine.

Bloomsbury Academic is announcing the launch of a new book series: Intelligence: AI and Humanity. I’m humbled, delighted, and honestly amazed to say that I will be the series editor. Intelligence is a venue for writers from a wide array of fields and areas of expertise to reflect on artificial intelligence as a mirror to […]

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Jürgen Habermas has died. In memory of the great philosophical provocateur, is a section of my book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis, grappling with his idea of the public sphere and the coffeehouse. Writing and conversation came together in a new institution built for the purpose: the coffeehouse. There, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in England, varied […]

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Here is an excellent paper that clearly explains the philosophy that guides Yann LeCun’s research in AI and his new company, AMI Labs. It also perfectly expresses my complaints about the trope of artificial general intelligence — AGI, or BS for short. LeCun et al reject the idée fixe that obsesses the Promethean dreams of too many […]

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I’m back. Here’s where I’ve been. Most of you should not care, but for those wanting a medical update, here’s the tale.  Two weeks ago, on Sunday, Jan. 11, I lost a test of strength with bedding on laundry day. As I’ve already recounted, My feet flew out from under me; I flew up and […]

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In this terrible time, what disappoints and angers me so about my own field of journalism — to which I have devoted 50 years of my life — is its refusal to recognize fascism, to even use the word so as to explain it, and to judge Trump and the Trumpists for their crimes against decency, democracy, and humanity.  […]

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We have lost a most generous soul. I have lost a benefactor, mentor, and friend. Leonard Tow died Sunday at age 97.  Len held a PhD in economic geography from Columbia and taught at Hunter and Columbia before deciding to leave for business, first in theater and then in the infant industries of cable TV […]

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Like every sane American, I am outraged that CBS/Paramount/Ellison Inc. canceled — in the true meaning of the word — Stephen Colbert, capitulating to Trump in the rapid Orbanization of American media. Here I propose what I hope comes next for Colbert: that he build his own show and empire online. And I’ll tell for the first time of […]

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The Times has it out for Zohran Mamdani. The record is clear. It is time to examine receipts.  The latest attack on him is journalistically unconscionable, and so is the editors’ reaction to legitimate criticism. In a story played by its editors on its home page and boosted by its reporter as his scoop — when it […]

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In an endless game of lobbyists’ Whac-A-Mole, it’s a new year and here is new legislation trying to save the news. Except it’s not new. First, from Oregon, comes a rehash of bad legislation written by newspaper hedge-fund lobbyists, versions of which were deflected in two other states last year. At least the Beaver State […]

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For 25 years now, the Edelman PR company has issued its Trust Barometer. This year, it’s all about grievances. It’s Festivus every day, the world around. Six in 10 people in the survey “hold grievances against business, government, and the rich.” Only 36% worldwide — 30% in the US, 14% in Germany, 17% in the UK — believe the […]

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Two days to go until the fascist oligarchy comes to power in the United States and this is how our once-greatest newspaper, The New York Times, is covering what could end in the fall of American democracy. To The Times, all the world’s Trump’s stage and they’re merely spectators. On the socials, I started to […]

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Every current and common explanation for the reelection of Donald Trump — whether inflation or immigration, culture wars or campaign tactics, blaming Harris or Biden or the party — elides its true and root cause: racism.  The United States is a deeply, fundamentally racist nation and unless and until we in white America admit and address that, our endless […]

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Nevermind every other theory or tactical complaint about what happened in this election. Kamala Harris did everything she possibly could to win. The fault is not hers.  The fault is in our nation. We must come to the realization that America is deeply racist and sexist, incapable of electing a Black, Asian woman to its […]

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Rupert Murdoch’s media have been a key source of moral panic about the internet and technology — see, for example, this from his Times declaring that phones are “dope” that imprison us all in an epidemic of addiction causing cognitive decline:  On the latest episode of This Week in Google, we discussed parents’ legitimate concerns about their […]

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It is as if the editorial department at The Washington Post woke up one morning asking, in headlines I will quote below, “What are we doing wrong?” I will start by trying to answer the question for them, The New York Times, CNN, and the rest of incumbent journalism: You have refused to recognize fascism […]

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As often as I am disappointed in and critical of them lately, I will not cancel my subscriptions to The New York Times or The Washington Post. They should be so lucky, for I will stay on their cases. I also wish to support the good reporting that still comes from them. I’ve been thinking […]

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