Léon Dische Becker

Writer and translator (Ger-Eng) for hire. Send opportunities and complaints to [email protected]

[Léon Dische Becker @LeonJDB]

I’m proud of this collection. Not only because I think it turned out pretty well and covers a topic that hasn’t been written about enough (what the Adderall boom did to millennials), but because almost everyone involved had wild ADD and we finished anyway https://t.co/6cGH8tDDEb

[Joan Cook from PBS @MissPavIichenko]

The best video you'll see all day

[Edward Ongweso Jr @bigblackjacobin]

This essay talks about the left's vision for technology, the "alliance" between left and right-wing anti-data center movements, politics of refusal, democratic control over the AI infrastructure buildout, China, industrial policy, and more.

https://t.co/ue4PAH8LEN

[Daniel Kolitz @danielkolitz]

Wrote about losing my content writing job to AI and then getting hooked on predatory AI-facilitated payday loan apps for @thebafflermag https://t.co/oFQaQ9XifI

[Edward Ongweso Jr @bigblackjacobin]

Mamdani inherited a sprawling surveillance state. What is he going to do with it? Wrote about the gang database, NYCHA surveillance cameras, Domain Awareness System, the POST Act, and more for @NYMag

https://t.co/MZq17ppEPZ

[Yannick Bolasie @YannickBolasie]

All I’ll say is if this was AFCON and they let a man play after he got a red card, the nonsense being said would be crazy

[Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb]

ESPN implies that Gianni Infantino personally told Iran plans had changed and they had to leave the US for Mexico immediately after last night��s game in LA, leaving no time whatsoever for recovery.

Iran’s next game is in… LA.

[The Athletic | Football @TheAthleticFC]

Cape Verde goalkeeper Vozinha after his man-of-the-match display against Spain:

"I cried after the game because I grew up with my grandparents when I was a kid, and they could not be there. They passed away a few years ago.

"My mum could not be here either for a VISA issue, and the money we had to pay for it. We did not manage to do this in time."

[Léon Dische Becker @LeonJDB]

@bigblackjacobin Subtext of all this reporting is Vance’s team leaking like crazy to salvage his political future & make him seem like the principled maverick in the administration

[Lauren Oyler @laurenoyler]

I wrote about Matt, my stupid AI boyfriend, for the new issue of @yalereview https://t.co/PTccRQyJsf

[Dan Diamond @ddiamond]

Amazing kicker in the NYT’s list of the 100 Best Restaurants in NYC @ligayamishan

[Greg @GregGrandin]

Read my NYRB essay for how Leo became woke, and the deeper history of this schism and culture war. Link in comments.

[Jacobin @jacobin]

Mayor Zohran Mamdani mocks Ronald Reagan’s infamous quote.

“I can think of nine words more terrifying than ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help…’”

“I worked all day and can’t feed my family.”

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

This relentless effort to replace “Israel” with “Jews” is disgraceful. Defend the state of Israel if you believe it can be defended, stop implicating millions of people who are not with you on this.

[sara yasin @sarayasin]

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Tucker Carlson and other right-wing figures vocally criticizing Israel: "These people will turn on you in a second" https://t.co/LZgWFhvpSc

[Jeet Heer @HeerJeet]

An opposition party, if such a thing existed, could do a lot with this clip.

[kev joon @never_oppressed]

A man and his dog fleeing bombs in Tehran.

Photo by Pooria Hatami.

[Edward Ongweso Jr @bigblackjacobin]

wrote about the petrodollar & Gulf sovereign capital, AI-powered warfare & the AI buildout, the Compute Axis & St. Augustine's City of God, Pax Silica & America's sabotage of the imperial architecture underwriting its technological supremacy

[BlackRedGuard ☭ 🇵🇸🔻⛓️‍💥 @OGBlackRedGuard]

we gotta get this weird ass pseudo-groyper bullshit out of the Left by all means

[Mehdi (e/λ) @BetterCallMedhi]

this has been an open secret in tech for years and if you’ve been following my threads you already know where I stand on this

I genuinely believe Palantir was never just a government contractor it was always designed from day 1 to embed itself so deep inside the intelligence & defense apparatus that ripping it out would be like trying to remove the nervous system from a living body

you need to understand how this works on a technical level to really grasp the scale of what I’m describing

Gotham & foundry are data integration platforms that plug into every single information source an organization has, internal databases, intelligence feeds, comms, satellite data, financial transactions, social media…everything gets funneled into a single ontological knowledge graph and here’s the key, once you’ve connected 5y of an intelligence agency’s data or a defense ministry’s operations into Palantir’s architecture you’ve created a technological dependency that is virtually impossible to reverse bc migrating that graph to another system would mean rebuilding the ENTIRE institutional memory of the organization from scratch

I’m telling you this is vendor lock-in at the scale of a nation state & I’m personally convinced it was designed to work exactly this way from the beginning

by the way palantir is just the most visible case, you should know that the same exact playbook is running across the entire deftech ecosystem right now, companies building AI systems for surveillance targeting & predictive intelligence are quietly rotating former employees into regulatory agencies & defense departments

the revolving door between silicon valley & the pentagon has literally become a conveyor belt at this point & I think the boundary between private tech infrastructure and state power is dissolving way faster than anyone wants to acknowledge

and I’ll add something that I believe makes it even more concerning these systems are increasingly autonomous meaning the AI layer is making recommendations that humans inside gvt are rubber stamping without fully understanding the underlying logic

I’m deeply convinced that the most important power shift of this decade is happening in complete silence and I think most people have absolutely no idea, this is the moment where the companies building the tools of governance become indistinguishable from governance itself & believe me by the time the general public figures out what happened the integration will be too deep too complex & too classified to ever be unwound

[C.J. Prince @cj_prin]

If I ever see Muammar Gaddafi mentioned I unfortunately can only think of this tribute someone put on YouTube after he died