Saul Thomas

Lecturer in Chinese history and anthropology at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

[Acyn @Acyn]

Trump: If I did meet with the new Ayatollah, I would be honored to meet him.

Doocy: Do you think because Epic Fury killed his killed his dad and his wife and his kid that he's has hard feelings?

Trump: I would say I'm not his favorite person, but with that being said, he's probably a pro—I don't know him—he's probably a professional in some circles, he has a very good reputation actually, you know, sometimes when people say bad, but a lot of people say bad about me . It's totally false, of course.

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

Pete Hegseth takes a break from promoting a $1.5 trillion military budget and wars at every corner on the planet, to warn us about the dangers of a military buildup in China - which has not fought a war in 46 years.

[Saul Thomas @saultthomas]

@longhaul_mag @threadreaderapp unroll

[deaf kennedys @thamosdeaf]

I like that building high speed rail in California requires nine thousand years of environmental impact studies but throwing up a data center the size of Texas takes fourteen seconds with zero material public support.

[Taylor Lorenz @TaylorLorenz]

SCOOP: A pro-AI dark money group backed by a powerful super PAC funded by execs tied to Palantir and OpenAI, has been secretly paying influencers to push pro-AI, anti-China propaganda on TikTok and IG.

[Yisu Zhou @yisuzhou]

The China watcher sphere on X is currently dominated by geopolitics, tech dominance, he green transition, and macro finance. But framing issues exclusively through the lens of "great power competition" masks the intense, complex social changes happening on the ground.

A recent viral controversy in Shenzhen perfectly illustrates what we are missing. (https://t.co/GtBtMFozE2)

Last week, a man and a woman got into a physical altercation at a bus stop after she tried to stop him from smoking. Both were detained and refused to settle. In response, police subjected the woman to a forced strip search—sparking massive public outrage regarding law enforcement overreach.

But the controversy itself isn't what caught my attention. It’s the woman at the center of it: 29-year-old Wang Ronghao.

It turns out Wang is a meticulous, active chronicler of the grueling service industry. Over the past 9 years, she has worked at Haidilao, Hema Fresh, Lawson, and various other gig economy jobs, documenting the crushing reality of modern labor. Reading her diaries, you realize that the mechanisms of control over labor have evolved right alongside economic development, taking on terrifying new forms. (A report from 2025: https://t.co/0qqWA9E0F3)

Her writings expose the invisible, often dehumanizing architecture required to maintain "extreme service":

Algorithmic Panic: At Hema grocery, strict "30-minute fresh delivery" timers force kitchen workers to literally reach into 100°C steamers without gloves to grab RFID tags just to avoid algorithmic penalization, leaving them covered in burns.

Panopticon Management: At Haidilao hotpot, a relentless reporting culture and surveillance enforce "16 zero-tolerance rules." If a customer pours their own water before a server can sprint over to do it, the server faces docked pay and public reprimand.

Systemic Overwork: A total deprivation of basic human needs. Convenience store clerks are forced to stand for 10+ hour shifts even when the store is empty, and workers battle for corners on the street just to sleep for 20 minutes.

I don’t want to frame this merely as a "China labor story." It is clear that we are seeing the exact same algorithmic exhaustion in Amazon warehouses and among Uber drivers in the U.S. It could be any country.

The very "substrate" of society is shifting globally. In both countries, and in many others, the driving forces are identical: the relentless optimization of technology and the unchecked leverage of large, powerful companies.

It is not a question of which country is "better" or who is winning a geopolitical rivalry. Beneath the high-level macro narratives and great power posturing, this is plainly an age-old labor struggle, evolving alongside technology, that never actually left.

[Saul Thomas @saultthomas]

@Daizy3609 @CattardSlim Joel Webbon certainly is. "White nationalist" is too mild a term for him. He's a fanatic racist.

[Saul Thomas @saultthomas]

@heynavtoor LLMs are deception machines. They are specifically engineered to deceive users into thinking that they are conversing with a coherent, thoughtful, responsible and moral entity. Nothing could be further from the truth.

[Saul Thomas @saultthomas]

@x00ge_ii63 Are you suggesting that were it not for CR reforms, the overwhelming majority of Chinese people would have been "educated" by 1976? Measured by what standard?

[Philippe Lemoine @phl43]

The complete lack of self-awareness of Americans will never cease to amaze me. The US just launched a war of aggression against Iran, which it started by murdering its entire leadership in the middle of negotiations. A few weeks earlier, it had attacked yet another country and abducted its leader in the middle of the night. At the same time, it's strangling Cuba, a country that poses no threat whatsoever to the US, by imposing a strict embargo on it, while openly threatening to use force against it unless the government does as Trump says. But despite all of that, they still think they're in a position to castigate "rogue states", lmao.

[Ryan Goodman @rgoodlaw]

This is utterly extraordinary.

If Hegseth et al got this wrong, think what else is happening with the drug boat strikes and much more.

The U.S. Said It Helped Bomb a Drug Camp. It Was a Dairy Farm.

Gets worse as you read it.

1/

[Alonso Gurmendi @Alonso_GD]

Tucker Carlson sucks. He’s not on “my side”. But he is getting a lot of centre left people to listen simply bc he can say basic stuff w/o retaliation. He wasn’t sanctioned like Albanese, suspended like Khan, dropped like Barrera, cancelled like Glazer or assaulted like Ballal

[Saul Thomas @saultthomas]

@weewinnywins @DropSiteNews "Western civilization" believes in individual rights and protecting innocents while "Eastern civilization" believes in collective punishment? What kind of person would say this? He is and always has been an absolute white supremacist racist piece of shit.

[Ounka @OunkaOnX]

Norman Finkelstein just schooled everyone on international law. Finkelstein citing Article 51:

Iran is legally defending itself. The US and Israel are legally committing aggression. There's no debate

[Saul Thomas @saultthomas]

@BrankoMilan @Lisdat Have you linked to the correct source for the data? What is the full name of the organization or institution?

[Saul Thomas @saultthomas]

@ArunKrishnan_ The obvious but unthinkable fact is that an even greater precaution to protect civilians would be not to bomb anyone at all.

[Saul Thomas @saultthomas]

@mideastXmidwest I wonder if the Germans on the logistics teams sending provisions for the prisoners in concentration camps felt that they had to participate because that they were doing good, important work for the inmates.

[Adam Johnson @adamjohnsonCHI]

Note that Def Secretary Hegseth said they were ignoring “stupid rules of engagement” and vowed to “unleash the most lethal” “airpower campaign in history.” This, combined with relying on moral laundromat Claude to “choose targets,” means they, at best, made this inevitable.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

🚨BREAKING: MIT hooked people up to brain scanners while they used ChatGPT.

What they found should concern every single person reading this.

ChatGPT users showed 55% weaker brain connectivity than people who didn't use it. Not after years. After just four months.

Here's how they tested it. 54 people were split into three groups: one used ChatGPT to write essays, one used Google, and one used nothing but their own brain. They wore EEG monitors that tracked their brain activity in real time across four sessions over four months.

The brain-only group built the strongest, most widespread neural networks. Google users were in the middle. ChatGPT users had the weakest brains in the room. Every time.

Then the memory test hit. Participants were asked to recall what they'd just written minutes earlier. 83% of ChatGPT users couldn't quote a single line from their own essay. They wrote it. They couldn't remember it. The words passed through them like they were never there.

It gets worse. In the final session, ChatGPT users were told to write without AI. Their brains were measurably weaker than people who never used AI at all. 78% still couldn't recall their own writing. The damage didn't go away when the tool was removed.

Meanwhile, brain-only users who tried ChatGPT for the first time? Their brains lit up. They wrote better prompts. They retained more. Their brains were already strong enough to use AI as a tool instead of a crutch.

The researchers also found that every ChatGPT essay on the same topic looked almost identical. More facts, more dates, more names. But less original thinking. Everyone using ChatGPT produced the same generic output while believing it was their own.

MIT gave this a name: cognitive debt. Like financial debt, you borrow convenience now and pay with your thinking ability later. Except there's no way to pay it back.

The question isn't whether ChatGPT is useful. It's whether the price is your ability to think without it.

[Uncle Lou @crazyunclelou]

We have spent the equivalent of what it cost to build this just blowing things up the last 4 days.