Linkage

In 1977, the Dutch city of Groningen implented a plan that restricted through-traffic from the city center. Local businesses protested, threatened politicians, and predicted economic disaster. Decades later, Groningen has one of Europe's most livable inner cities without endless traffic jams—a perfect example of balancing livability with smart car accessibility.

Do we have anything left now?

In mid-May, the Wikimedia Foundation fired Brooke Vibber.

If that name doesn’t mean anything to you, here is what it should mean. Vibber took over as lead developer of MediaWiki, the platform that runs Wikipedia, in early 2003. She was the first full-time employee the Wikimedia Foundation ever hired, and its first Chief Technical Officer. For more than twenty years she was the engineer you called when something deep in the code was broken. The Foundation itself once described her as one of a very small number of people in the world who deeply understand the technical underpinnings of the system. She was also a union organizer.

A week later, on May 21, the Foundation announced it had disbanded the Community Tech team. Five engineers and a manager: gone. Their job had been to take the wishes Wikipedia editors submitted through an official channel called the Community Wishlist, and build them. It was the one team at WMF whose product owner was, in effect, the volunteer community. Most of the engineers were also union organizers.

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Bernadette Meehan became CEO on January 20, 2026, recruited from a career that included Wall Street stints at J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers, a spokesperson role at the National Security Council, senior leadership at the Obama Foundation, and most recently a posting as U.S. Ambassador to Chile. Four months in, the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki is fired, the team that personifies community service is dissolved, and the union is in open confrontation.

This is the standard tech playbook. Fire the engineers who know how the system works, fire the ones organizing labor, hope nothing catastrophic breaks before you can ship something splashy. Twitter did it. Meta did it. Salesforce did it. Google did it. We have all seen this movie.

Brooke is a first-gen Fediversian, and an absolute legend. This is a disgrace.

Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary—their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions—known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs)—often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD.

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These discoveries do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms. Few legal systems allow for any ambiguity in biological sex, and a person's legal rights and social status can be heavily influenced by whether their birth certificate says male or female.

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So if the law requires that a person is male or female, should that sex be assigned by anatomy, hormones, cells or chromosomes, and what should be done if they clash? “My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter,” says Vilain. In other words, if you want to know whether someone is male or female, it may be best just to ask.

A new code of practice has said that organisations offering single-sex services and spaces must exclude Trans+ people from them, or no longer label them as ‘single-sex’.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission, the UK's equality watchdog, laid the Code of Practice before Parliament this Thursday, May 21st. It sets out that single-sex spaces, from toilets to changing rooms, must be served on the basis of what it calls 'biological sex', based on people's sex assigned at birth. It will come into practice after 40 days, if it is not opposed.

The code makes it clear that this is the case even if someone has a Gender Recognition Certificate that changes their legal sex. It sets out that this should now be considered their 'certified sex', instead of their 'biological sex', and that single-sex provisions must be delivered in accordance with 'biological sex'.

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In almost all instances, it recommends creating 'third spaces' for Trans+ people to use, setting out that though people should use single sex services based on their 'biological sex', if Trans+ people are perceived to be another gender, it may be proportionate to deny them access to these too.

For example, it sets out that if a trans man is perceived to be a man, they could be denied entry to the women's toilets, even though their sex assigned at birth is female. It describes this as "a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim" because "other service users could reasonably object to his presence".

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Although this guidance is not as bad as it could have been, this is horrific news for not only Trans+ people, but the whole LGBTQIA+ community. The Trans+ community are scared, angry and fearful about what it could mean.

Trans+ Solidarity Alliance says this code will become Labour's legacy, haunting them much like Section 28 did the Conservatives. Trans Actual have warned that this will impact everyone in the LGBTQIA+ community.

It will act as a blank cheque for anyone who wants to further narrow what men and women should look like, which will lead to increasingly polarised gender policing in bathrooms, changing rooms and spaces up and down the country.

The report, released tonight, recommends scrapping rules that force developers to include a minimum number of car park spaces when building housing.

The "Wasted Space" report found that upwards of 40 per cent of car parks were left empty each night in apartments in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane.

"State and local governments typically require new housing to include off-street parking — often much more than residents want, needlessly driving up the price of housing," the report said.

The report found these parking minimums increased construction costs by $70,000 for a two-bedroom Sydney apartment.

Bless Amy Goodman.

As consolidation, layoffs, and deference to power continue to hollow out the corporate media, Jon is joined by Amy Goodman, host and executive producer of “Democracy Now!” and subject of the new documentary "STEAL THIS STORY, PLEASE!" Together, they examine which stories get told and why, discuss the bargain the media makes in trading truth for access, and explore the power ordinary people still possess to organize and fight back — even as attacks on our democracy intensify.

Very interesting take.

In parallel with the rise of the technopoly over the past couple of decades the US’s global dominance has been declining. The 2007 crash effectively legalising financial fraud – you only get jail time if you defraud the rich – lead to both a decline in the rule of law in the US and an excessively financialised economy. When stock markets and the like are overrepresented they suck the air out of the rest of the economy and make it less competitive.

If you have two economies of equal size and productivity, one has a massive financial sector and billionaires while the other does not, the financialised economy will have less left over to invest in research, education, infrastructure, and healthcare. Over time, it will inevitably fall behind the country with a smaller financial sector because it’s the other things that drive the economy and productivity, not stock market growth.

The US has coasted on the fact that it’s economy is so big that it could afford all the finance and billionaire parasites sucking its blood. At least for a while.

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Instead of delivering services and software that unlocks value for their client industries, the software industry has spent the past decade or so trying to control their customers and their client industries. Why make software for hotels when you can control the hotel industry? Why make software for taxis when you can replace the entire industry with software? Instead of trying to entice customers to upgrade their software by making new versions more valuable to them, push them to a subscription service where you control what they get, when they get it, and what value they’re allowed to unlock from their own businesses. Why sell Word when you can sell an Office 365 Cloud Subscription?

The endpoint of this is to replace every industry that remains with generative models. Cut back on actual development of Photoshop, for example, lower development costs and programmer overhead even as you replace the industries that are your customers with automatic image and video generators.

But writing out a detailed analysis of the how, what, why, and where of the software industry’s grasp for control doesn’t really make that much sense when we don’t know how any of it’s going to pan out.

The software industry is built on the foundation provided by an unchallenged US global hegemony. Without it, without the economic force provided by the US dollar, the US having access to all of our data around the globe and their control over payment systems and networking would be less tenable. Today’s software industry would not exist. Without the weight of the US political empire behind it – if Airbnb or Uber had been local startups – much fewer countries in the world would have loosened their regulations and consumer protections to accommodate them to the point where they prospered as they did.

Even as the software industry achieves its ne plus ultra – the unprecedented achievement of controlling all language, media, and office work in the west by turning “AI” into the universal intermediary – the foundation they built on is crumbling.

The era of the “ten blue links” is officially over.

At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined “intelligent search box” — what the company describes as the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago.

Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times. Google is also introducing tools that can dispatch “information agents” to gather information on a user’s behalf, along with tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs.

The resulting experience will no longer look much like how people envision Google Search, which has long been defined by ranked links to websites that have the information you need.

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Combined, these changes will likely further decimate Google referrals to publishers, which have already been suffering from declining referrals due to AI Overviews. This has put some ad-dependent media operations out of business, and now things will likely get worse.

There’s little time left for publishers to adapt. The new search box is arriving this week, and generative UI is arriving this summer. Both are free. The mini-app-building feature and information agents will roll out first to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers this summer.

The lack of self-awareness in naming a site that excludes anyone who isn't a bigoted joyless monomaniac "Giggle" cannot be emphasised enough.

Last week, the Federal Court upheld a 2024 decision that it was discriminatory to exclude a transgender user from a women-only app.

The court had been considering an appeal from Giggle for Girls app founder Sall Grover over the 2024 finding that she discriminated against Roxanne Tickle by blocking her from using the app and refusing to reinstate her.

Grover and Giggle argued the decision to exclude Tickle was exempt from being classed as discrimination because the app aimed to achieve "substantial equality" and create a safe space for women.

On Friday, the Federal Court upheld its decision that the exemption did not apply, meaning similar arguments made in defence of single-sex spaces would likely also fail.

On Saturday, Opposition leader Angus Taylor said in a statement on social media that the finding confirmed "the Australian law does not properly protect single sex spaces for women and girls".

He vowed on social media to amend the Sex Discrimination Act if the Coalition won government, "to ensure that women and girls (and men and boys) have protections based on biological sex".

"We are not removing a single protection from anyone," he said.

"But we are recognising something that should never have been in doubt: biological sex is real, it matters, and women and girls deserve spaces where it is respected."

Taylor said a move to "define biological sex in the Act" as "the sex you are born" would be a first-term priority.

"This is not radical. It is common sense," Taylor said.

Sigh. Yes, we've heard it all before. It's reality that's being excessively radical, therefore we must legislate against reality.

The deal would have been Palantir’s largest yet in British policing, after others worth £330m and £240m with NHS England and the Ministry of Defence.

The row has been inflamed by the fact that Khan has previously made clear that Londoners only wanted to see public money being paid to companies that “share the values of our city”.

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The row has cast fresh light on Palantir’s record of winning public contracts in the UK. Scotland Yard previously appointed Palantir on a much smaller contract to use AI to monitor staff behaviour in an bid to root out corrupt officers. This contract was awarded directly, without advertisement or open competition, because its value was just below the £500,000 threshold required for City Hall’s approval.

Khan said on Thursday: “In general terms, what you’re allowing is these private companies to almost have a loss leader, so they give you a good deal or something for nothing for a short bit of time [and] you can become reliant upon them.”

In 2023 the government’s chief commercial officer raised concerns with Palantir about the practice of offering public services for a zero or nominal cost to gain a commercial foothold.

Donald Campbell, director of advocacy at the tech equity campaign Foxglove, said: “Palantir is notorious for its ‘land and expand’ approach, in which it wins small contracts or even offers free services at first, then uses those to build a much wider role in our public services.”.

He said Khan had “seen through this practice, and put a stop to it – while rightly highlighting Londoners’ concerns over Palantir’s ethical record”.

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Martin Wrigley, a Liberal Democrat member of the Commons science and technology select committee said he was “delighted” by City Hall’s decision.

“To get another contract without competition would have been a disgrace,” Wrigley said. “Palantir have failed to deliver to their promises on too many projects. Buying projects through free trials to then write the contract spec should be banned from government procurement.”

Khan’s move will be a blow to the Labour government’s efforts to use AI to improve policing. In January, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, called for police to “ramp up use of AI” and to adopt the technology “at pace and scale”.