March With Us This Weekend

Dear Citizens,

Elizabeth Holmes says the system is broken! We’ve seen it all. Also we’re hoping you caught our latest Citizens Understand this week, about the crisis of online exploitation.

Here’s what else to read, know and watch heading into the weekend.

🚨 CITIZENS IRL! March Against the Machines Tomorrow 🚨

Plans tomorrow? Want to be at the first-ever AI march in the UK, so you can tell your kids about it? “March against the Machines” is here, on Saturday in London. PullthePlug.uk is taking their fight right to OpenAi and the Big Tech giants and we’ll be speaking; start at the Open AI office (York House, Fora, 221 Pentonville Rd, London, N1 9UZ) and spend the day with some very proper advocates for change.

👉 Sign up here.

Can’t make it?

We bring together the people, ideas and actions fighting for accountable tech every week. Make sure you’re on the list.

👩🏿‍⚖️ ONE WATCH: Tesitify! 👩🏿‍⚖️

The social media giants are on trial for addictive algorithms, and young people are speaking out. In this powerful short video from outside the landmark trial, plaintiff K.G.M. speaks out:

(Thanks to our friends at Design it for Us who are driving so much of this!)

👉 Bonus watch: Is Regulation the Big (Tech) Fix?

From the Citizens archive, Join journalist Manasa Narayanan as she speaks to Marietje Schaake about whether existing tech laws are working and whether AI can be meaningfully regulated.

🎥 Watch here.

🤖 ONE READ: The Botlash is Here 🤖

A lot of good thinking about AI this week.

In the FT from our colleague and expert Marietje Schaake, is “the ‘botlash’ movement gaining momentum?” Marietje writes -

Tech chief executives and the Trump administration thus far calculate that embracing deregulation will ensure American AI dominance over geopolitical rivals. But they may well face a backlash, or “botlash”, reckoning … Some in the US believe such a future is already here. In Minneapolis, protesters have drawn direct lines between the country’s biggest AI companies and the Trump administration’s anti-immigration enforcement. “QuitGPT” is a campaign urging users to abandon OpenAI’s ChatGPT as a form of civic protest against the support its founders have shown for President Donald Trump (co-founder Greg Brockman donated $25mn to the Super Pac Maga Inc). Street protests have also targeted the Palo Alto offices of Palantir, the data intelligence company that has contracts with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Read the whole piece here.

👉 Bonus read: We know. You’re tired of AI. We’re tired of AI. But what if something better could actually rise from the chaos?

From The Renovator, this second piece in their series in their series on real-world democratic technologies, Nathan E. Sanders and Bruce Schneier argue that we don’t have to accept the corporate AI model as inevitable. Read it here.

👁️ ONE ACTION: Is Your Phone Snitching? 👁️

Not to be paranoid or anything, but OMG IS YOUR PHONE BEING SPIED ON!? (Probably) From Electronic Frontier Foundation, this new tool can tell you if you’re a victim of cellular spying.

It’s complicated but important… US law enforcement could be using “cell-site simulators” to track protestors and dissent. Ready to go deep?

To fill these gaps in our knowledge, we have created an open source project called Rayhunter. It is developed to run on an Orbic mobile hotspot (Amazon, Ebay) which is available for $20 or less at the time of this writing. We have tried to make Rayhunter as easy as possible to install and use, regardless of your level of technical knowledge. We hope that activists, journalists, and others will run these devices all over the world and help us collect data about the usage and capabilities of cell-site simulators (please see our legal disclaimer.)

This is a little more technical than our usual, but maybe important for some of our readers.

👉 Check out all of EFF’s tools here.

That’s all for this week.
Team Citizens

*PS - Join our Signal Chat if you haven’t already! There's over 350 people in there now.