When it comes down to it, after you strip away all the technology, degrees, accomplishments, and money, all we have is our humanity. This is not new, though over the years we have continued to add more and more stuff, trying to replace, or at least substitute for, that humanity.

We would recognize the current pattern reflected a century ago when the Gilded Age imploded. The Robber Barons of that era were somewhat able to diffuse the rising tensions their rapacious extraction was causing, because they were able to see the growing angst their skyrocketing wealth extraction was creating. It was visible to them because they were not firmly ensconced in the social, technological, and physical bubbles of their own creation that the billionaires of today have carefully crafted.

They didn’t have private jet nor their own islands. They couldn’t buy social media sites and change the algorithm to only feed them AI slop and propaganda that reinforced their delusions of grandeur. While they certainly had yes-men who told them that everything they touched turned to gold, they were also forced to regularly see the reality outside their mansion walls.

Strong unions were a key development of the Gilded Age, putting pressure on the corporations that extracted wealth from the workers to further pad the robber barons’ bank accounts. By unifying and mobilizing the workers, those unions were able to hit the bosses where it hurt, their bank account. And since their income was still based on real things, not just zeros creating more zeros in their investment account, they were susceptible to work and therefore production disruptions.

Our unions today are weaker and have lower participation after years of legal and extralegal set backs and crack downs. But against that backdrop, unionization efforts at some of our largest national corporations are accelerating. These efforts are providing visibility and support even if the federal environment makes it difficult to provide legal protections.

The Gilded Age saw police violence and federal forces deployed to put down worker strikes and crack down on dissent, a last-ditch effort to maintain a dying system that saw the rich get richer while the poor saw their quality of life continue to decline. Sound familiar?

The very name, gilded, exposes the lie. A very thin layer of opulence, covering over the actual structure below. Even by gilding standards, we’re shaving finer and finer layers off, a fraction of the 1% “worth” as much as nearly everyone else. Look no further than our national swimming pool to see what happens when you try to gild something as structurally unstable as a white supremacist nation that’s never fully processed it being built atop slavery.

The humanity of the formerly enslaved, still never fully accepted, because we never fully held accountable, nor punished, those who literally stole that humanity. Those who sailed the enslaved halfway across the world, packed in a hold so densely because their captors worshiped profit, not humanity. Those who ran the auction blocks and traveling slave traders. Those who bought, whipped, and raped. Those who chased the few who managed to escape, but where also willing to return with anyone who fit the description.

But the enslaved never surrendered their humanity. There were those who chose the sea. There were those who fled, despite the incredible odds stacked against them. Those who, having achieved their own freedom, returned to give others the chance to follow the underground railroad to freedom. Those who lead, or participated, in revolt, because escape seemed a foreclosed option and opposing your own subjugation, even violently, is our last desperate attempt to hang on to our own humanity.

You can only attempt to rip away people’s humanity for so long, before you succeed in destroying your own. That’s what connects the enslavers to the Gilded Age to the Techno Plutocrats we suffer under today. AI stealing the total sum knowledge and creativity of our entire humanity and using it to steal people’s jobs. Pushing us to feed at the AI slop trough that are our social media feeds. Companies that do nothing, and the banks that allow them to leverage that nothing, giving them more money to do more nothing. It’s all a modern attack on humanity. No where near the violence of slavery, at least not domestically, or at least not evenly distributed domestically. But it comes from the same place, the beliefs that there are those that are greater and those that are lessor. Coupled with the fundamental misunderstanding of whose world is build on whose backs.

Watching

Folks won’t listen to the college students. Won’t listen to the activists. Won’t listen to the up and coming crop of politicians who see our country for what it is. You don’t have to acknowledge the boomerang, it still boomerangs. But Coates hears it all, and has the platform to say it and be heard, and he has been saying it. Early and often.

Reading

The night the letters came down by Marisa Kabas

At a time when culture has become so diffuse, with millions following online streamers who millions of others have never heard of, the removal of the letters felt as close to a monoculture moment as we’ve had in a long time. It was a celebration that was geographically agnostic, attracting people throughout the country and the world and demonstrating just how starved we are to witness an ounce of accountability. That, and our insatiable thirst for his humiliation. And of the millions who tuned in to watch at least part of the livestream—MS Now’s stream  had more than five million viewers by its end—the president himself was surely one of them. Before he had the nuclear codes and the ability to destroy civilizations, he was the master of spectacle. But at the Kennedy Center on Friday night, Trump wasn’t the ringmaster; he was the bear in a tutu. 

Don’t conflate anti-Zionism and antisemitism by Nicole Erin Morse, Zainab Chaudry

If challenges to Zionism are branded antisemitic, then Palestinians are effectively being told they may describe their suffering only in terms palatable to those defending the system that has subjugated and oppressed them for decades.

Human rights advocates are being told they may criticize policies, but not the ideology that produced those policies.

Americans are being told that debate over billions in U.S. military aid, diplomatic cover and complicity in war crimes is somehow off-limits.

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The path forward must be clarity. Antisemitism is hostility to Jews as Jews. Anti-Zionism is opposition to a political ideology and state structure.

The two are not equivalent, and conflating them does not protect Jews. It only protects oppressors and perpetrators of injustice from accountability.

In both the short and long run, no people’s safety can be built on denying another people’s freedom.

Don't conflate anti-Zionism and antisemitism | GUEST COMMENTARY

Opinion: It is disingenuous and dangerous to erase the critical distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, writes Nicole Erin Morse and Zainab Chaudry.

Graham Platner and the Class Politics of Impunity by Alan Elrod

Nevertheless, the idea that Graham Platner’s behavior is just part of working class life needs to be addressed. If Platner’s past rhetoric about and treatment of women are the natural price of running a working class candidate, isn’t the implication that working class men by nature mistreat the women in their lives? Isn’t the subsequent implication that we are supposed to believe we live in a world where working class women are routinely mistreated and that we are also supposed to accept this as a natural consequence of their station? 

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I am not accusing Graham Platner of rape. But the suggestion that the allegations against him reflect the sort of behavior we should expect from “ordinary” or working class men raises some serious questions. What are women in this arrangement? Are they not also working class people deserving of the kind of solidarity some progressives seem determined to extend to Platner in perpetuity? Or, as countless people have said, is the issue that “women are bourgeois” by nature? Are women always already a stand-in for the fun-killing rules and authority that men wish they could flout? In that sense, can only men access class position and solidarity, while women remain fixed as nags and inconveniences?

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There’s no reason to think Platner is being subjected to special difficulties for his anti-Israel views. No one forced Graham Platner to get a totenkopf tattoo in his youth or to keep it until months into his Senate bid. No one wrote Platner’s misogynistic Reddit posts for him. And the allegations in the New York Times report, which come from women beyond just Fifield, do not have the outlandish quality of false accusations. In fact, Fifield describes disturbing enough behavior while also refusing to accuse Platner of more severe physical abuse or rape—though she has subsequently stated that the Times softened her account. 

Rather than seeing Platner as a victim of persecution, one is left wondering how any typical candidate could survive such a series of revelations. More specifically, it’s clear that no non-white or female candidates would ever be able to weather what Platner has.

Graham Platner and the Class Politics of Impunity

Solidarity with working class women never seems to enter into it.

At Delaney Hall, a V-Neck Sweater Can Change a Life by Christine Hou

In addition, guards often make last-minute dress-code changes and come up with arbitrary rules on a whim. These continual and abrupt changes of rules spike my anxiety, but I always remain calm on site. Individuals are coming to Delaney Hall during one of the lowest moments in their lives; it is essential not to exasperate their stress but to create a safe and humane space in a deeply inhumane place.

In my first months of volunteering on site, I often cried in my car for about 10 minutes before driving home. The amount of pain and suffering inflicted on families is so unimaginably vast, with no end in sight. I pause and remind myself of the kind individuals at the bottom of the driveway lending out clothes and the smiles and sighs of relief when visitors realize they now can see and connect with their loved ones.

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The arbitrary creation and enforcement of rules is a quiet but equally effective way of extending tyranny beyond the prison walls. Thus, the simple gesture of lending clothes is one of the most radical services EOI offers: directly connecting families with their loved ones despite the government’s cruel efforts to keep them apart. These perceivably small acts of compassion are an understated but essential part of activism.

At Delaney Hall, a V-Neck Sweater Can Change a Life

Helping detainees' families means showing up every day through wild weather, protests, and a changing visitors' dress code

Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers by Matthias Bastian

Google's AI overviews work nothing like traditional search results, the court argues. The AI rewrites and judges results "in its own words and according to its own structure," the ruling says. In the case at hand, for example, it opened with confident claims like "Yes, [company] is known for dubious business practices," then built its own structure with a summary, red flags for the alleged scam, and tips for users.

The court also found that the AI overview made claims "that are not even made in the search results." None of the linked sources drew any connection between the plaintiffs and the shady companies the AI mentioned. The court called these "the defendant's own statements."

Google built the AI, Google offered it to users, so Google owns what it produces, "because it alone has influence over the AI's offering and the algorithms with which the AI operates."

The court also examined existing rulings from Germany's Federal Court of Justice (BGH), which gave traditional search engines and autocomplete limited liability. The BGH had argued that search engine operators were only liable as indirect infringers because they merely made third-party content findable. A proactive duty to check results would threaten how search engines work.

The Munich court found that this reasoning doesn't apply to AI overviews. A regular search engine just points to outside websites. But AI overviews generate "independent, new, and substantive statements" by evaluating and combining content from various third-party sites. And only Google can check those statements, the court said, "at least by comparing the underlying third-party websites with its own statements based on them."

Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers

A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for the content of its AI search overviews. According to the court, previous limited liability protections for search engine operators don't apply to AI overviews. In this case, Google's AI had falsely linked two publishers to fraud and made claims that didn't appear in any of the linked sources. The ruling could set a precedent for AI-generated content liability worldwide.

Moral Imperialism versus Class Solidarity by Grace Blakeley

None of this is to say that morality has no place in politics. It is indispensable. Many people are driven into politics out of a sense of injustice, and this moral conviction often helps them to keep fighting when they might otherwise give up.

But one’s personal morality is no substitute for shared solidarity. Solidarity is the recognition of our interdependence. It is the understanding that our fates are bound together; that the conditions of my life are shaped by the conditions of yours. Solidarity is what makes us realise that we have to work together to fight a system that is exploiting and oppressing us all - rather than trying to dissociate ourselves from the evils this system causes.

Recovering that capacity to build powerful political movements, in conditions shaped by decades of deliberate fragmentation, is the central challenge of our time. This challenge cannot be overcome by prioritising individual moral rectitude - or by forcing others to adopt our particular version of the good. It will require, as it always has, the unglamorous work of finding one another across our differences, recognising our common interests, and acting together in pursuit of them.

Moral Imperialism versus Class Solidarity

Individualism and imperialism define ruling class morality. Solidarity is the left's only answer.

Community street teams contribute to decline in Trenton crime rate in The Trentonian

The Isles Trenton Community Street Team formed in 2021 through a partnership led by Isles with Fathers of Men United for A Better Trenton and Building a Better Way for Trenton. Its 26 members, nearly all of whom live in or grew up in the neighborhoods they serve, provide safe passage outside Trenton Central High School, the 9th Grade Academy, Capital City High School and the Isles Youth Institute, along with conflict mediation and survivor support.

Since the safe passage work began in 2022, the schools the team serves have seen a 96 percent drop in violence, the organization said. Police calls to those campuses during student arrival and dismissal are down 75 percent, and the team has escorted more than 4,000 students to and from class.

“For years, people told us that violence in Trenton was just the way things were. These numbers continue to show that’s not the case,” said Perry Shaw III, director of the Trenton Community Street Team. “Violence is not just a law enforcement issue, it is a public health crisis.”

The Trenton Restorative Street Team, a program of Salvation and Social Justice, operates in the North and West wards. Its practitioners provide violence prevention and intervention through education, advocacy and conflict resolution, while offering support to victims and facilitating restorative justice practices such as peace circles, community conferences and grief groups.

“True public safety comes not from punishment, but from restoration,” said the Rev. Charles Boyer, co-founder and executive director of Salvation and Social Justice. “Violence declines when communities are empowered to lead.”

Boyer said sustaining the results will require greater investment in community-based street teams. Both organizations said the work is unfinished and that progress depends on continued partnership among residents, schools, faith leaders and law enforcement.

Community street teams contribute to decline in Trenton crime rate

“These numbers represent lives saved and a community that refused to accept violence as inevitable,” said Laura Fenster Rothschild. “They are also proof that prevention works.”