Scott Capener
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scottcapener.bsky.social
Scott Capener
@scottcapener.bsky.social
Principal Product Designer

✨ Culture ❤️ Mental health 🎮 Video games
Reposted by Scott Capener
Okay. I just came back to this and you aren’t calling these efforts resegregation yet, you absolutely should be
August 31, 2025 at 10:49 PM
Reposted by Scott Capener
for the one millionth time, the dept of education just monitors access to education. civil rights, title ix, disabilities, making sure everybody gets a fair opportunity.

this is not about curriculum. states design those standards. this is an attack on the idea of fairness in education.
if a senile old man can wave his little marker and say the department of education is gone we don’t really live in anything remotely like a democracy do we
March 20, 2025 at 11:45 PM
Reposted by Scott Capener
we have an utter fucking nimrod attempting to set himself up as dictator because for 50 years anyone who could have stopped him has dithered and procrastinated, hoping someone else would do it
So Trump saw Dems pathetic response to Jan 6th and concluded basically everyone with 'power' in America was actually a pathetic push over coward and... It turns out he was right.
March 21, 2025 at 12:37 AM
Reposted by Scott Capener
Just an absolutely, fundamentally wrong way to report this research. AI models do not experience "anxiety" or any other emotion. This is misinforming the public. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/s...
March 18, 2025 at 1:10 PM
Reposted by Scott Capener
Trump and Musk are basically trying to deskill America:
1) kill all white-collar jobs and replace them with AI
2) kill universities
3) use tariffs to turn the U.S. into an economic island manufacturing, oil and ag hub
4) empty the cities
5) push men into manual labor & women back into the kitchen
March 15, 2025 at 5:21 PM
Reposted by Scott Capener
One thing everyone should understand is that DOGE has created the least efficient conditions for government I've ever seen.
*The working conditions are chaotic.
*No clear sense of who works there.
*Routine processes have been stopped.
*No planning can take place.
*People are incredibly demoralized.
“Nobody feels like their job is safe. Everyone is on edge,” said Kim Hasenkrug, an NIH scientist emeritus… “Even the top people can’t keep track because they’re hiring and firing so much. Direct supervisors of those who were terminated didn’t even know that it was happening.”
At NIH, ‘everyone is on edge’ as they brace for deep cuts and more centralized control
As the NIH braces for cuts of up to 5,000 of its 20,000 positions, “people are scrambling and freaking out,” a researcher said.
www.statnews.com
March 15, 2025 at 4:37 PM
Reposted by Scott Capener
the us declaring war on solving problems is one of the best ways i’ve heard of framing how this is playing out
I hope everyone likes their egg prices high because the US has declared war on solving problems.

www.rfdtv.com/ag-sec-brook...
Ag Sec. Brooke Rollins has taken HPAI vaccines off the table
www.rfdtv.com
March 13, 2025 at 4:30 AM
Reposted by Scott Capener
the tesla protest might objectively be among the most successful in history already just in terms of immediate response, if you consider they forced the world’s most powerful person & its most wealthy to fully degrade themselves like used car salesmen on live TV while the whole world watched agog.
March 13, 2025 at 5:46 AM
Reposted by Scott Capener
I hope it is lost on precisely nobody that Musk's entire communications M.O. is an extremely obvious game of "I am rubber, you are glue."

Call him an oligarch? The next day DOGE is "taking down the oligarchy"

Call DOGE a coup effort? The next day efforts to stop it are "judicial coups"
Musk's calling it a "judicial coup" because Judge Amy Berman Jackson entered a two-day administrative stay to consider the sudden firing of the Special Counsel who, by statute, has a 5-year term and can't be removed except for specified reasons, none of which were even mentioned by the notice.
February 11, 2025 at 1:49 PM
Reposted by Scott Capener
@theiachatelle.bsky.social of @jewishcurrents.bsky.social: Yale Police installed cameras, tracked students’ social media and monitored them with drones. They collaborated with New Haven PD and a fed counterterrorism intelligence-sharing center to suppress protests.
jewishcurrents.org/inside-yale-...
December 20, 2024 at 8:40 PM
Reposted by Scott Capener
🧵New paper out on MIDDLEWARE‼️What is it? 3rd party tools that can interact with, in this case, social media platforms, on behalf of users. Maybe to curate your feed in a particular way. Maybe to moderate, labeling & hiding content or users that you don't want to see.

www.thefai.org/posts/shapin...
Shaping the Future of Social Media with Middleware | The Foundation for American Innovation
This paper is co-published by the Foundation for American Innovation and Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.
www.thefai.org
December 18, 2024 at 1:36 AM
Reposted by Scott Capener
Newsletter: Our digital lives are unregulated growth-hacked ecological disasters. The modern tech ecosystem's growth-at-all-costs mindset is actively harming billions of people, pushing them toward authoritarianism for profit. We must fight back.

www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/
Never Forgive Them
In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting wor...
www.wheresyoured.at
December 16, 2024 at 5:31 PM
Reposted by Scott Capener
people just want one (1) place online that is competently moderated and not itching to reinvent itself to appeal to bigots
December 15, 2024 at 1:18 AM
Reposted by Scott Capener
It’s coordinated. Moms For Liberty is going after books telling immigrant children they belong
December 12, 2024 at 10:33 PM
Reposted by Scott Capener
Let’s talk about what the authoritarian aggression we know is coming will look like. Built on an existing system of political harassment, it’s already taking shape, as it did this week in my neck of the woods. Thread. 1/26

www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...
Edmonds School District cancels immigrant rights event after threats
On social media, commenters threatened to take pictures and use the meeting to help immigration officers with enforcement.
www.seattletimes.com
December 12, 2024 at 6:08 PM
Reposted by Scott Capener
New publication (4+ years in the making): “The Diffusion and Reach of (Mis)Information on Facebook”. shorturl.at/VE2fU
We analyze the propagation of 1B+ posts across content moderation regimes, with @davidlazer.bsky.social @jatucker.bsky.social @taliastroud.bsky.social @annenbergpenn.bsky.social
December 11, 2024 at 5:23 PM
Reposted by Scott Capener
"I will never forgive these people for what they have done to the computer" is an all-time banger, put it on a tshirt, put it on a mug, put it directly into your brain; whisper it gently yet firmly with every push-up while you plot your utlimate revenge.
Working on the final newsletter and script of the year
December 6, 2024 at 10:10 PM
Reposted by Scott Capener
Damn: “This is what making a billion dollars costs you. You must spread yourself so thin in its pursuit that you disappear entirely. You become the money, and it becomes you.”
December 7, 2024 at 12:10 AM
Reposted by Scott Capener
"We cannot continue to participate in the social network feed of a man who proclaims the death of the media and therefore of journalists... X is a platform that no longer serves the public interest at all, but the special ideological and financial interests of its owner and his political allies"
European Federation of Journalists to stop posting content on X
The EFJ represents over 295,000 journalists in 44 countries.
www.thelondoneconomic.com
December 2, 2024 at 3:12 PM
Reposted by Scott Capener
The usual suspects are out there yelling "There are 23 million government workers! Fire most of them!" No awareness that most work for local governments, and most of *them* are schoolteachers. Federal employment hasn't grown since the 1950s
November 23, 2024 at 2:06 PM
Reposted by Scott Capener
This is the most extreme anthromorphization I've seen. Even if LLMs or some future magical model that doesn't yet exist even in research can experience suffering, the meaning and reasons of that suffering would be completely alien compared to how animals experience it
November 11, 2024 at 6:37 PM
Reposted by Scott Capener
Something real odd about ai welfare concerns when your tech is contributing to the deterioration of human welfare.
Anthropic hires its first “AI welfare” researcher
Anthropic’s new hire is preparing for a future where advanced AI models may experience suffering.
arstechnica.com
November 11, 2024 at 5:13 PM
Reposted by Scott Capener
until the day I die I will never understand why he was even still allowed to run after this
November 5, 2024 at 3:13 AM
Reposted by Scott Capener
Charlie Jane Anders:
“Daydreaming is the opposite of doomscrolling”
!!!!!!
#xoxofest
August 25, 2024 at 12:14 AM