PhilipTheBucket

Automation undeniably has some useful applications. But the folks hyping modern “AI” have not only dramatically overstated its capabilities, many of them generally view these tools as a way to lazily cut corners or undermine labor. There’s also a weird innovation cult that has arisen around managers and LLM use, resulting in the mandatory use of tools that may not be helping anybody — just because.

The result is often a hot mess, as we’ve seen in journalism. The AI hype simply doesn’t match the reality, and a lot of the underlying financial numbers being tossed around aren’t based in reality; something that’s very likely going to result in a massive bubble deflation as the reality and the hype cycles collide (Gartner calls this the “trough of disillusionment,” and expects it to arrive next year).

One recent study out of MIT Media Lab found that 95% of organizations see no measurable return on their investment in AI (yet). One of many reasons for this, as noted in a different recent Stanford survey (hat tip: 404 Media), is because the mass influx of AI “workslop” requires colleagues to spend additional time trying to decipher genuine meaning and intent buried in a sharp spike in lazy, automated garbage.

The survey defines workslop as “AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” Somewhat reflective of America’s obsession with artifice. And it found that as use of ChatGPT and other tools have risen in the workplace, it’s created a lot of garbage that requires time to decipher:

“When coworkers receive workslop, they are often required to take on the burden of decoding the content, inferring missed or false context. A cascade of effortful and complex decision-making processes may follow, including rework and uncomfortable exchanges with colleagues.”

Confusing or inaccurate emails that require time to decipher. Lazy or incorrect research that requires endless additional meetings to correct. Writing full of errors that requires supervisors to edit or correct themselves:

“A director in retail said: “I had to waste more time following up on the information and checking it with my own research. I then had to waste even more time setting up meetings with other supervisors to address the issue. Then I continued to waste my own time having to redo the work myself.”

In this way, a technology deemed a massive time saver winds up creating all manner of additional downstream productivity costs. This is made worse by the fact that a lot of these technologies are being rushed into mass adoption in business and academia before they’re fully cooked. And by the fact the real-world capabilities of the products are being wildly overstated by both companies and a lazy media.

This isn’t inherently the fault of the AI, it’s the fault of the reckless, greedy, and often incompetent people high in the extraction class dictating the technology’s implementation. And the people so desperate to be innovation-smacked, they’re simply not thinking things through. “AI” will get better; though any claim of HAL-9000 type sentience will remain mythology for the foreseeable future.

Obviously measuring the impact of this workplace workslop is an imprecise science, but the researchers at the Stanford Social Media Lab try:

“Each incidence of workslop carries real costs for companies. Employees reported spending an average of one hour and 56 minutes dealing with each instance of workslop. Based on participants’ estimates of time spent, as well as on their self-reported salary, we find that these workslop incidents carry an invisible tax of $186 per month. For an organization of 10,000 workers, given the estimated prevalence of workslop (41%), this yields over $9 million per year in lost productivity.”

The workplace isn’t the only place the rushed application of a broadly misrepresented and painfully under-cooked technology is making unproductive waves. When media outlets rushed to adopt AI for journalism and headlines (like at CNET), they, too, found that the human editorial costs to correct and fix all the problems, plagiarism, false claims, and errors really didn’t make the value equation worth their time. Apple found that LLMs couldn’t even do basic headlines with any accuracy.

Elsewhere in media you have folks building giant (badly) automated aggregation and bullshit machines, devoid of any ethical guardrails, in a bid to hoover up ad engagement. That’s not only repurposing the work of real journalists, it’s redirecting an already dwindling pool of ad revenue away from their work. And it’s undermining any sort of ethical quest for real, informed consensus in the authoritarian age.

This is all before you even get to the environmental and energy costs of AI slop.

Some of this are the ordinary growing pains of new technology. But a ton of it is the direct result of poor management, bad institutional leadership, irresponsible tech journalism, and intentional product misrepresentation. And next year is going to likely be a major reckoning and inflection point as markets (and people in the real world) finally begin to separate fact from fiction.

On September 28, hundreds of people took to the streets of Paraguay’s capital, Asunción, to protest the right-wing government of Santiago Peña (2023-present) and the national political structure in general.

The protest call was made on social media under the slogan “We are the 99.9%”, following several days of protests in the capital. According to the protesters, the Peña government continues to uphold a form of power based on corruption and neglects basic services, especially public health and the safety of the population.

Journalist Amado Arrieta told Peoples Dispatch: “What was demanded in the protests was an end to nepotism, an attempt to stop the advance of narco-politics, which has basically taken over the three branches of government, and more opportunities for young people. The children of politicians get the best jobs, sometimes without having the necessary skills.”

According to Transparency International’s 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index, Paraguay is one of the most corrupt countries in Latin America.

“Here in Paraguay, we are really asking for security, justice, and health in our country … [We reject] corrupt politicians who steal from the people right in front of them,” nursing student Jenifer González told EFE.

Many media outlets have portrayed the protest as a new example of resistance from what is known as “Generation Z”, that is, protesters born between the late 1990s and 2010, who are fed up with current politics and have already demonstrated in France, Nepal, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh.

And while certain symbols were repeated, such as the enormous letters Z painted on walls and flags with images from the anime “One Piece”, the truth is that the mobilization included groups of different ages demanding an end to corruption, nepotism, and the interference of drug trafficking in all structures of the Paraguayan state.

However, it is also important to note the similarities in the mood of the protesters and the demands and symbols between the protests in Asunción and those that took place on the same day in Lima, Peru, where hundreds of people protested against the political establishment.

In this regard, analyst Leonardo Berniga told DW: “In this mobilization, there is an international identification with a population group that is extremely frustrated by the corruption, inequality, abuse of the law, and injustice that occur in Paraguay, and that coincide with demonstrations that have taken place in Nepal, Peru, and other countries … The mobilization shows that there is a politically aware youth, but one that is not represented in the electoral process.”

The government’s response: a witch hunt?

On the other hand, it is undeniable that there are also similarities between the responses of Dina Boluarte’s government in Peru and Santiago Peña’s government in Paraguay to the protests. Law enforcement agencies in both countries have shown that they are willing to disperse protesters as quickly as possible and that they can easily arrest those who are demonstrating.

Indeed, the police deployment in Asunción has surprised many. An estimated 3,000 police officers carried out operations against just a few hundred protesters, which shows the force with which the state wanted to act. According to the data, following the protests in Asunción, 10 people were injured and more than 30 were arrested.

In this regard, the Paraguayan Chamber of Deputies condemned what it called “police repression” against the protest: “We condemn the police repression exercised against citizens who demonstrated on Sunday, September 28, 2025, both before and during the demonstration, and against the demonstrators who were arrested during it … Throughout the demonstration, police officers revived the darkest period in national history: the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989).”

Arrieta is more cautious in his estimates of the number of protesters, although he also points to the large police presence: “At its peak, there were between 600 and 700 protesters. But before the protest, there was a campaign in the mainstream media that sought to instill fear in the population, suggesting that the Paraguayan March [a political crisis in 1999] in which many young people died would be repeated. Three thousand police officers were deployed, and almost 30 people were arrested. At night, according to reports, a ‘witch hunt’ began, in which anyone who happened to be in the area was arrested.”

Berniga similarly recounts: “There were police persecution operations in raids in which the security forces went out to hunt down demonstrators without a warrant, without records, without due process, detaining people for more than twelve hours, without the presence of a prosecutor, with clear examples of abuse of force.”

A long struggle by Paraguayan youth

But we must not forget the struggles that Paraguayan youth have waged over several decades, beginning with the resistance of many of them to the US-backed dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989), one of the longest-lasting of the 20th century, in which more than 20,000 people suffered torture, executions, and/or disappearances.

In 1999, thousands of young people protested in the Paraguayan March, a political crisis that shook Paraguay’s nascent democracy, following the assassination of then-Vice President Luis María Argaña. According to some figures, a massacre left eight protesters’ dead and more than 700 injured. They were opposed to the government of Raúl Cubas, who would eventually resign as president.

In more recent years, young people protested in 2015 against irregularities reported at the National University of Asunción. In 2017, several protesters set fire to the Parliament building after a bill was passed allowing indefinite reelection.

And while different generations of young Paraguayans did not always share the same political ideology or objectives, it is important to emphasize their active and political nature in Paraguay’s recent history.

For now, it remains to be seen whether the September 28 protest was merely a spontaneous act that was controlled by law enforcement or whether, on the contrary, more people will join the new calls for action and unleash demonstrations like those seen in Peru, which are leading the government into a genuine crisis of legitimacy.

Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), warned of the danger of statements by the Israeli government describing some 250,000 civilians trapped in Gaza City and northern Gaza as ‘terrorists or supporters of terrorism.’

Lazzarini considered that such statements carry worrying implications of intentions to commit large-scale massacres against the population.

UNRWA: a stark warning over Israel

In a statement posted on his account on the ‘X’ platform, Lazzarini said “The Israeli statements suggest plans to kill more women, children, the elderly and vulnerable groups who have been unable to flee”, stressing that “no one has a licence to kill civilians under any circumstances”:

Labeling the nearly 250,000 people currently trapped in #Gaza City & the north as “terrorists or terror supporters” by the Government of #Israel is a statement suggesting planned large scale massacres: killing more women, children, elderly & vulnerable people unable to move out.…

— Philippe Lazzarini (@UNLazzarini) October 2, 2025

The UNRWA Commissioner-General pointed out that the ongoing international crimes in the Gaza Strip cannot continue amid silence or indifference from the international community, noting that the continuation of the current situation without intervention will lead to ‘further collusion with what the UN Commission of Inquiry has already concluded and deemed to be genocide.’

Lazzarini added that the humanitarian situation in the Strip has reached an unprecedented level of deterioration, amid continuing military operations and a shortage of basic supplies of food, medicine and water, stressing that civilians are paying the highest price for this war.

The UN official concluded his remarks with an urgent call to the international community to take immediate action and bring about a ceasefire, saying, ‘The time to act is now. #Ceasefire_now.’

Featured image via the Canary

By Alaa Shamali

Collective human consciousness is full of imagined or mythical dream-like utopias, hidden away behind mountains, across or under oceans, hidden in mist, or deep in the jungle. From Atlantis, Avalon, El Dorado, and Shangri-La, we have not stopped imagining these secret, fantastical places. One of these, Xanadu, is actually a real place but has been embellished over the years into a place of legend and myth, and thus became the namesake of an Internet we never got to see like all of those other mystical, hidden places.

The Xanadu project got its start in the 1960s at around the same time the mouse and what we might recognize as a modern computer user interface were created. At its core was hypertext with the ability to link not just other pages but references and files together into one network. It also had version control, rights management, bi-directional links, and a number of additional features that would be revolutionary even today. Another core feature was transclusion, a method for making sure that original authors were compensated when their work was linked. However, Xanadu was hampered by a number of issues including lack of funding, infighting among the project’s contributors, and the development of an almost cult-like devotion to the vision, not unlike some of today’s hype around generative AI. Surprisingly, despite these faults, the project received significant funding from Autodesk, but even with this support the project ultimately failed.

Instead of this robust, bi-directional web imagined as early as the 1960s, the Internet we know of today is the much simpler World Wide Web which has many features of Xanadu we recognize. Not only is it less complex to implement, it famously received institutional backing from CERN immediately rather than stagnating for decades. The article linked above contains a tremendous amount of detail around this story that’s worth checking out. For all its faults and lack of success, though, Xanadu is a interesting image of what the future of the past could have been like if just a few things had shaken out differently, and it will instead remain a mythical place like so many others.