𝐇𝐞 𝐝𝐮𝐠 𝐭𝐨𝐨 𝐝𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐄𝐥𝐬𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐫'𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐥 𝐟𝐮𝐞𝐥 𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬: "𝐈 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐝"

If you're into science or medicine, you may have heard of journals like Cell or The Lancet. You might also be familiar with their parent company Elsevier / RELX, and their predatory practices: sometimes charging more than 10,000 dollars for publications whose running costs don't reach a tenth of that amount.

What you might not know is that beyond pocketing public research money, Elsevier is also contributing to climate breakdown, pouring millions into tools and journals providing information about areas yet to be exploited for oil and gas extraction, as well as new technologies needed to dig up oil more efficiently in the Arctic and the Canadian tar sands. The motto of one of their online tools, Geofacets, used to be that, thanks to it, “exploration has never been more seamless.”

But that's the tip of the iceberg. For years, RELX's political action committee REPAC has been providing support to climate denialist politicians in the US, preventing carbon mitigation bills from reaching a vote in Congress.

I document this and other complicities of big academic publishers in my new book Science in Resistance, where I interview Kip Lyall, a former employee of the journal Cell, who was fired after asking too many questions about the company's fossil fuel ties.

Excerpt below. 👇

#Science #OpenScience #Fossilfuels #Climate #Climate #Activism #Journal

RE: infosec.exchange/@mttaggart/11…

I think the way I would put it is:

1) The point of the AI project is ideological; the goal is to reshape industries such that we are dependent on AI companies' products, and to destroy free and open knowledge such that we are dependent on these products for thought and reasoning. We see an injection of AI into cybersecurity, while simultaneously drawing money and resources away from (boring) efforts that would actually broadly improve cybersecurity.¹ We see an injection of AI into knowledge acquisition, while simultaneously polluting the landscape of the internet as a useful source of knowledge. Both are in service of the same ideological project, and working towards the same goal.

2) The touted usefulness of AI for programming and cybersecurity is directly funding the project to expand it everywhere else, where it is causing massive harms to civil society, individuals' mental health, and the information landscape. You or your company paying for these products is keeping investment money flowing and extending the runway, for AI companies to reach that point of "indispensability". There is no divorcing your cool shiny toy from the creation of AI deepfakes that destroy democracy, or the AI psychosis that destroys lives. This is because the AI companies are pursuing an ideological project that ultimately has nothing to do with improving people's work or their lives; the leaders of these companies have loudly and publicly said that very clearly. You are laundering the reputation of these companies and keeping them alive, when the only moral option is to destroy them.

I've said this elsewhere, but: Maybe you, who are reading this, is offended by this framing, because you use and enjoy the AI tools. But it's also likely that you, and many other technologists, take moral abdication almost as a point of pride, where the only thing that matters is "capability". In that case, I don't understand the defensive response. Why are you uncomfortable being described as the thing you're bragging to be?

#fuckAI

¹ The stark contrast: The breathless and brainless promotional posts about Glasswing came into my feed at the same time as the posts about the final gutting of CISA. securityweek.com/white-house-s…

Taggart

2026-04-09 00:34:08

Yeah so let's refocus on the real perspective here. It doesn't matter at all how good these models are at code or finding vulnerabilities if we destroy our ability to seek and share knowledge.

futurism.com/artificial-intell…

Analysis Finds That Google’s AI Overviews Are Providing Misinformation at a Scale Possibly Unprecedented in the History of Human Civilization

A new analysis commissioned by The New York Times suggests that Google's AI Overviews are wrong an astonishing percentage of the time.

^{Frank Landymore (Futurism)}