Wynn-Williams isn't alone. The Big Tech companies are laying off employees by the thousands, thanks to their failed 11-figure AI bets. Those ex-employees know where every body is buried. They know where to find the memos that establish their ex-bosses' *intent* to create and maintain monopolies and the hardest part of any antitrust case is establishing intent.
33/
One place this could start: joint hearings that call ex-Big Tech employees as key witnesses, daring companies like Meta to invoke their gag orders. It's one thing to tell Sarah Wynn-Williams she can't talk to a crowd at a book festival, but Meta has taken the position that she cannot speak before a legislature or regulator, either.
32/
This shouldn't be complicated: if Sweeney is indeed free to vigorously enforce the law against Meta, then she could have published a statement the day her appointment was made public: "I do not have *any* contractual restrictions on my ability to discuss Meta or its current or former personnel." If she is truly able to do this job, then it shouldn't take her half a year to issue a weasel-worded, heavily caveated statement.
22/
When Sweeney was given the job of regulating her former employers, it naturally raised questions about whether she would be legally allowed to criticize - or even talk about - Meta. Sweeney declined to comment on this at all for seven months, and now, at last, she has issued a heavily lawyered statement that seems to affirm that she will be allowed to do her job:
20/
Take Sarah Wynn-Williams, who has been fined $111m by the company's arbitrator as punishment for her #1 *NYT* bestselling whistleblower memoir, *Careless People*. Meta has told Wynn-Williams that she may not appear in public to discuss *anything*, not just her book, and now they've sued her for *standing motionless and silent* for an hour on a stage at a literary festival:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/27/zuckerstreisand-2/#autodisparagement
19/
And in Ireland - the place where European tech regulation goes to die - they've just appointed an ex-Meta lobbyist named Niamh Sweeney to regulate the privacy practices of the US tech giants that pretend to be headquartered in Ireland in order to evade their taxes:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta
17/
All over the world, tech antitrust has gone into retreat. In Canada, ex-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau created sweeping new powers for the country's Competition Bureau, but now his successor Mark Carney is making equally sweeping cuts to the agency's funding. In the UK, PM Keir Starmer fired the devastatingly effective head of the Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the CEO of Amazon UK:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter
16/
Big Tech ponied up millions for the Epstein Ballroom, and they also provide key material support to Trump's ethnic cleansing program. If you end up in a concentration camp thanks to one of Trump's ICE chuds, you can blame Microsoft for providing the administrative software; Google for providing the location data used to track you down; and Apple for blocking apps that warn you if you're about to get snatched by masked thugs:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply
15/
That's key, because - as the Marshall Plan's architects could tell you - giant national monopolies often become a de facto, private, unaccountable arm of the state in the countries where they are born, and can call upon the governments they've colonized to protect them from other countries' attempts to enforce their laws.
13/
That means that it's not just that the same companies are committing the same crimes everywhere around the world - it also means that most of these countries have substantively similar statutes establishing those crimes. A successful case in South Korea will likely be successful in the UK - providing that the company engages in the same conduct in both countries (which, again, it does).
10/
The technocrats who oversaw the Marshall Plan understood that large, monopolistic firms played a key role in the rise of fascist governments in Europe and Japan, and so they transposed America's landmark antitrust laws - like the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act - onto lawbooks around the world:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/08/competition-is-killing-us/#borked
9/
RT: @implausibleblog Steve Reed, "We know Russia wants to influence elections because we had the former Reform UK leader for Wales, Nathan Gill, who is now serving time in prison for taking bribes from Russians to do their bidding in the European Parliament, rather than representing the British electorate who sent him there"
"We cannot leave our democracy exposed to abuses like that from foreign states"
Which begs the question why two years into a Labour government there is still no investigation into the full extent of Russia's interference in the Brexit referendum
I thought it was a joke
Sometimes you come across something that fascinates, and you wish you’d written yourself . Here’s one such.
https://thegrimhistorian.substack.com/p/has-america-crossed-the-asshole-threshold?r=pt3y9&utm_id=97758_v0_s00_e0_tv4_a1dennhb6uf2c4&triedRedirect=true
🦠 Malwarebytes
Scammers are using AI to sell impossible flowers
AI-generated flower scams are blooming online, with scammers using fake images to sell seeds for plants that don't exist, like these "cat's face orchids."
🔗 https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/scams/2026/07/scammers-are-using-ai-to-sell-impossible-flowers
Good for Michelle Goldberg to offer her own mea culpa:
Lessons From the Graham Platner Disaster https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/opinion/graham-platner-rape-accusation.html?smid=tw-share
I could probably build a small house that stands for a while, but without expertise, I wouldn't know if it's truly safe or built for real world conditions like fire/floods. If I only need house for a day, though, I might not care whether it lasts a week. This is not gatekeeping from anyone writing apps. But, this is how I see this whole anyone now build apps or website by prompting. Not to mention issues like stealing other peoples code, art and environmental damages are there too.
YC CEO says he ships 37K LoC AI code per day. A developer looked under the hood and found inefficiencies, code bloat, security and rookie mistakes lurking in production. 🤣 https://www.fastcompany.com/91520702/y-combinator-garry-tan-agentic-ai-social-media
And they want to replace doctors and many other critical jobs with AI. Lmao.
#TruthTuesday 👇
This bears repeating till governments do the work to corral unbridled #AI development: 👇