Access Denied

(www.cnbc.com)

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/business/ai-job-cuts-wall-street.html
https://archive.is/cD3Dy

forbes.com

(www.forbes.com)

Remember who is paying a billion dollars to promote a malign influence operation on AI.

The Koch Network Is Pushing Trump to Accelerate AI, Documents Show

Right-wing political group Americans for Prosperity, backed by oil and gas billionaire Charles Koch, sees data centers as part of a larger pro-fossil fuel agenda.

DeSmog (www.desmog.com)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2025/07/17/bill-gates-charles-koch-and-three-other-billionaires-are-giving-1-billion-to-enhance-economic-mobility-in-the-us/

Billionaires do not give two hoots about "economic mobility"; NextLadder is just another fascist think tank like the Heritage Foundation & Claremont Institute.

Those slimy corp channels are heavily skewed towards the corporate agitprop du jour.

If they hate it here, it's because they need engagement to be tweaked to feel at home anywhere.

I wound up with 40 total votes, which in hindsight is a bit high for 8 session blocks. I guess I'm just trying to get a sense of whether I fall in the "useful data" or the "just clicked on everything" bucket?

I am part of a community group, and I would really appreciate hearing these two discussions. I feel like the more we hear people's lived experience, the more flexible in our responses we can be.

Anyway. Do you broadcast your unconference? Or will you maybe bootleg a recording for rr groups to pass, hand to hand?

Reading through the first third of the list, it seems like a lot of the sessions that mention AI are critical of it

Honestly, this is awesome of you. Considering how informative your threads are, I'm sure you'll do great.

I do wonder if people were afraid that if they submitted a session about ICE that ICE might try to stop it? That invasion likely caused a lot of trauma.

Don’t let the loudest voices distort your perception of the world.

If nobody’s talking about what you wish everyone were talking about, don’t assume nobody wants to hear it. Be brave. Speak up.

If you think you’re the only one…you’re almost never the only one.

/end

14/

Right before the session deadline, I looked at the schedule and thought, “Nothing about ICE?? Really?! After all we’ve been through in MSP!” Feeling a little desperate, I created this session:
https://sessions.minnestar.org/sessions/2108

I quickly got a DM from the inimitable Eryn O’Neil, who’d been thinking exactly the same and was halfway through writing up a session when she saw mine come in. We quickly determined our two ideas were complementary, so she created hers:
https://sessions.minnestar.org/sessions/2126

13/

Don’t let the loudest voices distort your perception of the world.

If nobody’s talking about what you wish everyone were talking about, don’t assume nobody wants to hear it. Be brave. Speak up.

If you think you’re the only one…you’re almost never the only one.

12/

Thing is, you go to 2 of these talks and it basically all boils down to the same shit. Most talks are so surface level, that even if you were really into AI prototyping, you're not going to learn much. The industry is having a ridiculous moment about how we're not going to need teams anymore, and most people are still struggling with the same old executive roadblocks. It's completely unrelatable for many.

There are approximately 1.5x as many non-AI sessions as AI sessions, but there were approximately ~2x as •votes• for non-AI sessions.

Many talkers, few listeners. Curious.

@inthehands

First, there’s an asymmetry between how many people will volunteer to •talk• about AI and how many people want to •hear• about AI. Without saying what it means, that asymmetry exists.

11/

Maybe people are volunteering to give AI talks only because they feel like they’re supposed to. Maybe a lot of the AI talks are scam and spam. Maybe Those Darned AI People are all solipsists and just want to talk and don’t care whether anybody wants to hear it.

I’m hesitant to conclude anything nearly that judgemental from this data. There’s a lot of slippery questions about what exactly a “vote” means here, given how they’re collected and how people cast them.

10/

Maybe the people who aren’t interested in AI also happen to vote for more sessions. (At a quick prod at the data, penalizing votes from people who voted for large numbers of sessions does not seem to change the conclusions above, but I haven’t investigated this thoroughly.)

Maybe AI is a more fragmented topic due to its newness, and interest has not coalesced, leading to a large number of small sessions. (But again, •total• votes for AI, including the whole long tail, were proportionally smaller.)

9/

I find that capping discussions of AI to 1-2 sessions means all the AI boosters go there, and the rest of the sessions can focus on their topics. It's bound to come up in every session, but it doesn't have to be the main topic.

Maybe Minnebar isn’t all about AI after all.

8/