Weekly digest — w.12, March 2026
The through line this week is the contest over who gets to narrate technological progress — and who gets sacrificed to it. Peter Thiel’s crowd raids René Girard’s theory of scapegoating to build an intellectual scaffolding for techno-authoritarianism, while in Ukraine compute infrastructure is fast becoming a theater of war, making plain that the material basis of AI is never far from the logic of force. Meanwhile a New Yorker piece on the strange new reality of AI-assisted coding suggests the priesthood of software engineering is dissolving in real time, with no clear account yet of what replaces it.
On the other side of these power shifts, people are improvising. A Ugandan clinic is feeding therapy calls into multilingual AI models to patch a mental health system that global capital never bothered to fund properly — a genuinely promising use case that still raises hard questions about data and consent. African youth are leveraging Web3 not as liberatory finance but as a fraud vector, because that is what economic exclusion and regulatory vacuums produce. And Norway is putting out absurdist videos about enshittification, which sounds like a joke until you remember that someone, somewhere, has to actually insist that technology should serve the public. These links sit at the intersection of extraction and possibility, which is more or less where we always are.
6 links this week.
Comment Peter Thiel et les techno-réactionnaires américains récupèrent la pensée du philosophe chrétien René Girard Journalism — lemonde.fr
Les trumpistes accusent la « pensée 68 » d’avoir été le ferment du « wokisme ». Mais certains d’entre eux cherchent à revendiquer l’héritage d’une autre école française, d’inspiration chrétienne, qui trouva à s’exprimer à Stanford, sous l’influence du philosophe, théoricien du désir mimétique et du bouc émissaire.
#transhumanism #far-right
The chatbot will see you now: how AI is being trained to spot mental health issues in any language Journalism — theguardian.com
Calls to a clinic in Uganda are helping create a therapy algorithm that works in local languages, as specialists look to technology to address the global mental health crisis
Cool project my friend Jana is working on
#ai
The coming compute war in Ukraine Research & Report — atlanticcouncil.org
For the United States, the coming compute war isn’t just a Ukrainian problem—it’s a preview of US challenges in future conflict.
#war #compute #autonomy
Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It Journalism — nytimes.com
In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they’re doing is deeply, deeply weird.
btw this page was Claude-coded
#ai
‘Another internet is possible’: Norway rails against ‘enshittification’ Journalism — theguardian.com
Absurdist video urges policymakers and users to resist deliberate deterioration of platforms and devices
The rise of Satoshi Pablo? African youth, fraud duality, and the Web3 smokescreen Academic Paper
Drawing on interviews and social media data, the study reveals that Web3 fraud thrives among African youth due to economic hardship and weak regulatory oversight.