Loneliness and mental health illnesses are rising in the US, while access to care dwindles — so a lot of people are turning to chatbots. Do chatbots work for therapy?

More like this: The Collective Intelligence Project w/ Divya Siddarth and Zarinah Agnew

Why are individuals are confiding in chatbots over qualified human therapists? Stevie Chancellor explains why an LLM can’t replace a therapeutic relationship — but often there’s just no other choice. Turns out the chatbots designed specifically for therapy are even worse than general models like ChatGPT; Stevie shares her ideas on how LLMs could potentially be used — safely — for therapeutic support. This is really helpful primer on how to evaluate chatbots for specific, human-replacing tasks.

Further reading & resources:

• Stevie’s paper on whether replacing therapists with LLMs is even possible (it’s not)
• See the research on Github
• People are Losing Their Loved Ones to AI-Fuelled Spiritual Fantasies — Rolling Stone (May 2025)
• Silicon Valley VC Geoff Lewis becomes convinced that ChatGPT is telling him government secrets from the future
• Loneliness considered a public health epidemic according to the APA
• FTC orders online therapy company BetterHelp to pay damages of $7.8m
• Delta plans to use AI in ticket pricing draws fire from US lawmakers — Reuters July 2025

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What’s it like working as a local representative when you live next door to Silicon Valley?

More like this: Chasing Away Sidewalk Labs w/ Bianca Wylie

When Hilary Ronen was on the board of supervisors for San Francisco, she had to make lots of decisions about technology. She felt unprepared. Now she sees local policymakers on the frontlines of a battle of resources and governance in an AI era, and is working to upskill them to make better decisions for their constituents. No degree in computer science required.

Further reading & resources:

• Local Leadership in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and the Tech Oligarchy by Hillary Ronen
• More on Hillary’s work as a Supervisor for SF
• Hillary Ronen on progressives, messaging, hard choices, and justice — interview in 48Hills from January 2025
• More about Local Progress
• Confronting Preemption — a short briefing by Local Progress
• What Happens When State and Local Laws Conflict — article on state-level preemption by State Court Report

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Welcome to the final boss of scams in the age of technology: Enshittification 

More like this: Nodestar: The Eternal September w/ Mike Masnick

This is our final episode of Gotcha! — our series on scams, how they work, and how technology both amplifies and obscures them. For this final instalment we have Cory Doctorow on to chat about his new book Enshittification.

Is platformisation essentially just an industrial level scam? We will deep-dive the enshittification playbook to understand how companies lock users into decaying platforms, and get away with it. Cory shares ideas on what we can do differently to turn tide. Listen to learn what a ‘chickenised reverse centaur’ is…

Further reading & resources:

• Buy Enshittifcation now from Verso Books!
• Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow
• On The Media series on Enshittification
• Pluralistic — Daily Links and essays by Cory Doctorow
• Conservatism Considered as a Movement of Bitter Rubes — Cory on why conservatism creates a friendly environment for scams
• How I Got Scammed — Cory on his personal experiences of being scammed
• All of Cory’s books
• All (Antitrust) Politics Are Local — the entry to Pluralistic that Cory wrote on the day of recording

Thought we were at peak scam? Well, ScamGPT just entered the chat.

More like this: Gotcha! The Crypto Grift w/ Mark Hays

This is part three of Gotcha! — our series on scams, how they work, and how technology is supercharging them. This week Lana Swartz and Alice Marwick join Alix to discuss their primer on how generative AI is automating fraud.

We dig into the very human, very dark world of the scam industry, where the scammers are often being exploited in highly sophisticated human trafficking operations — and are now using generative AI to scale up and speed up.

We talk about how you probably aren’t going to get a deepfake call from a family member to demand a ransom, but the threats are still evolving in ways that are scary and until now largely unregulated. And as ever even though the problems are made worse by technology, we explore the limitations of technology and laws to stem the tide.

Further reading & resources:

• Read the primer here!
• More about Lana Swartz
• More about Alice Marwick
• New Money by Lana Swartz
• Scam: Inside Southeast Asia's Cybercrime Compounds by Mark Bo, Ivan Franceschini, and Ling Li
• Revealed: the huge growth of Myanmar scam centres that may hold 100,000 trafficked people
• Al Jazeera True Crime Report on scamming farms in South East Asia
• Scam Empire project by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project

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This just in with data centers: Energy grids are strained, water is scarce, utility costs are through the roof — ah well, let them eat compute, I guess!

More like this: AI Thirst in a Water-Scarce World w/ Julie McCarthy

It was just climate week in NYC and we did a live show on data centers with four amazing guests from around the US…

Thank you to the Luminate Foundation for sponsoring this live show and for all of our NY-based friends, and network from around the world that made it to Brooklyn for a magical evening. You can also watch the live recording on Youtube.

• KeShaun Pearson (Memphis Community Against Pollution) will break down how Elon Musk’s xAI supercomputer is polluting the air of historically Black neighborhoods in Memphis, and how organizers are fighting back against yet another chapter of corporate extraction in their communities.
• KD Minor (Alliance for Affordable Energy) will demystify the energy impacts of data centers in Louisiana and share organizing strategies to mobilize community opposition to Big Tech and Big Oil infrastructure.
• Marisol (No Desert Data Center) will talk about their grassroots coalition’s recent win in Tucson to stop Amazon’s Project Blue data center proposal, which threatened the city’s scarce water supply, and how they’re organizing for future protections.
• Amba Kak (AI Now Institute) will talk us through the bigger picture: what’s behind Big Tech’s AI data center expansion, who stands to benefit from this boom, and what we sacrifice in return.

Further reading & resources:

• Amazon Web Services is company behind Tucson’s Project Blue, according to 2023 county memo — from Luminaria
• Tuscon to create new policies around NDAs following the councils regret around not knowing more about Project Blue — from Luminaria
• How Marana, also in the Tuscon area, employed an ordinance to regulate water usage after learning about data center interest in the area.
• xAI has requested an additional 150MGW of power for Colossus in Memphis, bring it to a total of 300MGW
• Time reports on increase in nitrogen dioxide pollution around Memphis due to xAI turbines
• Keshaun and Justin Pearson on Democracy Now discussing xAI’s human rights violations
• Meta’s Mega Data Center Could Strain Louisiana’s Grid — and Entergy Isn’t Prepared — report by the Alliance for Affordable Energy
• 'A Black Hole of Energy Use': Meta's Massive AI Data Center Is Stressing Out a Louisiana Community — 404 Media

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OpenAI just secured a bizarre financial deal with Nvidia — but the math is not mathing. Is the AI sector an actual market, or a series of high-profile announcements of circular relationships between a tiny number of companies?

More like this: Making Myths to Make Money w/ AI Now

Alix sat down with Sarah Myers-West to go through the particulars of this deal, and other similar deals that are propping up AI’s industry of vapour. This is not your traditional bubble that’s about to burst — there is no bubble, it’s just that The New Normal is to pour debt into an industry that cannot promise any returns…

Further reading & resources:

• More on the Nvidia OpenAI deal — CNBC
• Analysts refer to deal as ‘vendor financing’ — Insider Monkey
• Spending on AI is at Epic Levels. Will it Ever Pay Off? — WSJ
• OpenAI, Softbank, and Oracle spending $500bn on data centre expansion in Abilene — Reuters
• How Larry Ellison used the AI boom and the Tony Blair Institute to bolster his wealth
• Oracle funding Open AI data centers with heaps of debt and will have to borrow at least $25bn a year — The Register

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Multi-level marketing schemes have built an empire by enticing people with promises of self-realisation and economic freedom. The cost is simple: exploit and be exploited.

More like this: Worker Power & Big Tech Bossmen w/ David Seligman

This is part two of Gotcha! Our series on scams, how they work, and how technology is super-charging them. This week Bridget Read came to Alix with a very exciting business opportunity. Bridget authored Little Bosses Everywhere — a book on the history of MLM.

We explore how door-to-door sales in the mid 20th century US took on the business model of a ponzi scheme, and transformed the sweaty salesman into an entrepreneurial recruiter with a downline.

MLM originators were part of a coordinated plan to challenge the new deal in lieu of radical free enterprise, where the only thing holding you back is yourself, and the economy consists solely of consumers selling to each other in a market of speculation. The secret is, no one is selling a product — they’re selling a way of life.

Further reading & resources:

• Buy Bridget’s book: Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America
• Family Values by Melinda Cooper
• The Missing Crypto Queen: a podcast by BBC Sounds, about a large scale crypto scam, where there wasn’t even any crypto
• LuLaRoe — the pyramid scheme that tricked American mums into selling cheap clothes to their friends and family with the promise of financial independence.
• My Experience of Being in a Pyramid Scheme (Amway) — a personal account by Darren Mudd on LinkedIn
• Watch our recent live show at NYC Climate Week

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Hey you! Do you want some free internet money? If this sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is!

More like this: Making Myths to Make Money w/ AI Now

This is Gotcha! A four-part series on scams, how they work, and how technology is supercharging them. We start with Mark Hays from Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), and get into one of the biggest tech-fuelled financial scams out there: cryptocurrencies.

Like many things that require mass-buy in, crypto started with an ideology (libertarianism, people hating on Wall Street post 2008). But where does that leave us now? What has crypto morphed into since then, and how does it deceive both consumers and regulators into thinking it’s something that it’s not?

Further reading & resources:

• Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
• Capital Without Borders by Brooke Harrington
• The Politics of Bitcoin by David Golumbia
• Learn more about Americans for Financial Reform
• Check out Web3 Is Going Great by Molly White
• Line Goes Up by Folding Ideas — an excellent survey of all the tactics and rug-pulls during the height of the NFT boom
• The Missing Crypto Queen: a podcast by BBC Sounds, about a large scale crypto scam, where there wasn’t even any crypto

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Gotcha! is a four-part series on scams, how they work, and how technology is supercharging them — running through to October 10.

In the series we look at:

1. Crypto: Mark Hays on how a thing touting financial freedom ended up being a kind of fin-cult, rife with scamming
2. Multi-Level Marketing : Bridget Read on the history of the biggest and most successful type of scam that still plagues us today
3. Generative AI: Data & Society’s primer on how generative AI is juicing the scam industrial complex
4. Enshittification: Cory Doctorow on his upcoming book, and how the process of Enchittification represents user-hostile practices that scam people into paying more, and ecosystem lock-in

What if you could listen to multiple people at once, and actually understand them?

More like this: **The Age of Noise w/ Eryk Salvaggio**

In our final instalment (for now!) of Nodestar, Andrew Trask shares his vision for a world where we can assembly understanding from data everywhere. But not in a way that requires corporate control of our world.

If broadcasting is the act of talking to multiple people at once — what about broad listening? Where you listen to multiple sources of information, and actually learn something, without trampling over the control that individuals have over who sees what, when.

Andrew says that broad listening is difficult to achieve because of three huge problems: information overload, privacy, and veracity — and we are outsourcing these problems to central authorities, who abuse their power in deciding how to relay information to the public. What is Andrew doing at OpenMined to remedy this? Building protocols that decentralise access to training data for model development, obviously.

Further Reading & Resources

• The Computer as a Communication Device by JCR Licklider and Robert W Taylor, 1968
• World Brain by HG Wells
• Learn more about OpenMined
• We’re gonna be streaming LIVE at Climate Week — subscribe to our Youtube

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