Update: an earlier version of this article had the relationship between the ads and the videos reversed. We regret the error

Some of Youtube's most expensive advertising is being run against climate denial conspiracy videos, with ads from major brands like "Samsung, Uber, Nintendo, Showtime, Harley Davidson, and Warner Bros" as well as Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund showing up on videos promoting conspiracy theories that deny climate change. Read the rest

Earlier this month while I was in San Francisco, I went over to the Y Combinator incubator to record a podcast (MP3); we talked for more than an hour about the history of Adversarial Interoperability and what its role was in creating Silicon Valley and the tech sector and how monopolization now threatens adversarial interop and also how it fuels the conspiratorial thinking that is so present in our modern politics. We talk about how startup founders and other technologists can use science fiction for inspiration, and about the market opportunities presented by challenging Big Tech and its giant, massively profitable systems. Read the rest

The American right -- always prone to conspiratorial thinking -- has tumbled off the cliff in this century, supercharged by the Trump years, with a series of outlandish conspiracies about Ukrainian election-meddling and climate change that make birtherism and trutherism look positively hinged by comparison. Read the rest