1/ The biggest problem in today's world? It's not climate change, pandemics, or democratic collapse. It's that too many brilliant minds are stuck in boring corporate jobs, instead of working on those problems.
Rutger Bregman
@rutgerbregman.com
Historian | Author of ‘Utopia for Realists’ (2014), ‘Humankind’ (2020) and ‘Moral Ambition’ (2025) | Co-founder of The School for Moral Ambition | moralambition.org | rutgerbregman.com 📖 substack.com/@rutgerbregman 📺 youtube.com/@rutger.bregman
Twenty years ago, climate denial was a problem of the right. Today, AI denial is a problem of the left, and the consequences could be even more disastrous. www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpTZ...
Liberals Are The New Climate Deniers
YouTube video by Rutger Bregman
youtube.com
I've finally caved, I'm starting a Substack. Field notes from inside my new career!
Billionaires pay about half as much in taxes as everyone else. Why? Better lobbyists. But history shows we can win this fight. Same arguments were made against income tax, democracy still prevailed. It can again. Excited to team up with @gabrielzucman.bsky.social to make sure it does.
This sounds nice, but it's a great way to undermine the welfare state. When the middle class has skin in the game, they defend the system. When welfare is 'just for the poor', it becomes a poor program: stigmatized, underfunded, easy to gut. That's why billionaires keep pushing this idea.
TechCrunch@techcrunch.com · 3mo ago"Why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year paying more than $1,000 a month in taxes?" Bezos said Wednesday morning on CNBC. "That's $1,000 that could help with rent, or groceries, or anything."
Last year, 52% of Harvard graduates went into finance, consulting or (big) tech. I was invited by students to talk about this waste of talent, and what we can do about it. Link in next tweet →
INSANELY powerful speech about one of the most evil, legal industries: Big Tobacco. This industry kills 8+ million people/year. More than HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria combined. The #1 cause of preventable death on earth. Yet the fight against it gets just 0.1% of global health funding. 🧵
1/ Less than 24 hours before broadcast, the BBC called me and said: we're editing a line out of your lecture. The line? That Donald Trump is the most openly corrupt president in American history.
Over 80% of people want a wealth tax for billionaires. Of course they’re resisting with their army of lawyers and lobbyists, but we’re building ours. I’m so excited to be teaming up with @gabrielzucman.bsky.social 👉
It’s the most FT thing in the world to describe the manosphere as a market failure but it somehow doesn’t detract from this very good piece as.ft.com/r/c3d11403-b...
The market failure beneath the manosphere
[FREE TO READ] Confronting the misogyny and get-rich-quick schemes of influencers means talking openly to young men about success
as.ft.com
Sam Altman is the most dangerous man in Silicon Valley right now. The board that fired him? Replaced. The safety team that questioned his priorities? Dissolved. The nonprofit structure that was supposed to keep mission above profit? Restructured. The employees who wanted to speak out? Silenced.
GiveDirectly has sent $1 billion in cash directly to people in extreme poverty. Their model has no middle man and study after study shows it works. Any billionaire could call them tomorrow and help pull an entire country out of poverty. For some, it would cost about a year in the stock market.
We pay you to quit your job and spend 7 months fighting the tobacco industry, transforming the food system, or making the superrich pay their fair share in taxes. 37 fellowships. US, Canada, Europe, Kenya. Applications close April 27th.
80% of billionaire political spending goes to one party. Guess which one.
As a historian, I've always been careful with the word "fascism." We've all seen how it shuts down debate when everyone throws it at everything they don't like. But at some point, being careful with the word starts to mean being blind to the thing itself.
Peter Thiel literally wrote that freedom and democracy are not 'compatible' and that regulating Big Tech is the work of the 'anti-Christ'. Stop treating this as metaphor. When billionaires tell you they want to end democracy, take them seriously.
I made a video about fascism in America. Not as an insult. As a clinical diagnosis --> www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDf2...
10 Signs of Fascism. America Has All of Them.
YouTube video by Rutger Bregman
youtube.com
The international boycott of ChatGPT has absolutely exploded. 2.5M people have already joined, and this is just the beginning. Go to quitgpt.org. Cancel your subscription, delete your account. And tell at least one person why. My op-ed: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
This is the most important thing happening in the world right now. Trump and Hegseth want killer drones + mass surveillance of Americans. Anthropic refuses to build it. While most tech companies fall in line, they are prepared to pay the price for their principles.
What conservatives did to Bud Light in 2023, that's what progressives should do to ChatGPT in 2026. OpenAI is so vulnerable right now. With enough pressure, I think it's actually possible to take the whole company down. quitgpt.org
The BBC just remade Lord of the Flies — the story that taught generations humans are fundamentally savage. But when it ACTUALLY happened in real life? Six boys shipwrecked for over a year built a functioning society.
Just before what could be the greatest wave of job loss, democratic erosion and threat to humanity itself, the Left - the people who are supposed to care most about these things – are going: LALALALALA it's not happening, it's all fake, AI is absolutely incapable of anything 🙃
Absolutely brilliant piece about the Left's TOTAL blindness on AI. Their dismissal of AI risks mirrors how climate deniers treat CO2. Will probably get a lot of nastiness for this on Bluesky, but I guess that's part of the same problem. www.transformernews.ai/p/the-left-i...
The left is missing out on AI
As a movement, it has largely refused to engage seriously with AI, ceding debate about a threat and opportunity to the right
transformernews.ai
I tell Ryan Holiday something unexpected: ego can push people to do the right thing. History's biggest moral revolutions didn't just happen from obligation, they happened because people cared about their legacy. Vanity isn't pure, but it's powerful.
The best conspiracies are the ones that change the world. In 1884, the Fabian Society plotted to bring us the 8-hour workday and votes for women. In 1947, a handful of intellectuals met in Switzerland to roll back the state. They called themselves 'neoliberals.'
Just before Trump's re-election, I attended a tech conference in Silicon Valley. Over dinner, a tech bro spoke in ways that reminded me of 1930s fascists. I pointed this out. He replied, without irony: "Yeah, I think we should get a little fascy."
One of the most effective things you can do right now to fight Trump and ICE is to cancel your ChatGPT subscription.