😥Tech is bad for women😦

TL;DR: A new report from UN Women warns that online abuse against women in public life is becoming more sophisticated, more coordinated, and increasingly powered by AI. Deepfakes, “nudify” apps, anonymous harassment, and algorithmic amplification are pushing many women to self-censor or leave digital spaces entirely. Yet another example of tech platforms scaling harm faster than accountability. 🫠

For years, tech promised the internet would democratise opportunity and amplify voices. Instead, many platforms have become environments where misogyny is algorithmically rewarded because outrage drives engagement. 📈

The UN report found:

• 6% of women surveyed had experienced deepfakes 🎭

• 12% had intimate or manipulated images shared without consent 📱

• nearly a third received unsolicited sexual advances online 🚨

• 45% of female journalists self-censor on social media ✍🏾

• almost 1 in 4 reported anxiety or depression linked to online abuse 🧠

The bleakest line in the report?

“AI-assisted virtual rape is now at the fingertips of perpetrators.”

Which sounds less like a warning and more like a Black Mirror pitch that somehow already exists. 😬

Importantly, the report argues this abuse is not random. Researchers describe coordinated misogynistic networks designed to silence women and undermine gender equality — particularly women who are racialised, LGBTQ+, Muslim, Jewish, or outspoken online. In short: being a woman makes you a target; having intersectional identities makes you a bigger one. ⚠️

And this is where the AI industry has a serious credibility problem.

The same companies selling AI as empowering and productivity-enhancing are also releasing tools that make harassment faster, cheaper, and harder to contain. Safety measures often arrive after the product launch — if they arrive at all. Silicon Valley still seems deeply committed to the “deploy first, regulate later” strategy. 🚀

The consequences go far beyond bad comment sections. Women are avoiding topics, stepping back from public discourse, and leaving platforms altogether. When journalists, campaigners, and experts are pushed offline, everyone loses — particularly in an era already shaped by democratic backsliding and online radicalisation. 🧵

The UN is calling for stronger laws, better platform safeguards, and more accountability from tech companies. Which feels increasingly urgent given AI didn’t invent misogyny — it simply industrialised it. 🏭

Why this matters 💡

If digital spaces become actively hostile to women, especially Black women and other marginalised groups, then the tech industry’s endless talk about inclusion and “AI for everyone” starts to look very selective. Because a future where only some people can safely participate online isn’t innovation — it’s exclusion at scale. 🚨

Read more 📚

• The Guardian coverage

• UN Women

💰Lets settle💰

TL;DR: Google has agreed to pay $50 million to settle a lawsuit alleging systemic racial bias against Black employees. The lawsuit claimed Black workers were funnelled into lower-level jobs, paid less, denied promotions, and told they weren’t “Googley” enough 😬

According to Reuters, the settlement covers more than 4,000 current and former employees in California and New York. Plaintiffs alleged Google maintained a “racially biased corporate culture” that systematically disadvantaged Black staff in hiring, pay, performance reviews, and career progression.

Among the allegations:

• Black employees being steered into lower-level roles 📉
• lower pay and fewer promotion opportunities 💸
• racial stereotyping, including being labelled “angry” 🚨
• managers allegedly saying staff weren’t “Googley” enough 🤨

Which remains one of the most Silicon Valley-coded ways imaginable to allegedly discriminate against people. Because apparently discrimination sounds more innovative if you workshop the wording through a startup culture deck first. 🫠

Google, naturally, denies wrongdoing. The company says it “fully complied with all applicable laws” while simultaneously agreeing to a $50 million settlement and changes including pay equity reviews and greater salary transparency. Standard corporate legal strategy:

“We did absolutely nothing wrong and here is an enormous cheque.” 💀

The case also lands at a particularly awkward moment for Big Tech.

Over the last few years, many tech companies have quietly scaled back DEI initiatives amid political backlash, layoffs, and pressure from investors to focus on “efficiency.” At the same time, workers from underrepresented groups continue reporting issues around pay equity, promotion pathways, and workplace culture across the industry. ⚠️

And this is the broader contradiction tech still hasn’t resolved:
Corporate America appears to love talking about meritocracy while repeatedly settling claims suggesting the playing field wasn’t remotely level to begin with. 🎯

The industry also appears to have a habit of treating diversity as a branding exercise during boom years and a “nice to have” during downturns. Yet lawsuits like this keep reinforcing the same uncomfortable reality:
culture problems don’t disappear just because the careers page has more inclusive stock photography. 📸

So what? 💡

This isn’t just a Google story — it’s a reminder that the tech industry’s diversity problem was never only about hiring. Retention, progression, pay equity, and workplace culture matter just as much. As AI reshapes the future of work, the risk is that existing inequalities simply get automated and scaled unless companies address the systems underneath them. 🚨

Read more 📚

• Reuters on Google’s $50m settlement
• AP coverage
• LA Times coverage

🍟Everyone loves chips🍟

TL;DR: Intel stock has surged nearly 500% in a year as investors bet the former chip giant can reinvent itself for the AI era. Meanwhile Samsung just crossed a $1 trillion valuation thanks to booming demand for AI memory chips. Turns out the real winners of the AI boom may not be chatbots — but the companies selling the infrastructure underneath them. 💾

For most of the last decade, Intel looked like a tech giant slowly losing relevance while Nvidia, AMD, and TSMC sprinted ahead. Now suddenly Wall Street is treating Intel like Rocky Balboa with a semiconductor fab. 🥊

According to TechCrunch’s coverage, Intel’s stock is up nearly 490% over the past year as investors pile into the idea that new CEO Lip-Bu Tan can turn the company into a major AI and manufacturing player again. 🚀

The optimism is being driven by:

• exploding AI chip demand 🤖
• Intel’s foundry ambitions 🏭
• governments wanting local chip supply chains 🌍

The only issue? Investors seem to be pricing Intel as though the turnaround has already happened rather than is still very much… loading. ⏳

Meanwhile, Samsung has officially crossed a $1 trillion valuation as demand for AI memory chips explodes. According to The Wall Street Journal, Samsung’s AI-focused memory chip business is effectively sold out as data centres race to secure compute infrastructure. 💰

The bigger takeaway here is that AI is reshaping the entire hardware economy:

• memory chips are suddenly gold again 💾
• manufacturing matters again 🏗️
• supply chains are geopolitical assets now 🌐

Everyone talks about AI models and prompts, but increasingly the real power sits with the companies controlling the chips underneath it all. Turns out the AI revolution might actually just be a semiconductor supercycle with a chatbot marketing layer attached. 😭

So what? 💡

The AI race is no longer just about who builds the smartest model. It’s about who controls the infrastructure powering them. Chips, memory, energy, and manufacturing capacity are becoming the new strategic assets of the digital economy — and governments know it. Expect even more money, politics, and hype to flood into semiconductors over the next few years. 🏭

Read more 📚

• TechCrunch on Intel’s comeback
• WSJ on Samsung’s $1 trillion valuation

💼Welcome to the AI Economy: Fewer Jobs, More Chatbots 🤖💼

TL;DR: Cloudflare says AI made 1,100 jobs “obsolete” even as the company posted record revenue. Meanwhile, reports suggest morale inside Meta is collapsing as employees face layoffs, AI mandates, and increasing pressure to automate their own work. At the same time, the UK is debating an “AI tax” as fears grow that AI productivity gains are flowing almost entirely to companies rather than workers. The AI revolution is beginning to look suspiciously like “do more with fewer humans.” 😬

Cloudflare this week announced it was cutting around 20% of its workforce — over 1,100 jobs — despite reporting record revenue. CEO Matthew Prince argued the cuts were driven by AI efficiency gains, not financial weakness. Employees across engineering, HR, finance, and marketing are reportedly using thousands of AI agents daily, reducing the need for support roles.

Which is a slightly bleak milestone for the AI era:
we’ve now fully entered the “great quarter, shame about your employment” phase of tech. 📉

The timing is particularly awkward because governments are simultaneously trying to work out how society handles an economy where productivity rises but headcount falls. The BBC reports growing discussion around ideas like an “AI tax” — effectively taxing companies that replace workers with AI systems in order to fund retraining or social support.

And honestly, the conversation was inevitable.

For years, Silicon Valley framed AI as a tool that would “augment” workers. Increasingly, companies are saying the quiet part out loud: some jobs are simply no longer needed. 🫠

Meanwhile over at Meta, reports suggest employees are “miserable” amid aggressive AI restructuring, looming layoffs, and pressure to integrate AI into nearly every workflow.

The vibe inside many tech companies right now appears to be:

• everyone must use AI 🤖
• everyone must become more productive 📈
• everyone is worried AI is coming for their job anyway 😭

There’s also a strange irony underpinning all this. The tech industry spent years selling remote work, flexibility, and digital transformation as liberation from old ways of working. Now many workers are discovering digital transformation’s final form may simply be “one employee supervising twelve AI agents while three former colleagues disappear from Slack.” 💀

So what? 💡

This is the part of the AI transition the industry has been reluctant to discuss openly. AI isn’t just creating new products — it’s restructuring labour markets in real time. The big question now is who benefits from those productivity gains. Because if companies become dramatically more profitable while workers absorb the disruption alone, expect political pressure around AI regulation, taxation, and worker protections to escalate very quickly. ⚖️

Read more 📚

• BBC on the AI tax debate
• TechCrunch on Cloudflare layoffs
• NYT on Meta employee morale

No more swiping 🌍

TL;DR: Bumble is killing the swipe, Tinder is desperately trying to win women back, and the dating app industry is slowly admitting that turning romance into a dopamine casino may not have been the long-term growth strategy they imagined. Meanwhile, AI is increasingly being positioned as the solution to the exact problems tech platforms created in the first place. 😭

Bumble announced this week it plans to move away from swiping entirely, with CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd promising a more “intentional” and AI-driven dating experience. Translation: even the apps that built swipe culture are now admitting everyone is exhausted. 🫠

At the same time, Match Group — owner of Tinder and Hinge — is openly scrambling to make Tinder feel less like a digital lads’ holiday. According to the Financial Times, Tinder’s user base is estimated to be roughly 75% men, while usage has fallen sharply from its pandemic-era peak. CEO Spencer Rascoff says “winning women is critical” to the app’s survival. Which feels like a sentence that maybe should have come up before the industry spent a decade optimising for maximum male engagement metrics. 🚩

The problem, increasingly, is “dating fatigue”:

• endless swiping 👈👉
• ghosting 👻
• low-effort conversations 😴
• gamified validation loops 🎰
• the emotional atmosphere of applying for a graduate scheme every time you open the app 📄

Even Tinder now admits women no longer enjoy the “quick-twitch gamified swipe mechanic” that made the app famous. Which is corporate speak for:

“Turns out women don’t love being processed like content in a recommendation feed.” 😬

So naturally, the industry’s answer is… more AI. 🤖

Apps are increasingly pushing:

• AI match recommendations 💘
• AI-assisted profiles ✍️
• AI conversation prompts 💬
• algorithmic compatibility scoring 📊

Which means we are rapidly approaching a future where two AI systems flirt with each other on behalf of two emotionally unavailable humans who met via a machine-learning ranking model trained on engagement data. Romantic. ❤️

And then, in an almost too-perfect subplot for this edition of tech absurdity, Dua Lipa is now suing Samsung for allegedly using her image on television packaging without consent. According to BBC News, fans had apparently started referring to them online as the “Dua Lipa TV Boxes.” 📺

Which honestly feels like the perfect metaphor for the modern internet economy:
take an attractive image, optimise engagement around it, monetise first, and ask questions later. 💀

At this point, somewhere inside Silicon Valley there is probably already a startup raising $40m to let AI decide which celebrity face should emotionally optimise your consumer electronics purchasing journey. 😭

So what? 💡

The dating app industry is undergoing a quiet identity crisis. Users — especially women and Gen Z — are increasingly rejecting platforms that feel transactional, addictive, or emotionally draining. The irony is that the same tech industry that gamified human connection is now trying to use AI to “fix” the social behaviours its own products encouraged. Whether AI creates healthier relationships or simply more efficient emotional outsourcing remains very unclear. 🚨

Read more 📚

• TechCrunch on Bumble removing swipes
• Financial Times on Tinder trying to win women back
• BBC on Dua Lipa suing Samsung

📱Social Media Platforms Are Quietly Rewriting the Deal 🧠📱

TL;DR: Instagram is tweaking its algorithm to reward original creators as it tries to lure users away from TikTok, while TikTok is introducing a £3.99/month ad-free subscription in the UK. Together, the changes reveal where social media is heading: creators fighting algorithms, platforms fighting for attention, and users increasingly being asked to either pay with money or pay with their data. 💸

Instagram says it’s overhauling its recommendation system to prioritise original content over repost accounts and “aggregators.” In practice, this is Meta trying very hard to become TikTok before TikTok was eating instagrams content creation lunch 😭.

The platform says smaller creators will now have a better chance of breaking through, with reposted Reels being replaced by the original creator’s version in recommendations. Which is a polite way of saying:

“maybe rewarding content thieves for years wasn’t ideal.” 🫠

The issue is many creators already sound exhausted. Constant algorithm changes, fluctuating reach, and endless pressure to optimise content have turned social media into a full-time behavioural science experiment where nobody except the platforms knows the rules. 🎰

Meanwhile TikTok is introducing a £3.99 monthly subscription in the UK for users who want an ad-free experience. Everyone else? You stay on the free tier — powered by personalised advertising and tracking. 📊

This is part of a much bigger shift happening across the internet:

• free platforms becoming subscription businesses 💳
• privacy becoming a premium feature 🔒
• algorithms becoming more aggressive attention machines 🤖

As one expert quoted by the BBC put it, we’re moving towards a “two-tier social internet” — one version for people who can afford more control over their experience, and another for everyone else. 😬

And honestly, that might be the most honest description of modern social media yet.

For years the deal was:

“Use this for free and we’ll show you ads.”

Now the deal increasingly looks like:

“Use this for free and we’ll profile your behaviour in microscopic detail unless you pay us not to.” 💀

The really interesting thing is that both TikTok and Instagram are converging toward the same place:

• algorithmically personalised feeds 📱
• AI-driven recommendations 🧠
• creator economies dependent on platform favour 🎥
• users trapped somewhere between entertainment, labour, and data extraction ⚠️

The social internet is starting to look less like a community and more like a very sophisticated casino where the house also owns your attention span. 🎲

So what? 💡

The next phase of social media won’t just be about content — it’ll be about control. Control over reach, privacy, monetisation, and discovery. Platforms are increasingly asking creators to trust opaque algorithms while asking users to either surrender more data or start paying subscription fees to escape the ad-targeting machine. The “free internet” is slowly being replaced by behavioural capitalism with optional premium upgrades. 🚨

Read more 📚

• BBC on Instagram’s algorithm changes
• BBC on TikTok’s ad-free subscription

📈 The tools behind the tech📉

📦Product📦

•  AI is Breaking Two Vulnerability Cultures

📏Design📏 

• A visual explorer for Unicode  

👩🏿‍💻Code👩🏿‍💻

• Using Claude code and like HTML?

🏢The business behind the tech🏢

• Uber is getting a move on

😃BTF is back😃

Yep we're going to call this the "best tech festival" is back

• October 29th 

• New venue, Tobacco Docks

• Early bird price tickets (the same as last year)

Check it out. Joinbtf.com

😃What we are consuming😃

💔Bumble is getting rid of the swipe

🍱 Get your table on Deliveroo