All stories by
Julian Cross
Julian Cross writes about AI, automation, surveillance, digital identity, labor, human relationships with each other and automation, complex systems and attention — less about what new tools, studies and observations can do in theory than what they're already doing to how we work, spend, relate, and get measured. His work follows leads to the point where it stops being a product and starts being a condition.
The U.S. Government Is Watching You More Efficiently Than Ever — And Outsourcing the Hard Part
For decades, the hard limit on government surveillance was human attention. A December 2025 GAO report and ACLU documentation of federal AI profiling tools reveal what happened when that limit disappeared.
Voice Cloning Has Crossed the Threshold. You Can No Longer Trust a Call.
Voice cloning has crossed a perceptual threshold that researchers say human ears can no longer reliably detect — and the way we authenticate identity in daily life hasn't caught up.
They're Teaching Robots to Do Your Job — By Paying You to Film Yourself Doing It
A quiet new gig economy has emerged where workers in 50+ countries film themselves doing chores for robot training data — and the data they sell today may determine what work is left for them tomorrow.
Tracked by Software, Judged by Nothing: How AI Surveillance Is Quietly Breaking the Workplace
A new study found that AI workplace monitoring produces worse outcomes than human oversight — and the reason turns out to be less about privacy than about something older and stranger.