Betting on Wildfire and AI's Political Beliefs
A round-up of this month’s signs of late stage capitalism and the horrors we’re living through.
Miles Kampf-Lassin
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents don’t just wear masks to look intimidating — they also shield agents’ identities from public disclosure. If that sounds paranoid, just look at recent news that the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility — meant to act as an internal watchdog — has opened more than 100 cases related to incidents of “doxing and threats” toward ICE employees. Some of this “doxing” apparently includes acts as basic as recording the activity of agents and posting about it online. You may have thought that people have a First Amendment right to free speech, including criticizing government agents when they flout the law. But apparently under the Trump administration’s neo-fascist fever dream, monitoring behavior is solely the legal domain of the state.
Get ready for a shitload more fossil-fuel power plants being built in service of private data centers for, you guessed it, AI. President Trump recently said he wants to fast-track construction of new power plants across the country, and personally called Big Tech titans including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, SpaceX’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and OpenAI’s Sam Altman asking them why they haven’t taken his administration up on its offers to evade environmental regulations and loosen all sorts of safety rules to get these massive power plants and data centers up and running. Meanwhile, heat domes have been baking much of the Northern Hemisphere this summer, and new analysis shows increasing oil production massively profits industry CEOs but flies in the face of long-running scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels contributes to record-breaking temperatures. Maybe AI can just fix it all?
If you’ve ever used any AI drafting tools, there’s a chance the text may have been altered to inject the political beliefs of the tech company that created the model. In a new study, researchers say that these drafting tools have a habit of shifting meanings when it comes to hot-button political issues such as abortion and climate change, which could have severe long-term consequences. As Oxford Professor Sandra Wachter, one of the study’s co-authors, explains: “Language is one of the things making us human and all of a sudden a mediator is stepping into that process. AI is forcing itself in as a gatekeeper of knowledge and understanding.” Let’s hope the AI algorithm has all of our mutual self-interest as humans at heart.
A new wildfire season is underway and you know what that means: time to start betting in order to cash in. In January 2025, Polymarket users spent more than $1 million gambling on the outcomes of the inferno wreaking havoc across Southern California, and as prediction markets have rapidly grown in usage, 2026 is slated to be a record-setting crapshoot. A new market called Wyldfyre even bears the tagline, “You can’t predict fire. But you can trade on it.” A spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service told High Country News about this glut of trading, “Systems that tie financial gain to wildfire outcomes risk encouraging misuse, including arson, and are not compatible with our mission.” Luckily they are still very compatible with disaster capitalism.
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Miles Kampf-Lassin is Senior Editor at In These Times. Follow him at @MilesKLassin
