🔥The Internet is Cooked: May 13, 2026
Good morning. Here's your dispatch from the corners of the internet still fighting slop: Carney about to sell out again, Uber drivers who beat the algorithm, Cycling Canada pulling the rug on its women even though they’re the ones winning, workers with a secret weapon against the AI slop machine, and a forgotten history of the Indian city that already did the thing Zohran is trying to do.
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Mark Carney is about to sell out again. Friday, Danielle Smith left Ottawa switching her language from "if" to "when the deal gets signed." Coastal First Nations cut out, BC calling it an "energy vampire," Guilbeault already resigned, Avi Lewis (now NDP leader!) naming it. The quiet part: it's the Iran war giving Carney cover to ram a tar sands pipeline through unceded land. We need powerlines, not pipelines.
Sometimes the apps lose. Huzzah! On April 28, more than 1,000 Uber drivers in Victoria, BC ratified Canada's first-ever Uber union contract with UFCW Local 1518. Quarterly bonuses, real human reps when Uber tries to deactivate you with a button and more. Bargaining committee member Gilberto Talero Almanza said it best in the press release: “when workers unite in solidarity, great results can be achieved”. Victories are contagious. We’re hoping this spreads like wildifre.
Cycling Canada quietly killed the women's team pursuit program for the 2026 worlds. They're citing "budget constraints," while keeping the men's program intact, despite the women accounting for 100% of Olympic track cycling medals over the last 30 years! The women have been performing better than the men for 18 months, and the women's team pursuit is the only discipline already in a qualified position for LA 2028. So the federation just defunded the actual viable Olympic pathway. The athletes' open letter cites CC's own equity policy. We're watching.
The moment to unionize the AI build-out is right now. Ben Carroll, an organizer with the Southern Workers Assembly, makes the case in Jacobin: the entire AI economy depends on gas turbines and power transformers that take over a year to build, with orders already booked to 2030 and no quick substitute. Three companies make 75% of the world's turbines, and their main US plants — staffed by a few thousand mostly non-union workers — sit in the Carolinas and Georgia. A slowdown at any of those plants will throw a giant wrench in the works of the AI industry. That's the leverage. SWA is already placing rank-and-file organizers across the South's EV battery supply chain; turbine shops are next. Sam Altman cannot order a transformer on Amazon Prime. Organize the shops, slow the slop.
A different world existed, and it got crushed, and we should remember it. Rishi Mittal filed a beautiful piece in Current Affairs Monday on Faridabad — the Indian city built by Partition refugees in 1949 as a worker cooperative. Under socialist organizer Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, refugees with no construction experience built 5,000 houses, schools, factories, and a community-run health system in under two years, under budget, with rotating group leaders and salary caps. Then the Rehabilitation Ministry, threatened by the autonomy, dismantled the whole thing and brought in Bata. Mittal threads it to Mamdani: if refugees with nothing but the clothes on their backs could do it, what's stopping any of us?
Bring back cartoons. Asher Perlman's daily cartoon yesterday in The New Yorker feels relatable. Adults are cooked.
Soundtrack: Jack Antonoff and Bleachers drop their fifth record, everyone for ten minutes on May 22. Antonoff's line on it: in 2026, being real is punk. We'll take it.
Solidarity forever,
The internet is cooked.