To produce the level of content that I do and to have no engagement breaks my heart. While I’m not giving up, I am making changes to get the engagement this quality of content deserves.

To that end, if you’re interested in receiving future issues of DINT/The Pushback, please reply to this email. That’s really it. Simply reply. You can share whatever you like:

• your impression of the newsletter (open to both critical and non-critical comments)

• what you would like to read in future issues

I do hope to hear from you and take you with me on the journey to what’s next for me as I cast a critical eye on the tech industry.

After nearly 200 issues of DINT, the newsletter averages one comment per issue and it’s always from the same person, a close family member who I shared my concerns with. There have been the occasional comments from others but the average is about one comment every 25 issues. This is unsustainable. I owe it to myself and to my future audience to produce this content for an audience that both reads and responds to it.

DINT is now … The Pushback, a publication for people who build and ship tech products.

Why does tech need another voice, you may be wondering. I’ve noticed there’s no one piecing critical issues in tech together. Even those so-called curated newsletters leave key insights on the table.

The Pushback is about managing risk in your career and in the company you’re at currently:

Career risks:

• Working on projects that become PR disasters (facial recognition scandals)

• Being on teams that get shut down due to bias issues

• Missing regulatory changes that torpedo product roadmaps

Company risks:

• Discrimination lawsuits from biased algorithms

• Regulatory fines for non-compliance

• Talent flight when ethics practices are bad

The Pushback equips you with the information you need to be the smartest person in the room who synthesizes key information into one, coherent course of action.

We’re living quarter by quarter in hopes we won’t be in the next raft of layoffs to impress The Street or potential investors with how ‘lean’ our company is.

You want to survive in this climate? You’d better get ahead of your peers and spot ways to leverage trends to your advantage. The Pushback is your partner in doing just that. Let’s go.

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This Week’s Intelligence

Meta Makes Billion-Dollar Employment Offer to AI Researcher

There’s a war going on in tech and it’s for AI resources. Recently, Meta admits its launching an all-out raid on its competitors’ AI talent. This initiative culminated in a billion-dollar employment package filled with incentives to be distributed over five years for a highly sought-after AI researcher.

What matters for tech workers

Layoffs continue to loom yet tech companies throw hundreds of millions, and in this case billions, of dollars at AI researchers. If the layoff frenzy that started in 2022 didn’t signal a harbinger of things to come then this billion-dollar offer certainly will. Tie accomplishments to AI and you may live to fight another day in the tech industry.

Business impact

Large tech firms entered the AI talent wars and smaller enterprises may just follow, if they see AI as a key factor in company valuation.

More insights

'No names': A brief moment in an interview with OpenAI engineers highlights the state of the AI talent wars

Sam Altman says the AI talent war is a bet that a ‘medium-sized handful of people’ will make superintelligence breakthroughs

xAI has hired 14 Meta employees this year as the AI talent war rages on

Meta Reportedly Acquires AI Audio Startup WaveForms Amid Ongoing Talent War | Technology News

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AI Copyright Litigation: From Ethics to Existential Business Risk

This week Anthropic pushed back against the certification of a class action lawsuit that could potentially cost them - and the AI industry as a whole - billions of dollars in copyright fines.

Garrison Lovely of Obsolete summarizes the case in this way:

William Alsup, a federal judge in San Francisco, certified a class action lawsuit against Anthropic on behalf of nearly every US book author whose works were copied to build the company’s AI models. This is the first time a US court has allowed a class action of this kind to proceed in the context of generative AI training, putting Anthropic on a path toward paying damages that could ruin the company.

(Source: Anthropic Faces Potentially “Business-Ending” Copyright Lawsuit)

The math ain’t mathin’: By law, the damages require copyright infringers to pay $150,000 per pirated work, which could amount to $100 billion in penalties. Anthropic, and others in AI such as OpenAI, have trained their large language models on millions of books from shadow online libraries.

Think of the early days of online music and digital music rights. Remember Napster? That’s where we are now. Those fines were real, companies and individuals who downloaded pirated works had to pay.

Meta, on the other hand, escaped having to pay Sarah Silverman and others in her class action lawsuit, because the claimants didn’t expressly show how pirating their works hurt them financially, according to presiding judge Vince Chhabria’s ruling.

The Bottom Line

Algorithmic bias isn't a "nice to have" ethics concern anymore—it's business risk. Companies that proactively address bias gain competitive advantage. Those that don't face litigation, regulation, and talent flight.

The Pushback tracks who's winning and losing this transition.

The Pushback synthesizes algorithmic bias intelligence for tech professionals. Forward this to colleagues who need to stay informed.

Subscribe for premium intelligence on tech accountability

Copyright 2025. All Rights Reserved. The Panoply Group

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At the intersection of tech, race, and gender a tech CEO did the unthinkable for someone in the industry. He failed to realize the widespread usage of tech to record and track people.

Andy Byron attended a concert with a colleague in Boston. Two days later, he resigned from his position as CEO of Astronomer, a workflow and data management company based i…

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Video game designers have just announce the pre-release of a game that gamifies the return of looted African art from European and American countries.

During colonial times, say academic researchers, Britain, Belgium, the United States, and France stole thousands of pieces of art from the African continent. When confronted with the issue, only France and…

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Judge to creators: ‘Come back when you’ve got proof AI swiping hurts your pockets’

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Let’s take a quick look at the most popular stories in tech, race, and gender in the first half of 2025. Spoiler alert: AI false arrests and unlawful surveillance dominate the list. Check it out:

6. Detroit records more false arrests from misuse of facial recognition

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Will AI Agents Sabotage Black People? - DINT 154

• AI futurist says to prepare for a human-less Internet

• Digital agents will search the Internet for us and customize info to meet our specifications

• Apple and Meta and other tech companies are moving away from handheld devices and towards search-enabled eyeglasses

• Will tech companies copy and paste the same sys…

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Google to pay $50M to Black employees affected by discrimination

• Black employees faced false accusations, lower pay, no promotions, and fewer opportunities to advance

• Former Google recruiter April Curley launched the class action lawsuit in 2022 along with other Black women affected by Google’s unfair practices

• Google takes no responsibility but agrees to …

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The Erasure of Black Women in Tech

I’ve noticed as I’ve read my LinkedIn feed I see posts from my peers, Black women in professional environments who experience daily attacks on our credibility, our beauty, our capacity to simply exist.

The feed has started to become one-note and I feel trapped in the echo chamber of my own experiences reflected in the li…

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This image / video progression made the rounds in AI news this week and not one person, that I’ve seen, has stated the obvious. AI clearly believes we’ll all become Black if you ask it to re-create an image for you enough times.

An AI experimenter asked ChatGPT to make an exact replica of an image of her friend. She asked the system 74 times. The first r…

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There’s quite a bit going on in the Metaverse around race this week.

• Meta’s founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan are shutting down the school for underprivileged children they started in 2016.
  

• The utility serving Meta’s latest mega data center wants to pass on the energy bill to its customer base, 50% of whom are low-income, Black, and Latino residents of their coverage area.
  

• Meta hires workers in Africa to handle tedious work for AI but they’re keeping it hush-hush by using third-party vendors to hire and manage workers.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) will close operations of two San Francisco-area schools in 2026.

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, run CZI as a for profit charity to organize funding of groups they support.

Chan and Zuckerberg chose to start The Primary School in 2016 in an area of Northern California that has mostly Black and brown residents. Many of the Latino residents come from undocumented households.

This video shares more on the impact of the closing:

Parents point to the timing of the closings as a possible reason for CZI’s decision to wind down its direct educational program. They’re doing this because CZI provided no reason of its own as to why it’s closing The Primary School.

The New York Times reports the school invited parents to a bagel breakfast and made the announcement of the closings, without explanation. They did, however, outline a transition plan that would see students receive educational savings plans with seed funding of up to $10,000. That’s part of CZI’s $50 million plan to help students further their education away from the soon-to-be-defunct Primary School.

The Guardian revealed that employees of CZI were troubled when Meta rolled back its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

CZI leadership reaffirmed the organization’s commitments to DEI and that its operations are separate of those at Meta.

Next up: Meta may leave low-income residents with a $5 billion bill for powering its new data center in Northeast Louisiana.

According to Business Insider, Entergy, the company that will provide power for the new Meta data center, wants to saddle its customers with the cost of building power plants big enough to keep the new data center humming.

While the data center, slated to open in 2030, will provide Northeast Louisiana with up to 500 high-paying jobs, Entergy’s customers may not see enough of a benefit from the three new power plants to cover the cost of their increased power bills. Here’s why:

By its own admission, half of Entergy’s customers are low-income, elderly, and disabled.

They live in economically challenged, rural areas (in many cases except for New Orleans). Here’s their coverage map from their 2024 report:

The average income of residents in these areas is $60,728. Only two of the 13 counties and parishes Entergy covers have an annual income above the national average (which is $77,719).

Here’s a link to the sources of data for this chart.

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More News from the Intersection of Tech, Race, and Gender

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Copyright 2025 The Panoply Group

This week, Amazon reported stats on its workforce, including workforce percentage breakdowns by race and gender.

No media organization reported on these numbers. Here’s why …

Amazon:

• publishes percentages only, instead of raw numbers, making the data difficult to verify
  

• self-reports its data and doesn’t disclose government filings around race and gender in …

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Inside Job? Video conference of first Black, female Fed board member hijacked with racist images

Two days ago hackers posted racist statements, Nazi symbols, and porn images on the livestream of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa D. Cook’s speech on the U.S. economy during the McKay lecture series at the University of Pittsburgh.

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Last week’s news of Google requiring the exclusion Black employees from a class action suit before they agreed to a $28 million settlement for racial discrimination has a bit more context now.

Last week’s settlement of the class action lawsuit filed by former Googler Ana Cantu, is restricted to non-Black groups (Hispanic, Latinx, Indigenous, Native Ameri…

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Global tech trade organization ISACA published a report on workplace culture that had no mention of race or neurodiversity at all.

Instead of providing a comprehensive view of the topic, the report focused solely on the experiences of women in the workplace and how tech culture affects us as women.

Here at DINT we’re of course focused on tech race and ge…

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