The Waifu We Deserved, Not the One We Needed In January 2026, a purple-haired cartoon schoolgirl named Amelia became an unlikely internet phenomenon. Within weeks, AI-generated videos of Amelia flooded social media—particularly X—showing her waving Union Jacks, denouncing immigration, embracing Donald Trump, and delivering racist and Islamophobic talking

How Systems Produce Harm Without Deciding To There is a familiar way to explain how institutions produce suffering. Either there are bad actors at the top—architects of cruelty who design harmful policies and direct their implementation—or there are bad actors at the bottom, rogue operators who exceed their

It started with a dungeon map—corridors branching into chambers, chokepoints narrowing into passages, the whole thing rendered in that particular style of competent anonymity that machine learning produces so effortlessly. I. The Map Without a Key The image appeared in a Facebook group dedicated to AI-generated art. It could