Link here or send me a DM - happy to share a PDF to those who need! t.co/IiJWrposFE

Is infrastructure sabotage always a destructive act led by seditious individuals? no my new article in Human Geography studies Colombian public sector workers ‘breaking’ infrastructure to oppose privatization in 1992, and argues sabotage can reshape policies, politicize society & more

sunpilled & cozymaxxing

Finally updated my Research page for the first time since April so you can peruse all my latest rants all in one place www.blairaf.com/research/

Instead of calling Big Tech companies for what they are -- fascist -- we have abstracted the language about them to "hyperscalers"? I see.

OpenAI has been grantwashing for a long time. Hope we take it more seriously now.

Tech companies are actually pretty explicit about this: The point is to have a device that you can’t escape, one that always has access to you and makes you a constant source of data beyond what a phone does. Surveillance-first devices.

Is it racist to bar visas for international adoption *only* for Black/brown children? Yes. Is it racist for an industry to move children from the global south to mostly white homes, stripping them of their family, culture, language and even the right to know who they are? Also Yes.

The Canada Revenue Agency's chatbot mostly generates wrong answers and is expensive. "The agency says the bulk of cost is salaries ($13.67 million), though that doesn’t include costs related to employee benefits and travel. Another $3.21 million was spent on IT consultants for the project."

people who think they're being discreet by saying nothing (and quietly policing those who do speak up) will come out of the woodwork in due time. they'll make us all sick with their rancid morality.

in 10 or 15 years, when it requires no courage whatsoever (indeed, when styling oneself as "human-centered" and avoiding speaking out about it are incompatible), they'll cite dead palestinians and lament the genocide and say zionism is bad.

Participating in the dumbest and most violent timeline.

Imagine if all the tech critics actively spoke out against zionism.

If Copilot is what innovation looks like, I don't want it.

Frankly, I'm not sure why anyone in the Canadian tech policy space is surprised at Microsoft's latest $7.5 billion investment in data centre expansion, premising "Canadian sovereignty." How are we taking digital sovereignty seriously?

lol we wrote this a year ago and things have just gotten more ridiculous ever since. A thread on me losing my mind trying to buy basic stuff on the internet 🧵

You gotta be kidding me www.utoronto.ca/news/u-t-est...

The biggest challenge in AI governance rn is leaders who are scared of regulation and scared of Trump

Even if this was true--and I question the premise that there are a lot of Jewish Americans who don't know what the Jordan River is--this kind of condescending "if you think murder is wrong name five of their albums" stuff is exactly why they lost the kids

Must read: Queering intelligence: A theory of intelligence as performance and a critique of individual and artificial intelligence by @blairaf.com

Must-reads: The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence by @timnitgebru.bsky.social and @xriskology.bsky.social Disabling Intelligences: Legacies of Eugenics and How We are Wrong about AI by Rua M Williams link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Not one mention of eugenics.

My research shouldn't be investigative journalism.

I wish The Logic would also report on the partnership Palantir has with Carahsoft to "to expand and accelerate delivery of Palantir’s operating systems across the Canadian Public Sector"

Canadians dish out violent civility and call themselves progressive.

Every dollar JK Rowling makes from Harry Potter is going into bankrolling an extortion racket issuing legal threats to organizations across the UK to purge themselves of trans people or face ruinous lawfare.

Still asking!

I MEAN

Sitting with Edward Said's words more and more

This book will change the world.

Advancing techno-fascism, the EO edition.

Free Palestine

If you're talking and writing about Palestine, you should be critiquing Zionism. Anything less is a disservice to Palestinian freedom and justice.

Enter generative AI in general and ChatGPT in particular. If your idea of learning is scrolling through content and perhaps shuffling it around a little before submitting it back online for your credential, it must seem like a kind of liquid-metal coursework Terminator. Why *wouldn’t* it appeal?

I think back of all of it is credentialism, the idea that the degree and the GPA are the point, the insistence on the shortest path to both for market reasons; at the upper end university is a Student Experience and at the lower end it certifies you for data entry. This corrodes the desire to learn.

where do i remember seeing #Deloitte before...oh yes #TheTrevorProject and they also flirt with #SalesForce hmm sensitive data nearby would be oh so fun to "de-person-ize" and whatever might a for-profit company do with #CrisisLines conversations? philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/deloitt...

I did my best to not yell about how ridiculous everything is right now and how hard it is to take anything seriously when we're all supposed to bet our future on magic beans rabble.ca/podcast/the-...

#AcademicSky Mood

Alt-text: graphic titled “Native Land Dispossession” shows land inhabited and stewarded by natives and land controlled by settlers overtime, top depicts Palestine/Israel and bottom depicts USA

On this day, Indigenous people and allies confront the settler-colonial narratives of “Thanksgiving,” observing it instead as a National Day of Mourning.

If you're not calling out eugenics in AGI, you're a part of the problem.

If anyone presents on military AI at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, I hope they mention the founding donors' financial support of former lone soldiers. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESEG_F...