And if you're wondering about what else I'm watching on the Criterion app 😅 I still maintain that The Darjeeling Limited is Wed Anderson's worst film, and I'm enjoying the Sean Connery Bond movies much more than I expected to. They're much less of a sexist nightmare than I expected

Possibly one of my most cringe features is that Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one of my lifelong favorite movies, and I just watched it again, and now I'm so excited for the new Spielberg, internet haters be damned

NPR has a 'Word of the Week' series, and this week it's LUDDITE I spoke with Emma Bowman about who they really were and about the new luddites organizing against big tech + AI A fun one and, since it's airing on All Things Considered, maybe the biggest-audience luddite rehabilitation effort yet

McSweeney’s on the economics of the AI bubble. This description of AI driven layoffs is excellent satire.

ending the week with 248 copies pre-ordered, which feels pretty terrific. thank you Bluesky for buying books!!

"Who could have predicted this?" says the historian of medicine

Counterpoint: we have The Spreadsheet because the automation doesn’t meet our needs.

I love how Donna Haraway is like: "trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations" And the one word summary for my students is: "eugenics" 😅

Like so many things in the past 80 years, the special ed system we built in this country was deeply flawed, wildly unequal, and one of the great achievements in terms of scale and transformations for uncountable individual lives. We're gonna miss it.

@drnikko.bsky.social and I are putting together a special issue proposal for Big Data and Society on "Trans Data"! If you're an #STS nerd, or a #transstudies nerd, or ideally both, do submit ideas if you have them - docs.google.com/document/d/1...

This is one of many reasons why designing societies around cars was a mistake. It's not a path to follow, it's something that good civic leaders are now trying to undo. These guys don't understand *anything* about society, yet governments are allowing them to shape our futures with their ignorance.

Almost to 200 copies pre-ordered, very exciting

This story is horrifying & exactly the kind of shit so many of us have been trying to get people to seriously consider BEFORE it gets more widespread & de facto accepted across the academy. Like, there's a real possibility for this to be met with an administrative shrug, and that cannot come to pass

Sometimes it may feel like we aren't making progress in the fight against RFK Jr.'s destruction of US public health, so I wanted to share some of the successes that we can look to for motivation: 1. Stopped the illegitimate ACIP 2. Ended said ACIP's anti-vax recommendations

There is so much to unpack here I'm tempted to do a thread. MAHA/TikTok pseudoscience, gendered surveillance, and the assumption that women are too inattentive to notice what's happening in their own bodies, to start with.

The awful thing is that we teach this to young students too; this notion that everything can and should be measured and that there is nothing that cannot be quantified. It’s not a useful way to conceive of the bodymind in all its states

Interestingly, the intuition I felt and spoke from -- that embodied knowing -- is precisely the kind of thing AI, for all of its performative anthropomorphic gesturing at the simulacrum of personhood, can't do. Tech billionaires want us to believe that our embodied/human ways of knowing are useless!

As I walked away, I had another funny feeling. What if this "book" and his entire "experiment" is funded by an AI company? This is exactly the kind of "scholarship" tech bro overlords want -- influential academics, preferably men, telling the rest of us that we are now useless in the age of AI.

I actually had a conversation with the keynote speaker afterwards, and told him what a shame it was that he allowed an LLM to make him believe in his own worthlessness. I tried to reason with him: "That's exactly what these companies want you to believe, and it's ridiculous." He was unmoved..

He kept coming back, repeatedly (in the way AI often loops) to this idea of AI (specifically Claude) representing "a position without an address", and it became increasingly clear to me that there was some odd mystification happening. Of course LLM products have an address. It's a corporate address.

I'm attending a digital humanities event in Montreal. There was a keynote on AI and something about the talk made me wonder if it had been written by Claude. I said as much in the Q&A. As I posed the question, the speaker shifted, looking slightly uncomfortable. What he said next shocked the room +

Last week, my Haraway seminar got tired of talking about Christianity on our way to making sense of the cyborg manifesto. They'll be thrilled today that we get to start with the modest witness 😅

I had big ambitions of going to the office at least 2x/week this summer but you know what, my sun-dappled, breezy neighborhood filled with the sounds of music out car windows and kids in sprinklers is a way, way better way to spend my days.

Donna Haraway, Oncomouse essay, third page, and going in my book manuscript: “The only thing my people [of technoscience] cannot do… is remain neutral. We must cast our lot with some ways of life on this planet, and not with other ways.”

A great thread that really drives home for me that this is not at all a debate between the humanities and the sciences, but between different factions within the humanities; one of which is intent on using "objectivity" to cloak their own ideological and academic commitments.

This fucking sucks, a month ago the line we parents got from principles was that nothing would be done in the foreseeable future.

I think a good chunk of the problem with "AI" discourse is that the fundamental shared definition(s?) of "intelligence" are rooted in eugenics.

Book release event for Femmephilia tomorrow (sold out!), and here's what Ms Five knows about it: - we watched The Little Mermaid to prepare - it's about how girls and women, particularly mommies, are Good - I'm wearing my me-made "pink mermaid outfit" that matches hers - and hot pink shoes

Good news!

"Replica of a Chip: The Weaving Technology of Marilou Schultz marks the first survey of acclaimed Navajo/Diné weaver + math educator Marilou Schultz... The exhibition positions Schultz as an innovator whose work... has influenced the practices of art, Navajo weaving, + computer architecture..."

Claudes all the way down

there's a moment early in the film of Ready Player One, where the voiceover says, "the only limit was your imagination", as the screen fills with pre-existing characters & IPs. It would one of the most on the nose satires of modern culture if not for the fact that it's meant entirely without irony

“19 full-time faculty members, 10 of them tenured, were told… that they’d been laid off… Dozens more have taken early-retirement or buyout offers… Among those laid off Monday was Sanjay G. Reddy, a professor of economics + prominent critic of the university’s financial management.”

One of the fund things about teaching @brooklyninstitute.bsky.social classes is discovering how many people are just... reading academic books outside of the academy and out of their fields of study?! We can forget this as hyperspecialized PhDs and faculty, but our work does matter to many people

AI's impact on productivity isn't straightforward, but companies are pressuring workers to use it anyway. If employers actually want to understand where the technology is helpful (and not), they should listen to feedback from workers, D&S's @aihathing.bsky.social says. www.vox.com/technology/4...

The things tech bros imagine happening in classrooms are so bizarre I have to assume they didn't attend a single college class

I'm completely gutted by this news. @raulpachecovega.bsky.social has passed. I never met but we talked so much online. He was so incredibly kind and generous. One of the best of us.

This is the AI slopulism we’ve been hearing about

There is something in here for everyone: Marxists, logistics obsessives, obsolete-software enthusiasts, and those are all the kinds of people I know about. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

Keep looking!

To be clear, though, gutting library infrastructure is a fundamental betrayal of the idea of a university as such.

Some folks say we’re not afraid enough yet and maybe that’s true but I’d rather just hate instead of fear.

You can seek to understand, predict, learn the history, set limits, purge your life, include it in some small way … but it’s enough to hate.

You can distinguish between generative AI and other forms of machine learning, but you don’t need to. You can just hate.

Remember: it’s enough to merely hate AI

I stepped off the library dean path when it became clear that this would be the job--managing the end of academic libraries as we know them. Please know that these changes are just a result of defunding. They do not herald some bright digital future. There will just be less access to knowledge.

Hell yeah, great ideas here in my neighborhood with a quick search!!

“All of France’s central government agencies have to come up with plans to move away from US tech—across office software, antivirus, AI, databases, and more—by this fall. On April 23, French officials also announced the country will move its health data platform away from Microsoft”

Also, the Marilyn essay was a great playground read while my kid played with her friends!!! 💯