Exciting this is out -- lost count of how many times I've recommended people read the original dissertation

Glasses promising to lower your cognitive load that depend on you being too cognitively overloaded to realize you shouldn't be wearing them

If you're in the neighborhood this weekend, I'll be presenting the Saturday keynote at this Harvard conference. Part of my project on Japanese CGI beyond simulation. Really just here to share the slick poster design though

Wednesday night at the Global Mediations Lab: Paul North (co-editor of the new edition of Capital) joins us to talk mediation in Marx

That article makes me realize I don’t really care if students can recite the plot. It’s not about enforcing one particular form of attention. I do still dream of in-person screenings, because there are some things you just can’t perceive at all without a bigger screen, or a bigger group

11am/8pm (Boston time) tomorrow!

11am/8pm (Boston time) tomorrow!

Yes, immigration agents not only took Arnoldo's phone, the 10th grader had to use Find My Phone to locate it — in a vending machine for used electronics, close to an ICE detention center. Read the full story here: www.propublica.org/article/vide...

Join us!

Great topic (and I appreciate this long list of related vocab)

Join us for a follow-up conference to Cultural Politics of the Computational Image, this time online. Friday, January 23, day/night. Register for the zooms at: globalmediations.mit.edu/cpci-workshop/

NEW: I looked into MAGA darling Anduril's latest foreign partner, and its weapons are accused of fueling the ongoing genocide in Sudan. theintercept.com/2025/12/11/a...

Given ambient audio capture is now mainly being used in medical contexts to record interactions with patients, it's helpful to think of Meta et al.'s 'always recording' strategy as basically turning all of life into one endless doctor's appointment

TIL about the tradition of satirical computer vision papers that propose using computer vision to automate the recognition of 'good' computer vision papers

“In the rare cases when the bot makes a mistake, they strap on a VR headset and use joysticks to manually control grasp and place the drink back on the shelf […] In a typical eight-hour shift, they take over the robot about 50 times, and it takes up to five minutes each time to resolve the error.”

NEW — I dug into the story of ICE abducting a 13-year-old boy in Massachusetts and moving him 500 miles across state lines without notifying his mother, local cop's complicity, and how the federal government's justification for such cruelty is already falling apart:

Imagine studying a technology whose presence in the classroom is so detrimental to the development of writing and research skills (including even the will to know the sources behind claims!) that mitigating its effects becomes a central goal of course design, and concluding with tips on adopting it.

A German teen told Meta's child safety researchers his under-10 little brother had been sexually propositioned multiple times on its VR platform. Meta deleted the evidence. New internal whistleblower docs indicate that was part of a broader cover-up: www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

Shocked, shocked, I tell you

2 weeks left on this (no idea why I put the deadline on a weekend)

Someone at Kodansha keeps inviting art animators to make VR films and it's great (newest one is a Wada Atsushi critique of mental health care in Japan/defense of imaginary cats)

Tokyo Metro doing an escape room tie-in for Exit 8 is a little on the nose, but why not I guess

The real 2.5D

A movie made of dust and mold (complimentary)

I wonder if one legacy of the VR/metaverse etc. hype cycle is companies have given up hoping people will *voluntarily* adopt new tech (excerpt from @bcmerchant.bsky.social newsletter)

All I can think about is all the AI startups working as we speak to essentially ruin Reddit on behalf of the advertising industry x.com/SavannahFede...

Cindi Textor's wonderful _Intersectional Incoherence: Zainichi Literature and the Ethics of Illegibility_ is available for free download. With chapters on Yi Kwangsu, Kim Saryang, Kim Sokpong, Yi Yangji, Yu Miri and others.

I spoke to CNN about Japan's new Office for the Promotion of a Society of Harmonious Coexistence with Foreign Nationals and also the rise of Sanseito: "Why has Japan set up a task force to deal with foreigners?" edition.cnn.com/2025/07/17/a...

Building on the great papers from our Global Mediations workshop this past April, we're launching a CFP for additional contributions to an anthology on the global contestation of computational imaging. Details below; proposals due 9/13

Building on the great papers from our Global Mediations workshop this past April, we're launching a CFP for additional contributions to an anthology on the global contestation of computational imaging. Details below; proposals due 9/13

An open letter of resignation from myself and many other book series editors at Amsterdam University Press, following its recent acquisition by the notoriously exploitative academic publishing conglomerate Taylor & Francis.

My sense is GPS *does* have something to do with AI, but in the sense of training people to do what a computer tells them to do rather than trust what they see in front of them. Technologies against situational awareness

This is a laundry list of rhetorical strategies to defend the adoption of a given technology for the purposes of advancing an ideology & economic regime: inevitability, unquestioning praise of “innovation,” buy-in from concerned stakeholders, assurances that partnership is not capitulation. 1/n

Finished @lizpelly.bsky.social’s fantastic MOOD MACHINE. The part on the re-muzakification of ambient really tracks with frustrations I’ve heard from musicians lately. If you only go online, it’s as if the history of ambient music has been rewritten to foreground more background-friendly styles

Will be circling the incomprehensible rotaries with newfound respect now that I know they can keep out self-driving cars

Posted about this before but this is basically Miyake Kaho’s argument about why working people stop reading novels—if you’re trained to skim for action items/takeaways then all that other novely stuff just becomes inefficient noise

We also looked at institutions & nations that are producing the most surveillance. Top inst: 1.MSFT 2.CMU 3.MIT 4.Chinese Univ of Hong Kong Top nations: 1.USA 2.China 3.UK If an institution, nation or subfield authors papers with downstream patents, most are used in surveillance patents. 6/

The output of computer-vision research is overwhelmingly aimed towards monitoring humans https://go.nature.com/45HQI4f

Creative writing assistant prof. position in our department now taking applications - fiction of any or many sorts! cmsw.mit.edu/applications...

The regime has posted signs at Manzanar, the WWII concentration camp for Japanese Americans, asking visitors to report "negative" historical interpretations. Hard to imagine a positive interpretation but it's probably just an excuse to shut down the park. www.sfgate.com/california-p...

Finally a Thai restaurant willing to tell customers not to use chopsticks lol

NCC's Resource Sharing Committee & CEAL's Committee on Japanese Materials hosted an open meeting featuring representatives from the National Diet Library on 3/13 at AAS to discuss access to NDL materials. A summary of the discussions can now be found on our site: guides.nccjapan.org/homepage/new...

"As the project progressed, however, institutional pressure mounted not to engage with the topic of non-Japanese labor before 1945 [...] What began as an immersive heritage experience has become something else entirely: a study in obstruction, an index of refusal, and a methodological provocation."

They're calling this ambient mini refrigerator-looking thing a 'wall washer,' promising to cleanse your space with $270 worth of LEDs (why be immersed when you can be power-washed, as it were)

VR to treat smartphone-induced myopia—when the only way to get you to look further away is to bring the screen right up against your face automaton-media.com/en/news/gami...

“It really does disappoint me that so many brilliant colleagues—whose genuine breakthroughs I’ve profited from for years—would be so quick to condemn this newer, stupider way that I and others like me can make money off your life’s work, through stealing.”

✨🗣️ Here is the link to register for the Queer and Feminist Perspectives on Japanese Popular Cultures symposium Second Edition 💕🌈🏳️‍⚧️🔥 a free and online event (May 19 to 22) with 20+ participants and three awesome keynotes ✨😎 Program below and at the link here 👉 events.humanitix.com/queer-and-fe...

Tomorrow

Turning back to VR for a moment, I appreciate this smart framing of Meta’s headsets—that even if you don’t see ads when you turn them on they should still be considered ad-driven devices, since that’s ultimately what’s paying for all of it (Ali Bar-Zeev interviewed by Gabriele Romagnoli)

Poster for my Global Mediations Lab workshop on global ramifications of the computational image, April 25 at MIT. Schedule/rsvp at globalmediations.mit.edu/cpci/