I just trash picked a huge pile of photos from the State Department so you all get Madeline Albright in a cowboy hat

In 1854, after watching the federal government deploy 2000 federal troops and spend $40,000 sending Anthony Burns back into slavery, Boston's Amos Adams Lawrence said “we went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”

Personhood is not a metaphysical question, it's a political question. AI personhood debates focus only on the former to obscure the latter.

Maybe take seriously the idea that the people at the levers of implementation will try it even if it's *not actually any good*. www.nobhillgazette.com/arts_and_cul...

Re: periods of revolutionary ebb (poem Kay Ryan)

Part of the way I talk about Jim Crow in the classroom is to say that it withdrew the protection of the laws from Black people, and from any white people who defied it. That wasn't a secret, it wasn't covert. It was overt, explicit, institutional. That's what's being described in the thread. Today.

Putting Echopraxia in this bucket too b/c apparently thinking really hard about how ritual, magical thinking, etc are themselves tools that provide utility in certain scenarios due to the magical thinking-shaped affordances of the human brain leads to novel jailbreaks recursion.wtf/posts/jit_on...

it’s weird, to run this website and have a very distinct marker for how much people care about what’s happening in Minnesota it feels especially not great to look at as eviction notices start to get served for families are still locked down hiding from ICE, who are still roving the streets

To everyone thanking me, much appreciated but not why I posted! Pls support your local immigrant defense group like: The Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota: www.ilcm.org/donate/ Or my hometown LUCE: www.lucemass.org/donate Or Google your city/state & “immigrant defense” to find your local heroes!

like the problem isn't SKYNET, the problem is letting amoral extraction class assholes apply half-cooked automation onto deeply broken sectors in exploitative ways in a country that's too corrupt to have functioning regulators

I swear to god I will give a lecture FOR FREE to any "AI" lab or company working on interprability or alignment with the title "doing psychology well is extremely hard and requires expertise which you do not have: a primer"

Should you get snatched out of your home on April 21st because you didn’t file your taxes on time? The government is focused on immigrants now but if you set the precedent that people should get kidnapped over paperwork there’s a whole lot of people who can get taken next

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

If you liked this you’ll also love Ana Tijoux, “Somos Sur”. Viva América. m.youtube.com/watch?v=EKGU...

Reminder when you watch the Intuit Super Bowl ads, they have Super Bowl ad money because they are a successful rent seekers who have worked for decades to kill free, quality, public tax preparation services donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-death-...

GenAI is a wonderful technology for generating infinite toil. We will be painstakingly undoing its damage for generations. We’ve already made a superfund site of our collective knowledge.

My latest: Applauding community defense is not enough. We are organizing resistance to a concentration camp regime. The front lines are everywhere. (Plus resources and my must-reads list!)

an elder in Boston spent his life building a one-of-a-kind radical library, but he's aging and it needs a new home. Cooperation Jackson has agreed to take it, but they need help shipping it all there. blog.bl00cyb.org/2026/02/my-b...

I had a great chat last week with @cward1e.bsky.social, looking back at the growth of open source investigation from when it was just a small bunch of people trying to figure stuff out, how the counter-disinformation community formed out of that, and why it's causing us all so many headaches now.

Doing art badly is good and sacred

“A majority of the people have been fed this narrative that AI is doing it on its own; most of the people think like AI is magic. And I do not know why we are being invisibilized…  we are completely not known, unrecognized, and completely sidelined out of the conversations.” - @joan1k.bsky.social

‘One officer told me that I "had no chance of returning to Minnesota" and that "the best thing for (me] is self-deportation." … She offered me $2600 to self-deport. I refused. I wanted to talk to my attorney. They didn't tell me the judge had already ordered my release and return to Minnesota.’

The Wayback is now so load-bearing we should be protecting it with our actual lives

I testified live on HB 2599, and so did @willie-agnew.bsky.social I also sent in extensive written testimony -- thanks @wolvendamien.bsky.social @histoftech.bsky.social @emilymbender.bsky.social @anthropunk.bsky.social for all the feedback on this! privacy.thenexus.today/hb-2599-hw/

Trump: "I want the oil! its a big island and i want it!" Keir Starmer: "let us use this time of austerity to return to gender." Gustavo Petro's Translator: "if it doesnt viscerally feel like Osmosis - can it really be spoken of as True Sex?"

(2/17) What one party does to shrink the space for newsgathering is a loaded gun the next party can use. I’ve always covered this as a bipartisan problem—here I am in 2020 reporting on a DOJ whistleblower and noting that going after reporters' sources was a wider trend:

I hear the enthusiasts on X are excited about a vibe coded “agents talk to each other” security trap/I mean, new social platform. Anyway here’s “Night Call, Collect”, 1969.

If it is not clear, they are arresting Black activists & journalists b/c they can’t deport them legally & state terror can serve a dual purpose of chilling dissent & labeling Black folks as rioters (read-anti nationals)./1 A 🧵 showing how this worked in India from 2014-2019.

Coincidentally I've been spending the week with some MA UX design students basically trying to convince them that what gets counted as an "emerging technology" is entirely politics, and this example is the one that really got through to them (1/2)

holy f*ck *MICROSOFT: 45% OF COMMERCIAL RPO DRIVEN BY OPENAI COMMITMENTS

Nothing says "there will be no technical glitches with age verification so need to worry about privacy!" like the guy from the age verification trade association being surprised when each new slide he shows starts playing music while a small dog yaps incessantly in the background

During her visit, @abeba.bsky.social will be taking part in our Technomoral Conversations event exploring AI narratives and counter-narratives – a collaboration w/ @braiduk.bsky.social & @edfuturesinstitute.bsky.social 🗓️ 11 Feb 18.00-19.30 📍 Edinburgh Futures Institute & online 🎟️ edin.ac/3MZEm0a

Yes.

Modern Times is a South Minneapolis staple, and a personal favorite haunt. For the duration of the occupation they're renaming themselves Post Modern Times and going to a donation-only model. Everyone but ICE can eat for free. Donations: Venmo: moderntimescafe givemn.org/story/centralimpactfund

BREAKING: EU Commission launches investigation into: * Grok spreading illegal content in the EU (including fake sexual images and child abuse material) * X's recommender systems as systemic risks ec.europa.eu/commission/p... #DefendDemocracy #HandsOffOurEU🇪🇺

The NYT can't be bothered to mention to readers that the new TikTok owners have a long history of not just repeated privacy violations, but overt support for anti-democratic right wing extremism. Just isn't of interest to the authors.

The National Guard is still patrolling DC, carrying handguns & long rifles, patrolling vibrant community spaces in packs to intimidate residents, especially Black residents, of the city. Keep that in mind as you see the videos of them handing out pizza & coffee in MN.

We need to get out good, verified information to the public as rapidly as possible, so counteract populist, conspiratorial, and authoritarian narratives that are produced by systems that work well in our modern information environment.

The events of the last 24 hours show why it's important to build functional verification structures in public and counterpublic spaces to resist the authoritarian erosion of our democratic systems, as described in this thread.

Alex from our time working together, while he was in nursing school. Later, he moved to ICU, working as a nurse to support critically ill Veterans. He had such a great attitude. We’d chat between patients about trying to get in a mountain bike ride together. Will never happen now

What I see often in activist spaces is almost obsessive concern over something that’s basically unavoidable: being identified as an activist. But then, lots of actions taken that INCREASE risk along those other dimensions: destroying evidence and recordings, aggressive and escalatory behavior, etc.

NEW: There's a bill in Massachusetts that'd do something really important — give a pathway out of prison to people, often women, who are in prison due to a crime they committed against their abuser. Several states adopted a version of this very recently: OK, NY, GA. Can Massachuetts be next?

It's a "moral crumple zone": humans kept in the loop as legal capacitors, not as meaningful supervisors. That's the same problem as with agentic AI tools. They're good enough to make you stop checking their work, but not enough to actually trust. And when they fail, you're liable, not the model.

one of the things I appreciate more and more over time, and that I try to help my students understand, is that the people doing the research matter. this is going to become increasingly important to discern as the overall landscape junkifies. who is out there still doing their own good work?

2025 was the hottest year on record for ocean heat content. Unfortunately, we now say this every year. 🥹 "In addition to setting a new record in 2025, the global ocean continues to show sustained and intensified warming." + #OpenAccess Study: doi.org/10.1007/s003... + Data: www.ocean.iap.ac.cn

it’s come to my attention that my tumblr post has been crossposted to bluesky, so I’m posting it on my account here #AntiAI #GenAI

A woman recording an ICE agent tells him "Shame on you." The agent responds, "Have you all not learned from the past couple of days?" "Learned what?" she asks Then he knocks her phone out of her hand

WSJ investigation: In the past 6 months ICE agents have fired at vehicles 13 times, leading to: * 8 people shot * 5 of which were U.S. citizens * 2 died * no victims drew a weapon The playbook: Agents box in a vehicle, block attempts to flee, then fire www.wsj.com/us-news/vide...

I think it's a bad sign that every major news media outlet has spent days asking whether or not murder is bad and how much child porn is an okay amount

Michelle Alexander wrote this the week Philando Castile was killed, that Alton Sterling was. It still echoes in my head. It's been useful so many times for me in the last decade and seems so now. www.embracerace.org/resources/so...