I've been threatening to teach a course called "Living the Luddite Life" for several years now, and have slowly been seeding the idea in my chair's mind that he'll give me space for a typewriter lab...

Here's the link to the free pdf of my new book The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet. Access is so important and I'm grateful that the press is platforming it as one file that is easy to download. www.upress.umn.edu/978081669906...

When a writer you admire shouts you out… dawwwww (and pupppppy) 😳

An extraordinary interview.

In his 1992 novel Snow Crash, writer Neal Stephenson coined the phrase "Metaverse" to describe a VR world experienced through goggles. Now, Stephenson says he no longer believes face-worn computing is the future: “People don’t like wearing things on their faces and don’t trust those who do.”

Tomorrow in Berlin, giving a talk! “1:1 - drawn to scale”. It was fun to think across space, VR, and AI to discuss simulations that strive for realism.

The first academic talk i ever gave (as a 2nd year grad student maybe?) was on the humor that resulted from Pluto being demoted from a planet to a dwarf planet.

i have an anthropology joke but it's culturally sensitive

"the delusions of the Oligarchs... manifest as infrastructure, but will later [be] societal ruins. So, it might be easier to act now — to resist the data centre buildouts that usher in their worldviews — than to rebuild a society that has collapsed from a failed social experiment."

On "Ezra Klein", Jack Clark of Anthropic kept talking about "taste" as what they look for in hiring, now that Claude codes so well. When pressed, he defined "taste" as experience. In addition to the functions Chayka talks about, taste also seems to be a way to replace and diminish "expertise."

Thinking about this 2018 cartoon by Tom Gauld for no reason whatsoever

Nice timing for @mjcrockett.bsky.social and my article on AI Surrogates and Illusions of Generalizability to be officially published. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

In writing about AI Surrogates for human subjects research, @mjcrockett.bsky.social and i realized that their appeal indexes disciplinary anxieties. Dave's post nicely details some of the broader (institutional) anxieties that promises of AI replacements are surfacing. bsky.app/profile/lmes...

There is such an easy route that Uni's are failing to take. Lead with culture change. Stop spamming us about the new software and partnerships. Stop the endless workshops in the teaching and learning centers. Start talking about what learning is and when these products help or hurt this process.

i.... can't.

Revising an academic manuscript, as told in Matthew McConaughey GIFs. Phase 1: Completing the first draft and deluding yourself it's perfect. You did it!

UCLA has inked a deal to give all its faculty discounted access to ChatGPT, the same company who made it possible for their owner to give 25 million to the supreme leader Trump's campaign, the same president who has sued UCLA and ruined its campus life and damaged its reputation. That's leadership!

I had sent MJ this essay. we were both reading it and finding it 🔥 but nearly at the same time realized it was largely LLM penned. If folks want to spend time conversing with an LLM, fine. But i'm frustrated by how much time i spend reading slop (w/out knowing it). Disclose use of LLM from the jump!

Grateful to @mjcrockett.bsky.social for explaining the concept of "epistemic vigilance" that we all need to get up to speed on.

Enough with this winter wonderland!

"Anthropic, the wildly successful AI company that has cast itself as the most safety-conscious of the top research labs, is dropping the central pledge of its flagship safety policy, company officials tell TIME."

Is this bad

Many are appropriately outraged by Altman’s comments here implying that raising a human child is akin to “training” an AI model. This is part of a broader pattern where AI industry leaders use language that collapses the boundary between human and machine. 🧵/

Stanford CS researchers just got a huge payday for promising AI agents that can simulate the real world. @mjcrockett.bsky.social and I wrote about these researcher's vision. Screen shotting quite a lengthy part of our paper, because we spent A LOT of time thinking about the paucity of this promise

reckless endangerment

I don’t really pay attention to charges of doomerism. I don’t know what it means offline. I do know that refusing a version of how the future will unfold forecloses on the power that actually shapes that future. That’s not disavowing that tech changes are happening but they are in now a given.

Everyone should go read "More Work for Mother," by Ruth Schwartz Cowan.

New today in The Important Work from @kconrad.bsky.social. Questions to ask when the ed tech companies come to your campus. Wise and useful.

Like, lol, this fantasy only makes sense if you are intentionally engineering the demise of civilization such that the long term existential risk timeline maps onto the 10-20 years of building a space city. There are a handful of people i'd like to just go live in luxury and stop doing stuff.

Ted is a CS professor (and Oscar winner) who has also become an STS scholar. He is teaching his computer graphics class this semester by pairing STS and technical readings. What a model. See the thread for some great parings.

Great oped on Yale's remarkable rejection of academic freedom - and our Yale AAUP chapter's proposal to start to make academic freedom real for all Yale faculty and researchers. Check it out! yaledailynews.com/articles/why... @yaleaaup.bsky.social

Really enjoyed this piece by @pranavdixit.bsky.social on the demise of the Supernatural VR app. Grateful that Pranav quoted the central lesson I teach to undergrads in my "Technology and Culture" class. Highlight, tho, is the Roomba named "Mark Suckerberg." www.businessinsider.com/zuckerberg-m...

Using five courses i took in undergraduate to tell a specific story: 1. Unified Engineering 2. Autonomous Reasoning and Decision Making 3. Space Systems Engineering 4. Probabilistic Systems Analysis 5. The Rise of Modern Science 5, uh, set me on a completely different path

“Or do productivity increases from AI assistance undermine skill development?… We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery” Another study showing that AI creates a world where we are producing more, but understanding less. AI Bad.

A new study from Anthropic finds that gains in coding efficiency when relying on AI assistance did did not meet statistical significance; AI use noticeably degraded programmers’ understanding of what they were doing. Incredible.

In 2021 I was telling people in my field of art history to stop legitimizing the use of image recognition, to stop applying for grants to use AI in identifying the subjects of portraiture bc this was what such work was being used to further. All this was obvious. theconversation.com/how-ai-is-hi...

I have a new article out! It’s about the “technological fictions” that Big Tech leaders perform during corporate keynotes, particular Zuck and Cook as they tried to sell the metaverse and spatial computing. 1/

Just in time to be in conversation with Meta's backing off of Horizon Worlds--new from me in Games & Culture: "Metaverse Engineering: Epic v. Apple, Ontopolitical Play, and Gaming the Law." journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I haven't had words to capture what i've been feeling, so i've just been reading others' words. The Boss reminds: just say the names and describe the acts of the people who are evil. that's enough for now. Get Noem and Miller and anyone who was even close to this out of power. ICE out now.

AI can crunch data. It can’t replace scientists. Real discovery still depends on human judgment, creativity and collaboration. buff.ly/g48SKCW

this was an instant read for me. beautiful essay, @tamigraph.bsky.social!

“There needs to be some deep reckoning with what we do with a tool that benefits individuals but destroys science.” @lmesseri.bsky.social www.science.org/content/arti...

Let's start by not believing the claims being made corporations about these products when it comes to education. Do not let a whole generation be guinea pigs. Demand rigorous evidence of efficacy before incorporating into classrooms.

The new framing by promoters of AI Scientists is that you still need an experienced human in the loop (as stated in this article). But HOW do you get such a human if these tools are used earlier and earlier in training and education. Also, the article gives the answer to the title's question: no.

I'm co-chairing the Society for Social Studies of Science @4sweb.bsky.social Conference in Toronto, Oct 2026. #STS #scipol #innovation Theme: "TechnoPower • Technoscientific Futures". Open panel submissions portal is open! ls! Deadline: 2nd February 2026 www.4sonline.org/about_the_co...

MAIHT3k newsletter: The narrative of the denialism frame is that those opposing "AI" are afraid, under-informed and/or engaging in wishful thinking. None of that is true: The people who oppose the "AI" project are actively fighting and refusing to accept the premise of tech bros and AI boosters.

If Fbook's purchase of Oculus in 2014 was the start of VR hype, Meta's reduction of Reality Labs is an official end of that chapter. But don't be fooled, Meta still wants to put a screen between you and the world. It's more pernicious, in the form of always-on, AI infused Ray-Bans. The cycle repeats

they had me at "worker-owned" and kept me with "We will not use AI, because it has no taste."