Remember the internet before Google, before algorithmic feeds, before monolithic social media corralled us onto the same handful of apps? When small, *personal websites* and webrings linking them together reigned supreme? Time to bring it back.

Ford has rehired hundreds of senior engineers after replacing them with AI backfired and has cost the company billions of dollars. AI adoption is blamed for Ford being the most recalled automaker in the U.S. with 51 recalls covering over 11 million vehicles in the first half of 2026 alone.

In her keynote, Lucy Suchman reminds us that raw data is an oxymoron and a bad idea. #FAccT2026

Windows 10 to continue receiving updates through Oct 2027

Charlton McIlwain makes such a poignant point at #FAccT2026: what has the decades of work that has measured, documented, & evaluated the failure and bias of AI systems done? we have known the negative impact for decades yet very little has changed

Has anyone else noticed how senior white academics love to say "refusal will never work," so oblivious to the reality that it already has

A useful resource for educators and students. And I also appreciate this from @emilymbender.bsky.social: "Be a stick in the mud! If you think about our current situation as mired in mud that's hard to walk in, if you plant a stick, you can start to create firm ground for others to join you on."

Remember that meta-study of ChatGPT effects on learning that got retracted by SpringerNature recently? Here's a new paper showing why it and others like it can't be trusted due to serious issues with the underlying literature. Bluntly put, they're meta-reviews of junk science doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

Like you can see the potholes on your road and how long you wait at the emergency room and then a billion dollars appear in your backyard to do math in a gray box the size of a football field or ten

Once again: Grok shows us what these genAI products can do w/r/t manipulating public consensus. Yes, as Noble & others have shown, search engines do this too through their ranking algos, but at least they offer the possibility of evaluating sources. GenAI suggests that judgment is inconvenient.

The long term goal of these companies is not the improved performance they promise to users but the guarantee of outcomes (for themselves, investors, partners, etc).

2- Righteousness. People do have legitimate needs, often unmet needs, and the synthetic text extruding machines can *look like* a solution. But just because the problems are real doesn't mean the solution is beneficial, effective, or worth (not always externalized) costs. >>

No, technology is not neutral, and calling AI and other technological contrivances “tools” obscures proper understanding of their role & impact. I encourage everyone to read @lmsacasas.bsky.social. Not just this, but everything he writes…but also THIS!

“Abundance” is a scam, pass it on

Stellan Skarsgård summing up the difference between social democracy & capitalism very succinctly.

The AAUP chapters at Vanderbilt & Wash U have issued a joint statement denouncing the “State of Scholarship” report commissioned by their chancellors. Please, let’s make this as widely read as the gaslighting to which it responds.

babe, please put the phone down. I swear these hallucinations are controlled

A look at the push to expand the data center in Lowell, its relationship to the university, and responses from citizens and politicians.

The irony is they are replacing all their non-union humans with agents run by a single organization that can demand changes in wages (aka token costs) overnight without bargaining.

So… this whole ‘we use gen AI to think through an idea before wasting dev cycles making it’ talking point… Like if I take that on the best possible faith, that the chatbot is used before human concepting… Are you publicly owning up to needing AI to do the job of thinking and scribbling some notes?

As a consumer, everything tech feels like a scam. Yet, there's still a pervasive belief among educators that new tech = empowering. We need to let that narrative go.

Decided to check my email after seeing this post. Got our periodic summer notification to set our office thermostats to 80 degrees, close all windows/shades/blinds, and turn off all "non-vital" electronic devices.

Really informative read.

The interesting question is not who uses Zotero or does not use Zotero. The interesting question is which academics enjoy working conditions that allow them to make scholarship central to their professional lives, and which academics have to do scholarship <in spite> of their working conditions.

New post! @nobugsnous.bsky.social, @rcmeg.bsky.social, and I have a short piece in Sweetland DRC's blog carnival 25, titled "Refusal-in-the-loop writing—or, what happened to the field that stood up to TurnItIn, Coruse Hero, Chegg, and paper mills?" Link below.

Some people have a profound interest in disentangling the supposed “inevitable” advance of AI from the massive amount of capital determined to make it advance in the first place. But without that capital backing, AI wouldn’t be taking over everything. It’s contingent, not natural.

Massachusetts votes to pass new #privacy rights bill that bans sale of precise location data - techcrunch.com/2026/06/08/m...

If you know Boston, you’ll appreciate this. A perfect Storrowing! (Photo from reddit - www.reddit.com/r/boston/s/R...)

BREAKING: the Massachusetts House just passed one of the best data privacy bills in the country. It includes a total ban on the sale of precise location data and includes a private right of action allowing people to sue Big Tech over data abuses. HUGE WIN! But there’s more work to do 🧵

We’re wringing our hands about how AI is destroying the college essay, scholarship, journalism. But bemoaning the enshittification only goes so far. The important question is: what are the material conditions that drive culture workers (students, scholars, writers) to use AI in the first place?

Tired: Anthropic is the most dangerous one because they are fanatical true believers who come off as the good guys Wired: the other ones are more dangerous because they are also full of fanatical true believers but come across as normal corporations

I want to say one thing about this. This has been the hiring process for low wage workers for awhile. Wal Mart et al have been using automated job application systems to gamify everything from postings to schedules. The crisis, such that it is, is that it is now happening in middle skills jobs.

turns out the paperclip maximizer thought experiment was shockingly correct

the full paper gets into way more detail: cdt.org/insights/dar...

This is seriously fucked. Like for starters they’re using commercial web analytics that are in no way in line with federal privacy disclosure requirements…

doubly infuriating that AI boosters claim it "democratizes" mediums when, in reality, hardware—one of the most powerful tools at our disposal in modern society—is being taken away from normal people by the wealthy

Anthropic wants to sprinkle AI woo-woo throughout the world because the mysticism makes their work seem more meaningful and suggests we must tread carefully as we regulate it. Resist the woo-woo! biblioracle.substack.com/p/can-we-ple...

The Vatican could have told Anthropic to stop stealing data, exploiting labor, killing the environment, deceiving us with anthropomorphic designs & lying about product "capabilities." Instead they partnered with them, like partnering with Sackler family to discuss harms of oxy.

“Separating the message from the messenger” or laundering information from its source is such a huge, huge problem

Hear a lot that AI can be used to enhance learning rather than outsource but every day I get emails like this (subject:"Turn big ideas into A work") offering me 50% off Grammarly to generate my work with AI, check it to see if it sounds like AI, then rewrite it with AI to not sound like AI.

LLM sycophancy is partly explained by its removal of friction. Everything looks, sounds, feels correct when there is no friction. If you ask for advice, it will give you the advice you asked for. Requires constant work to stay ahead of the sycophancy and even then, we're still behind.

This remains a very funny hill to die on for me Like yes, you should confirm your citation says the thing you’re citing it for! It’s bad if your whole field is fucking up a common citation! I get yelled at by a judge and potentially sanctioned if I do this

Here's the title and abstract from the proofs - except I changed "cultural translation" to "cultural mistranslation" last minute after hearing a talk that reminded me of Stuart Hall's cultural translation which is definitely NOT what NotebookLM does.

Here’s a video from the same podcast as linked in my previous post where you can hear the audio too. I love this because it really lays bare how LLMs fool us - but really they’re just slotting words into linguistic patterns that we’re familiar with. Genres like a podcast or LinkedIn post.

I'm proud to share Extracting WV 2.0, a digital project that examines the history of mining in West Virginia—including its impacts on the environment and local communities—alongside the current push for hyperscale data centers in various parts of the state. Posters created by Allyssa Persinger.

These issues are severe and warrant attention from consumer protection authorities. They also highlight how AI hype, now steering national policies isn’t empowering users--but too often leaving them exposed and mistreated. 17/

New paper from @aial.ie! @harshp.com, Dick Blankvoort, Adel Shaaban, @sashamtl.bsky.social & me We analysed 6 GenAI ToS--finding missing info, major power imbalances & user obligations that are impossible to meet without violating the terms arxiv.org/abs/2603.18964 & aial.ie/research/ter... 1/

“My hypothesis is that women will use AI to do more work. Men will use AI to get out of doing more work. And, every argument that is not dealing with the preconditions of this gendered inequality is not thinking seriously about AI” @tressiemcphd.bsky.social bsky.app/profile/lost...