“there are only 7 full-time book critics left in the US: three at NYT ( Jacobs, Garner, Szalai), 2 at WaPo(Rothfeld, Charles), 1 each at WSJ (Sacks), NY mag (Chu), Slate (Miller) more people have walked on the moon than write book reviews for a living” worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/septemb...

Now published in print: "The Legality of Logistics: On Techno-Orientalism and Geopolitics in Semiconductor Production" in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing as a part of this special issue 'Automation by Design' co-edited by @cperold.bsky.social , Gerardo Con Diaz, and @justcode.bsky.social .

Now published in print: "The Legality of Logistics: On Techno-Orientalism and Geopolitics in Semiconductor Production" in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing as a part of this special issue 'Automation by Design' co-edited by @cperold.bsky.social , Gerardo Con Diaz, and @justcode.bsky.social .

Our special issue is out! "Automation by Design: Politics, Culture & Landscape in an Age of Machines That Learn"! Eds. Colette Perold, me, Gerardo Con Diaz. Authors: David Dunning, Christos Karampatsos, Polyxeni Malisova, Eliza Pertigkiozoglou, Jason Ludwig, Megan Wiessner, & Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal

"literary-critical inferences cannot be identical, but cannot be an interpretive free-for-all or just statistically approximated hearsay. AI cannot suffer the downstream consequences of faked comprehension+wrongful inferences in its body." Nan Z Da newleftreview.org/issues/ii155...

"Encoding all of humanity’s skill and know-how into checklists is an enormous, possibly quixotic undertaking, but the frontier labs have billions to spend, and the sheer scale of their demand is reconfiguring the data industry." Really well-reported story here.

Would be great if legacy media could get around to covering NSPM-7!

I still think about this piece from last spring, which explains why the dysfunction and inefficiency are *intentional*. Plus, it’s not merely coincidental that executives for these software companies often sit on university boards.

Windows 98 Plus: Falling Leaves

In my 25yrs in the academy I 👀 the proliferation of expensive enterprise software that shifted the burden of sooo many basic administrative functions — reconciling receipts, paying honoraria, booking travel — from competent, efficient staff to faculty + students. I’d spend entire days on this crap.

Job call🔔🔔 Lecturer in Cultural Data & AI: werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

SKULL OF THOMAS AQUINAS: TAKE A LEFT NOW PRIEST: No, the GPS says we have to keep going— SKULL: I KNOW A SHORTCUT PRIEST: Do you remember the last ti— SKULL: FOR THOSE WITH FAITH, NO EVIDENCE IS NECESSARY; FOR THOSE WITHOUT IT, NO EVIDENCE WILL SUFFICE

NEW: an activist has been charged for allegedly wiping a Google Pixel phone before CBP could search it. Search was by a secretive CBP Tactical Terrorism Response Team, which ACLU says "interrogate innocent travelers." We uploaded the indictment here: www.404media.co/man-charged-...

A few years ago I had a partner who was a former roboticist. Through her I became acutely aware of how much of public-facing robotics is now is pure theatrical smoke and mirrors horseshit intended to dupe credulous tech press and VCs.

can't stop watching this clip of a tesla Optimus teleoperator taking his headset off before properly logging out the robot

“Sleeping’s underlying biological need is not a weakness to be remedied, or a limitation to overcome, but a fact of our nature that gives rise to valuable interpersonal and aesthetic activities and is also valuable in itself.”

They claim financial exigency, but then turn down $4 million pledges to keep the PhD programs open and disregard financial analyses that point to the real problem—bad real estate deals, spending on consultants, and their own salaries 2/2

Holy shit. Reuters reporting that new admin instructions on visas are if you worked at a platform in trust & safety or content moderation or on fact checking or online safety at an platform you *and your loved ones* are ineligible for H-1B visa. www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

They should invent a university that prioritizes teaching and research

Remember when Aaron Swartz downloaded JSTOR archives that he had full legal rights to download and the FBI hounded him literally to death for it? Anyway,

waymo ceo: we plan for fatal crashes and society will learn to accept them roblox ceo: kids must be preyed upon and victimized as a necessary consequence of scale WHATEVER HAPPENED TO HEADS ON PIKES

Happening today in a few hours!

Amsterdam friends, I am talking about Jameson, pipelining infrastructures, graphical rendering, and supply chain ecologies tomorrow at 1700 at the University of Amsterdam. www.uva.nl/en/shared-co...

Just Published: For the latest @jcmsjournal.bsky.social issue, Mal Ahern and I co-edited an In Focus dossier on 'Images and (Infra)structures,' which originally emerged from a lively @scmstudies.bsky.social roundtable in 2022. What, we ask, do images and infrastructure have to say to each other?

With John Behrens and Alexi Orchard, I co-wrote, for the latest issue of the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, this short reflection on teaching Generative AI through a multidisciplinary framework while technological systems change continuously. doi.org/10.1109/MTS....

@desmog.com reviewed US tax records which show Bill Gates’ charity has donated more than $3.5 million to a think tank run by Danish academic and climate crisis denier Bjørn Lomborg www.desmog.com/2025/11/05/b...

Freue mich auf diesen Workshop in Paris mit Estelle Blaschke und Claus Pias! www.dfk-paris.org/de/event/bil...

Travel data has historically been a correlative proxy. Early 2000s data mining used one way flights (*purchased third party) in terror algorithms. These apparent “errors” by HMRC illuminate machine learning logics: 1/ combine gov cloud data www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

I should say that this is the result of an invitation by @ritaraley.bsky.social and Fabian Offert, but also a reaction to this paper by Fabian and @ranjodhdhaliwal.com that I found very "generative." arxiv.org/abs/2411.18833

Read my new preprint "Surface Reading LLMs: Synthetic Text and its Styles." I argue that we should not only look at the depth behind LLMs, but also take the surfaces seriously with which they present us: as the principal plane on which we encounter them in the life-world.

Catch us at @shothisttech.bsky.social #SHOT2025 at @c2dh.uni.lu today!

I am still processing the many impressions, insights and ideas that emerged from our conference. Many heartfelt thanks to all the speakers for their inspiring contributions and the intensive discussion—it was great to welcome you all to Zurich, and I hope we'll be able to continue the conversation!

📣 #OpenCall: SNSF Starting Grants 2026 For researchers wanting to lead their own independent project and research team in Switzerland. 🗓️ Submission deadline: 5 May 2026 ➡️ https://sohub.io/rptw

Man, the “institutional neutrality” gambit really worked like a charm….

Fascinating to see how the very historical ideologies - stuffy east coast bureaucracies - that Silicon Valley rebelled against are now being used to criticize it... www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/t...

can she take on assemblages

youtube algorithms got those nerd dollars on lock.

From 02–04 October 2025, our conference «React & Respond. Image Cultures under Platform Capitalism» will take place in Zurich. Across three locations and with contributions by scholars and artists, the conference will analyze today's economies of networked image cultures. Program & Registration:

@4sweb.bsky.social friends, we are starting in ~10 mins!! Come see my midnight zoom face. #4S2025

Please submit! Conference CFP CRIES AND WHISPERS: PODCASTING AND THE PROMISE OF DISRUPTION (Feb 20-21, 2026 at Florida Atlantic University) Keynote: Jeremy Morris (UW-Madison) Conference website and submission portal: criesandwhispers2026.wordpress.com

vibe check on the american polity

#CfP: Special Issue “Celebrating 60 Years of ELIZA? Critical Pasts and Futures of AI” of the Weizenbaum Journal of the Digital Society (WJDS), co-edited by @strippel.bsky.social & Magnus Rust. Submission deadline: November 17, 2025. More: www.weizenbaum-institut.de/news/detail/...

This is not the AI boom creating a new type of work, this is a classic example of managers using automation to deskill old ones. Creative workers who once made a higher wage creating original art and writing are now paid in piecework to edit automated output. Bosses are using AI to cut labor costs.

ok it is SO over for the American university system, the overest it has ever been. www.politico.com/news/2025/08...

Now accepting submissions for my session, "Photography's Other Workers," at the upcoming CAA (Chicago, Feb. 18-21, 2026). Proposals can be submitted via the CAA platform until August 29th More info here: caa.confex.com/.../webprogr... Please share widely! #photosky #filmsky #caa2026

Going to be wild to have Clarence Thomas and other members of the court write that even the appearance of impropriety is sufficient to allow the President to remove Federal Reserve members from office, and then head off to Harlan Crow’s yacht

Sounds more like a Microsoft product than before. Some sort of alert system you can't turn off.