I am very excited and honoured to be the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant, starting January 2026 🔆 @erc.europa.eu. The five-year project will explore the broader social, political, and ethical implications of training algorithmic models on synthetic data. www.york.ac.uk/news-and-eve...

this is the industry governments want to hand over education and other societal infrastructure www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

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“My body is breaking down. My mother is collapsing from exhaustion. My cousin cheats death every day for a morsel of aid. Gaza's children are dying in front of our eyes, and we are powerless to help them.” www.972mag.com/hunger-gaza-...

Weil gerade wieder davon die Rede ist, dass «Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion» ja gar keine «echte» Diversität schaffe: So schaut der faschistische Kampf gegen DEI in den USA aus. Es beginnt mit Zensur und endet in der Verfolgung von Marginalisierten bsky.app/profile/bild...

Das Fahrlässige an Kaubes Text ist, wie er der eigenen Frage ausweicht: «Hat Thiel einen Masterplan?», fragt er zu Beginn – um mit der These zu schliessen, die «politischen Thesen und theologischen Spekulationen» Thiels seien «nur private Marotten». Doch diese «Marotten» haben politische Effekte 1/

🎉 A lovely wedding present from Big Data & Society! I bring together an ethnographic study of AI practitioners with Simone de Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity, exploring how ambiguity shapes AI practice and ethics journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Very excited to share this. It was an absolute joy to work with @louravn.bsky.social @velocitygravity.bsky.social and my good buddy @matthewarcher.bsky.social

🌟 New commentary “Unraveling the Regimes of Synthetic Data Metrics“ in Digital Society: link.springer.com/article/10.1... 📚 In it, @velocitygravity.bsky.social , @matthewarcher.bsky.social, @danishanley.bsky.social, and I argue that synth data metrics are linked to the politics of synth data. 🧵…

Das ist das neue Normal. 20 Prozent Rechtsextreme im Saal, und die Person of Colour mit dem Palästina-Pulli aus dem Parlament verbannen.

headed to #RESAW25 this week ✈️ Super excited abt the program and all the cool research ! catch me in a double feature on Thurs, 7C: Data Loss panel (on GITHUB ARCTIC VAULT) also w @louravn.bsky.social @nannathylstrup.bsky.social and @esmeec.bsky.social and 8C on ROBOTS.TXT with @emae.bsky.social 🤖

they gave a nobel prize to an economist who said vineyards and apple orchards in norway will offset the impacts of this.

🎆 Are you interested in the role of mythmaking and metaphors in contemporary and historical research and deployment of AI? Join us on 6th June, 1-2.30pm, for exciting talks by Dr Audrey Borowski and @velocitygravity.bsky.social, followed by a Q&A 🖊️ sign up: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/digital-me...

Interoperability capitalism you say? 👀

Platforms, silos, interoperability - what's the deal with these database buzzwords? Check out this🔥new paper by @matthewarcher.bsky.social @louravn.bsky.social and @nannathylstrup.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

The political economy of platformed silos: Theorizing data storage reconfigurations in the age of interoperability capitalism by @matthewarcher.bsky.social, Louis Ravn & @nannathylstrup.bsky.social in Big Data & Society. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

✨New commentary by @matthewarcher.bsky.social, @louravn.bsky.social and myself on the politics of desiloization in what we call "interoperability capitalism"! Grateful to find a home in the 🔥special issue on interoperability ed by @ikkibop.bsky.social, Silvan Pollozekj and @janpassoth.bsky.social !

⚡️New commentary in BD&S ⚡️ Check out our new article on how *interoperability* strategies relate to power in platform capitalism. Very thankful to have co-written this w/ @matthewarcher.bsky.social & @nannathylstrup.bsky.social. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Please enjoy! Hype, with Dani Shanley and Gemma Milne @danishanley.bsky.social @gemmamilne.bsky.social shows.acast.com/63997541ed12...

✨The first two papers in our Topical Collection on the 'Politics of Machine Learning Evaluation' are out in Digital Society! The collection is edited together with @dluitse.bsky.social and Tobias Blanke, with the great support of Digital Society and Federica Russo. link.springer.com/collections/...

On December 17 & 18, we are organizing a conference at the University of Amsterdam on GenAI & Creative Practices. We are very much looking forward to your proposals for papers, panels, roundtables and fishbowls!! CfP: rdt.uva.nl/genai--creat... Deadline proposals: 26 May

New article published in Big Data & Society. Latin American Critical Data Studies journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

New essay in @nytimes.com✨ With @richove.bsky.social I discuss gov data deletion of vital datasets and health resources as political strategy. Special thx to brilliant (!) @ktmac.bsky.social for our exciting discussions that has shaped this thinking! Thank you @erc.europa.eu for enabling our work

NEW: The CDC has been gutted this morning. Thousands of CDC employees who worked on things like preventing HIV and lead poisoning have been told they were subject to a reduction in force. Experts say people will die. from me, @makenakelly.bsky.social, @knibbs.bsky.social:

1 / Executive power now operates via Delete Commands in digital infrastructures. This isn't data management. It's calculated obliteration of who gets to exist in digital memory and knowledge infrastructures. Thank you @verfassungsblog.de for publishing our (@ktmac.bsky.social and my) essay!

23andMe is going under. Californians have the right to delete their genetic data before it's turned over to next party buying the assets. If you have a 23andMe account, go log in to download whatever reports you want to save, then follow these instructions to delete your data.

I helped build a government AI system. DOGE fired me, rolled the AI out to the whole agency, and implied the AI can do my job and the jobs of the others they've fired. It can't. But, what DOGE accidentally revealed about themselves in the process is fascinating. 🧵

FINALLY have given birth to this entity doi.org/10.1177/2053...

Looking very much forward to hosting @jaloud.bsky.social (PAX Memoria) and Jeff Deutch (Pax Memoria/Centre for Internet and Human Rights) for this workshop on digital methods and the ethics of crisis and conflict archives artsandculturalstudies.ku.dk/research/dal... #DALOSS @erc.europa.eu

We’ve just published a fabulous new issue of Surveillance & Society with a special Dialogue section on the #authoritarian #surveillance. The journal is always, fully #openaccess. Check it out, and please spread the word: ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/su...

Today is the last day to apply for this postdoc with me! jobs.unibas.ch/offene-stell...

IMLS is the Institute of Museum and Library Services. It's about $200 million per year for libraries and $50 million for museums. Not a lot for the federal budget, but a huge piece of the culture and knowledge system - which is why MAGA is eliminating it.

Last night @nannathylstrup.bsky.social gave a brilliant talk on ‘The ethicopolitics of unlearning’ at @camdighum.bsky.social, where she brought us through logics and politics of unthought and forgetting in machine learning architectures ✨⭐️💫 @erc.europa.eu

Super excited to join @danjokaz00ie.bsky.social and the DISC group at MMU next week for this hybrid talk on new research out of the data loss project on ARCTIC ARCHIVES. 🔗 Registration link below!

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

🌟 New article in Big Data & Society 🌟 In recent years, synthetic data have become imbued with a wide range of promises. In this new paper, I investigate how these *synthetic data promises* are fabricated and circulated. The article is open-access: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... 🧵…

1/5 The CDC's data portal vanishes under the banner of an executive order on gender ideology - a fascinating lens into how digital governance operates. It reveals the subtle mechanisms by which executive power can ripple through information infrastructure, reshaping what we know and how we know it.

There is a lot of work that detects and debunks AI hype. But what function does AI hype actually serve? Anna Schjøtt and I draw on 8 months of observations at the Associated Press to show how expectations on AI are leveraged to coordinate actors and mobilise resources: tinyurl.com/mwr2b6t3

✨ Deadline extended to Feb 2nd! Our 4S panel "Data Loss Reverberations" is taking shape beautifully. We'd love to see more work on memory, power & the politics of data loss. Here's the call: artsandculturalstudies.ku.dk/research/dal... w submission link #4S #STS #Critical/AI/PlatformStudies etc!

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🚨Really excited to start the year with a new article just published in @theoryculturesociety.org on the intersection of synthetic data and AI: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Please consider submitting an abstract to our 2025 4S panel on *Data Loss Reverberations: exploring disapperance, destruction and dispossession in digital societies*👇

Very pleased to see my interview with @fleurjohns.bsky.social out in Critical Humanities: mds.marshall.edu/criticalhuma...! 🌞 In it, Fleur Johns explains the central arguments of her recent book “#Help: Digital Humanitarianism and the Remaking of International Order“ (OUP, 2023)…🧵

I’ve been thinking so much lately about data storage, formats, inscription, archives & deep time for the #dataloss project. So cool to see this piece come out from @harvardlil.bsky.social on CENTURY-SCALE STORAGE by @maxy.bsky.social (ty @louravn.bsky.social!) lil.law.harvard.edu/century-scal...

So glad to see this great SI in @icsjournal.bsky.social out ! I had a great time writing "Desiloization and its discontents: the politics of data storage in the age of platformization" w @matthewarcher.bsky.social and Henriette Steiner for it 👉 link: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory is released _today_. You can buy a copy, or, you can read it FOR FREE via Project MUSE. Please spread the news to your colleagues, your friends, your syllabus makers. muse.jhu.edu/book/123276

👾Fresh Call for Abstracts!👁️ Come visit #STSItalia in Milan this summer to share your research at our panel on Critical Hype Studies exploring the many sociopsychotechnoenvironmental faces of hype. Deadline: Feb 3. @imaginaries.bsky.social stsitalia.org/call-for-abs... stsitalia.org/wp-content/u...

Tomorrow !!

So glad to be part of this Dialogue on the surveillance implications of synthetic data/media in the new issue of Surveillance & Society 💫 Thanks to @bcnewell.bsky.social and @empo11on.bsky.social for facilitating this! Also big thank you to all authors who engage in the dialogue (see below) 🌞