Happening now! I'll be talking company towns, tech futurists and stripped modernism.

Join us for BD&S 2026 Colloquium, Panel 2: Infrastructures in Time: Genealogies of Big Data (Feb 18 | 16:00–18:00 GMT / 11:00 AM–1:00 PM EST) uky.zoom.us/j/86848639105 #CriticalDataStudies #STS #BigData

A striking thing about articles I’ve read claiming to “study the effects” of generative AI on student writing skills and consumption of information is that (1) they nearly always find the effects are negative and (2) most “conclusions” are still written assuming that we must use AI, for some reason.

Please join us for our last Digital Aesthetics event of the AY 24-25: an AI & Media Roundtable, with Sun-ha Hong, Johan Fredrikzon, Julia Irwin, and Hank Gerba on May 20, 5-7pm PT. Abstracts and bios can be found here: docs.google.com/document/d/1... Zoom for the day of: tinyurl.com/5n8mdpbb

This Yougov survey contains an important finding: people who rely heavily on ChatGPT rate it as being "good" at tasks that we ABSOLUTELY know for sure it is very bad at imo, this is a strong piece of evidence these heavy users simply do not ever check outputs yougov.co.uk/technology/a...

I think we can split @hankgreen.bsky.social's question out into two categories: 1) Uses with an obvious failure mode 2) Uses with a subtle failure mode My theory is type (2) failures are becoming EXTREMELY widespread - the ones we catch are the iceberg tip, and suggest 1,000 un-caught errors

I love how @zgtcooper.bsky.social uses his ethnographic work in Greenland to take down the vacuous concept of the Network State, which is so detached from land and the people who live in a place, with tech bros grafting AI generated crypto fascist nightmares onto topographies they don’t understand

I do wish it was better understood by now—especially by folks in the media—that these "warnings" from large AI corporations in fact function as "advertisements" www.axios.com/2025/04/22/a...

One thing I distinctly remember from this book is FFM. 20th century SV grew on electronics manufacturing, and employers systematically looked for female migrant labour - they called it FFM (fast fingered Malaysians). Small, cheap, and you can ignore/suppress all their health & safety complaints

'From a legal perspective, the best analogy to robot rights is not human rights but corporate rights...' papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... @abeba.bsky.social

Sam Altman isn't keen on you reading my book. EMPIRE OF AI is based on 300+ interviews, 7 yrs covering AI, and my time as the first reporter who got extensive access to OpenAI. I sought OpenAI's perspective throughout. For months they said it was coming. It never did. Pre-order here: empireofai.com.

Folks, this is going to be big: “Hype Studies is an emergent, transdisciplinary research arena aimed at inquiring hype as a powerful and pervasive phenomenon that influences economic trends, political agendas, media narratives, and technological developments.” hypestudies.org

I was gonna grade papers today, but ended up yelling about VC bullshit instead. It is an article of faith in Silicon Valley that technology is miraculous, and will always save us. We are stuck dealing with the consequences of that faith and its failures. open.substack.com/pub/davekarp...

This is a gift link, we will continue to update this article as more Thiel names emerge:

🤯! I just learned that both Sarah and I are the "senior scholars and broken machine facilitators" at this summer's Digital Ideas Institute at the University of Michigan, June 23-7. Advanced grad students + early career scholars are encouraged to apply!

I wanted to see what Sarah Sharma's been up to, and I discovered that she's soon publishing a book titled Insufferable Tools, which sounds amazing. I love her 🥰

Remember Babylon Health: a Goldman Sachs banker sees the NHS gutted by austerity => promises magic AI doctors => 4.2bn valuation => IPO bust => bankruptcy. The funding system requires exponential hype - until, eventually, the massive costs & lack of actual product catches up with you.

"The more ideas have become automatic, instrumentalised, the less does anybody see in them thoughts with a meaning of their own. They are considered things, machines. Language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society." - Max Horkheimer, 1944

'The Network State, Venture Capital and the Political Economy of Exit' my latest manuscript (preprint) on Crypto-colonialists and NRx VCs www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Trump already empowering the worst bosses to just.. ignore labor law. Whole Foods workers won their union vote, and now Whole Foods (owned by Jeff Bezos) is saying they simply won't recognize the vote because nobody is going to make them.

It occurs to me, for no reason in particular, that I should put this starter pack back in circulation go.bsky.app/3h6n3YC

Straight up corporate welfare. Incredible stuff. Unimaginably stupid and wasteful and invariably will help SoftBank burn even more billions

One of the things to know about edtech is that many, many people involved in it have no experience teaching, and particularly not at the grade level the intervention is designed to target. They’re tech guys who think tech is Very Hard and teaching is a skill-free avocation for ladies.

This is especially relevant now that OpenAI is now touting its "$500 billion" data center project with Softbank, and celebrated by Trump—it shows that OpenAI still doesn't have a viable business model, that their costs are too high, and that they need more state buy-in and outside capital to survive

The key ambition for the tech ideologues is the systematic destruction of all things 'public' - public oversight, democratic institutions, public space. City councils, local media, community orgs, public health experts - everything 'independent' must be eliminated in this vision of tech as religion.

publicera.kb.se/jdsr/article... New piece in very cool JDSR special issue '(Un)stable diffusions', *open access*, [email protected] @lukestark.bsky.social @abpowell.bsky.social @melhogan.bsky.social & more - I show how genAI is being legitimised through dramas & rituals of 'realness'. Thread:

“I’m different, I’m a rebel. I’m an outsider,” I say to the credulous journalist before repeating verbatim the beliefs and worldview of the president of the United States and every person with money and power in the world right now.

Excited to share that @ftripodi.bsky.social will join us to discuss her incredible book, The Propagandists’ Playbook, for our next @civicsoftech.bsky.social book club, hosted by me and @philnichols.bsky.social! Grab a copy and register at www.civicsoftechnology.org/events to join us on February 18

publicera.kb.se/jdsr/article... New piece in very cool JDSR special issue '(Un)stable diffusions', *open access*, [email protected] @lukestark.bsky.social @abpowell.bsky.social @melhogan.bsky.social & more - I show how genAI is being legitimised through dramas & rituals of 'realness'. Thread:

Looting.

Los Angeles landlords are raising rents by as much as 124% after the wildfires.

A very important voice in the whole AI debacle — please have a listen to @ali-alkhatib.com

Is there a link between #ClimateChange & increasing risk/severity of #wildfire in California--including the still-unfolding disaster? Yes. Is climate change the only factor at play? No, of course not. So what's really going on? [Thread] #CAfire #CAwx #LAfires iopscience.iop.org/a...

PUB ALERT 🚨Thrilled that my article on Lensa (remember Lensa??) and the discourse of visual generative AI is finally out in the Unstable Diffusions special issue in @jdsr.bsky.social. Article link here: publicera.kb.se/jdsr/article...

"but we have to protect innovation" dude stop whiteknighting for openAI openAI is not going to fuck you (this isnt directed at ed i clearly agree with ed)

public goods should be shielded from market forces, like health care, housing, and the postal service. openAI is NOT a public good! neither is uber! both directly attack public goods in different ways! THEY ARE NOT JUST LITTLE GUYS AND IT IS NOT THEIR BIRTHDAY WE DONT HAVE TO GO EASY ON THEM

Part of a 🔥 special issue on (UN)STABLE DIFFUSIONS eds. Fenwick McKelvey, @jredden.bsky.social, Jonothan Roberge, and @lukestark.bsky.social w articles by @sunhahong.bsky.social @melhogan.bsky.social @abpowell.bsky.social @katemiltner.bsky.social & more Check it out👇 publicera.kb.se/jdsr/issue/v...

do you care about venture capital (derogatory)? do you care about *weird charts* (complimentary)? do you care about using extremely fiddly historical methods to trace the use of One Weird Chart through 40+ years of venture capital policy? HERE YA GO www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

This immediately made me think of the @sunhahong.bsky.social paper "Prediction as Extraction of Discretion"

Insurers must spend 80-85% of premiums on care by law. "But big insurers have figured out if they also become health care providers—by buying physician practices, clinics, and pharmacy benefit managers—they can meet that threshold by paying themselves and avoiding payment for their customers’ care."

“AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power. Projects that claim to ‘democratize’ AI routinely conflate ‘democratization’ with ‘commodification’.” — @al2.bsky.social

the rich people pushing AI on everything are going to be the same rich people who will brag they can afford to send their kids to a school with human teachers

New York and Erie Railroad, "Diagram Representing a Plan of Organization, exhibiting the division of academic duties and showing the number and class of employees engaged in each department," by D.C. McCallum + G.H. Henshaw, 1855, via Library of Congress blogs.loc.gov/maps/2024/11...

Soldiers who invaded the National Assembly are saying they were lied to:

The whole special issue of the Journal of Continental Philosophy this article is part of is now online. www.pdcnet.org/collection-a... Really a great collection of the latest philosophical thinking on technology! 🔨💻🧮📷📱☎️📺📽️📡

I’ve come to think the most important thing to understand and insist on about AI is that “AI” is not a discreet technology but it kind of story that someone tells about certain technologies or systems

“The algorithm in question, known as nH Predict, allegedly had a 90 percent error rate — and according to the families of the two deceased men who filed the suit, UHC knew it.”

📢NEW: 'Open' AI systems aren't open. The vague term, combined w frothy AI hype is (mis)shaping policy & practice, assuming 'open source' AI democratizes access & addresses power concentration. It doesn't. @smw.bsky.social, @davidthewid.bsky.social & I correct the record👇 nature.com/articles/s41...