Taking a brief break from sporadically posting photos of my pitbull to shout this into the void: I’ve spent the last seven months thinking about the Antichrist, and now those thoughts are published over at @wired.com. www.wired.com/story/the-re...

There’s a frenzy (from believers and nonbelievers) about the Rapture happening today. The content reveals a lot about our attention economy with its focus on self-help, revealing secret knowledge, and the difficulty parsing through earnest vs ironic engagement. open.substack.com/pub/holyscro...

Are you seeing this post? It might be because of divine intervention. A study by @sarareinis.bsky.social and @corrinalaughlin.bsky.social shows the many ways the #ChristianTikTok community conceptualizes and makes use of the TikTok algorithm:

Despite the veneer of placid smiles and pastoral bliss, tradwives operate from a place of rage—forming a distorted “mirror world” response to many issues traditionally taken up by feminists. This and more in my latest publication with Sarah Banet-Weiser: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

this exists it is called thinking

Despite the veneer of placid smiles and pastoral bliss, tradwives operate from a place of rage—forming a distorted “mirror world” response to many issues traditionally taken up by feminists. This and more in my latest publication with Sarah Banet-Weiser: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Some thoughts on the nature of “reality” in the gen AI age and a brief look into the booming genre of fake Christian worship music videos. open.substack.com/pub/holyscro...

Life is a continuous series of burdensome choices. True freedom comes when you give yourself over to the algorithm.

Some thoughts on the nature of “reality” in the gen AI age and a brief look into the booming genre of fake Christian worship music videos. open.substack.com/pub/holyscro...

"AI is not that novel. It is not that potentially revolutionary. It is in a long continuum of technologies that promise to transform education, starting with the TV, the typewriter, VCRs, tablets [and] Chromebooks." - @tressiemcphd.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/o...

New: A few weeks ago, when my father-in-law died, the funeral home asked if we wanted to use AI to write his obituary. So I dug into it and found that it's the biggest new trend in "death care." Tens of thousands of AI obits have been made already. Often the families don't even know wapo.st/4okuxIg

Zuckerberg farted out some nonsense today, and since most media outlets refuse to report critically any time a tech CEO offers them some a pseudoserious press release, I've decided to do it for them. sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/7/30/how-to-read-an-ai-press-release

Users on TikTok are asking ChatGPT what their "curse" is. What does it mean for us to want surveillance? To crave it? To feel comforted by being intimately known by software? open.substack.com/pub/holyscro...

My latest academic publication is out! After watching 3,000+ manifestation videos on TikTok, I dive into the ways platform features are shaping modern spirituality. 🔮🙏🏻 share this post to claim your blessing ✨🪽 Open access here: ijoc.org/index.php/ij...

Dozens more pregnant and postpartum women have died in Texas hospitals since the state banned abortion, our analysis shows. As the maternal mortality rate dropped nationally, it rose in Texas by 33%.

My latest: Generative AI is enabling a brute force attack against the algorithms that control reality. AI slop is taking over every algorithmically controlled social media platform and search platform, and the tech platforms are helping: www.404media.co/ai-slop-is-a...

the creator presidency can promise only two things for certain: engagement and pain

Maya Man's digital piece on "day in the life" vlogs at @whitney.org prompted me to think about the internet content that renders the ordinary uncanny. (also, the AI slop historic pov videos and the humans-imitating-AI-imitating-humans videos that made me spiral 😵‍💫) defector.com/taking-the-l...

Are you seeing this post? It might be because of divine intervention. A new study by @sarareinis.bsky.social and @corrinalaughlin.bsky.social shows the many ways the #ChristianTikTok community conceptualizes and makes use of the TikTok algorithm:

Wrote some thoughts about memes of data nihilism and Meta takeover conspiracies in the wake of the temporary (but still vaguely looming) ban of TikTok.

Despite people's impressions of the tech world and religion being quite separate spheres, this has been brewing for a long time. We will only see more of this as tech leaders seek some sort of cosmic moral framework to justify their actions and deflect criticism. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/b...

New article on spirituality & social media by Steering Committee member @sarareinis.bsky.social and co-author @corrinalaughlin.bsky.social “GOD IS MY SPONSORED AD!! MY ALGORITHM!” Read it here: bit.ly/4hPLUMY @asc.upenn.edu @bzelizer.bsky.social

In other words, the nature of global "democracy" is changing again. The same way the citizen was replaced by the consumer, the consumer is now being replaced by the creator. Politics shifted from something you participated in to something you consumed. It's now something you parasocially relate to.

If I just read one million more posts tonight, I will have complete control over what comes next

i think it is important to say that the open and explicit racism of the president and the vice president isn’t just uncouth or “controversial” but a direct attack on tens of millions of americans and a dereliction of their duty to represent the entire country

Fascinating paper on how religious belief shapes how TikTok users understand the algorithm—and vice versa. Introduces the framework of the "spiritual algorithmic imaginary" which should prove incredibly useful in the age of online Christian nationalism. A+ title too.

now that’s a title journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Excited to share my (first!) academic publication exploring Christian TikTok and attempts to spiritualize the unpredictability of algorithmic recommendation. Thank you to @corrinalaughlin.bsky.social for an amazing collaborative process. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

It's easy to read this as a return to the McCarthy era. But I'd argue--this is so much more dangerous. Because this time around, the Witch Hunt will be automated.

Fantastic reporting on the YouTube/podcast manosphere. Really great distillation and visualization of the emerging network and key figures and topics in the space. www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

Meta may want to flood Facebook with AI, but FB Marketplace still remains very deeply human

Totally. The use of AI imagery in right-wing spaces is both a strange confession that it's all an imagined fantasy and an attempt to build up a mythology worth defending, idolizing, etc

I appreciate this ad for making the aspirational face filter -> cosmetic intervention desire explicit. We shall not rest until we all look like girlies generated by midjourney

my latest with @jessmaddox.bsky.social is out this morning in @femmediastudies.bsky.social! We propose influencer snark as a feminist media practice to address concerns of credibility, authenticity, and representation in the influencer industry. please share!!! www.tandfonline.com/eprint/XZSZD...

using genAI models is training in obedience rather than "creativity"; the user cedes the capacity to imagine to the model and is taught how things are supposed to appear (by the corporate power concentrated behind the models)

help me put together a Theorizing the Web starter pack? who is on Bluesky that spoke at the events and/or does the work of applying social theory to technology? reply with @'s, feel free to tag yourself!

My prediction: taxes rebranded as subscription fees within six months

Thinking a lot about how Elon Musk, formerly an avowed atheist, has started to describe himself as a "cultural Christian." This is very telling about both the strength of the white Christian nationalism movement as well as how warped "Christian values" are serving as a justification/haven.

It really is becoming increasingly clear that many of us have no concept of others’ media diets and the senses of reality that come with them. The term “filter bubble” implies too much passivity, perhaps a term like “burrowing” better captures the agency involved in the process.