yeah, i've been thinking about this fixation on Authoritative People using Math to tell us something already collectively understood. it has a conspicuously similar structure as the weird investments, shared even by ostensibly "critical" people, in the idea of Artificial Intelligence

finally someone is bringing together all of the orthodontists and pilates instructors

"Most of us will remain girlproles until we either overthrow class society or, individually, escape into the bossing class. Could it be me?" from this excellent essay/book excerpt by Sophie Lewis lithub.com/how-the-girl...

if you don't want to try to catch up, you can get ahead by purchasing our *next* book, _Health Communism_ by @avierkant.bsky.social & @reallandsend.bsky.social. tentatively, we'll start in early October. order here ASAP: open-books-a-poem-emporium.myshopify.com/collections/...

this past week i said "sorry" to two separate people, on two separate occasions, who immediately responded with "are you canadian?"

at #4s2025 in an hour i will reveal whether you can talk your way out of social problems or not in the "writing things down" session

if you are at #4s2025 this afternoon, in the un-blackboxing AI session nina will explain how all of this marketing copy helps to render people into gelatinous blobs of undifferentiated labour

😭 scrolling through my listening history to revisit all of the in our time episodes that Changed me... ordinary language philosophy... kropotkin... feathered dinosaurs...

would totally eat up a psychoanalytic account of AI (as fantasy, as death drive, etc)

LLMs reinvigorate, and derive value from, the fantasy that we can talk our way out of late capitalism's crises

it's less "AI drives people to kill themselves" and more that "tech companies do it, and are indifferent about it". and, bleakly, some journalists seem determined to convince you that the focal point of this story is a high point of engineering rather than a low point of humanity

i did literally nothing to bring this together except lend them an essay that i already wrote, but i'm totally geeking out about this zine. just go look at the collection of art in the first couple of pages, i'm so enthralled right now, i love it. i desperately want to buy a physical copy.

mood

rather than thinking about how to "responsibly integrate" AI into the classroom, we should think about the classroom as a site of struggle against AI. i'm really excited to dig into the resources here (and also love the web design a ton)

i am increasingly convinced that AI harms research is primarily concerned with addressing AI's legitimacy crises. such a task incorporates radical positions to stabilize itself; it would be self defeating to take these positions seriously.

📣🔥❤️‍🔥 I'm excited to moderate a panel with none other than *Lucy Suchman and Joan Greenbaum* at Aarhus '25 - we'll hear them reflect on their work in tech social justice movements, and what we can learn and do today. Join us on August 19th IRL or online: tech-organizing-reflections.github.io

i hope we find a way to traverse the "there is no society, only chatbot" era

Very excited to share this workshop I'm helping to host on August 19: "From Tech Lash To Tech Fash: Strategic reflections on a decade of collective organizing in computing" tech-organizing-reflections.github.io

"Resisting AI means rejecting its consequences, such as the resurgence of eugenics through welfare and healthcare systems. It also means rejecting the conditions that allow AI to become so important and influential, like our growth-obsessed, centralized political economies."

> AI companies have grafted a fantasy of AI-empowered work onto longer-running imaginaries that idealize certain types of workers.

new working paper! we (me, Su Lin Blodgett, @ninamarkl.bsky.social) examine how recent marketing of LLMs extends older discourses that cast workers as bundles of skills, and unpack the false promises of empowerment these discourses embed, in times of precarity tisjune.github.io/papers/aarhu...

AI turns substantive relationships into flattened transactions. it replaces faces for masks, substance for simulacra. if you want monuments, but you're too cheap to build anything, you make potemkin villages & cynically challenge people to explain the difference between a home and sheets of plywood.

thinking about this great article by astra taylor and leah hunt-hendrix on the distinctions between (and histories of) these strategies: www.theguardian.com/world/2024/m...

this panel was incredible!!! my impression of facct so far is that the predominant theories of change do not meet the moment, and people are noticing. i think the workers' inquiry model is a fantastic (starting point for an) intervention.

i want to know what it means that this incredibly cognitivist, "look at all this hard science we did" study is from the MIT media lab, the centre for hip technosolutionism---i almost construe the overall project as "but don't worry, the tech *we* produce will be incredibly brain-enhancing"

Join us at #FAccT2025 for the AI Workers’ Inquiry CRAFT workshop, where workers, organizers, and labor experts will explore how AI is transforming our workplaces and discuss strategies for collective resistance. RSVP and more info: ai-workers-inquiry.github.io

the particular form of incompetence i constantly feel is sort of like i am trying to cook french cuisine without a deep understanding of the mother sauces (marx, freud, and...wittgenstein?)

trying to write = confronting the desire for a magic button that puts thoughts into words, as if the interaction of representation and represented is anything other than precisely where the action is

i hope we find a way to traverse the "there is no society, only chatbot" era

something i've been thinking about is how lots of AI commentary, especially as it pertains to measuring "capabilities", borrows from a sort of neoliberal skills discourse, where skills are commensurable and measurable insofar as they have market value

seems useful to reiterate this regularly: what LLMs could theoretically be used for, what they theoretically can and cannot do is largely beside the point given what they are currently being used to do and the larger political economy in which they sit

Attention all AI haters, prior auth haters, and abolition and design justice fans: I have a new paper out, which argues for the abolition of automated prior auth and proposes four tenets of "non-reformist design"...

my dog takes photos the way i imagine a divorced dad on a dating website would

a sunbeam in a bleak week

a sunbeam in a bleak week

look, i know i say this a lot, but think about it

AI in education is: - A political project to get even more private tech into schools and universities - Habituating children and students to industry-defined and -demanded "jobs of the future" - Often not actually "AI" ...

The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil is a disturbing illustration of @erikmbaker.bsky.social's argument that private universities have become laboratories of state violence and political repression. www.thedriftmag.com/the-fortress...

“Working conditions are learning conditions, we like to say, and it is so obviously true you want to tattoo it on your clavicle.” New: Peter Coviello on austerity in the English department.

One thing that needs to get repeated until it sinks in is that “AI” does not simply function as a tool that people in power are using; it’s even more powerful as a permission structure for the destructive & extractive things they wanted to do in the first place.

i've written a blog post about why I think we should reject generative AI in the university: languagemechanics.neocities.org/no-gen-ai

i love this idea of the "language mechanic" (and the incredible website design)

this is a really good question and i'm waiting to pick someone up so i have a minute to unpack thoughts: there are a couple of models i'm going to give some people as examples as well

really appreciated this discussion, framed around (as i heard it) the idea that "we have a full on counterrevolution but we never got the revolution" www.youtube.com/live/iyLiNN_...

back when he was little and cute and not so dense now that i think about it

mood

two quotes from this incredibly clarifying episode, on the eugenic political project running through every cruel and chaotic thing that's happened in the last few weeks (and beyond): "what erasure looks like is administrative violence"; "why let people suffer while the courts figure it out?"

In both confirmation hearings, RFK’s opening remarks claimed “a healthy person has a thousand dreams, a sick person has only one” and blamed high US healthcare costs on the chronically ill. People want to claim the term is overused, but RFK’s project is definitionally eugenic