so in seriousness i've been talking with @tisjune.bsky.social about this for a while and have heavily bought into the idea that what tech companies are doing with LLMs is not so much making "more capable" systems but rather accumulating power to frame and talk about "abilities" in conducive ways

New #FAccT2026 paper with Su Lin Blodgett and @ninamarkl.bsky.social on the ideological work performed by discourses that sell the capabilities of generative AI products tisjune.github.io/papers/facct...

8 more days to submit an abstract to our 4s panel, "Taking Back Technopower: STS and strategic interventions in the fight against technofascism." Looking forward to an engaging conversation centered on the (totally small, very easy) q: "how do we win?" Apply by 4/30: www.4sonline.org/accepted_ope...

Sarah Sharma has a super interesting, counterintuitive take on feminist technodeterminism. Fabulously enticing interview! Plus an amazing book and cover . . . @dukepress.bsky.social dukeupress.wordpress.com/2026/04/16/q...

mood

me sending out a paper draft for feedback

are dockworkers allowed to go on strike if they do not have a background in supply chain management

owing to the specific way my brain is broken right now i have convinced myself that every critical cscw article from the 80s and 90s is actually about logistics

delighted that some of Josiane Boutet’s work has now been translated into English and published last year — impressive work by Katy Highet, Larissa Schedel, Sabine Lehner, Catherine Tebaldi, Mi-Cha Flubacher and Martina Zimmermann! www.degruyterbrill.com/journal/key/...

Join us Friday, 2-4PM for @aydelottefound.bsky.social's panel - How to Stop a Data Center - online and @swarthmorecollege.bsky.social! Panelists from @datasociety.bsky.social, @kairosfellows.bsky.social, @peoplestechproject.bsky.social, and Philly Thrive. RSVP for zoom link: bit.ly/stopdatacenters

#CfA I'm organizing an open panel "Resisting the Datafied University" at #4S2026 in Toronto Please share widely & submit! www.4sonline.org/call_for_sub...

I want to look back on this piece tonight as a hysterical overreaction. Because that will mean the peoples and the cultures of Iran will have survived.

three more weeks to submit abstracts to our 4S open panel, that articulate STS-flavoured responses to the most important question of our times: "how do we win?"

i keep coming back to this episode of the dig podcast where michael denning talks about good sense and elaboration. "working through ideas" as tactile, as laden with counterhegemonic potential.

Audre Lorde's "master's tools" speech was not about tech platforms. So why does tech discourse keep citing it as if it were? I write about that here: tarakiyee.com/on-the-enshi... #enshittification #AudreLorde #techpolicy

"it feels more like having a conversation than configuring software" is the perfect epigraph for a linguistic anthropology paper

The fight against the University of Michigan–Los Alamos data center reveals the “political and planetary stakes” of AI and the threat of “tech-enhanced militarism,” @tisjune.bsky.social , @shreyachowdhary.bsky.social & @nathanckim.bsky.social write in #Academe:

some writing on AI as a war issue and war as a workers issue, and how the middle term does not simply cancel out

so you may potentially be able to acquire this thing i've been thinking about, of how sometimes conversation (with chatbots, with actual cops, etc) produces a fake sense of intimacy with a broader system of organized violence, in sticker form sometime soon

So, who is writing on “chat” and the conversation as interface? Because I hate it, and I would love to hate read such a piece

Now unlocked: we speak with Cassius Adair @cassiusa.bsky.social about Kansas’s new law stripping trans people of their driver’s licenses overnight, and the long history of state identification documents being used as tools of administrative violence on.soundcloud.com/N0SwdGJa9p9d...

dude that was cool ten years ago prompts sprawling colonial apparatus to perform just-in-time word delivery via Anthropic-branded interface

Reminder that the eugenicists currently dismantling public health think everyone should be outfitted with a wearable.

wondering if strategic essentialism is a useful frame for analyzing ideas about language in critical AI discourse. there's something mobilizing and morally meaningful about a sort of cognitive-romantic view of language and humanness... that come with serious epistemic and political asterisks.

🚨Save Languages at the University of Essex 🚨 #langsky #linguistics UoE plans to cut German, Italian, Portuguese and Chinese + all evening classes and merge Language and Linguistics with a larger unit. Only 2 languages will remain next October. Please sign our letter: tinyurl.com/SaveLingLang...

in a soon to be published paper we wink at how anthropic is better than openai at crafting marketing narratives that prospect personhood, packaging aspects of self and sociality into commodifiable nuggets. slicker sales copy for the same world-annihilating projects, so to speak

i don't care about keeping squirrels away from birds, i just want to produce high quality entertainment experiences for my dog

hi STS people! are you engaged in political struggle against fascism? do you have things to share: strategic reflections, organizing artefacts, etc.? do you have thoughts about how we will win? if so, you should submit something to our open panel at 4S this year! www.4sonline.org/accepted_ope...

reading the news:

@emmamay.bsky.social, Serita Sargent, and I analyzed the 2023 SAG AFTRA contract on AI to inform bargaining around AI across sectors as a lever for more meaningful worker control technology in the workplace. Out today in Big Data & Society journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I think that we have to look at AI as less of harbinger of some new technological future than a way of managing the effects of a declining empire.

"Tip of the Spear argues that prisons are war" is a hell of a thesis statement. it makes most academic work look bloodless in comparison. i'm so excited to read the rest of the book!

when i saw this article & the surrounding discourse last week:

i kind of think the left is too busy cultivating sociotechnical assemblages of collective care and political struggle in a time of violent imperial decay punctuated by liberatory possibilities to worry about having to manage some peoples' weird feelings about AI

thought this review, on knowing your enemies and/from your comrades, was extremely good.

I helped build the FAccT academic conference, and white men like Seth have to come along and make sure that the people we tried to get away from, the TESCREAL eugenicist ghouls, have every academic space in addition to the billions they're drowning in.

good morning, it’s day 4 of strikes at the University of Essex to save 400 jobs across all departments, the Southend campus and our Foundation programme — many members are worried about making ends meet. if you can, please donate to our strike fund: gofund.me/059af6be8

sometimes you can tell when someone's entire theory of change amounts to ctrl+f+replace-ing jargon

sorry for the dumb ai discourse subtweet but i would really love to see a language ideological account of the political work done by the distinction between "the drudgery" and "the creative, expressive part"

This is a genuinely huge, sweeping victory today for the University of California—or rather, for us, its faculty, acting through our faculty associations, while the UC itself maintained a strict policy of deer-in-headlights silence. The Trump admin has given up its appeal of a powerful injunction:

if you're interested in reading Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt by Orisanmi Burton, my reading group (Thought Soup) will start discussing it in a week (next saturday). see replies for links to buy it to raise money for Palestinians:

The defining feature of AI today is infrastructure: the rapacious buildout of data centres; the transnational configuration of labour exploitation; the grafting of AI onto processes of capitalist accumulation.

jumbo shrimp

New commentary by @cellllla.bsky.social, @perhaxis.bsky.social and myself: "The tech worker movement and the rise of the tech oligarchy". www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Join us for BD&S 2026 Colloquium, Panel 1: Constructing Alternatives through Community Data & Data Activism Jan 21 | 16:00–18:00 GMT (11:00 AM–1:00 PM EST) uky.zoom.us/j/85254638887 #DataActivism #CriticalDataStudies #DataJustice

thought we might need photos of dog

"That’s why I hate these New Year’s that fall like fixed maturities, which turn life and human spirit into a commercial concern with its neat final balance, its outstanding amounts, its budget for the new management. They make us lose the continuity of life and spirit."

henlo