feeling sad and fantasizing about the two semester seminar style course i would teach if i had, like, a completely different job... semester 1 would be focused on language and political economy, often together... semester 2, of course, would be "oops all wittgenstein"

new article out in Current Anthropology today on raciolinguistic ideologies of listening (+ labor) in mental healthcare AI! feat. dream team commentary pieces by Josh Babcock, Michael Berman, Jay Ke-Schutte, @nickseaver.website, Summerson Carr, and Rihan Yeh www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

i've been thinking about the work we're doing at varying levels to organize against AI, and maybe i've also been in the headspace of gardening and getting rid of weeds. i can't shake the feeling that AI takes up space opportunistically where people's needs are not being met. a little like weeds.

Also in the special issue: "AI as a War Issue, War as a Workers’ Issue" www.aaup.org/issue/spring...

Read @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social 's review of @anniemcc.bsky.social 's Beneath the Wage ( Zone Books , @princetonupress.bsky.social ). Brouilette highlights the book's focus on the new terrains of antagonism and solidarity afforded by service labor. spectrejournal.com/service-with...

“I do not invoke love as a universal unit of analysis or a private, hyper-commodified emotion emptied of history, but a revolutionary commitment to the land and its liberation.” -Laura al-Tibi, on Martyrdom and the Palestinian Wedding-Funeral www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/bri...

my hay fever brain fog makes me capable of exactly one activity---binging episodes of nz/aus television show guy mont-spelling bee---and i am only more convinced that any adequate theory of language must start from language's foundational calvinballness

New online: @sarahljaffe.bsky.social interviews Kathi Weeks about her new book. dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

Always a good time to read McClanahan and McCune’s “Ed Tech” keyword, but now seems even better www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

May Day reading from @charmainechua.bsky.social, who calls out the contradictions of a society built on impoverishing the lives of workers who create its wealth: "Ships, trucks, loading docks: these are containers of immiserated labor, and so they are also containers of revolutionary potential."

New issue of the @aaup.org Academe magazine -- AI in the Corporate University -- looks incredible. Important pieces by @dmgreene.bsky.social @hellobrittparis.bsky.social @heavyredaction.bsky.social @heavyredaction.bsky.social @tisjune.bsky.social and many others. www.aaup.org/academe

I was lucky to write the lead article for a special issue of Academe on AI in the Corporate University. In "What does AI do?" I offer a provisional balance sheet of this technology's effects on our work, our finances, and our management, in a moment of rising fascist attacks on higher education.

i wrote a post - "On techno-optimism".

“The forum, I hope, serves as a partial history of the hidden labor that makes possible the poems, stories, essays, books, and periodicals you read—including the magazine you currently hold in your hands.”

🔔 new paper alert 🔔 Justine, Su Lin and I spent the last year and a half trying to understand how LLMs are being sold — what are their supposed ‘capabilities’? how are these measured? etc and, more importantly, what does all of this discursive work *do*? what kinds of world does it presuppose? 1/

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: