A bad day for education....

A&M President to teach all classes related to race and gender. #Satire apnews.com/article/texa...

I honestly don’t get the value of this company. They hoover up energy and water. Their product constantly gets things wrong and, in extreme cases, coaches people into suicide. And it’s all built on what seems to be malicious and vast intellectual property theft. What does OpenAI offer the world?

Meta earns $3.5 billion every six months from showing Faceboon and Instagram users 15 billion “higher legal risk” scam ad impressions a day, internal documents state. That haul vastly exceeds how much the company expects regulators To fine it for running scam ads. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

also: this book is $20, but as this review states, worth much more. great book exploring a marxist political economy of AI without jargon. I plan to teach undergrads with this, and its also the first book I recommend when friends and family ask me how to think about AI.

📣 I am hiring a postdoc! aial.ie/hiring/postd... applications from suitable candidates that are passionate about investigating the use of genAI in public service operations with the aim of keeping governments transparent and accountable are welcome pls share with your networks

The TL;DR (even though it’s a very short review): perhaps the first book to attempt a serious move towards an analysis of AI rooted in the logics of capital, indeed as a direct manifestation of capital — and then attempts to think towards futures on those same terms.

In happier news: for Critical Inquiry, I reviewed @hagenblix.bsky.social and Ingeborg Glimmer’s WHY WE FEAR AI, which has just lately been catching some deserved hotness. 🔥 Read my take here: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/matthew_kirs...

CMU "expressive activity registration" policy hampers even simple student debates: the Campus Republicans and Campus Democrats had to register and pay $1000 for needless security, just to debate each other. Required registration policies kill expression. www.publicsource.org/cmu-expressi...

n the Netherlands, its election day. Because of the #Microsoft outage, however, parts of the train system are down, leaving thousands of citizens unable to plan their travel, buy tickets, or determine whether they could return to their hometowns in time for polls to close.

Did economists paid my Microsoft apologize as well?

Had the pleasure to speak with @mariahollenhorst.bsky.social of Marketplace about AI Hype on NPR today: www.marketplace.org/story/2025/1... Our full report on how Big Cloud is investing in AI startups is here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Really excited to present one of the papers coming out of my PhD at the AI, Ethics and Society (AIES) conference tomorrow called "The ‘Wild West’ of Medicine: Exploring the Emergence of ‘Grassroots’ AI Governance in Radiology". Link here: ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AI.... Thread on the paper below 👇

We should be paying more attention. Nvidia's all over the headlines. But we should be paying a lot more attention to Big Cloud's land grab—especially as it's leading to what the researchers say are a host of new anticompetitive practices. Their full paper here:

Important paper on ‘Big Cloud’ (Amazon, Google, Microsoft). Big Cloud cos are prolific investors, much as largest venture capital firms. They create (financial, technical & contractual) dependency in start-ups, a form of vertical integration that escapes regulation. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

💫 "In this report, we explore an underrecognized manner in which AI ecosystems increasingly depend on Big Cloud: Big Cloud’s investment in other companies." @ssrn.bsky.social @davidthewid.bsky.social buff.ly/AdcJjoM

“The Purdue student newspaper owns its own presses” is the sound of engines revving

more cool people in our D&S family :)

at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh PA #AI

Anyone here going to Bread and Net 2025? If so let's hang! #breadandnet

Second main takeaway: 2️⃣➤ Each investment may be insignificant, but cumulatively they shape tech ecosystems in Big Cloud’s interest. Thus, beyond scrutinizing only the big deals (eg, MSFT-OpenAI), we must track these investments and their effects in an ecosystem-wide, cumulative, & ongoing manner.

First main takeaway: 1️⃣➤ Dependence on Big Cloud is not just technical or contractual. It is also 💸 *financial* 💸 Structural separation is needed: Big Cloud must divest their cloud businesses, so they don’t both provide infra AND compete with customers *and investees* which rely on that infra.

Finally, fully *half* of all Big Cloud investments are made internationally, and each has their target countries. Interestingly, Big Cloud invests primarily through accelerators abroad while prioritizing traditional equity investments at home.

Big Cloud is also *investing* in a way that brings much of the same risks as vertical integration, which competition authorities watch for. And startups operating in the AI supply chain *more likely to rely on Big Cloud as their lead or sole investor* when they invest vs other investors:

Big Cloud invests heavily through accelerator programs, locking in startups early: • They offer *massive cloud credits* that smaller cloud companies can’t compete with • Capture ecosystems by pushing startups to use their other tech • Incentivizes compute-heavy tech, such as building Gen AI.

We might remember Microsoft's huge investment in OpenAI, but this was just the tip of a massive hidden iceberg🥶: Big Cloud deploys *hundreds of billions* over *thousands of deals*, often in smaller, lesser-known startups. They invest like VCs — and *100x more* than other Big Tech companies.

📣🚨NEW: ☁️ Big Cloud—Google, Microsoft & Amazon—control two thirds of the cloud compute market. They’re getting rich off the AI gold rush. In new work with @nathanckim.bsky.social, we show how Big Cloud is expanding their empire by scrutinizing their *investments*… 🧵 📄PDF: dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

🫧The news is finally asking if we're in an AI Bubble, and when it will pop. Good!🎈 Our data shows how we got here: Big Cloud is frantically investing in AI startups to build cloud market share and justify their *massive* investments in AI infrastructure. How Google, Microsoft & Amazon invests:

Yep. Same: ash.harvard.edu/resources/wa...

Israel Agrees To Go Back To Killing Palestinians On Less Frequent Basis

Every paper of Cella's is a banger, she's a pillar of the local organizing scene, a rare scholar who walks the walk. Cella is amazing - hire her!

🫧The news is finally asking if we're in an AI Bubble, and when it will pop. Good!🎈 Our data shows how we got here: Big Cloud is frantically investing in AI startups to build cloud market share and justify their *massive* investments in AI infrastructure. How Google, Microsoft & Amazon invests:

Just three companies comprise “Big Cloud” — Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, which together control two thirds of the cloud computing market. But dependence on Big Cloud is not just technical or infrastructural: it is also financial, write Nathan Kim and David Gray Widder.

Did you know that the university of Michigan is building the world’s largest supercomputer for Los Alamos National Labs’ nuclear weapons production programs, and paying for $830 million of it despite not being able to use >90% of it? I wrote about it here: www.michigandaily.com/opinion/umic...

Israeli drone footage shows the destruction in Gaza:

You cannot, by definition, be eugenicist to an LLM. Thats not what eugenics was, is or means. But also, it should worry everyone when tech people like Hailey dehumanize the actual survivors and ongoing victims of eugenics by making comparisons like this--its alarming.

jumpscare on instagram @dandekadt.bsky.social

📣 Germany's close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private comms-& Signal-in the EU. Time's short and they're counting on obscurity: please let German politicians know how horrifying their reversal would be.

BREAKING: WE WON!!! 💥 💥 💥 Federal Judge William G. Young ruled today in our lawsuit against the Trump administration that the policy of arresting, detaining, & deporting noncitizen students & faculty members for their pro-Palestinian advocacy violates the 1st Amendment. Full ruling here:

A wise man once said, “you get paid more for linear regression if you call it machine learning and data science.”

Cornell admin overruled a faculty committee to suspend a professor who asked a disruptive Israeli student to leave his class on Gaza. Details in the article. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

7/If there's one silver lining, I'm far from alone in feeling this way - ash.harvard.edu/resources/wa.... I think it's time to draw some lines in the sand b4 AI takes that from us too and say "no more". AI, if you're listening, we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore! 😏

this is what we've been saying :-)

loony tunes

Wow, incredible. Huge win for the No Azure for Apartheid organizers.

At some point earlier I'd said I was willing to help onboard anyone considering joining Mastodon, & that I am also willing to speak candidly about drawbacks there. All that still stands... And, I have a just-out paper about user safety & moderation there: openjournals.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/Jo...

Sorry to hear that Bluestockings is closing. www.bluestockings.com

At least half of my media studies lectures: