Lots of tech companies are releasing surveillance specs & I’m reminded of the internal Meta memo to put facial rec in their glasses during a “dynamic political environment” because people will be too focused on other issues to resist. Companies think now is the right time to foist these on us all.

Always worth remembering that Insider Higher Ed is owned by Times Higher Education, a one-time industry publication which has been remade as a data-analytic consultancy AND which is itself owned by Inflexion Private Equity.

The AI boom is unsustainable because the entire thing is predicated on cannibalizing the future. Is this a better way to search? Maybe! Will there be anything new for the AI to search if no one gets web traffic from Google Search anymore? There will not.

Of course, they falsely believe that AI will solve a problem for _them_, which is the cost of labor. At my campus, I have heard more times than I can count that “faculty pay makes up the majority of costs.” Yes, and? It’s a fucking university, right? Better that those costs go to what?

A very useful thread critically reading the agreements that universities make with AI companies

This needs its own ongoing thread: bsky.app/profile/cabe...

But then what of the poets trying to latch onto sciences to argue for their practical and material value? (Last time I was at the national creative writing conference the person presenting on "save creative writing by collaborating with sciences" did NOT like my q about sciences being attacked too)

Coming tomorrow to Canvas, if your university subscribes at the Canvas Next tier (IDK what that is either) and your IT department enables "Ignite AI." community.instructure.com/en/discussio...

The other thing this immediately makes me think of is the concept I'm writing an article on: "AI legibility" (for lack of a better word). *Everything* needs to be forced into an LLM-shaped problem so it can be forced through an LLM-shaped hole (that feeds directly into a system of surveillance...)

@miriamposner.com "said uni's shld respond by reconsidering the wisdom of delegating core academic infrastructure to a third-party tech vendor. She suspected they won’t. 'I suspect that what they’ll turn to is increased surveillance of our activities, ostensibly in the service of cybersecurity.'"

“A citation is a formal assertion of a relationship between works, and when that relationship is fabricated, the integrity of the entire document and the scholarly record is compromised.”

When you think about it, really we ALL paid the ransom together ☺️ (with the data and IP Instructure scraped from our units and students) www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

Retractions never get proportional attention. This one should.

Wow! UBC has still not reopened access to Canvas, instead choosing to pivot to open source for continuity! WordPress and Moodle (!) are being offered as alternatives. ltic.ubc.ca/alternative-...

In the comments: ”I'll just note that Canvas is no longer a pedagogical tool; in its current iteration and ownership structure, faculty and students are trapped in a digital learning environment that mines our labor without consent or privacy and intellectual property protections.”

A student who sets out to write a research paper will now encounter chatbots who will offer to do their work in their word document, in their learning management system, in their email, in their web browser, and in certain library database interfaces.

I want to make more of my scholarship of service to the profession. This special issue of the @aaup.org trade journal is stuffed with just such efforts, from across the country: An update on the CSU ai rollout, a review of contract provisions on AI, analysis of the IP consideration etc. Read it all!

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 have been really sus about how my floor at work went from two printers/copiers to one this year just as we were all forced to paper or "secure browsers"

There’s an article in the Guardian today which I was interviewed for: I wrote about it here, giving a fuller account of how and why I won’t be working with UQP anymore. sakr.substack.com/p/leaving-uqp

"The Editor has decided to retract this paper owing to concerns regarding discrepancies in the meta-analysis. These issues ultimately undermine the confidence the Editor can place in the validity of the analysis and resulting conclusions."

Are Sam Altman and OpenAI liable for one of the worst gun massacres in Canadian history? Allegations in a new lawsuit point to key unanswered questions about the shooter’s troubling use of ChatGPT. My latest, on a case that will test consequential legal terrain www.motherjones.com/criminal-jus... 🧵

In other words, any approach to understanding academia by listening exclusively to the most privileged and protected voices is either fundamentally misunderstanding higher education or explicitly acting in bad faith.

Any meaningful understanding of the conditions of academic labor therefore needs to attend specifically to those most vulnerable to shifts in institutional budgets and policies bc it is in those positions that systemic trends are most immediately legible.

“Faculty & Staff” can be a misleading way to characterize the academic labor force. The endowed chair of the business school is “faculty” alongside the adjunct teaching comp and an administrative assistant is “staff” alongside the Provost, but the conditions of their labor are radically different.

One year ago today I submitted my finished manuscript to my editor. Every day the book remains relevant gives me psychic damage. It is my goal to become irrelevant. If my work becomes irrelevant it means we've changed. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Every time I see someone talk about Claude I think about how they switched from female to male names as soon as they wanted the robots to seem like experts vs personal assistants.

Feminism and femininity. I misspell femininity so much that my autocorrect is wrong. My first two degrees are in gender studies and I followed them up with a PhD on feminist rhetorics of science.

That booing on ANZAC day was terrible says the RSL - so we are going to give in to it and let local RSLs cut the welcome to country. The worst response to ugly racist meanness. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04...

ok the Mr. Beast lawsuit, let’s go. step 1: don’t do this, or this, or this, or this

this is a *wild* thing to put in the handbook. the whole point of a company handbook is to have a document that says how perfect your policies are when you get to litigation. it is, literally, a defense against punitive damages—but not if it says this lol

Why is my feed always the place where normies find out that most professors don’t have health insurance and that disorganised prof you hated freshman year had no teaching experience and no one told them where the copy machine was? What I’m saying is I’m available to do comms for your faculty union

Hey friends - Who's been doing non-traditional humanities dissertations in the past ~5 years? Tons of fabulous resources from ~2021 and before, but wondering what cool people have been doing lately. References? Links? Exploring new options for our department.

No amount of AI literacy can protect us because the problem isn’t knowledge, or how to use the system, it’s that the system exists in a culture that has been radically structured around white supremacy and patriarchy and your precious autocomplete incorporates it into its operations.

Like, AI literacy in any form will not protect black and disabled folks from the algorithmic bias, and the violence that emerges from it, of spicy autocomplete. Full stop. No amount of AI literacy can protect us in the deployment of the system because it is tracking the wrong problem.

Very disjointed to read “wearing them seems like a violation of the social contract” next to a breakdown of price and battery life.

I know people bristle at the idea of leftists who police language but a big reason it happens is because, especially as it relates to politicians, the language we choose serves as an entirely accurate predictor of the types of policy decisions we would make & who we would & wouldn’t place value on

speaking of academic folks boycotting the U.S., over 2,000 mathematicians are petitioning the International Mathematics Union to move its annual conference outside the United States this year over their immigration policies and war in Iran. www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

Woohoo, here's my essay with my fav co-author on 30,000 fellowship wins across the Guggenheim, Stanford CASBS, NAEd, National Humanities Center, RSF visiting scholar, and Harvard Radcliffe. Spoiler: it's the people working at prestigious universities www.publicbooks.org/who-gets-gug...

Someone told me all about their great results with thousand-word prompts to write emails and no email I have ever gotten from them has been even half that long

because senior experts who give useful counsel to clients are created through years of practical experience - you can't become an expert without applied knowledge. For some fields, such as accountancy, if current hiring practices continue, we are likely to see a crisis of expertise in 10ish yrs

Ugh, preview didn't unroll. So, received wisdom is that junior accounting jobs are very automatable and senior, more expert roles that might be required to give counsel are not. However this creates a talent pipeline problem ++

Okay, so this is a VERY interesting story on - allegedly - the impact of AI on an accounting firm. Would like to see how this one develops because it's about a legitimate but perhaps counterintuitive focus on talent pipeline giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Palantir's UK head Louis Mosley wants us to believe that tech like theirs is neutral until their clients decide how to use it. People who study science, technology and society have long exposed such arguments as fallacious. My latest column for TNW. www.thenewworld.co.uk/philip-ball-...

Federal government declines action on AI in schools www.themandarin.com.au/310825-feder...

So when you see stuff like severely over-written Andy Masley substack posts about how GenAI is like 10 seconds of Netflix, remember that the comparison is never to *what its replacing*. Everyone in the world replacing the timer app with ChatGPT = a HUGE net increase in energy consumption.....

Remember that guy a few months ago who tried to use chatgpt to tell if it was day outside, and racked up an enormous bill because it was polling the server like every 30 seconds to see if it was day yet

Not for nothing, this is in keeping with the patriarchal orientation of science. The first image transmitted over the fledgling internet? A fucking pinup. You know who didn't get much credit? The model who posed for the image.