Pleased to see this piece. Personally, I find these uses of synthetic data v concerning and I find the traction and endorsements that this work has to be quite baffling, esp given the well-storied role of algorithmic targeting in undermining democracy

@bnjacobsen.bsky.social and colleagues at @geogdurham.bsky.social have published an article examining how prompting in machine learning is reshaping political power, expertise, and governmental decision-making in Economy and Society. #Prompting #MachineLearning #PoliticalPower #Decision #Government

Good to see this bad boy out in the world!! New article from me on drone delivery, AI testbeds, and the long history science and technology testing in the colony. Online first and gloriously open access ✨ doi.org/10.1177/2976...

Gilles Deleuze, On Painting: Courses, March-June 1981, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Charles J. Stivale – @uminnpress.bsky.social, August 2025 www.upress.umn.edu/978151791840...

53 years young and still trending

Today is the official UK publication day for Silicon Empires! I'm excited to have it out and hear what people think. There's an enormous amount happening every day in AI, and it's difficult to gain a stable perspective. I wrote the book to try and get some secure hold on that constant flux. 🧵

Travel data has historically been a correlative proxy. Early 2000s data mining used one way flights (*purchased third party) in terror algorithms. These apparent “errors” by HMRC illuminate machine learning logics: 1/ combine gov cloud data www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Morten Høi Jensen, The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of "The Magic Mountain" - @yalepress.bsky.social, October 2025 yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

Want to know more about #syntheticdata #assetization, #blockchain and #cloudinfrastructures in #finance? In this paper for @financeandspace.bsky.social , I talk about those topics, plus how synthetic data might be reworking financial #subjectivities! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

New in Theory, Culture & Society: Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, 'Inhabiting the Face: From Fake to Deepfake' - traces how new technological developments in face recognition and artificial intelligence affect the way we inhabit our own faces. (Online First) journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Our article on the politics of AI prompts is out now @econsocjournal.bsky.social www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 1/n

Such a nice paper on feature extraction as a project of perception - drone enclosures in digital India. “Feature extraction is an entirely speculative endeavour” rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

✨Deeply honoured to deliver this year's Annual Digital Lecture at The National Archives! Drawing on our @erc.europa.eu Data Loss project, I'll explore how preservation creates loss in the digital age and what that means for the politics of archives. Nov 20 6pm at Senate House, London. Do join us!

ICYMI: David Beer. 'Explorations in the Indeterminacy of Computation: An Interview with M. Beatrice Fazi' - this interview with M. Beatrice Fazi explores in detail her work on computation. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Glyph: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies – Samuel Weber, Deconstruction and the American Reception of French Theory progressivegeographies.com/2025/09/07/g...

I am very excited and honoured to be the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant, starting January 2026 🔆 @erc.europa.eu. The five-year project will explore the broader social, political, and ethical implications of training algorithmic models on synthetic data. www.york.ac.uk/news-and-eve...

If you are at the Association for Philosophy & Literature conference, check out the panel “Philosophies of Intelligence,” organised by @theoryculturesociety.org I will be speaking alongside N. Katherine Hayles, Luciana Parisi and Joel McKim. 📆 22 August 2025 ⏰ 1.45 pm 🗺️ APL 2025 Frankfurt

Digital Twins special issue in New Media & Society edited by Christoph Borbach, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun & Tristan Thielmann. 15 papers including one by Oliver Dawkins & myself. Interdisciplinary exploration of the conceptualisation and practices of digital twinning. journals.sagepub.com/toc/nmsa/27/8

One study concluded 70% of increased electric cost across US due to AI data centers. apnews.com/article/elec...

My essay “Because the twin is not a copy: the politics of digital twins” - written for a 2023 workshop organised by Christoph Borbach & out now in a special issue on digital twinning in #NewMedia&Society #DigitalTwins #algorithms journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I have a new article out: "Do artifacts have political economy?" It's a riff on an old argument by Langdon Winner about the embedding of politics in technology #STS #sociology #technoscience #technology #innovation journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

We are looking for a Senior Manager for our Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life @leverhulmecal.bsky.social A key person in our team & a future valued colleague. Apply here durham.taleo.net/careersectio... & feel free to DM me. Also look out for our October research fellows posts.

My follow-up article on synthesis in gen AI is now out 💥💥💥   Responding to @shanedenson.bsky.social response, I expand on my transcendental argument about LLMs and develop the case for a structuralist reading of Kantian synthesis. Available Open Access ⬇️ journals.ub.uni-koeln.de/index.php/ph...

Nick Srnicek, Silicon Empires: The Fight for the Future of AI - @politybooks.bsky.social, October 2025 www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?b...

Thank you so much @elkeschwarz.bsky.social & @politicalgeography.bsky.social - I am so grateful for this generous discussion of Cloud Ethics. A disc collapsing in my spine prevented me from writing a reply 😔 with 5 months sick. Thank you @oliviamason.bsky.social for continuing without me ❤️

7/ The article is open access at @icsjournal.bsky.social, and is available here: 📄 doi.org/10.1080/1369...

🆕New article in New Media & Society!🆕 On how cross-cultural encounters shape techies' perceptions of algorithms and their ethics. Focusing on immigrants to Silicon Valley, it calls for a more diverse view of SV's ideologies and their entanglement with algorithmic production. 🧵👇 tinyurl.com/dmknms

Data, algorithms and the asymmetric politics of extraction by @bnjacobsen.bsky.social in The Sociological Review journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

🚨 Excited to see this review article published in @thesociologicalreview.org. How is the notion of ‘extraction’ used as a framework of analysis and critique of data and algorithms in the social sciences?

🎉 A lovely wedding present from Big Data & Society! I bring together an ethnographic study of AI practitioners with Simone de Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity, exploring how ambiguity shapes AI practice and ethics journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

public pushback, refusal and resistance remains the main avenue of change so yea... counting on it www.wired.com/story/genera...

“Access to data — however extensive — must not be confused with intelligence, which necessarily ‘involves the person’s openness to the ultimate questions of life and reflects an orientation toward the True and the Good’.” Luddite Pope is not backing down on AI.

N. Katherine Hayles discusses her writing and thinking process with David Beer. Watch the full interview here: mediatheoryjournal.org/2025/06/14/n...

🧵1/ I'm happy to share my new article just published in the European Journal for Philosophy of Science: "Political philosophy of experimentation" 🔗 link.springer.com/article/10.1... #philsci #STS #politicalphilosophy

💎 NETWORK ANARCHY AND UNSTABLE DIFFUSIONS 💎 7 - 8 July Naarm/Melbourne @blueskychris.bsky.social @ranjodhdhaliwal.com @eryk.bsky.social @admscentre.org.au

'Meredith,' some guys ask, 'why won't you shove AI into Signal?' Because we love privacy, and we love you, and this shit is predictable and unacceptable. Use Signal ❤️

Paul is doing fascinating research on the relationship between algorithms and miscarriage. Get in touch with him if you are interested in taking part

🚨 I have a new paper out, “Prompt in the Shell” — now published in ECHO: A Journal of Music, Thought and Technology📝📔 It is a commentary that considers the relation between ideation and execution in computation. You can access it here: ⬇️⬇️⬇️ echo.orpheusinstituut.be/article/prom...

We wrote about this world model @ludovico-rella.bsky.social @alexcampolo.bsky.social @bnjacobsen.bsky.social - generative, latent, sequences, & zero shot #AlgorithmicSocieties www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🌟 New commentary “Unraveling the Regimes of Synthetic Data Metrics“ in Digital Society: link.springer.com/article/10.1... 📚 In it, @velocitygravity.bsky.social , @matthewarcher.bsky.social, @danishanley.bsky.social, and I argue that synth data metrics are linked to the politics of synth data. 🧵…

Hearing from friends editing special issues that so many submitted abstracts have the same structure, syntax, word choices—clearly generated by ChatGPT. How can academics complain about students when they can't even be bothered to produce artisanal, small batch human thoughts?

So much is broken right now, but I want to share an amazing new set of short, teachable interdisciplinary essays on ** Sociotechnical Error ** Live at IJOC journal @ijoc-usc.bsky.social: ijoc.org/index.php/ij... (scroll to Forum) Intro by me & Simogne Hudson: ijoc.org/index.php/ij... Pls share!

So excited for #AoIR2025Symposium at Bremen in just two weeks 🤩 Looking forward to hearing and getting inspired by all the cool researchers I know and new ones I don't know, and of course can't wait for my discussion at the concluding plenary panel. 💃🤓

What kind of infrastructure is an algorithm: @amoorelouise.bsky.social from @geogdurham.bsky.social will be delivering the second Infrastructural Geographies Annual Lecture on the 29th May, 16:00-17:30. All welcome!

In 2019 I was the first journalist to embed within OpenAI to profile them. Afterwards they refused to speak to me for 3 years. Here's the story of what happened, and Altman’s reaction, excerpted from my book EMPIRE OF AI about the company (out May 20). 1/ www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/19/1...

Very timely and necessary critical intervention by @katschwerzmann.bsky.social ‬– highly recommended: «By embracing LLMs before developing any critical framework for their use in pedagogical and research contexts, the University allows itself to be governed by the contingent, ever-evolving ... 1/

“Disarming Intelligence: Proust, Valéry, and Modern French Criticism” Zakir Paul press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Michael Hagner, Seeing Foucault's Pendulum: Between Science, Politics, and Art, trans. Robert Savage, Zone Books, September/November 2025 press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

✨New commentary by @matthewarcher.bsky.social, @louravn.bsky.social and myself on the politics of desiloization in what we call "interoperability capitalism"! Grateful to find a home in the 🔥special issue on interoperability ed by @ikkibop.bsky.social, Silvan Pollozekj and @janpassoth.bsky.social !

I have a short reflection on benchmarking in machine learning, titled "State-of-the-Art." Beyond questions of construct validity and rankings, how do benchmarks and model evaluation produce orientations towards progress or the future? Open access: doi.org/10.1007/s442...