Telling that this attack on good scientists doing good jobs, without any pretense of due process is 1) at an HBCU 2) in the agricultural extension. Decades of underfunding mean HBCUs are testing grounds for the austerity we all get later. Ag stations are isolated and full of workplace abuse.

Across the US, people fed up with Flock cameras surveilling their communities, and with local governments that are often unwilling to listen to concerns over privacy violations and ICE data sharing practices, are taking matters into their own hands—and tearing them down.

Yesterday Cory Doctorow argued that refusal to use LLMs was mere "neoliberal purity culture". I think his argument is a strawman, doesn't align with his own actions and delegitimizes important political actions we need to make in order to build a better cyberphysical world.

"As AI trans­forms academic labor, much more is at stake than the terms & conditions of our employment. At stake is the very integrity of the teaching & learning process & the notion that all humanity—not just a few individuals—should benefit from the production of knowledge at our universities."

“These surveillance tools are an authoritarian’s dream…”

We tried the carrot. Here’s the stick. #ICE is ramping up attacks against immigrants and American citizens— and #Palantir is their surveillance backbone. Go to www.purgepalantir.com/the-palantir-payroll/ for the list of dirty politicians trading our rights for Palantir $$$ — then call them out.

university admins will no more acknowledge their complicity in the damage done by AI than they did with covid

Sign this letter by @heavyredaction.bsky.social and Martha Kinney to support CSUs demands to divest from ChatGPTEdu actionnetwork.org/petitions/ca...

Old Dominion University is trying to compress 16-week courses into 8-week online courses for the 2026 fall semester — and fully integrate AI without faculty input. Isaac Kamola, AAUP’s Director of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, explains why this is a “nightmare.”

I talked to experts about steps scientist can take to improve their cybersecurity. Fav quote: “Every time you order food, you are spraying data into the world" Many thanks to @isaackamola.bsky.social, @hellobrittparis.bsky.social, @gleemie.bsky.social & others!

I've updated my document that tackles four of the common arguments used to encourage teachers to use AI. I hope this will be helpful to those educators wanting to push back on AI mania.

Considering developments in Michigan as a case study, Nathan Kim and Ira Anwar say current state incentives for data centers reflect a false binary between new jobs and detrimental community impacts.

Join leadership and experts from @aaup.org AI team and Mijente for an online press conference on the urgent concerns about Palantir Technologies' involvement with the Department of Education. fedscoop.com/palantir-edu... TOMORROW Wednesday, December 17, 4PM ET Register here: bit.ly/4p3iCh7

Well good news is EOs (like this new state law AI moratorium EO) are relatively toothless and we can do things to thwart them, like push elected a to pass better laws that people actually want. 👇 It’s hard but can be done. @aaup.org ai cmte will be working on this. Join us if it make you mad too 💙

👀👀 DiffProtect “rewrites a person’s face in a photograph using the same generative technology behind modern image creation tools. The resulting photo still looks like the person to any human viewer, but to state-of-the-art facial recognition systems, the image becomes something else entirely.”

This report is how I have channeled my rage as the tech industry has grown in wealth and power at the expense of workers, communities, and the environment. The old mechanisms of reform aren’t sufficient in a time of AI ascendance and data center accelerationism datasociety.net/library/turn...

Administrators are inking deals with OpenAI and inviting Palantir onto campus, ignoring faculty expertise and rolling out unproven data-thieving surveillance snake oil tech on our studens, staff and us. Enough.

"this is approximately 40% of the full-time faculty and a significant reduction of an already burnt-out staff. AAUP National describes this attack as the largest attempted firing of faculty currently taking place in the nation." docs.google.com/document/d/1...

So proud to see my friend and colleague @katiejwells.bsky.social ‘s critical research on the front page of today’s NYTimes!!!! Katie, you are a trailblazing scholar! ❤️

Y'all wanna warn your friends before you get on the "AI companion" bandwagon and warn your friends, help them get informed.

👀 Education Department spokesperson confirmed Palantir is a subcontractor to update the foreign funding portal, to monitor potential foreign influence in American schools...in a time when Federal funding is being revoked and watchwords are in place...👇 fedscoop.com/palantir-edu...

Hard to list all the things that are wrong with this. But hey if you needed some more data to show that the police is primarily a tool of race and class intimidation, and "solving crime" is a very low ranked priority.. at least this provides that?

Can't believe there was a marketing department that thought any of these were selling points.

“School officials have created a Microsoft Copilot prompt to review course descriptions with an eye toward avoiding ‘advocacy-oriented or prescriptive terms.’” Terms: “dismantling, decolonizing, interrogating, challenging, centering, combating, liberation, resistance, activism, justice oriented”

AI is not inevitable: A conversation with educators, unions, and the Collaborative Research Center for Resilience! Join your colleagues from across pre-K-12 and higher ed for a webinar on exercising worker power in the age of AI. December 11, 4-5 p.m. ET on Zoom Link to register below👇

Infrastructure and user consent for AI are brittle, despite what tech boosters hype would like you to believe. We can force our schools to renegotiate bad tech contracts and demand they consult us, among many other things. “AI is over if we want it”!!

At the beginning of this semester, my higher ed institution formalized guidelines stating that students should not be using AI for their classwork at all. The training for staff and faculty to use AI has quietly dropped off the schedule, too. The pushback is working!

AI Is Not Inevitable join AAUP for a conversation with educators, educator unions, and the Collaborative Research Center for Resilience zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Will continue to bang this drum: this is the system university admins are cramming into every aspect of education. This is the system we are told “isn’t going anywhere” so we all have to adjust to it.

Bleak but important essay by Ronald Purser on AI capitulation at California State University. We need to push back against this in our own institutions. www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

If you think generative AI should be integrated into the classroom then you also think management consultancies should determine the future for higher education. Both are ethics-free forms of machinic optimisation based on reductive abstractions that strip out important context and relationships.

The proposed Chicago city budget has a $5 million line item for a ShotSpotter replacement. Abandoning this failed pursuit would free up the funds needed to maintain 2025 funding levels at our city libraries, which would still leave the libraries underfunded but would avoid disastrous proposed cuts.

US telecom company trained an ai model to scan incarcerated people’s “calls, texts, and emails in the hope of predicting and preventing crimes.”

BREAKING: In AAUP et al v. Trump (wall-to-wall union lawsuit challenging the administration’s unlawful use of TItle VI to reshape the University of California system), the faculty and staff of the UC system WON!!! We were granted our preliminary injunction! @aaup.org

Amelia Acker: "Each chapter introduces data archiving processes that relate to the evolution of data sovereignty...: from magnetic tape + timesharing computer models from the 1950s,... to file structures + virtual containers in cloud-based information services over the past 40 yrs" — open access!

What a fun "Ghostwriters" issue of Limn released at time when we reflect on seasons' passing and other haunting concerns, featuring Tamara Kneese, Brooklyne Gipson + more. It was truly a pleasure to write this piece with Jeremy Butman on the epistemic function of giants. limn.press/article/ther...

In the media coverage of Amazon layoffs this week, how many of the headlines and press hits conveyed the point below?… or are most media outlets lazily providing a completely different message to the public? www.cnn.com/2025/10/28/b...

Thank you to the Daily Bruin for reporting on the latest of a string of big-ticket IT failures (article from May, but ever-relevant, esp in light of current efforts to centralize IT) dailybruin.com/2025/05/13/o...

🚨NEW PAPER ALERT 🚨 @tamigraph.bsky.social @briana-v.bsky.social and I discuss wellness chatbots, their labor implications, & "private vibes" vs "privacy". We call for critical human-AI communication scholarship that takes into account context & political economy: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

From an Amazon Employees for Climate Justice statement: “They’re pushing this narrative that AI is transformative and that’s why they’re making these cuts. But leadership is spending 100 billion this year alone on the new data centers; they have to find that money elsewhere,” said one AWS engineer.

"Cooperatively run structures are a path forward when we're seeing systems collapse." Proud to be one of 6(+???) worker-led newsrooms in @tinynewscollective.bsky.social. Here's how to join us, feat. interviews with our co-founder @maddiepoore.bsky.social and @soleilho.com of @coyotemedia.org:

It's not going to be fun when the bubble pops (and it won't even make AI go away). Disaster capitalism will be ready. I think we need to figure out what it would mean for us to get ready in turn.

New preprint alert! 🚨 “Let Them Eat Large Language Models: Artificial Intelligence and Austerity in the Neoliberal University”

Please understand that the only reason this has been released is because of the UCLA faculty association who filed a request and challenged the refusal in court. If you are a UC faculty member, join your FA!

Together we can push back on big brother software & more! cucfa.org/2025/10/lett...

Great article—AI in higher ed is about the crisis of higher ed, long in the making. Cites the AAUP report on AI. we are seeing cracks in the inevitability framing of AI—the only way out of this is together!

Belgian AI scientists call on colleagues to keep AI out of the classroom. apache.be/2025/10/24/-...

UC faculty and the @aaup.org demand the end of mandatory surveillance software use across the UC system. The future belongs to people, not to big brother! www.science.org/content/arti...

Actual panopticon.

"unless you are building war tools for a US government program" *glares at the university of michigan's planned billion-dollar AI datacenter project in collaboration with los alamos national laboratories*