Charles II: Did you finish that statue of the Archangel Michael defeating the devil? Luisa Roldán: Si y yo hice la Diablo real fucking sexy, just like you asked

#othernetworks!

there couldn't be a better ending to a symposium on the origins of AI and art than human networking with and around an ancient sequoia... #othernetworks #ai

this is just to say: I swapped eating cake in Vienna this morning for running and it was absolutely the right decision.

friends. if you were me--with a penchant for any combination of the weird, the old (technology, usually), the off-beat, the subversive--what would you see in Milan?

"AGAINST THE UNCRITICAL ADOPTION OF ‘AI’ TECHNOLOGIES IN ACADEMIA" with (only) one U.S. signee who happens to be from my home institution zenodo.org/records/1706...

new territory for me & the result of a great year spent reading (with @euclidpjones.bsky.social) as much writing on cybernetics as possible from 1943 to...I think we're up to 1965 now. "Other Cybernetics for Other AIs" - a paper I'm presenting tomorrow loriemerson.net/2025/09/18/o...

giving a paper tomorrow on the pre/early history of AI via the strange single-minded dedication to extreme rationalism & only now learning that Marvin Minsky was Jeffrey Epstein's closest friend at MIT & that Richard Stallman attempted to logic his way out of saying Minsky assaulted a minor. wow.

Viennese vandals say “ERROR MACHINE”

speaking of Cecil Rhodes, this is a powerful visual reminder to not get too nostalgic for past #othernetworks as if they're somehow less vulnerable to the corporate & governmental dominations that play out in/through today's internet

Today on WFMU: On Techtonic w/Mark Hurst: In 1976, MIT computer science professor Joseph Weizenbaum warned against the manipulative powers of AI. Faine Greenwood discusses how he was largely ignored, leading to recent harms and deaths due to AI therapy chatbots. (6 p.m. ET).

ha! "activist bureaucrats"! the right would have loved John McCarthy who coined "artificial intelligence" largely so that he could avoid dealing with Norbert Wiener. not surprisingly he was also contemptuous of Joseph Weizenbaum's critique of AI, writing: "This moralistic and incoherent book 1/3

in 1954 telephone employees at Mountain Bell came to Boulder, Colorado for "Dial Day" to teach residents how to dial a telephone. reportedly, employees explained "how busy signals were different than siren-like tones that indicated that a caller had mis-dialed." #othernetworks

one of the @mediaarchaeology.bsky.social's very talented artist in residence is hosting a "Mundane Magic Lantern Spectacular" every Monday this semester 5-7pm in the MAL pop up on campus (CASE W250). come play with magic lanterns and even learn how to make your own slides!

oh hey this is what 66 feet of antenna wire laid out across a back alley on campus looks like because one can't answer emails and be in zoom meetings allllll the time! #othernetworks @rose-alibi.bsky.social

a wonderful summary of some things I talked about at my lecture-performance on #othernetworks a few days ago 💚

for some reason i was absolutely *compelled* to give this NASA europa mission animation a freebird edit

another episode of "It Would be Funny if it Weren't Me": every time I have to write something new, I have to endure a week of agitation, anxiety, stress as I try to make sense of whatever...until day 8 when I calm down & realize it doesn't in fact make sense & that's why it's so interesting 1/2

if you live in the Denver/Boulder area, I would love to see you at the Boulder Public Library Canyon Theater Tuesday 5pm! I'll be performing a version of myself along w/my fav collaborator @rose-alibi.bsky.social, a lot of radios, some semaphore flags, & a few other neat bits & pieces #othernetworks

have you asked yourself lately whether your troubles are due to lack of practical knowledge, inexperience, or improper application?

also, finally, what could possibly be better than having 20 nineteen year olds check out the @mediaarchaeology.bsky.social for the first time and hear them mutter repeatedly to each other across a row of typewriters and ancient cell phones, "nice. this place is dope."

oh stop it, C.P. Snow, with your charming, slightly self-deprecating critique of "computer gadgets" from 1964!

as I just texted to @rose-alibi.bsky.social, I am trying to say something new at an upcoming AI symposium but I think all the critiques are already there in the 1960s and weirdly we have forgotten them and think "we" (ie even the anti-AI crowd) are coming up with fresh, new, important insights!

as true today as it was in 1963? "In the foreseeable future, automatic print reading devices will handle only materials with great uniformity of layout and type design, such as, for example, ordinary typewritten material" (more from www.rand.org/pubs/papers/...)

I am SO enjoying this very early...the earliest? critique of AI from 1965 whereby Hubert Dreyfus calls the hot air about AI "the production of intellectual smog" #ai www.rand.org/pubs/papers/...

is also becoming convinced that so-called "news outlets" are using AI to generate stories about AI otherwise known as "the circle of so-called life"...

squealing silently to myself w/glee over this test microbroadcast of a Barenaked Ladies demo tape I bought in 1991 to this extremely cute gathering of radios humming along themselves. if you need a reason to come to the Boulder Public Library 09/09 5pm for my lecture-peformance here it is!

please join me Sept. 9th 5pm at the Boulder Public Library (Canyon Theater) for a 30 minute #othernetworks lecture performance involving handheld FM radios, semaphore flags, and more! followed by a 30 minute discussion with @nathanschneider.bsky.social and Q&A. also note....: [1/2]

one last chilling gem from Arendt for the evening: "And though tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people."

"Monopolistic concentration and tremendous accumulation of violence at home made the servants active agents in the destruction, until finally totalitarian expansion became a nation- and a people-destroying force." --Arendt, 1951

"But we must also admit a certain nostalgia for what can still be called a 'golden age of security,' for an age, that is, when horrors were still marked by a certain moderation and controlled by respectability, and therefore could be related to the general appearance of sanity." --H. Arendt

truer words have never been written: "A very large percentage of the many troubles encountered in duplicating work result from lack of practical knowledge, inexperience and improper application." #zines #spiritduplicator #othernetworks munk.org/projects/dup...

#othernetworks!

does anyone out there happen to know where I can find a manual for a Ditto spirit duplicator? the @mediaarchaeology.bsky.social now has a model D-5 and we'd love to get ours working for making zines! #othernetworks

"How to Activate the Potential of Imaginary Networks" is now out! based on the section on imaginary networks in my book #othernetworks, I explore how imaginary networks provide us with meaningful models for alternative future networks outside of or beyond the internet viewjournal.eu/articles/10....

I hadn’t thought about match books as media — but of course they are! 1958 Match Corporation of America catalog in the Cooper Hewitt library

today is the day I'm supposed to work on my syllabus and gosh darn if the toilet doesn't look dirty and weeds in the garden and oh hey I should pick up some new clothes and pet the cats and??

"The myth of technological and political and social inevitability is a powerful tranquilizer of the conscience. Its service is to remove responsibility from the shoulders of everyone who truly believes in it." --Joseph Weizenbaum, 1975 #ai

Joseph Weizenbaum in 1975: "The very asking of the question, 'What does a judge (or psychiatrist) know that we cannot tell a computer?' is a monstrous obscenity. That it has to be put into print at all, even for the purpose of exposing its morbidity, is a sign of the madness of our times." #ai

"We have to sign on to this technology or else we'll be left behind" is something I keep hearing, but where are we being left??? Where is everyone else going?? Is it the place where all the 3D TVs and wifi-enabled toasters went? Is it literal dystopia? This argument is meaningless

you wouldn't think that a book called "Cybernetics and Management" would be so revelatory but really, Stafford Beer already knew in 1959 where it was at with so-called artificial brains! "Allied with new forms of energy, cybernetics is emergent to a new vision of society. 1/2 #ai #cybernetics

love Tony Tost's writing so much - I mean come on, it's like the latest season of Poker Face were written for me: episode 5 flashes a baseball scoreboard where poetics and cheese are tied 0-0 for maaaany innings...

oh boy do I ever feel seen - gift from a friend #othernetworks

oh my heart 😍

it's possible I committed myself to three mountain races, one lecture-performance, and two talks in five weeks. full gas?!

Many forms of “AI” fit fine with our policy. Grammar checking. Sorting a table of numbers. Maybe ML codes to do optimal data regression fits. Debugging code. Etc. But we just don’t think using GenAI to do writing, analysis, research, creative work, etc., fits our ethical standards.

I'll be trotting out my hopefully fun and zaney, completely analog #othernetworks lecture-performance here in Boulder Sept. 9th. come join the fun if you're around! 20 copies of Other Networks will also be for sale at the event. and thank you ‪@ntnsndr.in for making this happen 💚

the best and maybe only way to cleanse one's mind of policies "for ensuring compliance" is to read about binaural beat brainwave entrainment and how it might facilitate astral projection, telepathy and lucid dreaming. so there.

sometimes I like to imagine someone like Hugh Kenner or Harold Bloom being forced to take mandatory online training courses on the difference between "enterprise agreements," "stategic IT supplies," and how to make sure you "remain in compliance" 🤢

the smell touch feel look sound texture of #othernetworks!