Excellent reporting. This is the precisely the purpose of algorithms that displace human labor and human interaction; it’s not a glitch, and rather than focus on hypothetical harms and doomsday scenarios that only serve as PR for how powerful “AI” is, look at the harms it’s doing right now.

this kinda stuff is prohibited in the EU thanks to all the "red tape" that's "slowing down innovation" that big tech constantly complains about

Wag the Dog was a cool movie.

“Don’t walk in” instead of “just walk out.”

“I am sorry that when you played that romantic Johnny Cash song and said it was about us I sang the lyrics into our dog’s ear.”

These four “frictions” laid out here are helpful. Worth a read.

It’s me! And @profgabriele.com talking dirtbag medievalism (2026 goal, for real: submit the book proposal. I do have a couple of related shorted pieces in the pipeline!)

From Meta to Google to xAI, a team of researchers are using open-source intelligence to map the growth of America’s AI datacenters. @evystadium.bsky.social breaks down how Epoch AI’s map works. Full story by @mjgault.bsky.social here: www.404media.co/researchers-...

I wanted to include a reference to Harold Innis in something I’m writing, but I hadn’t read him since grad school, so my sicko ass spent the last two days re-reading Empire and Communication, and my God I cannot get that time back, but at least I have maintained my intellectual integrity?

No one could read before Gutenberg. Except five priests and the pope. The alphabet was a secret.

I'd love to work with a bunch of historians to create audiobook-only syllabi for people who like to learn that way. There is a shocking amount of good academic history on audio; that's how I did about a quarter of my general exam reading.

If you’re a historian of medieval manuscripts who reads anything by historians of the 20C, you get REEEEAAAALLLLL inured to sentences like this one. My eyes have calluses.

There is an entire genres of medieval medieval music and poetry that romanticizes the countryside in opposition to urban centers. It’s called the “pastourelle”. So yeah, neither unique to the US nor to the present

you can join the AI Skeptics Reading Group here; i'll be sending a reminder to buy the book (or the ebook) soon

some reading groups starting January 12: - Thought Soup (buying books from @workshops4gaza.bsky.social store @openpoetrybooks.bsky.social to raise money for Palestinians) ➡️ "echolalia echolalia" by @pipagaopoetry.bsky.social - AI Skeptics Reading Group ➡️ "Resisting AI" by @danmcquillan.bsky.social

Two very cool things I learned this year are (a) that I really like audio books; and (b) instead of remembering information based on a mental image of where it was on the page, I “see” it based on where I was when I got to that part of the audiobook.

Apps are open for our spring session of the Cross-Reference Coalition! We're exploring Search & Discovery! "Our journey will encompass the history of exploration + cartography, legacies of inquiry, tools of discovery, theories of curiosity, and counter-algorithmic means of 'finding things out.'"

First novel of the year: Mona Awad's _Bunny_. I very much enjoyed her _All's Well_ last year and am delighted to add another person to my stack of beloved contemporary authors with minds just the right kind of perverse.

Technofascism and antisemitism is just a new iteration of an old story. sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...

Back on my bs in 26! This is from one of the earliest chromolithographed books in England (1849, more or less, published in fascicles)--not perfect, but very good. But the team was French and the print-run small. The flat, yellow of the facsimile in the QT is more normal for larger projects.

As it happens, I have experience with high-level government demands to stop an explosive, accurate story from running, and I also have experience with 60 Minutes spiking a story I was involved in, so I have thoughts about the travesty at CBS. If you want some journalism anecdotes, here are a lot:

hey hey! as promised, we're back with a new episode! here we talk with @meganlcook.bsky.social about book history (including how reading works now) and grungy, gritty "dirtbag" visions of the Middle Ages. happy listening #medievalsky! pca.st/zt66xxja

Too many book reviews are like “this is a well-informed study of the history of citrus-growing up and down the Italian peninsula. Unfortunately, the author fails to explain how this knowledge helps us to break the power of the Dark at its midwinter height.”

Updates from my reading over the past year includes James Dobson's _Birth of Computer Vision_; Hito Steyerl's _Medium Hot_; Angus _Camera Geologica_ (not AI specific, but a great study of image production and extraction); and Belisle _Depth Effects_. Get Reading!

If you work in visual culture & are feeling pressure to incorporate AI here’s some homework. Art in America asked me to produce a syllabus— I used 7 key terms to anchor the curriculum: bias, extraction, augmentation, operation, the so-called, categorization, & power. www.artnews.com/list/art-in-...

Everyone needs one true friend to whom you can text when someone is wrong on the internet so you don’t go posting that shit on main.

At 3:20pm today, I got a text from my neighbor telling me there's a snowy owl about ten minutes away from me. After driving nearly a mile over a sheet of rutted ice, I joined a crowd of fellow birders and just bathed in joy. It was everything.

Taking me twice as long as it should to paint the kitchen because this guy comes in to demand our couch-book-reading-snuggling time, and how can I deny this?

2) I don’t like the term “crusadercore” because it plays with generally benign aesthetics (cottagecore, castlecore, etc) and thereby normalizes this kind of violent bigoted nostalgia underlying the obsession with the crusades. It also so papers over the longer far right history of its uses

Bildwissenschaft disavows an ethical investment in the practice of history while in search of a universal anthropology. Its purpose is to reinscribe the authority of the art historian as flaneur (never flaneuse), filling out a scrap book of time w a collage of historical analogies & pseudomorphisms.

Anyone who thinks the trans panic is about protecting women hasn't been paying attention.

People who work for OpenAI write like 12-year-old boys programmed with 1950s comic books exclusively.

A story about why book history and bibliography (the study of books and other textual artifacts as physical objects) are amazing and important fields and why I’m glad I call them one of my intellectual homes. The ending is somber, so fair warning. 1/n

“In the online version of the program, the same strategies are taught to the first-year students, but the AI-avatars are pre-recorded, meaning they function more like recorded lectures rather than live, interactive instructors.”

USPS quietly changed its postmark rules — mail is no longer dated when you drop it off. The “official” date is when it hits automated sorting — sometimes days later Which could have major implications for mail in voting — it’s a clever way to disenfranchise voters that’s going largely overlooked

For the Year in Review.

If academics wrote books like substack bros. “If you’ve been with me for a while you know that I like to go DEEP into a topic. That’s just who I am. Well this new book goes extra hard & I’ve written 90k words on my fave subject. But bear with me, folks, it’s gonna be a wild ride, so buckle up.”

Dammit, Ed why do you make me do this?

Strongly recommend this piece by @mattseybold.bsky.social and @ehayot.bsky.social www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

LOL.

What I love about Steyerl is not just that she’s brilliant; she’s also very fun to read. www.versobooks.com/products/332...

Omnia Year in Review 2025: In her Medicine, Magic, and Miracles class, Elly Truitt, Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science, guides students through the storied history of medicine, healing, and the nature of disease.

Microplastics are here to stay; that's why we need to eat them responsibly in the classroom

I have co-authored one (1) translation. It was some of the hardest work I've ever done, and my co-author and I read the publications and letters by Panofsky in order to decide how to translate single words alone. From the intro to our translation. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10....

WSJ said 50% of GDP growth in US in first half of 2025 related to AI yet over 50% fear it. Has there ever been a boom with a greater gap between market commitment and popular buy-in? This is a dreaded technology.

OK Mike

The OP, on the other hand, is right on.

The idea that academics are not responsibly engaging with the actual existence of gAI is simply making up a guy to be mad at. It has no relation to the way this problem is being negotiated in universities. That fact in no way changes the need to oppose this technology in every way at every level.

Abundance.