my sincere hope is that streaming services keep pushing this value inversion until it splinters industrial fandom and peels enough people off platforms that some other type of cultural production emerges

On international students:

we are living through a multi-decade catastrophe of higher ed leadership in the US. admins have waged war on the communities they have a duty of care to protect. and in return for nothing, diminishing their own power and the integrity of their institutions.

we need an ICJ for software engineers

I didn’t want to overreact, and took time to read this. Having done so, I’m adding Northwestern to the list of places I won’t visit or speak. The concessions re: international students and gender-affirming care are not merely symbolic.

Murder www.emptywheel.net/2025/11/29/m...

The NSF social sciences program has funded some of the best research I’ve seen, especially at the PhD level. There really isn’t another country in the world with the equivalent funding capacity to fill this gap, and the damage from this choice will be felt for a long time.

similarly, the majority of US adults use social media platforms every day but also perceive the effects of social media as primarily negative. people hate the control and abuse of the basic tools we must use to participate in society by unaccountable corporate powers.

similarly, the majority of US adults use social media platforms every day but also perceive the effects of social media as primarily negative. people hate the control and abuse of the basic tools we must use to participate in society by unaccountable corporate powers.

“Lots of people use it and therefore the people building it should have all the say” is an argument from faux-populist authoritarianism

impossible to separate the utility of machine learning models from the fact that the people who build them want to rule over us like kings

Today on Volts: I've had more requests to cover this than almost any other topic in the pod's history, so now, at long last, balcony solar! We dig into how "plug-in solar" took off in Europe & how it's making its way to the US, starting in Utah. Backyard DIY types rejoice!

VATICAN III: BUTLERIAN JIHAD

Volunteer to phone bank for Aftyn Behn from anywhere here:

much of the work on AI-generated misinformation focuses on regular users/communities, while ignoring how political and economic elites can seal themselves into a hermetic slop box -- a repeat of the same mistake we made with radicalization and conspiracism in the previous decade

i await further consequences for lying to courts beyond mean words

@thomascopeland.bsky.social and I try to explain why the rollout of user location data by X matters and how it's changing the conversation on the platform after some high-engagement political accounts were criticised for misleading users. www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKr3...

📣New paper! Thrilled to share the methodological recipe for @dataworkersinquiry.bsky.social in this article co-authored with @adiod.bsky.social @krystalkauffman.bsky.social Camilla Salim Wagner, Laurenz Sachenbacher @alexhanna.bsky.social & @timnitgebru.bsky.social 👉 ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AI...

it’s weird out there. the politics of my youth — the individualist, conservationist Montana — are gone. tbh I largely blame the spread of a nasty strain of evangelicalism

producer/consumer dynamic is an important part of the story, but the market analogy obscures how many online communities are now organized around disnormative information practices — an emergent property that I’m not sure is fully explained by pure competition over attention

👉 Our new paper uses daily mobility data to show that spatial isolation is much more common today among those living in advantaged neighborhoods than the converse. 👩🏻‍💻 Lots of massive data wrangling and careful assumptions about mobility data needed - but check it out here! doi.org/10.1177/0042...

the twitter location reveal is like discovering the puddles in the quiktrip parking lot didn't pass a health code inspection. should probably stop drinking out of them regardless.

The decline of religion as a source of meaning in people's lives remains underrated as a factor shaping society. The need doesn't go away - they just seek it out elsewhere in (often false) health/wellness beliefs, (often highly polarized/conflictual) politics, etc. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/o...

there's a very real risk that an era of corporate trench warfare over LLMs has settled in, complete with grinding incrementalism and weaponized KPIs, that will crowd out incentives to do actual scientific research on real artificial intelligence

I’ve been running around asking tech execs and academics if language was the same as intelligence for over a year now - and, well, it isn’t. @benjaminjriley.bsky.social explains how the bubble is built on ignoring cutting-edge research into the science of thought www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

the incandescent rage I feel at being asked to Make An Account for an App That Should Not Require An Account

NEW: When Propecy Fails is one of the most famous social psychology books of all time, a look at a small group of UFO believers when the “spacemen” failed to land. I wrote about a new study from an independent researcher who says the book is not what it seems. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

there's a very real risk that an era of corporate trench warfare over LLMs has settled in, complete with grinding incrementalism and weaponized KPIs, that will crowd out incentives to do actual scientific research on real artificial intelligence

Political Scientist Vahid Abedini detained boarding flight as he traveled to the annual MESA conference

the incandescent rage I feel at being asked to Make An Account for an App That Should Not Require An Account

🔔Job Alert 🔔 Thrilled to share that @stefaniebailer.bsky.social and I have been awarded 1.5 million CHF in SNSF funding for our new project: “Electoral choice: Which role does legislators’ quality play?” We’re recruiting 1 postdoc and 2 PhD candidates to join us in Basel and Geneva!

I wrote about the fake account blowup on X this weekend. A genuine post-truth nightmare and proof that these companies have polluted their platforms so thoroughly and traded reality for profit that they've undermined the very idea of what the internet is supposed to be.

it’s that time of the year again (rewatching Halt and Catch Fire)

Happy to see a bunch of our work referenced in this piece by @brendannyhan.bsky.social. The piece provides a good overview of the reasons why young people have not be participating in these performative days of peaceful activism, but they HAVE been protesting in other ways during Trump2.0.

if you're a human on the internet and you work at an organization without any strategy for dealing with Infinite Gamergate (which is basically all of them), you should read this:

i love when Bitcoin drops below $90k, bc it means my copy of Phoebe Bridger's 7" Killer EP that I bought for $1 at a show in Chicago in 2015 has a better 10 year yield

Community time bank, such a cool idea, New Mexico at it again:

[historically dominant group] is in trouble. maybe [reversing gains of historically marginalized group] is the solution.

i have run out of green chile a month before i am to return to NM, please respect my privacy in this emotional time

New Publication with @lhaffert.bsky.social in @ejprjournal.bsky.social! We study the role of generations in the urban-rural divide, which is increasingly shaping the politics of many democracies. Studying Switzerland, we show: The urban-rural divide is stronger among younger generations. (1/10) 🧵👇

To fight fascism we need opposition media with a backbone. 𝘓𝘪𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘊𝘶𝘳𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴 is that. Help us grow our voice. www.gofundme.com/f/the-libera...

computing should be embodied but the bodies should be either strange and terrifying or cute and colorful

the twitter location reveal is like discovering the puddles in the quiktrip parking lot didn't pass a health code inspection. should probably stop drinking out of them regardless.

With zero explanation, Wellesley College closing down a beloved and successful (and donor-funded) environmental justice program that (among other things) helps Indigenous students. thewellesleynews.com/22287/news-i...

Engagement KPIs have been responsible for infinite scroll UI traps, RecSys radicalization spirals, public shame brigades, and basically every modern ailment novel to the past decade. At some point, you have to recognize that the problem isn't any one technology, it's the metric.

Social media could work differently. We teach digital literacy, but ppl often can’t apply those lessons w/in systems that obscure where info comes from & how it gets to them. What might social media look like if users had better signals of information provenance? www.rawstory.com/maga-foreign...

optimization and personalization zealotry is, imo, the most consequential and dangerous ideology of the 21st century. more than the so-called post-liberals.

I spoke with people role-playing ICE raids in video games to help educate people on their rights and what to do in real-life situations. Tonight, they're holding an event in Fortnite www.wired.com/story/activi...

I’m imagining an alarm suddenly blaring deep within the QAA podcast studio walls

not good www.wired.com/story/senato...