"Why can't we have a calm discussion about AI?" Because folks don't actually want to discuss AI, they want blind submission to the ideological structures that motivate the contemporary use cases and deployments of AI. They don't want to hear the concerns except to dismiss them out of hand.

Being on linked in is so crazy because I'll see something and assume it's parody but it will be a totally serious post simping for military AI.

In our latest, @ayeshaasiddiqi.bsky.social joins us to discuss “anti-aging” trends and longevity influencers as symptoms of imperial decline and the role the wellness industry has played in producing this moment of heightened fascism www.patreon.com/posts/150271...

GIVE THE SUICIDE BOT ADVERTISING CAPABILITY WHAT COULD GO WRONG

You know that making yourself a little picrew and reading a horoscope is just as if not more fulfilling and less evil than asking chat fucking GPT to "draw" you right?

Hello Disability Internet. I know we know that the professions (like medical, veterinary, dentistry, other clinicians) are extremely ableist. Like they cannot figure out how to accommodate disabled students. Does anyone do this well? For Veterinary students?

"intelligence has to be embodied, so of course that means the more Normal your body the more intellegence you have" this is a real... the speaker is revealing more about themselves that they realize, huh?

This is also my take on OpenClaw and Moltbook and that "AGI" piece in Nature. Plus that people are *once again* misunderstanding what statistically correlative stochastic text and operations generation systems do At All let alone when placed into context and extended conversation with each other. …

My favorite GIF of all time captures the joy

"Whether you are an AI optimist, skeptic, or pessimist, none of us can afford to be fatalists. When we resign ourselves to the inevitability of oppressive systems, we give in to a desperate world." - Disabling Intelligences, Ch. 5, RMW

I have a student using @fractalecho.bsky.social 's Disabled Robots and Jillian Weise to argue that chatbots are Tryborgs *from the other direction* and I couldn't be more excited to see where this goes.

There's a giraffe joke in my book and idk if anyone found it

If this is what they do when they're out on the street with people pointing cameras at them, what do you think is happening inside the ICE prison camps that they keep denying Members of Congress access to?

15 years ago I borrowed a bulletproof vest from a reporter so I could report from a war zone. I held onto it after I returned. Last week the reporter finally asked for it back because he is headed to Minneapolis.

Imagine this is the time and we are the generation that derails the fascist agenda before it annihilates us all. Imagine yourself a part of the critical mass of communities that could and does take power back from these death mongering institutions.

This is such valuable advice and put plainly. Please take a moment. TY @tressiemcphd.bsky.social

People already working hard to prove how perfect Alex Pretti was. To show he didn't "deserve" to be killed. But it's a trap folks. You're only feeding into a dynamic where people who are considered lesser get no protection. You don't have to be an Alex Pretti to deserve to live.

Just finished @fractalecho.bsky.social ‘s Disabling Intelligences, and wow I will be thinking about the closing sentence for quite a while. Definitely recommend if you are in any kind of relationship to “AI”.

CHI26 workshop “Crip HCI: Cyborg Perspectives on Disability Justice” invites self-identified fellow cyborgs to consider what the field of HCI might gain from a deeper engagement with cyborg perspectives on disability justice, “crip HCI”, and better AT. Submissions due Feb 12. t1dsign.org/chi-2026

Reading this, I was shocked not only by the level of dependency on display here, but also by the lack of shame in that level of dependency. Students pay a fortune to learn from us. The least they should expect is that we created teaching materials ourselves.

They tell students papers sound like AI — even when they're the students' own writing — so the company can scare them and sell them a product. This goes beyond the general problem that even good AI detectors aren't perfect and shouldn't be the sole reason to accuse someone of writing with AI.

Yesterday, I interviewed a tech guy who told me something too important for me to wait until the podcast comes out for you to hear it: Many free AI detectors have especially high false positive rates because they make money selling software that "humanizes" writing. 1/2

Very accessible and very engaging. Thinking of "AI" as part of the longer program of eugenics is a very helpful frame for understanding it, what its function is, and how you can think about and react to it. I loved it and highly recommend reading it if it sounds even remotely up your alley.

I've just started reading it and am so enamored with it, I'm putting the first two chapters on my digital religion syllabus. May add more as I go through it. Very readable and I think teachable.

I thought we already figured out gamified eating is just sparkling eating disorder when all those people got triggered by noom's nonsense.

New book post today 🥳 Looking forward to reading this @fractalecho.bsky.social ! 💜

One time I murdered a book club by selecting "Descartes Bones" as the book and everyone else was so bored the club died but I was enthralled and in retrospect it should not have taken me ten years after that to realize I wanted to be an academic.

I've been ranting about this with Hypervisible and @lizjackson.bsky.social Instead of that rant, here's a joke. A blind person, a deaf person, an autistic person, and a person with facial difference walk into a bar. Their state enforced disability dongles bring down the entire AWS system.

"em dashes are AI" i didn't memorize alt+0151 and option+shift+hyphen to be accused of such treachery

As everyone talks about Greenland, don't forget its actual global significance--a two mile thick sheet of ice that if melted would raise the sea level 23 feet (and long before that choke off the currents of the Atlantic) open.substack.com/pub/billmcki...

The pitch goes like this: “If you let us follow you around all day we will surface insights about your life that you would not be able to recognize for yourself.” In short: no. Longer version: Hell no. Extended version: read luxury surveillance when it comes out 🤷🏿‍♂️

The current wave of devices pitched by tech CO’s are all based on the attempt to convince you that near-constant surveillance is a benefit rather than their old story (lie) that a little bit of surveillance was the price you paid for services or that it helped them deliver you better products.

It’s less we assume sentience is speech (see: animals) but that GenAI convincingly generates the affect of personhood (there’s a fun Japanese word for this - sonzai kan). Coupled with AI hype and a mechanical model of consciousness, we have a perfect storm.

I aspire to be generous in my reading, interlocution, research, citations, and collaboration. Not because I expect reciprocity (tho don't get it twisted: that Would be nice), but because it makes this career life bearable and not a pit of vipers. That's all.

Collaborative community organizing goes for academic research and citational praxis too

Hahahahhaha

This is a fundamentally Crip perspective in my view. Ableist systems require and perform ranking, prioritisation and notification of sentient life. Ability, completeness, enclosure and distinction -- not to mention the fetishization of the impossibility which is 'independence'

I always get so excited to go to a design museum and then it's always just edgy furniture and I remember I am not a designer

“Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws’,” was published in Technology and Culture in *1986*— that's *forty fucking years ago* people— & it was delivered as his (Kranzberg's) presidential address to the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) the year before that, so we're rolling up on 41…

The other thing about normalizing gAI use in higher ed is that we are teaching our students that they cannot trust their own creativity, their own thoughts and brains, their own skills without having it reshaped/shellacked/transmogrified by LLMs. We’re setting them up for failure and dependence.

I also highly recommend Goethe's Faust for a 2026 read.

As you begin to build your 2026 reading lists (which is a thing I assume some people do), consider adding my really very short book on AI and Eugenics. Disabling Intelligences:Legacies of Eugenics and How We are Wrong about AI has a lot in under 50k words. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

This is a Christmas present to me, specifically.

Often I am told by my peers, both senior and junior, that they're afraid to speak out like I do about various things, probably most especially challenging specific research or teaching norms more than broader (and more pressing) political issues. And I'm always confused by it.

Agree I worked in a school for children with profound disabilities and had to counter argue weekly with non disabled people who said “chat gpt is a disability aid, it helps students to write”. No, it does not, and in fact it steals work from other disabled creators- it isn’t safe or an aid.

Every single shitty and intrusive technology techbros want to make ubiquitous, they try to justify with a story about how it will help disabled people. Self-driving cars and blind people, voice activated tech and physical disabilities, etc. But that’s never really the reason they want to do it.

Stories about Meta's glasses "helping" blind people infuriate me. Ah yes. Because the greatest indignity is having to ask people for help. Never mind that relying on such technology 1. Absolves society from ever making any serious efforts to re-examine its values and practices

That time of year again!