“Shock and Awe” was a tell

i have been meaning to write something longer about how the various ideologies of the tech right are just warmed over pro-slavery apologetics

So much of the reactionary tech elite and rationalist movements' views, epitomized in Elon Musk, are indistinguishable from Calhounism. Here is Calhoun's famous 1948 speech arguing that Jefferson's assertion that "all men are created equal" was wrong. teachingamericanhistory.org/document/spe...

Seems to me this PRISM-like thing was what many, many folks were deeply displeased ~2013-2014; now just knowing about it feels like equipment for living

Here's the sort of thing Webloc can do: - zoom in on specific phone, see where else that device has been locally or around country - click a 'route' button to see the specific route - click a nighttime button to see where at night; their likely home No warrant www.404media.co/inside-ices-...

It's what Messerschmidt calls "dominance masculinity," the equation of forcible submission and conquest with power. Its the fruit of reactionary logics pushed to their end: the "self" doesnt have a real Other to react to it just craves constant abjection and death

Something that strikes me as I redesign my large lecture course to address AI issues with exam and essay writing: The incentive structure for AI adoption for instructors and students is entirely perverse.

Typically when the US embarks on an illegal or dubiously legal regime change we use noble words about democracy, rule of law, spreading freedom, etc. to justify our actions. Trump has not done that. He offers few noble words as eulogistic covering. It's a crass power & oil grab, according to Trump.

Elliott Abrams specifically wants this, as does his network. It didn’t begin in Trump term two. Began with Iran-Contra and continued through multiple admins, including Bush and also Biden, who installed Abrams as an advisor in 2023. Same horrible people with same horrible plans for a half century.

Amplifying some key claims from this bold/important article by @ehayot.bsky.social + @mattseybold.bsky.social 1/ …

As folks prepare for a new semester, I wanted to encourage you to check out version 2.0 of Reading Rhetorical Theory: Speech, Representation, and Power. Individual chapters are intended to be assigned as might fit the needs of instructors’ preferred order topics. open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricalth...

You’d think the death of the author/writer/artist and the rise of the “content creator” translates into a cultural emphasis of content over form. Quite the contrary. It’s all form now, no actual content.

Redaction 1.0: barred lines and conspicuously absent pages. 2.0: release documents in large tranches to obfuscate the release; inject new, unrelated images into the mix. 3.0: remove previously released images, draw even more attention to what’s missing from the files. Nothing to see here!

Here's a quilt of Volume 4 of the Epstein document dump. Gives you a 10,000 foot view of the redactions. that's 2,704 docs.

eighteenth-century burn!

Some of those pages are so redacted you’d think Parson Yorick just died

“It is, in other words, perfectly feasible for AI companies to document copyrighted works and to ask them to rightfully credit their creators—and, if the courts rule that training on such material is *not* fair use, to compensate them.”

gen ai as a project exists to ingest the other and reconfigure it as white supremacist fantasy

EdTech LLMs reinforce racism and forecast the death of education.

So very proud of Emily Winderman, whose book is out in the world as of this October!! The cover is AMAZING and the book is INCREDIBLE. Pick up a copy for yourself or your library!! tinyurl.com/Back-Alley-A...

I have a book chapter I wrote about this!! More specifically, it's about how tools like web templates help conspiracists move away from traditional visual markers such as wild color templates and mismatched fonts. Of course LLMs are making it worse. www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781...

"A circular economy of loans and debts and froth and hype…all entirely dependent upon one another. This emperor has $1 trillion and not a stitch to wear. Wiley Coyote at the edge of a cliff doesn’t fall until he looks down. When are people going to look down? The finances don’t make any sense."

One of those “I spent x year writing a book and they just … tweeted it” moments, only, my entire feed, everyone, forever moments. Feels validating, honestly.

This is literal iconoclasm, no?

In about three years the entire university pivot to AI curricula and schools and programs is going to be so deeply embarrassing. We will all pretend it never happened and I will be standing there, looking at people with a mirror in my eyes. This is all so embarrassing.

Some fun* facts: 1. Woodlawn, one of the neighborhoods that became the UC South Campus, was built as temp housing for the Columbian Exposition in 1893: a “white city” w/ the original Ferris Wheel, a “military encampment,” & German/Turkish “villages” Beck, Unfair Labor?, Burg, Chicago’s White City

ai is a fascist tool. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Forthcoming February 2026 from The Ohio State University Press: “Sovereign, Settler, Leaker Lie: Forms of the Secret in U.S. Political Rhetoric”! ohiostatepress.org/books/titles... Pre-orders available at link; the book will be released as an open access title. Book jacket description follows.

“Several of the skits show clankers being treated as second-class citizens. ‘For me, [said Moya Bailey, a professor at Northwestern University] the racism very much shows just how embedded and how tied anti-Blackness is with our ideas of work and labor and service and servitude.’”

Artists are not killing the a.i. industry; the a.i. industry is making it impossible for artists to make a living.

I think about this constantly as I test AI hardware and smart glasses. As someone who grew up being told my family was constantly surveilled because of my dad’s ties to North Korea, I don’t think people really understand what it means to always live like you’re being watched.

There it is.

I will remind folks those images of Nazi book burnings aren't burning just any books. They're burning the library of Magnus Hirschfeld; a gay, Jewish doctor who created an institute dedicated to LGBTQ sex education and healthcare. And a man who pioneered gender affirming care surgeries.

there is no question in my mind that rfk jr is the most dangerous person in this administration and that his eugenicist ideology threatens the lives of millions of people www.advocate.com/politics/dem...

One challenge here is that public officials use this tech as a pretext for acting like *preexisting* laws, policies and norms simply no longer apply when communicating with the public. As if LLMs open a magic portal to a law-free world. This spells trouble for administrative justice.

Oh, good. Classic correlation/causation dodge and weave with a sprinkle of surveillance, as a treat. The mental health uses/applications are honestly terrifying given how ai is refurbishing the ol’ psychopathology-to-carcerality pipeline. Your words live in public. You don’t own your prompts.

Anyone who looks at America in 2025 and thinks, "maybe we can fix this by throwing trans people under the bus" 1) doesn't have the brains to understand what's going on or how we got here 2) doesn't have the stomach for any of the fights ahead and 3) is vice signaling to their MAGA friends.

It's getting harder and harder to deny that AGI is a near certainty. This kind of rapid expansion, this level of investment and infrastructural shift, this amount of *risk* - it doesn't happen without astronomical reward. The other day I saw a big barn, which can only mean one thing: giant horses

“They’re using the trade secrets exemption — that it would materially harm the companies and their competitiveness,” Cuillier said. “That’s not what they’re doing. They’re deleting everything and having a vague cover page. That’s not complying with the law.”👇 talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/th...

"Although Trump has used his request to release them as evidence of his supposed transparency, now it is clear his DOJ knows they would be of limited revelatory value."

Nearly two decades after my principal said we couldn't do anything about kids' phones, so we had to figure out how to use them in our lessons, and after two decades of schools failing to "teach kids how to use them responsibly," phones are being banned and we're getting the same message about AI.

more evidence for “a bunch of AI cultists dismantled large parts of the federal government because they believed that their LLMs were intelligent and could do the work better” thesis

Epstein files? A "false flag." Texas floods? A "false flag." Welcome to the era of the "false flag," where every single major news event is now being labeled as fake. What could possibly go wrong...

NEW: Conspiracy theories about so-called false flag attacks have been around for decades. But as trust in media and public institutions craters, every major news event is labeled fake -- and the volume of posts mentioning “false flags” is at an unprecedented high. read @davidgilbert.bsky.social:

The Trump Administration’s Absurd Obsession With Secrecy talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo...

I’ll say it again: STOP ANTHROPOMORPHIZING MACHINES

So to recap the day: “ai for good” conference censors one of their speakers who planned to talk about ai and genocide AFT announces “partnership” with leopards, er ai companies Someone turns racism dial on grok to 11.

Incredible, the person who made several bad ai generated videos to try to claim Palestinians are fake is Google's ethics guy for making sure ai does not get abused www.linkedin.com/in/andreas-s...