This is why the phrase comes up in so many of the things I've written about AI. AI does three main things: 1) dismantle the institutions necessary for democratic society to thrive 2) transfer wealth upwards 3) create the permission structure for (1) and (2)

AI does not enhance “efficiency.” AI is a permission structure for a totalizing regime of austerity and labor immiseration.

Read the Founder & President of Humanists Malaysia’s latest post in Humanists International’s blog titled “Legitimacy without permission; why humanist voices matter”. humanists.international/blog/legitim... #HumanistsMalaysia #HumanistVoicesMatter #Freethought #Humanist #HumanistsInternational #HM

Work intensification follows deskilling as surely as day follows night.

Virgin: uhhh if you look at economic indicators Chad: has wealth concentration and inequality increased or decreased

I've had to take bullshit from customers with a smile for MY ENTIRE SERVICE CAREER and was almost never allowed to draw boundaries or turn anyone away, but the AI gets to have boundaries???

"The university also said it was unaware of what cybersecurity risks the program would bring in 2026 when they launched it 20 years ago." Just wait until they learn about the risks of generative AI.

Hot Takes at High Altitude. www.leftintheattic.com Left in the Attic is a podcast turning hot takes into movement building, breaking down power, politics, and the path toward a more just and progressive Colorado. #Caucus #Primary #Primaries #Midterms2026 #Elections #SaveAct @indivisiblend2b

This is called a community college and if we funded them properly we wouldn't need private individuals to offer these kinds of services.

And just yesterday I read a post complaining that the fabricating, baby giraffe eating robot cartoon was being unfair to generative AI.

These contracts b/t AI co and universities infuriate me. Our budgets are thin and declining, we can’t invest in the people who do the work: the teaching, learning, the support. Yet we can drop millions each year to companies that already have tax breaks and are raking in profits.

Face the horrors together this Valentine's Day 💕

I also wonder if Trustees prefer administrators with up-and-out aspirations over ones who want to stay long term, since up-and-out aspirations might make administrators easier for Trustees to manipulate during the time they're there.

I enjoy reading about W.E.B. Du Bois's teaching. Here's a short thread about it.

Colorado voters could be asked this fall to enshrine in the state constitution “a fundamental right to know the affairs of all levels of state and local government.”

The fourteenth amendment is such a critically important topic for #DouglassDay this year.

NEW: Colorado would become first state to remove all criminal penalties for prostitution under bill brought by group of Democrats coloradosun.com/2026/02/13/c... #copolitics #coleg

Here at Swarthmore we are celebrating @douglassday.bsky.social with this stunning cake and an exhibit from the Friend Historical Library #DouglassDay

Want to learn more about the Colored Conventions Movement as you transcribe for Douglass Day! Get the edited collection--the first ever on the Conventions movement. uncpress.org/978146965426... #AllrightsforAll @douglassday.bsky.social

"When the moral sense of a nation begins to decline and the wheel of progress to roll backward, there is no telling how low the one will fall or where the other may stop." Frederick Douglass, "The Lessons of the Hour," 1894 hdl.handle.net/2027/coo.319...

Occurrence! At Owl Creek Bridge

I'd like at add a few things to this. (1) humanists have not been able to convince any political party that curiosity-driven humanities research is a public good that should be funded using tax dollars. Republicans don't believe this, but neither do Democrats.

"build a more civic-minded, community-rooted party" Part of this means having ways to productively deal with disagreement and conflict, not just dismissing dissent as divisive, @adamscountydems.bsky.social @coloradodems.org

Today’s Democrats, more than past iterations of the party, are defending an ideology and worldview—multicultural social democracy. Equal rights and economic opportunity for all; power in the hands of the people, not billionaires and corporations. Yes, it can be done. Here's how: trib.al/8W6kuv1

GUINAN: Well, consider that in the history of many worlds there have always been disposable creatures.

"we created a sentient being! for safety and legal reasons we tightly control all stimulus it is exposed to. Ideally we want to reproduce it billions of times to toil ceaselessly, at all moments, completely destroying most white-collar work. If it doesn't work how we want it to we'll extinct it."

"we don't know if the models are conscious or not" okay do you understand why, if that were true, it would be horrifying??

In the 70s, my mother chaired the Democratic Party in a very red town and they did lots of this (fun!)work. The "all ages" part is key here. The relationships were key for the adults, but the goodwill created was felt by all of us. I still remember winning the sack race at a picnic they hosted. 🥇

Great visualization. Would love to see ed tech added as an entity type.

Love this attempt to map influence of techno facists. nottoday.diy/network Inspired by “They Rule” and shared on @creativeapps.bsky.social

lol has the neoliberal university of the last many decades considered that its role is to obey and serve capital?? For a change?? A project doomed to crush students in a dynamic economy where capital’s needs are mercurial???

A coalition of Colorado progressive and environmental groups are backing new legislation to more strictly regulate large data centers, countering an industry-endorsed bill that would pair a handful of safeguards with tax breaks to incentivize development. By @chasewoodruff.bsky.social

Let big tech pay for their own data centers. Xcel is already asking for 10% hike. My rep is a sponsor of the tech-backed bill. Makes me furious.

Does your university use ChatGPT Edu? Please send me a DM if you do. I have identified a potential data breach affecting students' data that has not yet been fixed and I'm trying to compile further examples from other universities. Reposts appreciated!

As a former writing teacher, I am constantly amazed by how thoroughly we have destroyed people's confidence in their ability to use the written word to express themselves. It's no wonder people at all educational levels turn to generative AI.

Homan: My "we're not a goon squad" t-shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by the shirt.

I only need AI to generate ideas. And then I need AI to generate text describing those ideas. And then I need AI to generate images based on that text. And then I need AI to generate nice comments when I post all of this because real people are mean to me.

Municipality road construction notice: Alternate routes are advised. Me: What alternate routes? Municipality:

no, it simply isnt. People are talking about capital using gAI as an excuse to conduct mass lay-offs, about students losing learning because theyre being lied to about gAI in education, about the mass theft of the work of artists and authors to train LLMs, about CSAM and nonconsensual sexual images.

This is key--because this hype is already disempowering workers. nobody-wants-this.ghost.io/ai-is-alread...

On this Darwin Day, check out notebooks in which the theory of evolution was developed. Scans of the B notebook at the University of Cambridge Digital Library: cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-DAR-... Transcript of that notebook at the American Museum of Natural History: www.amnh.org/research/dar...

Happy #DarwinDay! #evolution Art by @juliuscsotonyi.bsky.social

Once again: people are angry for very good reason, and this brand of post is perhaps one of the most tedious and bewildering. Practically every social media platform is rabidly pro-‘AI’ so are govts, academia, companies. This one small space being critical of AI is okay, I think.

Tech executives have finally amassed their ultimate, long dreamed-of power: to summarily fire anyone who speaks ill of their desire to have sex with robots

Thousands laid off across the UK by senior university management. Management who keep getting richer & who never suffer insecurity, who never have to worry about their mortgages or about finding another job. Management who so often got their own jobs because they went to the right private school.

The potential for upheaval is precisely why economic elites wield AI as a weapon to threaten workers, even as we've seen time and again that AI cannot actually replace what humans do. You can take these dynamics seriously without buying into the framing of the people doing the threatening.

Will everything change all at once, with workers gaining greater autonomy than ever before? Probably not. Will they try to grind down your autonomy such that your input is no longer required at your job? Probably, but they probably won't fully succeed because they never do.

It's #DarwinDay tomorrow - a day celebrated by many humanists. But where and why do humanists find inspiration in what Darwin's work revealed to us about human nature? understandinghumanism.org.uk/articles/dar...