From my book -- "The shift to algorithmically informed aesthetics moves us away from an appreciation of novelty, aesthetic innovation, or the cultivation of individual voice towards consumer preferences and audience engagement." How has algorithm-driven content changed what you consume?

"move fast and break things" applied to the scientific method. "On a day-to-day basis we have conversations with biologists who think, 'OK, that's wildly ambitious to try to prevent and cure all diseases.' And then you talk to the AI people [and they ask] 'Why are you so unambitious?"

This is brilliant! www.authoritarian-stack.info

Yep .. Douthat might ultimately be right, but where is the opinion columnist arguing this this is a Badiou style "event"/ rupture in political history

New study finds more generous state safety net policies w/ fewer administrative barriers are linked to better birth outcomes, esp for marginalized groups. Very relevant finding in current policy environment! doi.org/10.1016/j.so... @gabeschwartz.bsky.social @npwf.bsky.social @donmoyn.bsky.social

A smart Democratic party would be organizing food pantrys across the country and using their email lists to encourage people to donate to their local existing ones... Instead of asking for even more campaign donations

From Richard Hofstadter's "America at 1750" Explains the fervor with which some endeavor to undermine the rights of other... whether it is a sincere belief in "saving souls" or a tool used to forward a political agenda.. or both.. is a separate question.

Morning thought: if you combined Obama's messaging on hope with Biden's actual domestic policy results, what would the country think of the Democratic party?

This. We would be so much better off in our politics if we leaned into co-creating with empathy, care and grace rather than indulging in snark and division... I'd settle for a 75/25 joy to snark ratio, but that's just me.

Hey, can we talk about JOY? Join your local progressive groups, y'all! Working with neighbors to help us all can be one of the most joyful things in everyday life. Every time I join anything, I see these kinds of smiles. Here's a 🧵 of photos to inspire you. blacksky.community/profile/did:...

How can we address algorithmic justice challenges when we are faced with unreliable and malicious governments? My new article "Algorithmic Justice vs. State Power" confronts this question. Read here: montrealethics.ai/state-of-ai-...

Shout it from the roof tops!

Real question: why not run independent candidates in the Midwest with this Mandami style worker solidarity message (e.g Dan Osborne)?

The Eugene Debs things is deliberate.. and the music at the end. It's unapologetic in a way that gets the moment.

Dude is giving a solidarity speech from the left... I haven't heard a Democrat do that in a while

Bold move dropping the Eugene Debs quote #mamdami

This is awful... makes me think we're going back to the 1980's where good, critical, investigative reporting is going to have to "become indie" again. Question is whether there is a market for "dangerous knowledge" or at least one that is commercially viable.

As universities rush headlong into AI, it's worth noting that not all things the university does is about "learning skills".. that's a big part no doubt, but there are other values (1/?)

The most startling thing for me is how much the country has turned on immigration enforcement... 43 percent are supportive of things that I think few Americans would have supported 10 years ago

Just from a political messaging perspective, I can't understand why every Democratic politician doesn't lead with this picture and some form of "you're being conned.. when you'd like to stop being conned, let's talk" is beyond me.. maybe because the public doesn't believe they'd be any different.

When I listen to JD Vance, I'm persuaded by those who say that what the right want to do is to use the state to enact a Gramsci-style reassertion of Christian hegemony. The question is what happens if/when that effort fails?

Halfway through the PBS Henry Kissinger documentary. My takeaway so far is that what's different today from the Nixon years is that a fragmented media environment allows you to "hide in plain sight." So you don't need to engage in secrecy to achieve realist foreign policy goals.

What I find annoying is how blithely people accept the "woke academia" narrative without emprical evidence. I think the biggest data point is the Open Syllabus Project. it's true that if you look at the aggregate, it looks pretty biased, but individual departments look different (1/?)

"With Big Algorithm behind practically everything we now consume... we are existing in a time where the threat of becoming a one-hit wonder has evolved into a full-on existential crisis.' What's the democratic value of being unpredictable or novel? Can liberalism and sameness co-exist?

Cornell Information Science is hiring a Teaching Professor! Apply this week for full consideration: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30763

A passage from my book -- "We entrust tech companies and powerful elites to help us manage this information flood by allowing ourselves to be optimized and classified through recommendation algorithms... (1/2)

This is a beautiful reflection on The Brother's Karamazov (A book I'd admit I didn't finish as an undergrad). the author views it as a meditation on suffering and the Christian response... we are in deep need of a politics of grace that offers both resolve and compassion in the face of suffering.

Reading this article made me curious if any higher ed institutions were swimming against the stream and branding themselves as an "AI free" campus or having "AI free classrooms"?

Good @nytimes.com article about Setlist.fm posting concert setlists. From the perspective of market-based optimization, this gives the user the ability to decide whether they are going to like the songs they are going to hear at an upcoming concert (1/?)

As more graduate students unionize, it’s becoming tougher for universities to afford their salaries, pushing some programs to shrink, she notes." Ironically, I'd like to see more empirical evidence supporting this claim... But we're awarding fewer Ph.Ds to do that work so....

Janet Planet was pretty cool... Nice to see a well crafted, quiet, lo-fi film after a day thinking and writing about the looking AI apocalypse 😮 youtu.be/_aBF_v0gvpQ?...

This guy understands the political moment....

This has been an instructive for me. The view of politics as pocketbook voting was wrong... IMHO.. Trumpism created a cultural solidarity in which large numbers of farmers and small buisness owners will take financial losses and view it as "sacrifice" in the great struggle between good and evil.

Wise from Paul Musgrave... U.S. hegemonic withdrawal and the destruction of the post war liberal international order is proceeding apace and it's not coming back.. we need imaginative thinking about what should come next. musgrave.substack.com/p/dual-colla...

The takeaway from this article is that student AI use reduces "cognitive friction" so users don't exert as much mental energy on tasks (e.g. students can't easily recall work they "co-wrote" with ChatGPT. I'm a little hesitant to blame AI for this (1/3)

Great segment!! We've lost the art of debate and desperately need to recapture it youtu.be/-9QQNgMxdPY?...

Good advice for your cognitive health. It does no good to marinate in what is rather than thinking creatively about what can become and how to bring it about (my humble morning opinion)

Persuasive piece by Paul Musgrave. Maybe the problem isn't only the U.S. but a global rejection of the "open society" that academia promotes. If nations wanted, they could scoop up a lot of highly educated human capital to educate their people, but we might be in a global anti-intellectualism era.

The analog resistance is afoot! It includes coloring books and crochet needles!!

Good write up from @bcmerchant.bsky.social on the struggles and hopes of venturing on his own and starting a newsletter. I'm wondering if that will be the fate of a growing number of academics in the coming years. www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-to-win...

Every univerity can't go the route of every building looking like a Marriott lobby .. is the alternative to counter-program.. we don't have rock climbing walls.. we have books and in-depth discussions? www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...

The rampining up of strikes on "narco-terrorists" in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans is indicative of what Brian Massumi called "pre-emption" over "deterrence".... rather than use due process, the administration is likely using predictive models to pre-determine whether a boat is an enemy.

A deep-felt thank you to @jchanenson.bsky.social for the conversation about my book "You Must Remain an Algorithmic Problem" on the @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social podcast. I regulary listen.. it's taught me so much! I'm honored to be a tiny droplet in an ocean of knowledge @brisunipress.bsky.social

I'm hoping to make this talk.... important argument in the book is the "hackability" of our 18th century liberal democratic systems.... This Cory Doctrow piece is a prime example of tech companies engaged in "local optimization" rather than the public good. lithub.com/how-american...

Do AI agent browsers like Perplexity's Comet browser run into the same problem as driverless cars? The effectiveness is impacted by the infrastructure... bad browser designs and malicious actors will undermined the spread of the tech.. but unlike the cars, AI browsers r here and widespread already.

Good explainer on how accounts make money on Instagram by pushing violent content... and how Meta can both claim it's working to keep violent content of the platform and create incentives for creators to profit handsomely from pushing this content youtu.be/F81iSLDzzpo?...

Had a great conversation today with @citizencyborg.bsky.social and Nir Eisikovitz on the @ieet.bsky.social podcast Prosthetic Gods about my book. It's a really great tech podcast... One of the few that offers a dialogue between techno-optimism and techno-pessimism @brisunipress.bsky.social

Lived Experience: an Introduction to Phenomenology | Fall Courses | BISR Online | buff.ly/pybwfDI

My latest from @hyperallergic.com is on Trump’s proposed triumphal arch—& why looking at the structure’s history symbolizing imperialism & subjugation + its reception (Napoleon, Hitler) is important. NB: the ecclesiastical architectural firm pitching this structure. hyperallergic.com/1050375/the-...

"Charles Taylor understood that delusion and fullness are different sides of a coin. A relationship with a chatbot is not relational – there is no one on the other end. The synthetic agent that affirms every impulse doesn’t represent the divine, but another instance of surveillance capitalism."