Celebrating the Winter Solstice as the gods intended: a family walk along Lake Michigan, a trip to the Home Alone house, and the children’s first screening of the film.

If this whole landing an assistant professor job doesn’t work out, then I’ll have no choice but to become a MAHA influencer, and when that occurs, I will be offering supplements and/or a misting spray with this tagline:

Today, Marta Estellés and Andrew Doyle share ideas and approaches to collective resistance: www.civicsoftechnology.org/blog/citizen...

Tech Policy Press fellow Anika Collier Navaroli and I just wrapped her special podcast series, Through to Thriving, with insights from Ellen Pao, Jerrel Peterson, Alice Hunsberger, Vaishnavi J, Desmond Patton, Nora Benavidez, Mimi Ọnụọha, Timnit Gebru, Jasmine McNealy, Naomi Nix, and Chris Gilliard:

“‘My most daring idea is to refuse,’ she said to applause.”

“The same systems that made sure Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color were last in line for clean air, safe housing, and political power are the same ones making sure we’re also first in line to drown, burn, or be displaced.” - @merirei.com My first for @unicornriot.bsky.social

Reading some of GenAI discourse #OnHere abt the tech making more work for folks and wanted to share a resource for examining claims abt tech and promises of efficiency with students. See @alliethrall.bsky.social and Paige Arnell’s unit guide on Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s book "More Work for Mother” at:

Created new work in at least in 20 new ways.... hedgehoglibrarian.com/2025/10/27/2...

Scene from earlier today: a visit to one of our neighborhood parks and my favorite puritanical sign.

I made a tiny edit to the AI acknowledgement for reviewing papers for the International Society of the Learning Sciences’ annual conference 😉

It’s the entire point. There’s no plan to make this meaningful for students. No plan to use it administratively. Its design and implementation signals its only real intent. It’s best and easiest use case is for systematic harassment and to scare faculty into complying in advance.

With AI systems deployed at schools misidentifying a bag of Doritos and a clarinet for weapons in recent months, I'm resharing my library Against School Surveillance Technologies in case anybody is looking for news stories, peer-reviewed articles, reports, and other media to teach.

"refusing is actually the more hopeful, expansive vision of the future than the one that is telling us the future is already settled and decided"

Today was one of the days I am glad for the Naomi Klein you’re doing fine, Naomi Wolf then oof mnemonic.

An important critique for education researchers thinking of taking money from OpenAI or otherwise providing cover for the company by working with them👇🏻

A thread on why you should slow your roll before you immediately turn to AI for all your work.

This is obviously more bad news re: the AI bubble and coming bailouts, stated or unstated. The more personally invested Trump is in the hype cycle, the more he will use public money to delay truth time. But for now he has a notional technology saving his failed media company. Good times!

Should scientists apply to OpenAI's fund for research on AI & mental health? Should policymakers consider it a credible safety effort? Avriel Epps & I see it as "grantwashing," and it's an insult to anyone whose loved one's death involved chatbots. We explain: www.techpolicy.press/beware-of-op...

TFW the Sad Dad and his children share the same music account…

AI’s water and electricity use soars in 2025

Amid the AI investment boom, cities and counties across the US are pulling the emergency brake on data centers, writes Jenna Ruddock. From Maryland to Missouri, at least fourteen states are home to towns or counties that have implemented moratoriums: a complete pause on data center development.

What a cool project from @jenny-l-davis.bsky.social and her students documenting xAI's data centers in Memphis. The website is "a targeted lens on a specific locale and a window into AI’s infrastructural expansion" and has a "StoryMap, providing a place-based account of the story and its stakes."

Vandals decapitated and smashed the statue of Mary in an Evanston church’s outdoor Nativity scene Friday, and the church responded by replacing it with a sign saying Mary was beaten & dragged away in front of her son and is being held in immigration detention. www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/15/n...

Purdue's "plan" to have AI competencies, including "projects" for assessment in place by Fall of 2026 is absurd, impossible, and counterproductive. We have good models for addressing the challenge and this ain't it. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

"The gaffe occurred because an artificial-intelligence-powered surveillance system used by Lawton Chiles Middle School mistakenly flagged the clarinet as a weapon, according to ZeroEyes, the security company that runs the system and contracts with Lawton Chiles’s school district."

👀

“One state lawmaker said it will likely delay the closing of some dirtier, more polluting gas plants that are supposed to shut down in the next several years under the 2021 law.” So higher utility bills *and* more pollution to power AI slop? Cool cool cool cool

Seems bad!

ai detection is, itself, a bullshit ai product. it is attempting to statistically classify language and draw a non-statistical conclusion about who wrote it and how.

“We envision a resistance that is, by its very nature, a repudiation of the efficiencies that automated algorithmic education falsely promises: a resistance comprising the collective force of small acts of friction.” ✊🏻

“The AI industry is essentially unregulated, which has placed the burden for the well-being of kids heavily on the shoulders of parents.” As a parent of young children, I cannot emphasize enough how schools need to stop socializing children into GenAI users through partnerships with Big Tech.

Join leadership and experts from @aaup.org AI team and Mijente for an online press conference on the urgent concerns about Palantir Technologies' involvement with the Department of Education. fedscoop.com/palantir-edu... TOMORROW Wednesday, December 17, 4PM ET Register here: bit.ly/4p3iCh7

[Pausing my bsky break for a sec:] Huh. It's almost as if forcing customers into a technosocial paradigm of "AI" which a) many of them actively dislike for lots of reasons, b) has no meaningful public use cases, & c) is just shit-terrible at what you claim it can do Isn't good business strategy. 🤔

“This is a kind of de-professionalizing of what we do in classrooms, where we’re narrowing the horizon of what’s possible…And I think once we give that up, that’s like giving up the whole game. That’s the whole purpose of why universities exist.”

🫠

"Education should remain the space where we confront the architectures of our tools: the labor they obscure, the inequities they reproduce, the futures they foreclose. Instead, it risks becoming the laboratory of the very systems it should critique," writes Bruna Damiana Heinsfeld.

Each semester I go in my classroom and I try to figure out what we would use to block the doors, if it would be safe to crawl out the windows, where we could hide if there was a mass shooter in campus. It’s such an indictment of this country how we have normalized these preventable tragedies.

AS A PROFESSOR, I AM ASKING HOW ARE OUR STUDENTS SUPPOSED TO LEARN IN THESE CONDITIONS? HOW ARE THEY SUPPOSED TO GO TO SCHOOL AND TAKE EXAMS KNOWING SOMEONE MIGHT JUST SHOW UP WITH AN EASY TO ACQUIRE AUTOMATIC WEAPON? HOW??????????

As an author, I’ve already gotten multiple emails from people asking me for fake articles and books that I’ve supposedly written, because chatbots have told them fake references. I *cannot imagine* the frustration and time waste for librarians and especially ILL library professionals right now.

One of a few albums that soundtracked my senior year of college and will forever elicit Big Emotions.

So we're taking away from actual, needed physical infrastructure investments to create plagiarism machines. Got it.

how much water does it take to disrupt the careers of millions of people? how much water does it take to make deepfakes of underage kids? how much water does it take to exacerbate people's mental health crises? is there a good number? is there an acceptable number?

Applications now open for the 2026 DISCO Network Affiliate Program! Join a diverse, interdisciplinary community of scholars and get support developing writing on pressing issues at the intersection of technology and social justice. Open to grad students, early-career professionals, & junior faculty!

We're running a very short survey to explore why academics are increasingly turning to GenAI to do things that they know/feel they should probably be doing themselves (e.g. write peer reviews, draft papers, data analysis etc.) - please share (or fill in!): redcap.helix.monash.edu/surveys/?s=L...

“The goal of academic training is not to solve problems as efficiently and quickly as possible, but to develop skills for identifying and dealing with novel problems, which have never been solved before.” Open letter, consider signing 🖊️ if you haven’t yet 🙏 openletter.earth/open-letter-...

💀

Yesterday was the 67th day of school and everybody in my oldest’s class made a crown to mark the occasion. Today she reported that the class held a funeral for the 67th day of school, including the kids delivering eulogies 🫠

Computer scientists: "So with machine learning we can extract subtle patterns from massive datasets. What shall we do with it?" Business school professors, every single time: "You know, I think phrenology got a raw deal in the late 1800s."