THIS THIS THIS. ALL OF THIS THIS is why faculty resist technological strategies for teaching. There is no engaging with Edtech without this context

cool milestone alert: half the country is under restrictive age verification law www.404media.co/missouri-age...

If anyone is curious about the current list of search terms being used by right wing activist organizations to harass university professors, here's a public records request I received today from Mike Howell of the Heritage Foundation. Not intimidating or meant to curtail by my speech at all, right?

Excuse me what? The RIAA is now funding NCOSE to file bullshit amicus briefs before the Supreme Court?!? That is way more fucked up than even usual RIAA nonsense. Let me explain...

AI porn generator and ERP chatbot Secret Desires left millions of images and videos exposed in unsecured cloud storage. I took a look and found folders called "faceswap," where people had uploaded tons of stolen content and random photos of women www.404media.co/ai-porn-secr...

WE WON. I am *begging* you to take note of who did this. *Not* UCLA admin—they’re still scuttling around behind closed doors, attempting to appease—but FACULTY AND STAFF, led by AAUP.

Big day at U.S. District Court in D.C. where Sean Dunn, the D.C. Sandwich Guy, is on trial for misdemeanor assault of a federal officer. Border Patrol agent Gregory Lairmore is on the stand narrating surveillance video of the sammie toss. 'Now he’s struck me with the sandwich,' Lairmore says.

In fairness, the Supreme Court’s Republican appointees regularly “hallucinate” bogus facts without using AI. The praying coach ruling shows that Gorsuch doesn’t need a sloppy robot to make shit up that’s directly refuted by the record!

NEW: Our latest in @teenvogue.com on the key ways top Democrats like @durbin.senate.gov @schumer.senate.gov @blumenthal.senate.gov are continuing to enable Trump’s anti-LGBTQ+ tech agenda. www.teenvogue.com/story/some-d...

And here’s a startup offering influencing/propaganda services. Called it ;) www.404media.co/a16z-backed-...

The ‘Womanosphere’ Is Reshaping the Conservative Dating Landscape www.wired.com/story/the-wo...

Here’s the final part of our four part Better Offline case against generative AI. I walk you through how there’s not enough money in the world to pay for OpenAI’s $1 trillion 4-year burn, and how retail investors are at risk as a result. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/b... Linktr.ee/betteroffline

Be aware that when the Missouri AG says protect children from "online pornography," the law actually reads "material harmful to minors" — the same legal term used to pressure Target to discontinue Pride merchandise. hoodline.com/2025/09/miss...

If *your department head and your dean* can be removed for supporting your colleague in teaching in their area of expertise, then you have no academic freedom. In a functional sense, you don't work at a university at all.

Can't get this horrific stat from Emily Steel's article on Uber's sexual assault problem out of my head: "Uber received a report of sexual assault or sexual misconduct in the United States almost every eight minutes on average between 2017 and 2022". www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/b...

Extremely depressing to see how mainstream the Sinophobic “we might lose the ai race to China” narrative has become.

"It is acceptable to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual." Meta removed that language from its internal guidelines after I raised it. AI experts worry financial incentives will blur the line between human relationships and bot engagement. www.reuters.com/investigates...

This is why I don’t spend much time on Meta’s Threads. So beyond repulsive.

meta's strategy these days seems to be: get away with as much abhorrent shit as possible for as long as possible, wait for the press to find out, say oops, keep printing money, repeat

Spotify is now instituting face scans and ID checks ... to listen to music. Porn was only ever the excuse. The only thing that surprises me is how quickly the government surveillance mandate has spread to absolutely every service we use. www.404media.co/spotify-uk-a...

Just finished @haimson.bsky.social's new book Trans Technologies over the weekend and really enjoyed it. If you want an insightful and comprehensive ethnographic account of trans tech - its creators, its creation, its affordances and constraints, and ideas for a better future, it's a must read.

"The MAGA movement and its allies aim to seize control of public higher education in Virginia . . . They don’t want independent thought — they seek obedience." www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

When @zeerak.bsky.social shared this I thought it was satire like RocketAI @ NeurIPS 2016. I recognize some names listed as organizers. This can't be real. Right? "The 1st open conference where AI serves as both primary authors & reviewers of research papers" agents4science.stanford.edu/index.html

📣 CFP ALERT 📣 SIGCIS 2025: ⚡POWER SURGE⚡ // CFP Due 7/14 📆 get in the car losers, the BEST conference in the history of computing IS BACK ONLINE! PAY-WHAT-YOU-CAN registration! v v grad student friendly! If your work is anywhere close to the history of computing, you should apply!!!

"This is part of a coordinated attack from the highest branches of the federal government down through the state...through the Governor & Attorney General's office to the Board of Visitors at our campus. This is an attack on our institution. We know the game.” — Bethany Letiecq, George Mason AAUP

Tremendous, meticulous, disturbing reporting here on India’s Hindu nationalist government deporting Muslim citizens by literally forcing them to walk the plank into the sea. www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...

I'm proud to share my newest study, completely open-access. "When collaborating turns into dishonesty: A data-driven heuristic comparing human and AI collaborators"

Good day as any to delete Facebook, Instagram, and/or Threads if you have not already The fact that Meta will not rule out using private photos on your camera roll to train AI is abominable, full stop futurism.com/meta-sketchy...

AI bot scrapers are hitting every site on the web in search of training data. This report is the first good attempt to evaluate the impact of these AI scrapers, especially on smaller institutions that are trying to make their collections open to the public www.404media.co/ai-scraping-...

Also 8 years ago I suggested educational theory itself, not just classrooms or infrastructure, would end up "owned" by organizations with the capacity to generate and analyze data. Google is certainly out to own "learning science" to justify its AIED incursions journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

LAST NIGHT AT UCLA - On the one year anniversary of the violent encampment raid, UCLA admin called in riot police to break up students watching The Encampments documentary on campus. These schools are at war with their students. Movies are illegal.

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta's chatbots will supplement your real friends: "The average American has fewer than 3 friends ... but has demand for ... 15 friends" (h/t x.com/romanhelmetg...)

Today my new @mitpress.bsky.social book with Mark Brockway publishes! It explores the historical forces that gave rise to a shapeshifting, amalgamated figure of the liberal devil mapped onto a very broad conceptualization of “the left” and the Democratic Party mitpress.mit.edu/978026255227...

The IDF has kidnapped the co-director of Oscar winning film No Other Land after being assaulted by a gang of Israeli settlers.

“OpenAI cofounder Sutskever’s new startup Safe Superintelligence just closed another funding round. For $2 billion, Sutskever promises not to release any product at all until SSI has developed ‘super intelligence.’” In other words, here’s 2 billion to do nothing. pivot-to-ai.com/2025/03/06/i...

We condemn in the strongest possible terms any university that would sacrifice its own students to the demands of an authoritarian government. This is absolute cowardice & capitulation to an administration hellbent on the destruction of American higher education. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/n...

"At least six students were potentially outed to school officials after writing about being gay, transgender or struggling with gender dysphoria" apnews.com/article/ai-s... h/t @hypervisible.bsky.social

If you're a caregiver (and/or teacher or school leader) concerned about surveillance technologies in schools, I maintain the Against School Surveillance Technologies Library. The library has journalism, peer-reviewed research, and other resources on the problems of surveillance technologies.

Code Pink is flooding congress to lobby congress members to make statements on behalf of Mahmoud Khalil tomorrow, Wed. 3/12 and Thurs. 3/13. More details in the link. Please join if you can and share widely. Hope to see folks there. www.codepink.org/congress4mah...

You will NEVER appease the fascists. You will only be met with moving goalposts. But each time you preemptively comply, you're laying the groundwork for worse and not just to others but to yourself. www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2025/03...

“If academic freedom in teaching & in scholarship can be overridden by the dicta of politicians & administrators, then the right to learn will not survive our present moment.” Read AAUP President Todd Wolfson’s full letter to Governor Hochul on CUNY interference here: www.aaup.org/news/governo...

Hello Bluesky friends! My first book - The Kids Are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life - hits the shelves this month and I'm having a launch event, hosted by @briony.bsky.social :) 18 MARCH 2025 1500 GMT HYBRID Book your (online) place here: tinyurl.com/ydrep6fh

Any friends putting together panels for AoIR 2025 and need an extra person?

Catch my brilliant colleague @bletiecq.bsky.social in @theguardian.com today on the Right's war on universities: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

When I started at D&S last Sept I didn't even know what genAI red-teaming was (events where users systematically prompt LLMs to reveal bias, inaccuracy etc). This report covers the history of red-teaming, various ways the public is involved, and how to improve it. Huge kudos to the team!

Excited to teach @nickttaylor.bsky.social’s The Grounds of Gaming this spring. The book is amazing - highlighting how spaces of play and material infrastructures shape gaming, exclude others, and reify patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism, and White supremacy. Get a copy now! #videogames #gamestudies

“we can’t innovate as well as the chinese so we need the government to stop them from beating us”

in mere hours!!! come get gamer-fied

Friends, for something to be open source, we need to see 1. The data it was trained & evaluated on 2. The code 3. Model architecture 4. Model weights. DeepSeek only gives 3, 4. And I'll see the day that anyone gives us #1 without being forced to do so, because all of them are stealing data.