#HPS #STS 🗃️

First Concert: Good Charlotte, lol Best Concert: oof, how to choose….Vampire Weekend? Bilmuri? Jason Isbell? Last Concert: Blood Orange and Turnstile

three ideas (chat, scroll, and email) hooked up to increasingly large space heaters

Towson University's COMM department is hiring an Associate or Full Professor to join us and serve as department chair. See the link below for the call and to apply. I'm chairing this search, so I'm happy to answer any questions. Unofficial review of applications begins at the end of October.

I beg you: if you're submitting a chapter to an edited collection + the editors ask you to use a specific citational style, please do not use citation services or just copy + paste from who knows where. Sincerely, someone who has been chasing down authors' first names all weekend.

‘I can’t meet, I’m on an oil rig’: the signs it might be a romance fraud Source: www.theguardian.com/money/2025/s... #GuardianHaiku: wgx.github.io/guardian-hai...

"hey man, what are you up to today?" "tons of plans, man, busy day ahead for sure for sure" The plans:

artificial intelligence peaked with my email telling me I forgot to attach something

"If the essays speak to one another, flow logically from one to another, and/or are organized in tight thematic groupings, these qualities will also enhance your case." We in #teamrhetoric love a good edited collection. If you're developing one, this is a great brief read. (Also, send it my way!)

Colleagues: my department is hiring! Please share far and wide … psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/PSU_Ac...

Meta has created a super PAC to fight against AI regulation. Meta is pouring tens of millions into the American Technology Excellence Project—a super PAC built to block state-level AI regulations and boost tech-friendly candidates, Axios reports. techcrunch.com/2025/09/23/m...

My semi-annual reminders about the FIRE annual “free speech” rankings on college campuses: 1) FIRE has promoted highly punitive and restrictive positions on free speech in higher ed. They lack credibility as a source of information. 1/

New episode of Rhetoricity for the first time in a while. I talk with @kendalljoy.bsky.social about her timely and award-winning book Sensitive Rhetorics: Campus Activism and Academic Freedom! rhetoricity.libsyn.com/sensitivity-... #teamrhetoric

Looks like we got a “save post” feature on here!!! 🥳

this is gaslighting, plain and simple. No, it's not the worker producing workslop, it's the fucking AI!

fascism's goal is totalizing, which means it wants to take over every institution or group or community. yes, that one too.

People are interpreting this as snark or me calling McConaughey dumb but that was truly not my intention. I think human minds are extraordinary, including his! My dismay is with the way marketing is LLMs is leading people to doubt their own capacities in favor of something technological.

Building data centers is a way to (territorially) rebuild/maintain empire, as fossil fuel gets (necessarily) replaced by solar energy — I can see no other reason to invest in AI infrastructure, as a technology it has no business model …beyond worldbuilding….

Check out the guest post I did for @dhandlib.bsky.social on what I read this summer, practicing the @disconetwork.bsky.social method of "technoskepticism" vis-a-vis critical AI and platformization. dhandlib.org/recommended-... #TeamRhetoric #Academicsky #CriticalAI

Not taking seriously the power of words and not taking other people’s humanity as real go hand-in-hand. Language (and information generally) is the only interface we have between people for understanding their inner humanity, and if you don’t care about the one you don’t need to care about the other

Hey #teamrhetoric check out this generous review of my new book: informallogic.ca/index.php/in...

We're discussing reading practices in my PhD course on Thur with @meloncon.bsky.social's response to @caseyboyle.fail's thoughtful post as well as Kyla Wazana Tompkins: avidly.org/2016/09/13/w... Any other recs for insightful resources about reading scholarship? tek-ritr.com/ethics-of-re...

Please apply for / pass on this vacancy with @tuc.org.uk! You'll be working with the brilliant @adamc-c.bsky.social and with us @connectedbydata.org to ensure workers' voices are an effective countervailing force that shape the adoption of AI. tuc.current-vacancies.com/Jobs/Advert/...

📢2026 Fellowship applications are OPEN!📢 If you are someone looking to inform technology policy through rigorous original reporting or policy analyses, we want to hear from you! Apply here: airtable.com/appIrc1F9M5d...

This Google decision appears to be a complete failure to break up its monopoly. It has to share *some* search data? Big deal. Plus it can still legally do search engine payola. And no Chrome sale. A best possible outcome for Google, the same monopolized, enshittified internet for the rest of us.

Something I didn't get to say yesterday: We heard over and over during the event about "human-centered" approaches to "AI". But if refusal is not on the table (at every level: individual students and teachers right up through UNESCO) then we have in fact centered the technology, not the people.

Any win for Google is a defeat for democracy. Google's mission is to defund & replace information that isn't their slop, and this harms our ability to solve our most pressing problems, notably our environmental emergency. The forces of authoritarianism are ascendant and this setback is part of that.

Check out my Rhetoric & Public Affairs book review of @kendalljoy.bsky.social insightful book, Sensitive Rhetorics. This is required reading for critical higher ed work and really for anyone invested in higher education and the power of language!!! #TeamRhetoric muse.jhu.edu/pub/26/artic...

New goal

There is some great literature on stock photography, but has anyone written on the history of Clip Art?

“But I am a hater, and I will not be polite. The machine is disgusting and we should break it. The people who build it are vapid shit-eating cannibals glorifying ignorance. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”

It’s all so depressing and I’m just losing the energy for this fight, it feels unwinnable now - and when it collapses (and it will) the harm will be devastating - forget the covid generation, we will have the deskilled generation dependent on expensive proprietary software in a dystopic technocracy

“Any hint of looking at the broader system rather than individual responsibility is excised from this paper. That is clearly an intentional choice: if Google disclosed the system impacts of generation, it would probably look way worse.” @ketanjoshi.co on what’s obscured in Google’s AI climate data.

UK can't afford to help old people with winter heating but wants to subsidise failing LLM industry just at the point everyone has started to realise their product is basically crap www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Sometimes, my problem is that I think words, and then I utter them in public.

On a positive note, I am really thankful for the work that @caddiealford.bsky.social and Jennifer Rhee are doing around Critical AI at VCU. humanitiescenter.vcu.edu/labs/ai-futu...

📣 2 exciting things: 1. I'm taking 3.5 months off! No email, but reading recs ⬇️ pls! 2. In December, I'll be an Assistant Professor at UT Austin in the School of Information! ❗️Tell folks wanting to think about & dismantle systems of power in AI supply chains to do a PhD with me! Deadline Dec 1!

This is the Critical AI Starter Pack — go.bsky.app/B2kmVWg

This mighty book has arrived and I’m eager for it to be in your hands! It can orient us term by term to past struggles in higher education and the ones ahead. www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

Just Published: In 'Informatics of Domination,' edited by Zach Blas, @melodyjue.bsky.social, and @jsrhee.bsky.social, published by @dukepress.bsky.social, we were all set the task of writing about one entry each from Donna Haraway's famous chart in her 1984 legendary cyborg manifesto.

So excited for a semester teaching an interdisciplinary PhD course in critical higher education. I built this as a rhetorical studies course, including fantastic work by @kendalljoy.bsky.social, @ericdet.bsky.social, @bradvivian.bsky.social, @shannonmattern.bsky.social... #TeamRhetoric

Tenure letters are perhaps the most consequential document I ever write, and while they're a ton of work, they're also so rewarding and cool to do. One of the best parts is a year later when you see someone announce having gotten tenure, and you know, as well as anyone, how deeply deserved it is.

Had a great time talking to More Perfect Union about the slow destruction of Google's products youtu.be/GvaOUFwXjf4

I'm also not sure why outlets aren't publishing the "five myths about genAI for enterprise," which run contrary to any assertion of any "learning gap" with users. You can read the report! It says all of this!

Also, let’s not underestimate the power of design to influence, intimidate, dominate… www.cbsnews.com/news/hitler-...

I always encourage people to lead with the money when trying to pierce through this hype.

Just got my gorgeous copy of "Intimate confession is a project" ed Jennifer Teets! it features my essay on affective infrastructure via Sirk's "Written on the Wind," plus words by Juliana Spahr, Roberto Tejada, Ara Wilson, Lara Mimosa Montes, and Michael Snediker. plus ART.

Given that this appears to have been written by IT, I wonder how faculty feel about this claim: "Understand that your usage of GenAI-based tools can give you the means to better not just yourself, but also society as a whole, and there is an ethical responsibility towards doing so."

What do you mean my book received a positive and robust review in the top rhetorical studies journal?! So honored and grateful. #TeamRhetoric www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....