It just keeps getting better. Thanks to my friend Dr. @olamichael.bsky.social of the Hype Studies crew for inspiring the improvements.

I have friends who live in European cities where procuring air conditioning is basically illegal. One theory I've heard is that part of the problem is that the elites - who, let's be real, control environmental policy - have summer homes they escape to when it gets too hot.

Working on a short post called "Notes on Boomer STS" on the problematic twins of a) critique of "technocracy" and b) thinking "participatory democracy" is *the* solution, but now I think my prompt that led to this beautiful image may be my greatest contribution to the field.

Ah, the last bubble was so great.

LA weirdos! It appears that @uchicagopress.bsky.social is giving away my book OIL BEACH for FREE this month (as an e-book) Link is here: press.uchicago.edu/books/freeEb...

I ask this question constantly. I thought our major upshot of the whole Aaron Swartz thing was that IP is a nonsense construction. Many GenAI haters would clearly have me believe otherwise.

MIT Technology Review asked me to review Stewart Brand's new book _Maintenance: Of Everything_, vol. 1. I went into it with a lot of questions, including about how he'd deal with labor, politics, and social structure. It's a lot worse than I expected. www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/17/1...

So wild that the first Maintainers conference was a decade ago!! The other day I looked back at the class I taught called Peoples & Things that eventually led to the podcast to see when I first conceived of it. ALSO A DECADE AGO. fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu TIME FLIES.

This ep of People’s & Things with @leev.bsky.social and @bialski.bsky.social interviewing @susansegfault.bsky.social about @torproject.org completely nerd sniped me and was very enjoyable! micro.chadkohalyk.com/2026/04/09/p...

VIBERCRIME!!! Hahahaha. This is neat. Also, the fact that cybercriminals find these tools useful suggests that they might . . . I don't know . . . . be useful?!?! Yes, for crime and for more than crime.

LMAOOOOOOOO. Not even a little bit surprising given what we already know about how these tools are being used in industry right now, but deliciously ironic given the anti-AI attitudes of some Bluesky subcultures. Should their non-use of AI also entail non-use of Bluesky?

Paula Bialski and I had such a fun time talking with Ben. I loved his approach to the Tor community, and it was also lovely discovering our many research community overlaps. As I say in the ep, I felt like the spirit of @biella.bsky.social was in the virtual room with us the whole time.

This week's Peoples & Things features me and my buddy and guest host Paula Bialski talking with Ben Collier, Senior Lecturer i at the University of Edinburgh, about his fascinating book, _Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy_. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/p...

This is one of the studies I'm most excited about right now. Wish I could watch the launch, but I'll be traveling. But YOU should check it out. Mentioned Lana's study as a great example of taking other humans seriously in this piece. peoples-things.ghost.io/why-do-peopl...

Very glad to share this piece in @modamhist.bsky.social! I am glad they let me squeeze 7 figures into the article. You can see one of them here:

I like it. I try to send junior scholars fan mail, too. I'm on a panel at the Business History Conference tomorrow: Casey Eilbert, a postdoc at Hopkins. Casey's diss and forthcoming book are a history of the concept of "bureaucracy" and its critics in 20th century USA.

I’m in Kansas City for #ASEH2026. I co-edit a history of technology book series for Johns Hopkins University Press. We are always looking for titles that intersect with environmental history. If you have a project, let me know and let’s talk 🙂 #envhist

Nancy Fraser's remembrance of Habermas is really great. At once respectful and critical. Fraser is really important to me for her feminist critique of the system-lifeworld dichotomy that is found in nearly all cultural pessimist technology criticism. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...

This thread of replies from Lee (whom I do not know, but whose work I know quite well) demonstrates a degree of politeness and generosity that is wholly unwarranted given the degree of uncollegial lashing out and intellectual dishonesty on display.

Hi there, @emilymbender.bsky.social! Thanks for this. I have a lot of respect from your work, have learned from you, and enjoyed having you on my podcast. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...

This is neat.

What you see at the bottom of my road. That's Pearis Mountain. She's the queen of these parts.

We got a new little buddy over the weekend. 3rd dog, the other two are medium sized. His name is Pip, short for Pipsqueak but also has a nice Dickensian ring to it. He's currently sleeping on my side in bed, 3rd pic is right now.

Pleased to announce that my forthcoming book, _A Good History Of Shit Jobs: When, Why, and How the American Economy Left So Many Workers Behind_, has been picked up by University of Chicago Press. Very excited. Probably be out in ~3 years.

The critical innovation studies journal, NOvation, has extended the deadline for their special issue call, "The Helix Framework and Beyond. Genealogies, Metaphors and Governance in STI Policy" to April 1: revistas.ufpr.br/novation/ann...

Holy fuuuuuuuuuu I didn't realize that there's not just one criti-hype-y AI "documentary" coming out but at least two. Looks like we will have a whole series of Mystery Science Theater 3000 dissection livestreams. youtube.com/watch?v=xkPbV3IRe4Y

Folks, please share widely. Minneapolis's Capitol Area Architectural and Planning Board has put out a neat call for a Public Project on the Urban History of Commemoration in the Capitol Area. Cool project that it would be good to have great folks on. mn.gov/caapb/commem...

I've long been perturbed that, seems to me, historians of computing do not have a good response to the famous "productivity paradox" in economics. Finally talking about it soon: Accounting for Computing, or Why We So Badly Need Social and Economic Histories of Everyday Digital Technology Use

ICYMI: Our most recent episode of Peoples & Things featured guest cohost Paula Bialski and me chatting with Fred Turner about Countercultures, Cybercultures, and Californian and Texan Ideologies. Loads of fun! And Fred's such a sweet guy. newbooksnetwork.com/fred-turner-...

It looks like we'll be recording a Mystery Science Theater 3000 style livestream dissection of this new criti-hype-y movie, _Ghost in the Machine_, which appears to be _The Social Dilemma_ of our GenAI moment - in mid-April. So stay tuned for details. It will be fun! notaidoc.com/trailer

Historian of flat-panel displays here to reaffirm that this was a bad idea...

Wrote a quick little post about the Big 12's recent fiasco of introducing and then quickly yanking giant LED glass basketball courts. peoples-things.ghost.io/the-fall-of-...

Hi, everybody. A colleague has asked me about "the history of FemTech (or, more broadly, gendered digital health)." It's a good question. Any thoughts?

Hmmm. This is great question!!! I have been thinking about this as I dip back into teaching about standards and standardization and find myself going back to things like Andy Russell's first networking book. I've been out of the loop on that lit for too long. WHAT'S NEW ON *INTEROPERABILITY*?

On LinkedIn, Rajesh Veeraraghavan tagged me in a post bemoaning our current info environment around GenAI, including both positive and negative takes. So I wrote up some thoughts, "Bubbles Are Shitty Information Environments, and All We Can Do Is Wait" peoples-things.ghost.io/bubbles-are-...

I don't agree with all of it - for example, unclear how much "proletarianization of high-skill work" there is - but I'm glad to see Henrik Skaug Sætra's "The Tyranny of the Stochastic Parrot: How AI Critique Became a Way to Not See What's Happening": papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Maybe the answer is that there isn't one yet?

What is the best published argument we have yet - including reasonable theoretical and strong empirical bases - for the idea that Generative AI is an especially "authoritarian" technology?

Jacob Bruggeman has a neat new article out, "Phreaking Politics in Modern America," which covers telephone hacking, AT&T's status as an icon of American technology, and the New Left-to-libertarian pipeline in modern American political order doi.org/10.1017/mah....

It was a lot of fun.

I really enjoyed Jon Lindsay's LONG rant of a review of Yudkowsky and Soares dumb _If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies_ book. What I most appreciate about it is how it attacks the book from *so many* different angles dolos.substack.com/p/if-anyone-...

Bob Charette has given a new talk, "Trillions Spent, Still Failing: Why IT Needs Human-Centered Thinking," building on his recent IEEE Spectrum article and decades of work on how and why software system developments, modernizations, etc. so often fail. www.youtube.com/watch?v=FslT...

Neat article shared on The Maintainers list, "Army surveys existing contracts to expand right to repair access." The US federal government has been using procurement to do regulation by fiat at least since the 1920s. See my _Moving Violations_. federalnewsnetwork.com/army/2026/02...

A friend nicely let me know my old essay, "You're Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype," where I coined the term criti-hype, had become inaccessible. So I've reposted it for now on my Ghost newsletter. peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-...

Man, this is beautiful. I'm going to use this image in a lot of future talks when I critique idealist forms of explanation in the humanities and social sciences that act as if ideas move and do things on their own. ChatGPT FTW.

My buddy and soon-to-be podcast cohost @benwaterhouse.bsky.social has written one of my favorite pieces yet critically connecting 1960s counter-culture to the rise of "neoliberalism" - "Big Brother and the Holding Company: What the 1960s Did for Neoliberalism." benjaminwaterhouse.com/wp-content/u...

Very excited about this week's Peoples & Things episode featuring historian of computing Tom Haigh talking about his forthcoming book with the working title, _Artificial Intelligence: The History of a Brand_. newbooksnetwork.com/111-thomas-h...

New Peoples & Things episode this week features Verena Halsmayer talking about her award-winning book, _Managing Growth in Miniature: Solow’s Model as an Artifact_, including how it relates to the economics of technological change. newbooksnetwork.com/managing-gro...

I enjoyed Bob Charette's new piece at IEEE Spectrum, "Trillions Spent and Big Software Projects Are Still Failing." I've long believed this is one of many factors at play in the "productivity paradox" of computing. spectrum.ieee.org/amp/it-manag...

Hey, y'all! This week we have a special episode of Peoples & Things - a recent livestream featuring very special guest host danah boyd talking with Cory Doctorow about his new book, _Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It_. newbooksnetwork.com/cory-doctoro...