"What I really would like to see unions do is push as strongly as they can on their racial and social justice commitments. [...] Once you really center [racial and social justice], you can't really go back. If you keep it marginalized, you can play with it." 💯

I went to college *many* years ago, and I can state unequivocally that Dr Toombs was the single most important educational influence I ever had. He lit the spark that transformed me from a bookish hayseed to an adult with an actual political consciousness, simply by speaking the truth, then as now.

It's a stunning book. You might like this Q&A with the author, which features a handful of photographs as well: thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-southern-w...

a story in two screenshots

Today is the last day to comment to the FCC that LGBTQIA2S+ names, stories, identities don't need a warning label. This new potential rulemaking is an attempt at criminalizing the mere fact of being trans or otherwise queer, in the name of discrimination, bigotry, and persecution. Tell them no, now.

this looks fascinating; will be ordering forthwith

Because this country likes to forget what it’s capable of, I take it as a duty to remind us. We sit at the brink of the largest decimation of Black political power since the fall of Reconstruction — a Second Redemption. And the end of Black political power means the end of democracy itself.

We've become an unserious society because unserious people flood the zone without shame and wash out the serious people, who can never hope to keep up

I do think this is a kind of novel problem with our current media environment - Serious people aren't good at making content, they have other things to do, but content is what drives attention. Tastemakers used to highlight the serious people but they're gone, replaced by content creators.

What a day for AI resistance resources! 1) The AI Resist List from @karenhao.bsky.social and colleagues at DAIR at airesistlist.org 2) The Luddite Lab from @alexhanna.bsky.social and colleagues at DAIR at labor.dair-institute.org

Get rid of every one of them.

every time someone tries to make me think about sliding approval numbers, I just think about all the increased gerrymandering, voter suppression, and mass disenfranchisement, and then any interest in those sliding poll numbers just falls right out of my head

Absolutely badger your senators. Become the badger. Become a family of badgers in their phones.

Here are the 8 dems who voted for this shit. Just in case you live in their district. The vote has already happened but it'd be good to give em a call anyway to let them know what you think about that.

The times that a trans student has come out to me as a part of their self-discovery are sacred to me at a time when little else is. This is an abominable and unenforceable fascist tactic.

every person has a moral duty to disobey unjust laws

I need a fresh soundtrack to carry me into summer. Please share four of your favorite albums in any genre from these periods: 1) 1950s-1960s 2) 1970s-1980s 3) 1990s-2000s 4) 2010s-2020s I let you lovely people slide whenever we do our anarchic #BQT, but no cheating or fudging allowed on this one!

The lesson I would take from this is that solidarity across ranks and including students works.

May is the month when institutional bureaucrats pile up as many pointless tasks as possible, administrators whisper about sweeping destructive changes they hope to make if nobody stops them, and students give you handwritten letters of gratitude and heartfelt gifts

Today @dairinstitute.bsky.social is releasing the Luddite Lab Resource Hub. The hub hosts case studies, resources, and political education for unions, labor organizations, and workers who want to fight “AI” and automation at work. labor.dair-institute.org

Congrats, Google. We now have unreliable AI narrators of impoverished information sources, representing their hallucinations as truth. I'm glad I learned to use a card catalog when I was a kid, because fuck this. I'm going to the library. (3/3)

When nobody visits the web anymore, what incentive is there for people to populate it with information? That means AI search will be retrieving information from deteriorating, out-of-date sources and feeding it endlessly back to us. And that means even fewer people will populate the web. (2/3)

With its new AI-based "search," Google is literally killing the infrastructure that its entire business is built on. Instead of linking people to the web, it will lock users into an "interactive" mode that slorps up data what is rapidly becoming the now-neglected and unvisited web. (1/3)

Spread the word: "The Luddite Lab Resource Hub provides resources for unions, labor organizations, and worker-organizers fighting AI and automation at work. The lab provides strategies for worker-led governance and oversight of new technology through case studies, primers, and a resource library."

i am sick of all vowels

Calarts staff has been struggling to unionize for awhile now meanwhile Ravi was given a 4.5 million dollar home by the school. (This fucker went to Yale btw) his "secretary" is actually chairwoman of the school board. www.theartnewspaper.com/2024/11/26/c...

I find it especially distasteful that the secretary thinks she can speak for poorer students. Just because they struggled harder to graduate doesn't mean they arent also protesting. Ai affects them even more than kids with financial safety nets. Animation is struggling and it should be acknowledged

a common feature in this emerging genre is the thinly veiled contempt that the administrative classes of institutions have toward their own students, and there's a simple explanation for this: those administrators see students chiefly as revenue streams rather than fully participating humans

Talk is great, but it's also important to walk the walk, so I'm happy to report that I've also withdrawn a short story of mine I recently submitted to Granta (it's a good story too!) if outlets can't be bothered to treat the craft of writing seriously, then why read them, or submit our work there?

Granta just keeps looking worse and worse with this. “We asked Claude” is an insane thing to say or do or admit to doing! It is not even an AI detector (with all the faults those have)! This literally isn't how anything works.

pathetic!

I read the interview in the Polish original, and it’s truly painful to read. Tokarczuk is a cofounder of a company that uses AI to make RPG games, and got a massive donation from the Polish government, so in this light her enthusiasm for AI surprises less…

Shared governance would prevent these errors. "By a margin of 9-to-1, she says, those who stopped to cast their vote with a dry-erase marker said they did not. “The people who decide we’re going to give this much money to ChatGPT are not the people who interact with students every day,” she says."

Yes - and as a writer or researcher there are few tasks more annoying than correcting a bunch of errors that you wouldn’t have made in the first place.

why is everyone who does it so weird about admitting they're lazy and ask chagipiti things and assume the answers are true, just own how much you don't give a shit, this is so tedious

sorry, but her “often I just ask the machine, ‘darling, how could we develop this beautifully?’" and other claptrap quoted in the @lithub.com.web.brid.gy story is a completely different account than the prepared statement given here. See for yourself!

word? which ones?

Nobody has fucked journalism and publishing harder than Google has over the past seven years

God I hate this garbage company

Asking AI if AI is AI

I am biased, but I very recently had a fantastic experience with New Square, who published a short story of mine: www.sanchopanzalit.com/issues

I read because I want to learn, to grow, to think, and above all else to create a space in which my mind and heart can commingle with the heart and mind of another thinking and feeling person. That shared experience cannot occur with a machine, and I can have no interest in it, and no use for it.

so glad right now to have an entire house full of books written before 2023, and to have made the acquaintance of so many actual humans before 2023

IF AI DID IT (HarperCollins, 2027)

Exactly! I've never read Tokarczuk but I know many admire her work. But as a reviews editor, I certainly wouldn't commission a review of this book or any book I knew were created through a process that used LLMs.

Recall it. Pulp it. Never publish this man again. It's not wrong to make examples that reflect the values we wish to live by in the world.

A lot of the time on social media, I purposely avoid talking about the daily churn, Chuds of the Week, etc., and instead try to talk about interesting books, and sometimes I feel like I’m avoiding the “real” subjects of the day. But preserving what’s left of real human culture *is* a vital project!

“Often I just ask the machine, ‘darling, how could we develop this beautifully?’” Like the Granta ridiculousness, this is all just so pathetic and embarrassing.

And not to be a dick about it, but the same family who owns the New Yorker also owns Turnitin, the for-profit AI training and student surveillance platform.

Hard to keep up with Kang's hackery. Probably not worth the trouble. But... The primary source for this story is Kevin Carey (who has never worked for a school). He has been an EdTech shill for decades, promoting a series of failed rollouts. His think tank is funded by technofeudalists.