This rules. Absolutely the funniest possible outcome. The president of the United States filling in as the headliner of a concert because Milli Vanilli canceled.

"Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about." — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Maybe AI is just the thickest vaporware ever concocted.

On the one hand, the Pope presents a series of carefully structured and persuasive arguments, but on the other hand billionaires keep saying introspection is a scam and that we need to get on a rocket to the future without asking any questions, so it's really difficult to decide which side to choose

"Our first task is neither to demonize nor idolize technological tools, but to utilize them on the basis of a fundamental principle, namely that truth is a common good and not the property of those with power or influence. We must therefore promote an ecology of communication."

"Communication 'is not only the transmission of information, but… the creation of a culture.' [What] circulates within digital environments shapes how people perceive the world and introduces into the collective consciousness images and narratives that direct our desires and influence our… choices."

Leo directly appeals to AI developers, making an analogy to ethics and art: "Technological innovation can represent human participation in the divine act of creation. Developers, therefore, bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility, for every design choice reflects a vision of humanity"

Not unlike academic writing projects.

the manuscript i submitted

wild stuff e360.yale.edu/digest/china...

How soon will see administrators using this Canvas hack situation as reason to go all in on AI?

It’s incredible how much our culture, from music to art to publishing to journalism, is saturated with people who had wealthy parents who supplemented their income as neoliberalism flatlined wages and cost of living priced others out and who had their careers artificially boosted in the online era.

Everyone has a voice, but not every voice needs its own podcast.

We are actively looking for news & views (short pieces) that offer feminist perspectives about the current political moment: the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, Epstein and institutional complicity, AI, fake news and deepfakes, etc. More info on how to submit: www.feministstudies.org/home.html

Our reality is just so fucking ridiculous.

Each generation gets the Foucault book cover design it deserves.

I think the correct pronoun here is “them.”

I wish Bluesky had a flush button to rid my timeline of the last 24 hours of news.

Was this at the Spouter-Inn?

the penne opticon

I think it’s time we all think very seriously how much of the internet and online life in general we’re willing to give up to shut down the panopticon. Doesn’t look like there’s a future with both tech and tech regulation. Looks increasingly like safety means being offline.

What if the digital humanities did more projects like this?

happy tax day

I bet Frances McDormand could doula some death.

"At some point if the ship doesn’t turn around, maybe it will start taking on water or listing badly or hit an iceberg, or perhaps the iceberg has been there all along and is named Donald Trump."

I keep noticing “billionaire” attached to names like it’s an earned credential, a recognized authority.

"AI is upending of the psyches of people who build and sell the technology. It’s startling to watch the raw, almost gleeful desperation of these (presumably) bright folks as they completely submit themselves to a product that demands they shut off their minds and critical faculties."

Related sentiment: “The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. “ ~Simone Weil’s “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force.”

Strange turn: the loudest champions of “nothing replaces in-person learning” now insist that the most impersonal tools built through/with AI are somehow indispensable to it.

The Worst and The Blightest

I understand the sentiment, but feel just the opposite. AI is saturating every surface of students’ lives. What we have to offer them is not small tweaks to their engagements w the technology, but rather spaces separate from it via which they can develop their own critical faculties.

The difference between a millionaire, billionaire, and trillionaire, as explained in Ray D. Madoff's "The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy"

A whole generation of journalists seem to believe that journalism is just stringing together TwitterX posts.

He can’t even fill all the seats in his own renderings.

She used her academic expertise to improve conditions in the real world?

try and imagine a bigger W as an academic

We’re inching close to the charge that something is too real to be real so it must be AI.

Art does not begin with imitation, but with discipline. (Sun Ra)

Remember: Octavia Butler wrote we should save seeds to plant, pick up skills like sewing and carpentry, learn how to shoot guns, practice how to fight, and create the futures we need, even as we look to the stars.

Nice visual/written essay by Terry Godier on how material goods of capitalism (phone, appliances, apps) shifted from being products to becoming relationships. This shift is a mirror of neoliberal subjectivity that demands ‘work on the self’ via moral imperatives. www.terrygodier.com/the-last-qui...

Be prepared for everyone to claim a state of exception, as if it had not been organizing things all along.

A lesson to learn: power expands at the speed of tolerated transgression. Each crisis that fails to end someone’s transgressions resets the threshold of what comes next.

That Overton Window slides pretty fucking fast.

The world could be such a nice place if we allowed it. It's all so goddamn unnecessary. There's no need for any of it. It's so beautiful here. It should be so cool to be alive

When there are no consequences for the last bad thing, you'll get a next worse thing.

Masthead, then headline, then kicker...I ask...is this vertical integration?: "Maybe the significant gains to humanity from these new satellites are worth the losses to astronomy, to the atmosphere, to biodiversity, to human health and to the night sky. Reasonable people can disagree about that."

Same. (Kafka’s diary entry on 25 Feb 1912).

Good morning

I wrote about how the reading crisis can only be understood within the context of class warfare, and how culture and capitalism continues to be intertwined lithub.com/on-the-so-ca...