Data & Society
@datasociety.bsky.social
An independent research and policy institute working toward a future where people, not technology, come first.
In polling and policy, anger against data centers and anxieties about AI are usually treated as separate topics: "one an expression of environmental & civic worries, the other concerns about job loss & chatbots. But there's growing evidence that it's not so clear-cut." www.wired.com/story/how-da...
How Data Centers Broke American Politics
What the Unabomber, Steve Bannon’s tech guy, and Bernie Sanders taught me about the great data center backlash of 2026.
wired.com
"The same AI executives who promise that their products will deliver human civilization to a triumphant future seemingly cannot release consumer-grade tools without face-planting." www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
The Return of ‘Move Fast and Break Things’
The AI industry is getting sloppier.
theatlantic.com
On Wikipedia, errors are corrected publicly; responsibility is shared and edits can be traced. By contrast, AI-generated information like Grokipedia obscures the process by which it was gathered: “It *sounds* right....And that’s worse.” www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...
The Accidental Architect of the Internet’s Brain
Steven Pruitt has made more than six million edits to Wikipedia. Here’s what his life looks like beyond the screen.
newyorker.com
AI "is the backbone of a superstructure that merges regressive politics with unchecked economic power in the guise of technological innovation," @tressiemcphd.bsky.social writes, offering a reading list to help us ask better questions in an era of "data politics." www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/o...
Opinion | Want to Fight Back Against Big Tech? Start Here.
A.I. is a political theory. And it is gobbling up our democracy.
nytimes.com
“When our conversations about AI in college remain tethered to the idea that students might use it to cheat, we miss the larger context in which executives view AI, first and foremost, as a labor-saving (and labor-disciplining) device,” @dennismhogan.bsky.social writes.
Dennis Hogan@dennismhogan.bsky.social · 3w agoMany faculty have been sounding the alarm about the problems generative AI poses for student learning. Strangely, some higher ed administrations seem have emerged as major AI boosters. Why? As I write in the latest @hedgehogreview.bsky.social it's a labor story: hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-f...
This incident shows that having humans in the loop (or restricting AI agents to a sandbox) cannot, by itself, guarantee meaningful oversight. Check out our primer for more on what human oversight of these agents actually requires, in practice. www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...
Inside OpenAI’s Hack of Hugging Face
Hugging Face’s chief science officer recounts the cybercrime that signals a terrifying new era for A.I.
newyorker.com
Data & Society@datasociety.bsky.social · last wk.📣 New! As AI agents are increasing used for daily tasks, their relative autonomy challenges traditional means of human oversight. Samir Passi & Ranjit Singh show why oversight can't rest on individual users alone, w specific recommendations for builders and deployers. datasociety.net/research-lib...
Greater cultural awareness of Meta glasses has also made them “a lightning rod for broader anxieties about surveillance and the perils of new technology.” www.thecut.com/article/the-...
The Cursed Quest to Make Meta Glasses Cool
How much star power does it take to make surveillance chic?
thecut.com
📣 New! As AI agents are increasing used for daily tasks, their relative autonomy challenges traditional means of human oversight. Samir Passi & Ranjit Singh show why oversight can't rest on individual users alone, w specific recommendations for builders and deployers. datasociety.net/research-lib...
Technology “extends our capacities and faculties as human beings, and in that extension, there is a simultaneous amputation, a something-lost that is often only visible or admissible in hindsight,” @smathewss.bsky.social writes. www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...
Getting Off with the Luddites | Sarah Thankam Mathews
They see Big Tech as having eroded commonality: the common good, the social fabric, the institutions of collective interest. Luddism, as they conceive of it, is a communal, spiritual, and political pr...
nplusonemag.com
“If we don’t find a way to call this out from an education perspective, I fear that we will lose a generation of kids,” says @rweingarten.bsky.social. “The work of teaching and learning in the earliest grades should be done without AI.” www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/t...
Teachers’ Union Urges Schools to Curb A.I. Chatbots and Screen Time
The American Federation of Teachers recommended “no screens” at all for those in second grade or younger, and no A.I. chatbots for students in elementary school.
nytimes.com
Once AI companies have taught their models to perform a certain job, their need for more training data in that area could sharply decline. In this way, data-training start-ups are like the freelancers they employ: making $$ today, in danger of being dropped tomorrow. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/b...
The Work of Helping A.I. Destroy Work
Start-ups are paying white-collar professionals to teach their jobs to artificial intelligence models. It’s a bonanza. It’s bleak. Where will it end?
nytimes.com
A lesson from the history of household tech, from the vacuum cleaner to the AI family assistant: Labor-saving technology tends to create domestic systems that are far more efficient over all, but not necessarily easier for the people doing the labor. www.newyorker.com/culture/prog...
The A.I. Gender Gap Meets the Parenting Gender Gap
Women use A.I. less than men and do more of the cognitive work at home. The A.I. “family assistant” promises to bridge both divides.
newyorker.com
New research suggests that LLMs can develop their own biases from experience, separate from their training data. This can lead them to stereotype job applicants even more than humans do. www.technologyreview.com/2026/07/20/1...
AI is more likely than humans to form biases when hiring
AI doesn’t just learn stereotypes from its training. It can cook up new ones, too.
technologyreview.com
“No fellowship, academy or glossy public opinion campaign can repair what years of extraction and broken promises have eroded,” @jbbranch.bsky.social writes. “[T]rust, once squandered, is far harder to build than the next model update.” www.chicagotribune.com/2026/07/16/o...
J.B. Branch: Brace yourself for the AI public relations blitz
Big Tech has a major accountability and responsibility problem. But the tech bros see it as nothing more than a serious PR problem.
chicagotribune.com
To make govt services more accessible & accountable, @baricks.bsky.social, @boston.gov’s aleja jimenez jaramillo & @megyoung0.bsky.social call on state & local govts to explore collectively-governed “in-house” alternatives to commercial language translation tech. datasociety.net/research-lib...
We’re so excited to introduce you to our beautiful new website, our first major redesign in many years! The new site was designed to make our research easier to discover, highlight our impact, and help us tell new kinds of stories. Check it out: datasociety.net
Opportunity alert! In partnership with @rooseveltinstitute.org, we’re excited to launch the Good Life Residents Program on AI, for emerging scholars & practitioners examining how public policy can shape investment in generative AI. Learn more & apply by Aug 12! rooseveltinstitute.org/careers/good...
Good Life Resident Program
The Good Life Residents Program is a six-month initiative focused on developing new leaders and elevating bold ideas centered around six economic policy priorities for the Roosevelt Institute, as part...
rooseveltinstitute.org
"Silicon Valley seems to have only just begun reckoning with what it means for its primary business operations to be in the material realm," @matteowong.bsky.social writes. "You cannot vibe-code a data center." www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
Silicon Valley Has Lost Its Biggest Advantage
In the data-center age, the business of tech companies is more like oil-refining than coding.
theatlantic.com
"Rather than naively assuming all AI innovation is socially beneficial, we should ask: what exactly does the public receive in return beyond access to a technology of dubious value?" @swachter.bsky.social writes. www.computerweekly.com/opinion/The-...
The public deserves socially beneficial technology in return for its AI investment | Computer Weekly
It is important to understand that AI companies would not be successful without the public’s support. Our data, our land, our electricity, our water and our weakened fundamental and individual rights ...
computerweekly.com
As web searches are increasingly performed by AI chatbots, the number of people visiting websites is falling. It's a change that poses a serious threat to the open web. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/t...
How Google’s A.I. Search Is Imperiling the Open Web
As Google incorporates more artificial intelligence into search, people are spending more time on Google. Some website operators are crying foul.
nytimes.com
"When a company chooses to opt you into an AI feature, they are making decisions with real-world consequences," @thiccreese.bsky.social writes. If a company "opts millions of users into a deepfake tool, then a world filled w even more deepfakes becomes more possible." www.wired.com/story/please...
Please Stop Making Me Opt Out of AI
I’m sick of “opt-out” toggles for automatically enabled generative AI features. It’s past time to make “opt in” the default setting for sensitive features.
wired.com
A must-read by Director of Research @alicetiara.bsky.social: "AI slop lets the right simultaneously annoy anti-AI liberals, animate divisive stereotypes, and boost tech companies embracing anti-democratic principles, all while increasing social media engagement." 🔥
The Bulwark@thebulwark.com · 3w agoWhile Republicans and Democrats are growing suspicious of AI at roughly the same pace, right-wing politicians and influencers have embraced AI slop in a way that the left has not. Why? @alicetiara.bsky.social on the right's love affair with AI slop:
If you were perplexed by Anthropic’s latest ad, you are not alone! As @lilashroff.bsky.social writes, the ad "captures the company’s ambivalence about its own existence.” www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
Anthropic Accidentally Made the Perfect Commercial
How a 90-second ad encapsulates the AI industry
theatlantic.com
We’re also searching for a seasoned project coordinator to give critical operational coordination and support to the AI Civics program. Learn more and apply by July 29! job-boards.greenhouse.io/datasocietyr...
Project Coordinator, AI Civics
Remote - NYC
job-boards.greenhouse.io
Data & Society@datasociety.bsky.social · 3w ago🚨 Job alert: We're hiring a senior researcher for our AI Civics program! This subject-matter expert will be a lead contributor to our ambitious work on civic action and community control over AI. Learn more and apply by July 30! job-boards.greenhouse.io/datasocietyr...
🚨 Job alert: We're hiring a senior researcher for our AI Civics program! This subject-matter expert will be a lead contributor to our ambitious work on civic action and community control over AI. Learn more and apply by July 30! job-boards.greenhouse.io/datasocietyr...
Senior Researcher, AI Civics
Remote - NYC
job-boards.greenhouse.io
What Kaiser call center nurses are experiencing is part of a broader trend: Across different industries, persistent surveillance is increasing stress levels for workers who are resolving complex, emotionally-charged issues. themarkup.org/artificial-i...
Kaiser nurses say surveillance of them is undermining healthcare – The Markup
Call center nurses at Kaiser Permanente said workplace surveillance tools and AI prioritize speed and cost savings over quality and safety.
themarkup.org
In an excerpt in @wired.com, the authors of "Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI" examine one of ELIZA’s earliest interactions and how it laid the groundwork for human relationships with computers for decades to come. www.wired.com/story/invent...
The Chatbot That Foretold Why People Share Secrets With ChatGPT
In the 1960s an MIT professor named Joseph Weizenbaum created a chatbot called ELIZA. The conversations people had with it set precedents for the chatbots to come.
wired.com
The growing use of workplace data is a “slippery slope,” says D&S’s @aihathing.bsky.social. “Any type of activity can be interpreted as indicative of performance,” even when it's not, and “technical systems might not be able to parse why data is missing.” www.inc.com/georgia-fear...
Meta Workers on Maternity and Medical Leave Claim Tech Giant's AI Punished Them for Being Away
The tech giant says people—not AI—made its layoff decisions. Twenty-six employees say the data guiding those decisions punished legally protected absences.
inc.com
“[I]f software cannot bear responsibility, the responsibility does not evaporate. It stays with the people and institutions that designed the screen, set its thresholds, supplied its data, configured it, bought it, and benefited from it.” www.techpolicy.press/assigning-re...
Assigning Responsibility When AI Discriminates Against Job Applicants
As AI systems become more ubiquitous in hiring, courts are beginning to answer the question that policy keeps postponing: who owns an automated decision?
techpolicy.press
"Instagram demanded a certain sort of woman and then produced her, deranging broad swaths of the population in the process," Jia Tolentino writes. "AI, which...builds on the premise that what is specifically human is inferior, for being imperfect, will do worse." www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...
Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare
As cosmetic procedures become both more invisible and more extreme, our connection to reality is fraying.
newyorker.com