Meanwhile these “AI” companies are just further contributing to the destruction of the biosphere and all the actually sentient creatures that are dependent upon it.

Elinor Elliot@elinorelliot.bsky.social · last yr.

I'll answer that question: No they fucking can't. They're not sentient. Animals, on the other hand, can and are. How about we stop ripping up the planet before worrying about the feelings of chimerical lines of code? www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

1. Can a language model feel pain? Clearly not. Large language models are computer software and they can no more suffer than any other human-created artifact can. >>

“Hype is eating the future, and leaving us the bones.” Sun-ha Hong of UNC-Chapel Hill says the Silicon Valley hype machine systematically “borrows credibility from the future to purchase legitimacy in the present.” The cost, he argues, is a planetary-scale drain on our alternatives.

Tech Hype is Cannibalizing the Future

Every day, we are told that we live in the future—but hype is eating the future and leaving us the bones," writes Sun-ha Hong.

techpolicy.press

“Universities must stop falling in love with every new piece of software … that the tech industry pitches as essential. Administrators spend on software as if it is a durable investment, when all of the evidence shows that it … makes bloat worse.” globecollegetown.substack.com/p/higher-ed-...

College campuses need to be liberated from their administrators

Higher ed is being strangled by absurd and costly rules. What message is that sending to students?

globecollegetown.substack.com

all infrastructure erodes consent, sometimes it bypasses it completely this is uncomfortable (& often problematic), but it should not be controversial to point out this fact

The @digsovobs.bsky.social is hiring a short-term research consultant to develop a #digitalsovereignty digest to inform policymaking and shape future research directions. Apply by October 26th! Details here: lnkd.in/p/g2ff42AV

📣 Job alert: We are looking for a short term consultant to work on our Digital Sovereignty Digest. More info: www.graduateinstitute.ch/internationa...

Swiss glaciers suffer 'disastrous' year of ice loss, threatening water supplies "…in its simplest form, what we see right now is that we took an ice cube out of the fridge and it's just melting in front of our eyes." www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This is quite cool. My university is the first organisation in the world to force Microsoft to allow us to turn off copilot summaries in Word 365, after a backlash against it from staff (including, very vocally, me). That cannot have been easy for our heroic IT people so hats very much off to them!

It's too depressing and obnoxious to write about, but virtually all of the doomy/horny AI hyperventilating is transparently displaced anxiety about our fucked climate and political situation. Even rich idiots know it's bad and being permitted to get worse. They're trying to write their own ending.

Are you a tech worker? Or know a tech worker? Or just want to know what tech workers actually think about “AI”? Check out @cwunews.bsky.social and @utaw.tech’s tech workers inquiry. www.instagram.com/p/DdrTMsqIvX_/

Instagram

Create an account or log in to Instagram - Share what you're into with the people who get you.

instagram.com

"There’s a special place in hell for people who steal from the poor" Criminals exploit a well-known flaw in the cards most low-income Americans use to get aid: magnetic-stripe tech. Few states have switched to the [more secure] chip cards that distribute welfare funds. www.wsj.com/us-news/how-...

How Romanian Crime Rings Are Draining U.S. Welfare Accounts

Thieves have exploited antiquated magnetic stripes on benefits cards to steal hundreds of millions of public dollars.

wsj.com

Ditto 30,000 roles in universities in the past three years.

Willard Foxton@willardfoxton.bsky.social · last mo.

I think it's absolutely mad that today there's a *national news story* about 400 oil platform workers losing their jobs, and the government being blamed. 25% of the UK TV industry lost their jobs in the last 4 years and we never hear a peep about it! Some jobs are 'real jobs' I guess.

About 2.7 million hours of work for no return.

Charles West@pseudo-isidore.bsky.social · last mo.

21,627 applications for the Marie Curie early career fellowships.

‘OpenAI’s policy director…wrote that the company was “creating systems that substitute for the labor of the people that define the ‘culture’ of society”… OpenAI called itself an “existential threat” to news publishers, …“no matter how prominently we show the links, users won’t click.”’

‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft

"Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions."

404media.co

This is why I hate "just a tool" so so so much. You can make a calculator without access to every calculation. You can make photoshop without access to all photos. Someone show me a genai tool that didn't require all of our labour in its production. It's plagiarism software.

Jason Kint@kint.bsky.social · last mo.

Eye popping. Court just unsealed Summary Judgment motions in New York Times v OpenAI / Microsoft. Easy to see why the AI companies had so many redactions (pink). Their own people wrote the lede for NYT, the "largest theft of labor in human history"... "more and more substitutive..." /1

people are always saying anti-AI arguments don’t understand the full nuances of the technology. which is correct. but only because it stole everyone’s work, exists solely to get you fired, has made the entire internet unusable and has been forced on everyone without consent

Exactly. "To these detectives of digital inauthenticity, I say: Friend, welcome to a typical Tuesday in a Kenyan classroom, boardroom, or intra-office Teams chat. The very things you identify as the fingerprints of the machine are, in fact, the fossil records of our education."

I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.

I'm calm. I'm calm. I promise.

marcusolang.substack.com

Citizen.Coping@propcazhpm.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Re: overfitting in ChatGPT word choice: "In Nigerian English, it’s more ordinary to speak in a heightened register; words like “delve” are not unusual. AI is trained on the entire internet… Nigeria has one of the world’s largest English-speaking populations." free link: archive.ph/2025.12.16-1...

***URGENT PLEASE SHARE*** University of Brighton management have announced today that they ‘give notice of termination of all collective agreements’. This is a fundamental erasure of workers' rights. Management have announced the termination of all contractual documents, which includes:

University and College Union (UCU)@ucu.org.uk · 2mo ago

UCU members at Brighton University face the threat of derecognition. We have called an emergency rally tomorrow at 1:15pm. It would be amazing to see as many #TUC26 delegates as possible in attendance. 58-67 Grand Parade, Brighton and Hove, Brighton BN2 0JY

Good luck to all those university students starting shortly who will find their departments looking dramatically different, due to job cuts, to how they looked when they applied ....

Zemene Mesafint II (the age is so disordered it hasn’t got round to a name for itself, let alone the obvious candidate).

🚨🚨🚨JOB ALERT: The HSS Department at Penn is hiring a tenure-track or tenured professor in the history of data/info science, computing, or AI. Please share widely! apply.interfolio.com/192132

A good piece on Aadhaar, its design problems, and the opacity behind some of its purported figures (deduplication failure rates, exclusion errors, cost savings estimates)

Aaron Martin@sixfouronea.net · 3mo ago

"Remarkably, little of the domestic critique [about Aadhaar] appears to have shaped how the system is described to the rest of the world. This is worth a closer look, not b/c digital identity is a bad idea, but b/c Aadhaar embodies one particular design choice." www.techpolicy.press/aadhaars-suc...

Jason Arday is dead, and the culpabilities are numerous.

There’s a Ralph Bunche Rd in Nairobi: Kenyatta and Bunche were friends from LSE days, and he visited Kenya at Kenyatta’s invitation

Christina Proenza-Coles@proenzacoles.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Ralph Bunche, political scientist & diplomat, won the Nobel in 1950. He & Barack Obama descended from John Punch, an enslaved African man who had a son with an indentured European servant in the 1630s. Their progeny split into the "white" Punches of VA (Obama’s line) & the “colored” Bunches of NC.

our entire global financial system is currently leveraged to the hilt on the premise that it was good and right for a small cadre of US companies to steal all of the intellectual work ever produced by humanity and sell its back to us without credit or remuneration to the authors (plagiarism)

"Questions have been raised about colleagues’ research performance being evaluated, without the use of provisional REF grades or journal metrics or actually reading any of it, by managers with no expertise...What we do have expertise in, however, is bullshit..."

Better Than You

From the office of Prof. Neville Morley, Supreme Plenipotentiary, Überboss and Vice-Chancellor of Ex University, Earth 2: Your ever-caring and responsive senior management team has heard your pathe…

thesphinxblog.com

I ran a workshop on jobs in history outside universities for PhD students at the University of Vienna earlier this year and got very good feedback from participants, so I'm looking to run it again later this year. Please get in touch if this would interest your students or department.

For @newleftreview.bsky.social I wrote about Timothy Mitchell's fascinating and frustrating book The Alibi of Capital. newleftreview.org/issues/ii159...

Jack Copley, Rentier Regimes, NLR 159, May–June 2026

Jack Copley on Timothy Mitchell, The Alibi of Capital. Capital re-conceptualized as terraforming expropriation of the future.

newleftreview.org

As someone who has written a whole book about the importance of Twitter to public discourse I cannot emphasise enough important it is for people to log off the current incarnation of the site.