Alexis Lothian
@alothian.bsky.social
Scholar and sometimes practitioner of queer speculation, critical fandom, digital social justice, and feminist world building. Associate Professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Maryland.
🔇 🔇 🔇 My book, Deep Unlearning, is now available for preorders! I don't know how people write so many books because this one took a lot out of me. It turns out, I had a lot to say 😂, with editors cutting out 50k of my words 🫣 ✴️ You can now preorder it at www.simonandschuster.com/books/Deep-U....
Look. The hiring of an obvious fabulist like Arday over any possible number/combination of scholars of color is, itself, the institutional racism that is often just more overt from the right. It is as much an indictment of racism as others, proving that it persists, perniciously, in academe.
The takedown of Jason Arday has overjoyed the right, and must be a wake-up call for the left | Jason Okundaye
The Cambridge academic has rightly now resigned. But that won’t end the targeting of senior black figures or the lazy way institutions promote faux equality, says Guardian columnist Jason Okundaye
theguardian.com
"Much of science as we conceptualize it now was built on top of the framings of Verne’s era. Revisiting the exuberance, obliviousness, chauvinism, and optimism of Verne’s science-related worldview offers a useful reminder of where some of our own narratives come from." @mitpress.bsky.social
Jules Verne’s Empty Dream of Spaceflight
In “From the Earth to the Moon,” scientific advancement is treated as destiny — but no one quite asks why.
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
If you’ve seen this article, you may be sitting with anger, pain, or just exhaustion at dealing with another helping of colonial nonsense. We feel a responsibility to speak back when these colonizing narratives show up, yet again, in such a prominent venue. endangeredlanguages.com/story/respon...
The New Yorker@newyorker.com · 3w agoThe idea that we have a special duty to prevent the death of languages is instantly compelling to anyone who loves languages. But is it true? www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
Just published open-access: @sarahciston.com et al., *Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI* direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon.... @berrydm.bsky.social
Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI
How the original ELIZA chatbot transformed ideas about AI and society’s response to them.As we reach the 60th anniversary of ELIZA’s public debut, Inventin
direct.mit.edu
I have a new short essay out in LIMN's special issue This Is Not a Platform titled "Platform Obscurantism: The Hidden Substrates of Machine Learning." ChatGPT is a platform. That may be the least interesting thing about it. limn.press/article/plat... 🧵
Platform Obscurantism - Limn
ChatGPT is a platform. The chatbot is infrastructure. Thousands of applications now build on OpenAI’s application programming interface, creating a dependent ecosystem of developers, startups, and ent...
limn.press
For more on how to talk about tech sold as "AI" in more precise terms: buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...
How to talk about
Emily M. Bender and Nanna Inie In our op-ed for Tech Policy Press ("We Need to Talk About How We Talk About 'AI'"), we made the case against the...
buttondown.com
If we fail to understand the logic of AI as itself part of the ever-expanding logic of capital, we risk ending up with a romanticized recent past, false idols, ill-conceived enmities, bad alliances, and entirely incongruous political strategies
Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 2mo agoHere again, my take.
![Matthew Kirschenbaum
The Writing Lesson
Revisited: AI [and | in | is]
the Scriptural Economy
ABSTRACT. This essay uses Michel de Certeau’s framing of mo-
dernity as a scriptural economy—and that concept’s parafictional
deployment in Tom McCarthy’s 2015 novel Satin Island and the
novel’s debt to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous chapter “A Writing
Lesson”—to situate large language models (LLMs) in a tradition
of writing and textual production rooted in capitalism and trans-
actional practices. It argues that generative artificial intelligence
should be understood not as the disruption of writing or an aber-
ration but as the completion of the structural logic of the scriptural
economy and that LLMs are very likely the final word on a system
of production wherein writing is tokenized and transacted for ex-
traction of value in ways that render the technology’s current limi-
tations, such as a propensity for hallucinations, largely beside the
point. Lest there be any misunderstanding, this is not intended as
a salutary diagnosis.
friedrich kittler (1995) pronounced the last historical act of
writing as taking place in the early 1970s when engineers at Intel
leaned over their boards to draw up blueprints for the 4004 micro-
processor, the first ever for the commercial market. But Kittler might
have done better to declare a long goodbye. Consider a parallel episode
almost a half century later, sometime in early 2017, when an engineer
at Google used software to create a diagram for a machine learning
paper titled “Attention Is All You Need”: The diagram limned the novel
transformer architecture that became the basis for OpenAI’s ChatGPT
and many other generative artificial intelligence (AI) models (Vaswani
et al. 2017, 3).
© 2026 The New School
social research Vol. 93 : No. 2 : Summer 2026 285](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:j3hiqh5g6il7vmphiyldeklv/bafkreiafofvipodolu23mltf6bk2tymsqgiy2v4uygvwknizsdun67776y)
The most dangerous thing about AI is not that the machines might one day think. It is that we are being trained, by men with enormous financial gains riding on our acquiescence, to stop thinking for ourselves.
You can read the full report here. It's got lots of useful info right at the top. I might start sharing sections of this with students in the beginning of the term. unu.edu/inweh/collec...
The Environmental Cost of Artificial Intelligence: Carbon, Water, and Land Footprints
AI’s rapid growth drives huge energy, water, and land use, raising environmental and equity challenges across its global infrastructure.
unu.edu
Anna Kornbluh@annakornbluh.bsky.social · 2mo agomaybe UN SCIENTISTS will get thru to the "environmental impact is negligible actually" slopboosters "A new investigation by U.N. scientists warns that AI’s water use in 2030 will match the needs of 1.3B people, power use triple that of population of 650M." www.democracynow.org/2026/6/12/ai...
"Even if the Microsoft Office team employed a philosopher who said you shouldn’t be so certain, because consciousness is not well understood, that would not be sufficient reason for you to take this idea seriously." www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...
No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
Taken to its logical conclusion, this line of thinking is absurd—and damning.
theatlantic.com
AI is the lynchpin of the whole political project. It’s the container for the parallel governance they have promised each other. I truly think that they are surprised that people don’t like it…and that they can’t yet wholesale punish everyone for not liking them.
danah boyd recently argued that social media (as we knew it) is mostly dead; what we have now is parasocial media: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... I agree. Networked social media is disappearing, replaced by a new logic/structure of content creator, creator-centered community, & algorithm.
Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media - danah boyd, 2026
When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms...
journals.sagepub.com
In "Reckoning with the Political Economy of AI," @cyberlyra.bsky.social, Ben Shestakofsky, Alex Taylor, and I are particularly keen to understand how the project of AI involves numerous "decoys" that misdirect critics' attention, undermining efforts to hold AI to account. arxiv.org/abs/2604.16106
Reckoning with the Political Economy of AI: Avoiding Decoys in Pursuit of Accountability
The Project of AI is a world-building endeavor, wherein those who fund and develop AI systems both operate through and seek to sustain networks of power and wealth. As they expand their access to reso...
arxiv.org
The paper in question: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence
Despite rising concerns about sycophancy—excessive agreement or flattery from artificial intelligence (AI) systems—little is known about its prevalence or consequences. We show that sycophancy is wide...
science.org
The_Lady_Red@theladyred.bsky.social · 3mo agoA PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking Al to write their breakup texts. So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world. What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable.
The always incisive @alondra.bsky.social discusses the purpose and possibilities of an AI bill of rights and standards. It will "require the political will to extend existing accountability frameworks to a domain that has so far resisted them." Crucial reading!
A civic grammar for AI rights
Earlier this year, the artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic, developer of the large language model Claude, published a document it calls “Claude’s Constitution,” described by the company as ...
science.org
So much attention has been paid to the Musk v. Altman trial. But real accountability for the AI industry will not come from a billionaire mudfight. It will come from the movements around the world resisting the empires of AI. My op-ed for @theguardian.com. www.theguardian.com/technology/c...
The Elon Musk v Sam Altman battle is a distraction | Karen Hao
Fixating on questions of whether Altman is untrustworthy, or whether Musk is even less so distracts from a far deeper problem with AI
theguardian.com
Some seem to be taking the wrong lessons from this scene. kotaku.com/university-c... (1) It is 0% shocking that new college graduates (in humanities!) are critical of AI. (2) Pushing back on AI hype from a commencement speaker seems more likely an indication of high rather than low AI literacy.
UCF Graduation Speaker Totally Shocked When Students Boo AI
The University of Central Florida commencement speaker didn't know how to read the room
kotaku.com
Also +1; but I’m all for the Luddite analogies dismissed at the beginning of this piece, and started my recent AI class with that history!
Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 3mo ago+1
I just finished teaching a new course using the history of science fiction to critically engage the current moment of AI doom and boom. The students have been amazing, and I was excited to get interviewed about it for my college. arhu.umd.edu/news/what-ca...
What Can Science Fiction Teach Us About AI? | College of Arts and Humanities
arhu.umd.edu
Preprinted! Been working on this for ~1 year w wonderful coauthors Nancy & Mark: > Understanding Artificial Neural Networks: Mysterianism about Known Mechanism is Mysticism doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Have you noticed many experts say they don't understand AI? What's going on? 🤯 Let us tell you... 1/
This is a terrible, TERRIBLE idea and plays into the false notion that religious people are somehow innately more ethical and moral than non-religious. There are principled ethical people everywhere, regardless of religion. Ditto for corrupt and evil people. www.baltimoresun.com/2026/05/08/a...
Tech is turning increasingly to religion in a quest to create ethical AI
The goal is to create a set of norms informed by various faiths.
baltimoresun.com
This is for *your* kids, you understand. The tech elites send *their* kids to private, screen-free Montessori schools. They know exactly what they're doing.
Sam Cole@samleecole.bsky.social · 3mo agothe biggest tech companies in the world are endorsing a new bill that would shove AI onto kids in school www.404media.co/literacy-in-...
"These two books show us not only what a writer’s archive can be but also what this kind of archive demands." @titachico.bsky.social on two recent Octavia Butler biographies: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/positive-obsession-h-is-for-horse-octavia-butler/
