I just left the *live* taping of the great legal podcast @strictscrutiny.bsky.social and decided to stop by the D.C. home of Blanche Kelso Bruce, the first Black elected Senator from Mississippi who served from 1874-1880. Tonight I salute Scott Colom who will be the second. Never stop fighting!

Welcome, new, blueskyers! If you are interested in UX or software, I've been curating a starter pack for you go.bsky.app/2NKjZdu

This graph from @stephensemler.bsky.social is absolutely amazing and is worth it on its own, let alone the rest of the piece. www.stephensemler.com/p/two-charts...

Gut Shabbos

One of my all-time fave memes

The next time someone tells me we need to allow LLMs because it levels the playing field for international students and scholars, I will be ready with this footnote. And I'm going out of this high note for the week. Happy Friday everyone!

Danya Glabau@allergyphd.bsky.social · yesterday

"An ethical use of AI is smoothing transitions in your writing!" Bitch no, those words mean things! The meaning SHOULD be selected and refined carefully because that is part of thinking! It's supposed to be hard, and get easier! I'm so done with the 90% of academics who seem to think this is fine

Unquestionably integral to the project of alignment as a desocialization and depoliticization and even desecuritizing effort too.

Hidden Brain is my personal most hated among those tbh You think there could be nothing worse than an engineer who thinks he knows social science, or a science journalist who thinks they know how academic research works.

Instead by keeping the convo focused on content, recommendations, AI summaries, free speech, censorship, misinfo, and fact-checking, the platforms create an ablative shield to protect themselves from taking responsibility for social (associational) harms they invite and support on their platforms.

There was a liberal technocratic project that predates Trump and runs through TED talks; freakonomics, "gun violence is a public health problem," Hidden Brain on NPR and a lot more that treated social problems like info problems in order to not do politics & it opened the door to a lot of bad stuff

vortex_egg@vortexegg.com · 13h ago

The Crunchy Moms group isn’t an information problem. It’s a social problem (a problem of people forming associations, and what activities they do as a group) with an info component (they engage in harmful information behaviors like sharing make-believe, and group discoverability and recruitment).

Do the people running and planning libraries have any idea what libraries are physically and conceptually *for*?

@annakornbluh.bsky.social who I think runs bluesky has decreed that we share stuff about our book for all the new bluesky members. Mine explores the Marxist implications of activists' reuse of discarded materials in squats, favelas and encampments. sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-...

The Political Theory of Salvage

sunypress.edu

OUT NOW www.dukeupress.edu/good-vibes-o...

Good Vibes Only: Phenomenology and the Biopolitics of Algorithmic Legitimation

dukeupress.edu

David M. Perry@lollardfish.bsky.social · yesterday

You should welcome all the new people to Bluesky by TELLING US ALL ABOUT YOUR BOOK AND DONT FORGET A LINK SO WE CAN BUY IT. Bluesky, the app for books.

New-to-me General Ludd print by Communist Hungarian artist Bela Uitz from 1923

What kind of political project is AI? Who profits from the mass devaluation of skills, and the industrialized production of language? And what does the political economy have to do with the recurrent waves of "It may kill us all!!" nightmare stories? Find out in Why We Fear AI!

Why We Fear AI: On the Interpretation of Nightmares

Fears about AI tell us more about capitalism today than technology in the future.Will AI come and take all our jobs? Will it dominate humanity, hack the foundations of our civilization, or even wipe h...

bookshop.org

David M. Perry@lollardfish.bsky.social · yesterday

You should welcome all the new people to Bluesky by TELLING US ALL ABOUT YOUR BOOK AND DONT FORGET A LINK SO WE CAN BUY IT. Bluesky, the app for books.

I think it’s time to rewatch Berlin Alexanderplatz

as i suggest in my (slightly longer) review: this book is good and you should read it jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/bs...

Patrick McCray@patrickmccray.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Want some summer reading? How about a "book about books about computing"?? I have a new book out via @mitpress.bsky.social Details at: mitpress.mit.edu/978026255348... #HistSci #Computing #History #Books 🗃️

You should welcome all the new people to Bluesky by TELLING US ALL ABOUT YOUR BOOK AND DONT FORGET A LINK SO WE CAN BUY IT. Bluesky, the app for books. (thanks David! pass it on everybody!) www.versobooks.com/products/303...

David M. Perry@lollardfish.bsky.social · yesterday

You should welcome all the new people to Bluesky by TELLING US ALL ABOUT YOUR BOOK AND DONT FORGET A LINK SO WE CAN BUY IT. Bluesky, the app for books.

You should welcome all the new people to Bluesky by TELLING US ALL ABOUT YOUR BOOK AND DONT FORGET A LINK SO WE CAN BUY IT. Bluesky, the app for books. Want to read about the statistical revolution behind AI and how it is tied into capitalist production?

Revolutionary Mathematics

Our finances, politics, media, opportunities, information, shopping and knowledge production are mediated through algorithms and their statistical approaches to knowledge; increasingly, these methods form the organizational backbone of contemporary capitalism. Revolutionary Mathematics traces the revolution in statisti

versobooks.com

Anna Kornbluh@annakornbluh.bsky.social · yesterday

You should welcome all the new people to Bluesky by TELLING US ALL ABOUT YOUR BOOK AND DONT FORGET A LINK SO WE CAN BUY IT. Bluesky, the app for books. (thanks David! pass it on everybody!) www.versobooks.com/products/303...

Amazing work

iphawk@iphawk.bsky.social · 2d ago

Also hearing Leo blew up again. From Twitter:

Maybe I could write better if I got a little snack. That could fix me

oh yeah now we're cooking with whispered fear sentiment gas *MYSTERY SELLER SEEKS TO DUMP $500 MILLION OF DATA CENTER LOANS

Also, how is it possible that with all the advances in LLMs, spell check still has not figured out how to handle a missing syllable? You miss a syllable and you are complely out of luck, no chance it is finding the right word.

Writing truly is hell (and I would have it no other way). Can't believe people want to deny themselves this experience

Re-upping this for the end of the week. Rita Raley and I follow up our “AI and the University as a Service” with a brief response on the agentic turn. “ What we delegate is not comprehension but presence.” It’s handwritten and we worked it hard.

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 5d ago

Rita Raley @ritaraley.bsky.social and I respond to David J. Baker in the new (i.e., “May”) PMLA, with some words on the agentic delegation of presence in “The Unattended University”: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

And dropping soon in @techpolicypress.bsky.social, “Language is Now an Attack Surface”: “Now the textpocalypse is here but it’s not just a tsunami of slop, bad as that is. We are looking instead at an environment where language and code flow back and forth across the executable boundary condition.”

Well I’ve got the best part of my day sorted

It was nice of bob dylan to wear a tie to the meeting. Very thoughtful

Emily Herring@emilyherring.bsky.social · 2d ago

It's like they want us to meme

The interesting question about large language models is not whether or not they are sentient it is whether there could be any way to buy them for their exchange value yet exploit them for their use value (hence allowing them to create surplus value, a feat so far limited to humans)

When MN Demss gained a 1 seat majority in the state senate this is what they did. YOU. ACQUIRE. POWER. TO. USE. IT.

Marisa Kabas@marisakabas.bsky.social · 3d ago

"Now is not the time for-" i'm gonna stop you right there, it's the time for EVERYTHING