Lee Vinsel
@leev.bsky.social
I do technology studies, make the Peoples & Things podcast, co-founded The Maintainers, and profess Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech.
Cory is an incredibly generous and sweet guy. A Dutch friend also sent me a screenshot of Cory mentioning me on a Dutch documentary last week. He's taught me a lot about how to diligently spread the word about other folks' ideas.
Morten Bay, Philosophiae Doctor.@mortenbay.bsky.social · 7d agoIf you haven't yet checked out @doctorow.pluralistic.net 's new book, his great convo with Jon Stewart just dropped. 98 mins well spent! And @leev.bsky.social even gets a shout-out!
This week on Peoples & Things, I chat with the wonderful @lanalanalana.bsky.social about _New Money: How Payment Became Social Media_ and her other current, highly-creative projects. I love how Lana thinks through things. It's a really fun chat! newbooksnetwork.com/117-lana-swa...
Lana Swartz on Digital Money and Digital Cultures of Money - New Books Network
newbooksnetwork.com
I'm teaching a graduate seminar on global science and technology policy this fall, and I would like to assign some stuff on "sovereignty" around digital technology, including AI. Do we have a good piece that explains where this specific policy use of "sovereignty" came from and how it spread?
Great thread as usual from Costa on where data centers fit in concerns about climate.
Costa Samaras@costasamaras.com · 4w agoYes, there are about 250 million cars and SUVs in the U.S. that nearly all run on gasoline and they make about 1,000 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year and they stay on the road for 12-20+ years.
Some months ago, I began typing an email to my friend historian Richard John and quickly realized I was writing an essay I had wanted to do for years. I published it this morning and call it, "Two Forms of 'Technology' Criticism: Cultural Pessimism Versus Materialism." Link below.
Wow. I will be returning to and chewing on this one for quite a while. A *lot* of great stuff in here. The only part I'm not sure about is the bit about "fascism," but that's probably because I don't find that word useful as an analytical concept in general.
Toby Bennett@tgpb.bsky.social · last mo.Part II: An attempt to work through the "conjectural paradigm" of AI rhetorics and their associated value panics - and the need to replace Sherlock's magnifying glass with Adorno's splinter in the eye. tgpbennett.wordpress.com/2026/06/24/s...
Stewart Brand joined The Maintainers listserv in 2019 - see below - and he attended the Maintainers III conference, also in 2019. He knows there are entire scholarly communities studying maintenance and repair. He's not ignorant; he's just a dick.
Dave Karpf@davekarpf.bsky.social · 2mo ago“This series, I'm pretty sure, is the first to look at maintenance in general.” Okay right off the bat, no. Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell wrote an excellent book, The Innovation Delusion, which is all about how Silicon Valley ignores maintenance and celebrates “disruption.” Brand oughta know that
It just keeps getting better. Thanks to my friend Dr. @olamichael.bsky.social of the Hype Studies crew for inspiring the improvements.
I have friends who live in European cities where procuring air conditioning is basically illegal. One theory I've heard is that part of the problem is that the elites - who, let's be real, control environmental policy - have summer homes they escape to when it gets too hot.
Julia M. Rohrer@dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 2mo agoTIL heat is really killing a lot of people in Europe. hannahritchie.substack.com/p/heat-guns-...
Working on a short post called "Notes on Boomer STS" on the problematic twins of a) critique of "technocracy" and b) thinking "participatory democracy" is *the* solution, but now I think my prompt that led to this beautiful image may be my greatest contribution to the field.
LA weirdos! It appears that @uchicagopress.bsky.social is giving away my book OIL BEACH for FREE this month (as an e-book) Link is here: press.uchicago.edu/books/freeEb...
I ask this question constantly. I thought our major upshot of the whole Aaron Swartz thing was that IP is a nonsense construction. Many GenAI haters would clearly have me believe otherwise.
GAI Debord@dylanschenker.com · 3mo agoI wonder how many of the people who have anti-theft beliefs apply to them to downloading books too
MIT Technology Review asked me to review Stewart Brand's new book _Maintenance: Of Everything_, vol. 1. I went into it with a lot of questions, including about how he'd deal with labor, politics, and social structure. It's a lot worse than I expected. www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/17/1...
The case for fixing everything
A new book by Stewart Brand, an architect of modern tech culture, asks: How do we prioritize maintenance? And why? But it doesn’t quite have the answers.
technologyreview.com
So wild that the first Maintainers conference was a decade ago!! The other day I looked back at the class I taught called Peoples & Things that eventually led to the podcast to see when I first conceived of it. ALSO A DECADE AGO. fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu TIME FLIES.
Ben Gross@bhgross144.bsky.social · 4mo ago10 years ago on a social media platform far, far away...The #Maintainers were trending! themaintainers.org/maintainers-... #histSTM #STS #maintenance #infrastructure
This ep of People’s & Things with @leev.bsky.social and @bialski.bsky.social interviewing @susansegfault.bsky.social about @torproject.org completely nerd sniped me and was very enjoyable! micro.chadkohalyk.com/2026/04/09/p...
Podcast: Biography of Tor
Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy This episode of …
micro.chadkohalyk.com
VIBERCRIME!!! Hahahaha. This is neat. Also, the fact that cybercriminals find these tools useful suggests that they might . . . I don't know . . . . be useful?!?! Yes, for crime and for more than crime.
Ben Collier@susansegfault.bsky.social · 4mo agoSneak preview of a new preprint looking at adoption of Generative AI in the cybercrime underground: arxiv.org/pdf/2603.29545 we use a very large crime forum dataset to explore how cybercrime actors are adopting (or not) these tools - a phenomenon we call 'vibercrime'
LMAOOOOOOOO. Not even a little bit surprising given what we already know about how these tools are being used in industry right now, but deliciously ironic given the anti-AI attitudes of some Bluesky subcultures. Should their non-use of AI also entail non-use of Bluesky?
Jay 🦋@jay.bsky.team · 4mo agoBluesky is made with AI, the engineers and even some non-engineers use Claude code
Paula Bialski and I had such a fun time talking with Ben. I loved his approach to the Tor community, and it was also lovely discovering our many research community overlaps. As I say in the ep, I felt like the spirit of @biella.bsky.social was in the virtual room with us the whole time.
Ben Collier@susansegfault.bsky.social · 4mo agoHad a lovely time talking on the People and Things podcast about the Tor book - link here athenaeum.vt.domains/peoplesandth...
This week's Peoples & Things features me and my buddy and guest host Paula Bialski talking with Ben Collier, Senior Lecturer i at the University of Edinburgh, about his fascinating book, _Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy_. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/p...
Ben Collier on Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy
Podcast Episode · Peoples & Things · March 30 · 1h 1m
podcasts.apple.com
This is one of the studies I'm most excited about right now. Wish I could watch the launch, but I'll be traveling. But YOU should check it out. Mentioned Lana's study as a great example of taking other humans seriously in this piece. peoples-things.ghost.io/why-do-peopl...
Against Narcissistic-Sociopathic Technology Studies, or Why Do People *USE* Technologies?
Why and how do people USE technologies? This question should be at the center of any thinking about human life with technology. The ways in which people use technologies, after all, determines the so...
peoples-things.ghost.io
Lana Swartz@lanalanalana.bsky.social · 4mo agoApril 1! Join me for the launch of my new report: “Financial Lives in a Networked Generation: How Finfluencers, Fin-Tech, and FOMO Shape Young Adults’ Financial Well-being” Register here: dtdlab.virginia.edu/event/fling-...
Very glad to share this piece in @modamhist.bsky.social! I am glad they let me squeeze 7 figures into the article. You can see one of them here:
Modern American History@modamhist.bsky.social · 5mo agoUp now on First View: "Phreaking Politics in Modern America" by @jacobbruggeman.bsky.social explores the changing political valence of activists' use of American technology systems to critique the state. Link below!
I like it. I try to send junior scholars fan mail, too. I'm on a panel at the Business History Conference tomorrow: Casey Eilbert, a postdoc at Hopkins. Casey's diss and forthcoming book are a history of the concept of "bureaucracy" and its critics in 20th century USA.
Nancy Fraser's remembrance of Habermas is really great. At once respectful and critical. Fraser is really important to me for her feminist critique of the system-lifeworld dichotomy that is found in nearly all cultural pessimist technology criticism. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...
Nancy Fraser | After Habermas
Jürgen Habermas may be variously described as the moral conscience of postwar Germany, the last great systematic...
lrb.co.uk
This thread of replies from Lee (whom I do not know, but whose work I know quite well) demonstrates a degree of politeness and generosity that is wholly unwarranted given the degree of uncollegial lashing out and intellectual dishonesty on display.
Lee Vinsel @leev.bsky.social · 4mo agoHi there, @emilymbender.bsky.social! Thanks for this. I have a lot of respect from your work, have learned from you, and enjoyed having you on my podcast. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...
Hi there, @emilymbender.bsky.social! Thanks for this. I have a lot of respect from your work, have learned from you, and enjoyed having you on my podcast. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...
Emily M. Bender on AI Hype
Podcast Episode · Peoples & Things · September 23, 2024 · 1h 10m
podcasts.apple.com
Emily M. Bender@emilymbender.bsky.social · 4mo agoHe tries to position himself as better able to understand what's going on, claiming everyone else in the conversation (boosters, doomers, critics) are all speaking from "ideology"
