We live in a time of deep epistemic crisis, and everything we have depended on to make meaning and certify consensus reality is either suspect or in peril. It didn't have to be this way, and it doesn't have to stay this way.

FWIW-I am proficient at prompt generation & understand how LLMs work, because I study AI. But I do not use these tools in my work, EVER. NOR in my daily life (save where enshittification adds them without my consent) And I could operate without them tomorrow-PERIOD. This is not a radical stance.

I was a little surprised by how much this bothered me, tbh. Not because I thought it was intentional or even human carelessness- it's a reminder that these algorithms work against difference, they work against outliers, they work against marginalia (literal & figurative). And that's what I write for

Doctora Malka Older@older.bsky.social · 11h ago

my pinned tweet for years was "I write for the people whose names get underlined in red by microsoft word" and...this is why. (no shade to the lovely people at the MIT Press reader, who changed it immediately as soon as I pointed it out)

These pricks are raised in a bubble of privilege & immunity, told their entire lives that it's their right to have whatever they want & dominate anyone lower on the class or gender totem pole. They can not simply pivot, one day to the next, to a plausible attitude of regret & contrition. They can't!

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · yesterday

🤯 Rep. Max Miller's interview with Jake Tapper was one of the most self-destructive things I've ever witnessed on cable news. Here's the whole thing:

“Anyone who has ever been truly broke knows how totalizing a cognitive experience it can be.” www.thecut.com/article/soci...

Social Media’s Last Taboo

It’s okay to be every kind of person online — except struggling.

thecut.com

watching people you love and respect cutting corners to keep creative pace with an idiot machine, starve themselves to keep pace with a new, more impossible ideal, it is overwhelmingly sad some days and no one is truly immune to it

Sorry for the Substack link (😔) but this is good. “The social media hellscape I wandered onto was a gallery of proof that horrible men get away with *everything*.” nekocase.substack.com/p/in-what-fu...

IN WHAT FUCKING UNIVERSE?

This last week I was just cookin’ along minding my business when I suddenly found myself quite depressed.

nekocase.substack.com

If you want to be friends, you have to stop expelling and terrorizing and harming and killing my friends. That's just a rule I have about friends. www.the-reframe.com/if-you-want-...

If You Want To Be Friends, Then Why Aren’t You Friendly?

A look at one of the most alarming and pressing problems of our age: the much-lamented fact that "the left" won't be friends with "the right," over "political views."

the-reframe.com

Put more pressure on Tisch. Please.

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani@mayor.nyc.gov · 2d ago

I know I am just being a grouchy elder but how is it 2026 and writers are still out here saying "we" think of the Internet as "immaterial"—who is this "we" and where have they been for the last decade

I have, with my own eyes, watched my tax dollars in the form of missiles as they hit buildings inhabited by civilians. I'd much prefer subsidizing a grocery story I don't use.

USA TODAY Opinion@usatodayopinion.usatoday.com · 3d ago

Opinion: Mamdani's idea may sound appealing, but it's NYC taxpayers who will take the hit, subsidizing discounts they may never even use.

When the abusers say those things, it's a marriage of convenience between gaslighting and DARVO. (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Abuser, a standard abuser rhetorical approach that is also how the Trump Administration operates, with government as gaslighting abuser.)

“If this was true, I would be in jail” is not a real profession of innocence; it is a brag about how strenuously the state protects the male right of private sphere violence against women and children.

Rebecca Solnit@rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 4d ago

Those who believe things like this are working hard at not understanding the finite options available to someone whose abuser has not been prosecuted, found guilty, etc. by the law. And how rarely those things happen to abusers, esp. high-status white male abusers.

new game: genius or just main character

Comfortably Numb@numb.comfortab.ly · 4mo ago

These are very special bois

People potentially subject to the nyc pied-à-terre tax are being treated with 1% of the administrative hostility of SNAP and Medicaid applicants, and they’re throwing 100x the fit

I work at a public library. People who want to use AI seem to have no trouble doing so. People who don't want to use AI have a harder time. I crowdsourced and then finalized this document "How to disable or avoid intrusive AI" and then gave it a short URL: notoai.org Please pass along if it's useful

For writers worried that they won't be able to "prove" their work isn't Spicy Autocomplete--worry not. You thought about every choice and will be able to talk about those choices easily and clearly. Folks who used the slop machine didn't make choices and won't have anything to say about why

Sorry to be so cringe but things are majorly going down in my neighborhood. Channeling my inner Minneapolis ✊

“Nothing good is ever lost.” —Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu.

“We had whistles. They had guns.” —Becca Good

Oh hell yes.

S. Kramer@libraryephemera.bsky.social · 7d ago

Were you a child who read The World Book Encyclopedia for fun?

ever single regulation is in place because capitalists will poison you and everyone you know to save a few pennies on every single unit they make. they will cut every corner when not forced to be safe by goverments. "costly regulation" is lifesaving regulations

Jon of The North@krauza.bsky.social · last wk.

Turns out that food companies were only checking their food because the government told them to, which is exactly why we need government regulations.

TODAY: Nathan Schneider on what comes after Luddism. "The struggle against big tech can have two stories in one: the vibrant resistance and refusal, but also the effort to build a better economy under workers’ and users’ control." flaminghydra.com/issue-617/#b...

Bodies upon the gears

Alternative approaches to The Man, considered by Nathan Schneider

flaminghydra.com

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if you are using AI to write your newsletter, your readers will be able to tell, they won’t like it, and therefore you will neither make nor save money.

Niko Stratis@nikostratis.com · last wk.

I loathe the take of “well every writer is using AI and afraid to say it”. Like, that’s only true if your sample group is tech reporters and various hacks. Writers that don’t give a shit about writing, they just know they need a newsletter to make money, use AI. That’s a big fucking difference

The 'this business must make hockey stick profits or it's a failure' approach is just not realistic in ANY industry! I am naive and idealistic and believe in serving the common good while making fair wages, not extracting every dime of profit and then closing up shop.

Seriously, though, if you keep seeing the same players involved in immense churn, these are not good businessmen. They may be healthy and wealthy and well dressed and have a successful “look,” but they are not good businessmen. They’re just rich. That’s it.

Marisa Kabas@marisakabas.bsky.social · last wk.

they're shitty businessmen and we should say it more often

they're shitty businessmen and we should say it more often

I am so tired of witnessing media layoffs and publications just throwing away amazing talent as this career becomes less and less sustainable and growing numbers of people are pushed out. All for shareholder profits.

So much stuff is fake, rushed, or hollow. At this point, we gotta be dedicated to quality and authenticity and craft just on general principle.

Long-term and short-term. Human and nature. Restoration and protection. Boldness and humility. Learning by doing. And getting started now.