Generative AI is entering its protection racket phase as companies destabilize the open internet, try and sell us a fix, and in so doing threaten the whole ecosystem that built the open internet. I talk about it here for Fast Company.

AI's new business model: Break the internet, then sell the fix

The companies helping unleash a new era of cybersecurity threats are also positioning themselves to profit from the response.

fastcompany.com

As Associate Co-Editor for Special Issues at Rhetoric Society Quarterly, I'm happy to announce our 2028 call for proposals! The deadline is Jan 31, 2027. Please direct all inquiries + submissions to me *and* Jon Carter. Please share widely! #TeamRhetoric #AcademicSky #SpecialIssues #CFP

The Nvidia spy thing is just one of the many, many reasons it's an absolutely terrible idea to let society be run by a small, tight-knit group of extraordinarily wealthy/powerful egotists and their big corporations. It's a really obvious failure case, among all the others!

Surely we know someone who would be great for this job, no? careers.nintendo.com/jobs/4458631...

CONTRACT - Digital Archivist, Historical Systems - Nintendo Careers Site

Learn about CONTRACT - Digital Archivist, Historical Systems and apply for this open position.

careers.nintendo.com

In 2023, Massachusetts legalized online sports betting. We used 3+ years of transaction-level debit card data to follow 2,441 people who placed a bet the week of legalization. Most rarely bet again. But they're not the ones sportsbooks get revenue from. This story is about the ones they do.

The Gambling App Playbook for Bankrupting Young Men

More than half of US men under 50 are betting on sports. But the sportsbooks are making nearly all of their money from a far smaller group betting far more often.

bloomberg.com

This part really is the core of it that a lot of folks don’t get

Waitman Wade Beorn, PhD, FRHistS@waitmanwbeorn.com · last wk.

You can avoid this happening to you with ONE easy hack! Follow me for more #ProTips on how not to be a shitty academic! www.science.org/content/arti...

Computers in schools relegated to one room and they are for 1) Oregon Trail 2) searching the library catalog

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce.com · last wk.

Now that Bluesky is the official social media app representing the popular will of the United States of America™️, what is our first cultural decree?

Labor's call for free college is a starting point but now it needs to be defined. Free college as a metaphor that gets at: How is higher education central to a multiracial democracy? How does it address collective problems (e.g, climate)? How does it empower agency? How can we organize to deliver?

Media matters because it shapes our perceptions of the present and our hopes/expectations/fears for the future. The voices who stated as fact, "Democrats must abandon group X/morally-just cause Y to win" were wrong. Today is a great day to stop giving them your time/attention/money.

For years, Democrats have pushed legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) because they've claimed these compromises are the only way they can "get something done" on Big Tech with Republicans. Now they control all of Congress. No more excuses. Drop KOSA, regulate Big Tech for real.

Not to be a hater at this time but I wish I'd kept screenshots of all those old Bluesky posts about how all Southerners should just be abandoned to fascist wolves. If that was you, libbing it up tonight will be allowed once you fill out your Apology Form. Get your paperwork done

elon musk spent hundreds of millions of dollars demonizing trans people in texas and democrats flipped the entire fucking state trans rights forever baby

Gobsmacked at the online responses to this that are so internet-pilled they call for a third-party search engine for schools or something. Listen: Your K-12 school does not really require Chromebooks, Google Classroom courseware, Gdocs or Gmail—or even search. Just use books and teach.

Google Will Turn Off Search for Schools That Reject A.I. (Gift Article)

Google is making it easier to restrict its A.I. tools for students. But schools that block A.I. entirely will lose student access to Google’s search engine.

nytimes.com

The decline or end of the humanities specialist - and, indeed, entire disciplines - will happen because people decided to end them. Technology is not the cause, but rather the justification.

Grateful to @techpolicypress.bsky.social for including my Digital Rhetoric students' responses to "When, How, and Why to Abandon the Internet?" Their POV adds a vital texture to the robust responses on this episode. #TeamRhetoric #PublicHumanities #CriticalAI www.techpolicy.press/when-how-and...

Took up archery recently, and this is by far the best end I've shot. (The next end, I shot two not in scoring and nothing closer than blue, which is more the norm for me.)

Just fund the damn schools. Public universities are a crown jewel of American society, they are why we have been so prosperous for so long. We are committing collective cognitive suicide with this and it’s going to destroy us as a country if it isn’t reversed.

everyone is just out here trying their best. there are a lot of fumbles, but there are also a lot of bests, and DANG when those bests hit they hit like the a radiant blast from the sun. humans are capable of so much beauty. the bests will sweep you up and carry you away. they make every try worth it

Absolutely shameful tuning choices by Google.

Colin@colin-fraser.net · 3w ago

Another reason to not use AI is of course that it's a vector for not only corporate censorship but outright manipulation. You are prompting a system built by and designed to serve corporations' version of reality. And open models won't save you; they're distilled from the corporate models.

Anat Shenker-Osorio@anatosaurus.bsky.social · 3w ago

Among things Meta did in Brazil was have their AI bot within WhatsApp allow users to generate election poster for Flavio but deny requests to do so for Lula. When folks asked for posters for invented candidates, AI tagged them with #22 - Flavio's # - in a country where folks vote by #.

This sort of AI assistant technology will only be destructive unless and until the people developing it can actually grapple with these sorts of questions because they are at the heart of everything. What is worth doing with this one life? www.nytimes.com/2026/10/25/s...

"I understand that there have been some experiments showing that LLM review may have similar outcomes to human peer review, but who cares? Either scholarship, research and publishing are human enterprises or they aren’t." www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu... >>

Generative AI Is Not Our Peer

Automation can make many good things possible, but let’s not pretend it’s something it isn’t.

insidehighered.com

"AI will destroy humanity" has always and only been an attempt to distract from "AI will leak your login credentials to the internet"

Emily Bell@emilybell.bsky.social · 3w ago

Three weeks ago AI founders were all over the press making vague but portentous comments about the existential risks and power of their models. This week their models are part of a widespread security failure around critical systems such as your bank account..a more immediate and serious risk 1/

It's one thing to say "these vulnerabilities existed and could've been found before AI", that doesn't mean they could be exploited en masse at the speed and scale they are now. Which still for the moment at least means a huge net problem

The only problem with this parody is that the author is both clearer and more clever than Brooks.

McSweeney's@mcsweeneys.net · 4w ago

"Our democracy depends on our ability to distinguish between genuine Nazis and ordinary Americans who merely share some of their ideas. And until I see that diminutive rectangle of hair, I intend to keep that distinction firmly in place." buff.ly/SQwmock

the idea phase is the easiest and least valuable part of professional creativity. read the first draft of the first Star Wars if you doubt me Great art is made in the grinding, often miserable collision between the ethereal substance of an idea and the mud and blood and friction of reality

Keezy Young🌼@keezyyoung.bsky.social · 3w ago

"I only use chatgpt in the ideas phase" haha that's so weird. I just have them

The first genuinely honest ad for generative AI I've ever seen, from Microsoft / CoPilot A mediocre white guy sees his non-white colleague getting praised for good work, he asks AI to *literally copy it*, and then he gets all the praise instead: www.ispot.tv/ad/SoDi/micr...