Michael Richardson
@richardsonma.bsky.social
Associate Professor. Drones, AI, war, culture, affect, witnessing. UNSW. Media Futures Hub. ADMS Centre. He/him. Nonhuman Witnessing with @dukepress.bsky.social https://t.ly/cQW5N
Longtime listener, first time caller. Mél is a wonderful interlocutor, which made this an absolute privilege.
Mél Hogan / The Data Fix@melhogan.bsky.social · 12mo agoNew: The Data Fix with Dr. Mél Hogan - Ep. 68 Witnessing, with Michael Richardson 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 shows.acast.com/the-data-fix... @richardsonma.bsky.social
I loved doing this with the brilliant Mél... hop in and have a listen once it's out next week!
Mél Hogan / The Data Fix@melhogan.bsky.social · 12mo agoPlease subscribe to The Data Fix podcast so you don't miss an episode! thedatafix.net Next up, the amazing @richardsonma.bsky.social (Aug 25) -- on witnessing AI and algorithms. After this episode, I will take a break to get relocated, but plan to be back at it in October! Stay tuned!
My university has announced a fund to essentially poach doctoral students from US institutions. DM me if you do work on the history/social impacts of AI and are interested in being poached 😂
Terrific essay from @mmasnick.bsky.social I wish more of the business community would recognize this https://www.techdirt.com/2025/07/17/fascism-for-first-time-founders/
Fascism For First Time Founders
Over the last year or so I’ve seen a disturbing tendency in tech/startup/VC worlds to buy into the neoreactionary view that for startups to be successful they need to get on board the Trump t…
techdirt.com
I think this is the best thing I’ve read about journalism, AI and the business models of media companies. Must read for anyone who cares about this stuff, which really should be everyone.
Michael Richardson@richardsonma.bsky.social · last yr.Nailing it. “It is the only “business model” that we have and that I am certain works: We trade good, accurate, interesting, human articles for money and attention. The risks of offloading that trust to an AI in a careless way is the biggest possible risk factor that we could have as a business.”
Nailing it. “It is the only “business model” that we have and that I am certain works: We trade good, accurate, interesting, human articles for money and attention. The risks of offloading that trust to an AI in a careless way is the biggest possible risk factor that we could have as a business.”
404 Media@404media.co · last yr.The Media's Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work 🔗 www.404media.co/the-medias-p...
My legendary friend and colleague wrote for @crikey.com.au about the Gaza sized hole in Australian universities and what the draconian demands of special envoy Segal would mean for learning, teaching and being in the university. It is fire and you should read it. www.crikey.com.au/2025/07/15/i...
How to silence academic speech on Palestine
Jillian Segal’s proposal seeks to mobilise the IHRA definition of antisemitism and would have far-reaching implications for students and staff across Australian universities.
crikey.com.au
Final registration call for the @britishacademy.bsky.social funded symposium, 'Speculative Machines and Us: Histories and Futures of AI', @lancasteruni.bsky.social on 17 July! 💥🤖 FULL PROGRAMME, ABSTRACTS AND BIOS here: wp.lancs.ac.uk/sciencestudi... Register now here: wp.lancs.ac.uk/sciencestudi...
Speculative Machines and Us: Histories and Futures of AI
We warmly invite colleagues to join us for an in-person one-day symposium on Thursday 17th July 2025. To join, please register using the link below. The event is organised by the Centre for Science…
wp.lancs.ac.uk
Mass extraordinary rendition. And we know with certainty from the War on Terror that those certifications against persecution and torture are pro forma and are better understood as a document colluding to such treatment.
ICE memo outlines plan to deport migrants to countries where they are not citizens
The dramatic shift in policy could result in thousands of immigrants being deported to places where they lack family ties or even a common language.
washingtonpost.com
missing from this otherwise insightful account of the extremely online young men of the American far right is the tech platforms that host this garbage, there’s just this tendency to take social media as given but these platforms could be reined in or shut down www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/o...
Opinion | Trolling Democracy
The rise of a toxic online politics.
nytimes.com
This is the entire OpenAI business model
Mike Ginn@shutupmikeginn.bsky.social · last yr.feel like Adobe is kind of like the cigarette companies in the 1960s, going after kids. they give cheap licenses to schools to hook young losers such as myself. now i'm an adult stuck paying $90 a month because i never learned any of the other softwares
The intent behind this project makes me think of viral AI-gen image of girl holding puppy in a dingy during Hurricane Helene, legitimized for being "emblematic of people's trauma." Thru AI there's an active shift from evidentiary images towards a designed emblematic. www.404media.co/the-un-made-...
The UN Made AI-Generated Refugees
The AIs are designed to teach people about atrocities in Sudan.
404media.co
I've written a lot about the need to extend witnessing beyond the human, but this ain't it. We need to attend more closely to the abundance of very human testimony about war and suffering, to listen and act in response, not look for ways to dehumanise the survivors of dehumanising violence.
Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · last yr.There’s so much wrong here, but in particular it’s noted in the article that the creator of this project met with a bunch of stakeholders who told him the idea was shit, and he did it anyway.
If you want to know how political realignment is achieved and how the centre-left is moved inexorably to the right, this is it.
Paul Karp@paulkarp.bsky.social · last yr.Antisemitism envoy calls for powers to strip universities of funding www.afr.com//politics/fe...
The Albanese govt is seemingly backing a plan that could withhold uni and arts funding if they're seen to not tackle antisemitism. But what counts as "failure"? This sets a dangerous precedent, threatening academic independence, and informed and open debate. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07...
Antisemitism plan would strip funding from unis, arts events who fail to fight Jewish hate
Powers to strip funding from public institutions who fail on antisemitism, a review of Australia's hate speech laws, and visa screening for antisemitic views are among the recommendations of a wide-ra...
abc.net.au
I can’t count the number of conversations with students, friends, and academics where people dismissed at the idea that mass data collection was a huge risk to people’s lives and especially the most vulnerable www.404media.co/ice-is-searc...
ICE Is Searching a Massive Insurance and Medical Bill Database to Find Deportation Targets
The database, called ISO ClaimSearch, is nearly all encompassing and contains details on more than 1.8 billion insurance claims and 58 million medical bills.
404media.co
Non-academics: if you see an interesting academic paper on here and you can’t access it due to a paywall just email the author and (depending on the state of their inbox 😜) they will generally be thrilled you are interested in their work and send you a copy.
New article from me and Zoe Horn. "Digital twins and logistical labour: Models, plans and the inversion of the ‘real’," in which we show how operative, virtual replicas of material environments are beginning to subordinate the real within a logistical paradigm www.scienceopen.com/hosted-docum...
Digital twins and logistical labour: Models, plans and the inversion of the ‘real’
<p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" class="first" dir="auto" id="d24518e99">This article argues that digital twins constitute new computational techniques for the mobi...
scienceopen.com
Eliminate the humans so we can all get “popped up into some kind of sugar cube for a billion simulated years of bliss, but it's only six hours in clock time”
Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · last yr.Kinda wild how quickly people’s genocide fantasies became mainstreamed.
Or the violation of international law, which is actually more important to the rest of the world
Ruth Ben-Ghiat@ruthbenghiat.bsky.social · last yr.Why are no headlines focusing on the unconstitutional and dictatorial nature of this action?
Excellent new research on the eco impacts of AI, and the necessity of better transparency regimes and data standards from @sashamtl.bsky.social and crew
Dr Sasha Luccioni@sashamtl.bsky.social · last yr.Does a ChatGPT query really use ten times more energy than a Google search? Does training any AI model emit as much CO2 as 5 cars? and can AI help us reduce global GHG emissions by 10%? 🤔 We tracked down the origins of these numbers 🕵♀️ and wrote a paper about it! arxiv.org/abs/2506.15572
Looking for a research associate to explore societal engagement with forest restoration on digital media – with @lboungr.bsky.social @wildflyingpanda.bsky.social @gabrielecolombo.bsky.social & more. Grateful for help sharing with those who might be interested! jonathangray.org/2025/05/31/s...
students and even some teachers need to understand that the essay-as-outcome isn’t what matters, but the essay-as-learning is crucial because it teaches thinking, analysis, communication, knowledge-making, resilience, planning, and more
Bradley Busch@bradleybusch.bsky.social · last yr.New research from MIT found that those who used ChatGPT can’t remember any of the content of their essays. Key takeaway: the product doesn’t suffer, but the process does. And when it comes to essays, the process *is* how they learn. arxiv.org/pdf/2506.088...
This is — and I cannot stress this enough — absolutely bonkers
Ben Collins@bencollins.bsky.social · last yr.No they do not, New York Times! This is like writing that Santa Claus has IBS.
At defence tech conventions data fusion has been among the most common software and hardware services pitched to militaries around the world for at least half a decade
Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · last yr.Suggest we should call fusion centers something more appropriate like “authoritarian one stop shop” or “techno-fascist lair.”
“War Machjne” looks amazing — just a shame we all have to wait until 2026 to read it!
Richard A Carter@richardacarter.bsky.social · last yr.Forthcoming, Spring 2026 with Punctum - "War Machine" is my book of speculative, machinic criticism and poetry, performing the intersections of political-economic-military extractavism, automated warfare, algorithmic noise, and ecological collapse. punctumbooks.com/titles/war-m...
“Finding the truth at times of conflict has always been difficult, and now in the age of AI and social media, it is even more difficult.” Witness media is in crisis at the worst possible time. www.404media.co/the-ai-slop-...
The AI Slop Fight Between Iran and Israel
There’s a lack of footage from the conflict and AI-generated content is filling the void.
404media.co
This is why the new trend of AI native browsers is so cooked. They’re completely inverting the relationship to information proposed by the decentralised internet in favour of an opaquely filtered and probabilistically generated single source of “truth”.
Roland Meyer@bildoperationen.bsky.social · last yr.In some ways, what's sold to us as «generative AI» feels like a distorted mirror universe version of the promises of the internet. Instead of free and unrestricted access to all the world's knowledge, we got tech-oligarchs monopolizing it and turning it into an exploitable resource 1/
New in Digital War: Anthony Downey with an excellent new article titled “The alibi of AI: algorithmic models of automated killing” link.springer.com/article/10.1...
The alibi of AI: algorithmic models of automated killing - Digital War
The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Automated Target Recognition (ATR) optimises martial prophecies of perpetual threat while simultaneously exonerating the politically inclined prosecution of ...
link.springer.com
