New paper co-written with @idilg.bsky.social out now in @ejcs-journal.bsky.social: 🫠 Degenerative AI: AI slop, brainrot, and the gimmick of generative culture doi.org/10.1177/1367...
Stephen Yang!
@stephenyang.bsky.social
PhDing @USCAnnenberg // studying media, technology, environment // prev @Cornell @MSFTResearch @CDT // Angelino & 臺灣人 https://www.stephen-yang.com/
As scholars and journalists start to write more about data center noise politics, I hope they'll consider the precedents — the history of noise abatement activism + regulation, the whole history of zoning (which is in large part about sensory regulation), etc.
Hey #sociologists and #sts scholars! We've been teaching Merton's norms of science wrong for decades!! They're not lofty misstaken descriptions, but a prescription for state funded science to avoid Nazism! More relevant than ever today. My latest with @nataliebaviles.bsky.social #academicsky
Dan Hirschman@asociologist.bsky.social · 3w ago"Reading Merton’s writing on norms in science as a prescriptive text, not a descriptive one, makes visible his desire to counter the active dismantlement of prestigious and powerful scientific institutions in Nazi Germany." @nataliebaviles.bsky.social & @cyberlyra.bsky.social
Done-ness? Again-ness? World-on-fire-ness? What is the emerging aesthetic of academic-speak on Bluesky? After the death of Twitter, and amidst the ambivalence about LinkedIn—are we watching the emergence of new aesthetic categories? Perhaps this is bigger than academic-speak
This Is Fine Dog Meme in Burning House
Alt: This Is Fine Dog Meme in Burning House
static.klipy.com
Now is a good reminder that machine learning is a rebranding of statistical learning. Reinforcement learning is something I first came across in control theory. Many ML formulations are from information theory, a much more theoretically grounded discipline that's been around for decades.
Casey Newton@caseynewton.bsky.social · last wk.There's a reason why "these are just statistical predictions" hasn't caught on in the discourse, and it's not the tech press. It's that people see them reading and writing and reasoning and scheming and they realize that the stochastic-parrots framing is outdated and inadequate to the moment
UT President interfering with faculty tenure. Just the latest egregious example of administrator overreach and political capitulation. Non-paywall follows.
UT border surveillance scholar was a shoo-in for tenure. UT denied him.
American Studies scholar Iván Chaar López fears UT’s unexplained tenure denial violated his academic freedom amid scrutiny of controversial fields.
statesman.com
Sorry, but I need to rant about this some more--mainly, the importance of history in the current political landscape, and the way the field of media studies often treats historical work as the antithesis to the more politically conscious sub-field of contemporary criticism. I'm pissed, so buckle up.
Eric Shmeric@ericdienstfrey.bsky.social · 3w agoJust read another newly published article that discusses at length the film industry's adoption of Dolby technology, but that doesn't actually cite any existing historical work on the subject, and that instead just takes Dolby's pr at face value (or cites the "bro" academics who love Star Wars).
New Science & Community Impacts Mapping Project (#SCIMaP) analysis on the impact of the WH plan to eliminate NSF's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences directorate. @malar0ne.bsky.social @asinclair.bsky.social @cl10.bsky.social @alexmusicwrites.bsky.social scienceimpacts.org/insights/SBE...
"Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does?"
Citizen.Coping@propcazhpm.bsky.social · 2mo ago"Journalist Mary Harrington argued that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text… much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking." LINK: archive.ph/2026.06.06-1...
The Intro to our Special Issue on 🌑 "Encountering Nothingness" 🌑 (w/ @katiecmoliver.bsky.social) is here. We propose a 'void-thinking' that examines the originary nothingness that underpins all life + that is, in our current moment, intensifying in circulation. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Hmmm what might Andy Sachs say
Press Gazette@pressgazette.co.uk · 3mo agoJames Murdoch is buying Vox, New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network via his private holding company Lupa Systems in a deal reportedly worth more than $300m. The deal does not include Vox Media titles The Verge, Eater, Popsugar, SB Nation and The Dodo pressgazette.co.uk/the-wire/med...
"...if we continue to let our most experimental and interesting institutions fail in favor of administrative scale, we will find ourselves with a higher education system that is larger, more efficient and entirely devoid of the vibrancy that so many other countries are struggling to emulate."
Today feels like the first day of class even though it’s already week 3
apropos of vibes, but striking when “critical computing” papers make critical points only by citing other ACM papers, particularly when a dozen papers are stacked into a single bracket citation [1, 9, 33, 34, 49, 54, 63, 74] And yes I too have sinned. Effects of formats (cf. Sterne, 2012), perhaps?
Facilitating a hybrid panel? Turns out it’s just as hard, if not harder, than doing AV for concerts. Speaking from experience. #4S2025
Have you noticed that everyone in certain subcultures keeps using the term "first principles"? I explore its origins for Compact magazine: www.compactmag.com/article/how-...
How Engineering Replaced Politics
If an extraterrestrial—or, for that matter, a human being from anywhere else—were to land in Silicon Valley, the traveler would encounter a distinctive dialect of American English.
compactmag.com
File under "Ego + Capital + Tech ≠ Intellectual Insight." These self-styled tech visionaries are as full of hallucinations as the AI systems they impose on us. At least there's an excuse for the AI. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/o...
Opinion | Peter Thiel and the Antichrist
nytimes.com
Just got to Denver for #ICA25! Excited to present my work on TikTok's formatting of trendiness at the #DebatingCreatorCulture preconference today
Check out my colleagues’ and my work on sociotechnical errors published in @ijoc-usc.bsky.social (edited by Mike Ananny and Simogne Hudson)! I found the collection incredibly illuminating in helping me think through how errors are/may be claimed, mobilized, accounted for, and cared for
Mike Ananny@mikeananny.bsky.social · last yr.Re-upping this with better direct link to this @ijoc-usc.bsky.social collection: annenbergpress.com/2025/04/23/i... If you've ever been curious abt tech system errors, failures, breakdowns, & mistakes, check out this amazing new collection edited by me & Dr. Simogne Hudson, with fantastic authors.
Hasan Piker detained at the border and questioned for hours over politics. He was asked whether or not he’d interviewed Hamas, Houthis, or Hezbollah members. He was questioned about his opinions on Trump and Israel.
Hasan Piker detained at the border and questioned for hours over politics
"They straight up tried to get something out of me that I think they could use to basically detain me permanently"
usermag.co
How can live music culture help us rethink the ethics of algorithms when their operations are indeterminate in real time? This past weekend, I explored this question at the Failing Media Conference in Chicago. Part of this work was just published in IJOC: ijoc.org/index.php/ij...
Mike Ananny@mikeananny.bsky.social · last yr.So much is broken right now, but I want to share an amazing new set of short, teachable interdisciplinary essays on ** Sociotechnical Error ** Live at IJOC journal @ijoc-usc.bsky.social: ijoc.org/index.php/ij... (scroll to Forum) Intro by me & Simogne Hudson: ijoc.org/index.php/ij... Pls share!
Is there a difference between solo dates and romanticizing life
Celebrating the 1-year pub date of "In the Land of the Unreal" with talks in SoCal. Finally returning to the place that inspired this book. Catch me at USC tomorrow and UC-Irvine on Wednesday.
In the Land of the Unreal
Book
dukeupress.edu
Tomorrow is 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the February 28 Incident, which was a massacre against Taiwanese people by the ruling KMT. In this guide, we will tell you the importance of this holiday, and how it is celebrated in Taiwan. taiwantravelblog.com/228-peace-me...
228 Peace Memorial Day Holiday Guide – What to do and Best Historical Places to Visit (228和平紀念日指南)
228 Peace Memorial Holiday is a holiday to remember the February 28 Incident in 1947, in which a massacre against innocent Taiwanese people was started by the ruling KMT. It is a day to remember that ...
taiwantravelblog.com
If you are a Cornell Alum, you can vote in the upcoming Alumni Trustee Election. This vote is important - two of the candidates are right-wing attorneys who will work to enact their political agenda on the university's administration. See alt text for more info. vote.yeselections.com/cornell/
![• J. Kennerly (Ken) Davis Jr., a leader within the Federalist Society, the far-right conservative and libertarian organization that advocates for a textualist and originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. He is also active with the Alumni Free Speech Alliance and the Cornell Free Speech Alliance, which oppose anti-racist DEI efforts, and which promote the nebulous idea of “viewpoint diversity” — the idea that all opinions should be represented in classrooms, regardless of their academic, scholarly, or scientific merit.
• Cindy Crawford, an attorney for the Koch brothers’ primary political advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which advocates to end government regulations of environmental and safety issues, to end public education as a universal good, and to promote other policies that make it easier for the ultra-rich to become richer and to control public life.
What do these candidates believe? In their own words:
Of his student days in the 1960s, Davis wrote: “[T]he devastation wrought upon … all of Cornell by the shameful capitulation of President James Perkins to the armed occupation of Willard Straight Hall by campus radicals taught me forever that constitutionally compliant enforcement of the law and rule-based order is absolutely essential to protecting and preserving the integrity of the academic enterprise and, indeed, all of civil society.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:rwbqyvmee43mq76h5hxmfe6t/bafkreiadnrm2ad75j2u66n7vprihw2sgvsmrh64wpvll7xc5ngumq34mdu)
![Apparently referring to campus protest and movements for greater equity and justice, Crawford wrote: “[W]e are at a tipping point in which all elite universities, and Cornell in particular, must decide whether they will remain beacons of learning or acquiesce to demands for censorship, conformity, and political activism. It is relatively easy to pay homage to free expression and diversity of thought. But it can be difficult to uphold those values when confronted by aggressive attempts to shout down (or shut down) that support. I have dedicated my professional life to those issues, and I can guide and defend an incoming administration that is going to face severe challenges and tough decisions that will inevitably spawn outrage, whether real or feigned.”
(Crawford's professional life has been inside Koch-network organizations that seek to support billionaires and to undermine environmental regulations, public education, taxation on wealth, and other functions of civil society and the public good.)
Neither candidate has a significant volunteer history with the university, unlike the CATN-endorsed candidates. This means that they have not built up the same kind of knowledge of the operations of the university as the CATN-endorsed candidates, and it appears that their interest in sitting on the board of trustees is primarily for the purpose of enacting a right-wing political agenda on the university's administration.
The Cornell Free Speech Alliance and other organizations are organizing their constituencies to vote in this election. Since voter turnout is usually low, they can have a big impact.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:rwbqyvmee43mq76h5hxmfe6t/bafkreieotxntrec3tuut2xmprzx64qap6lbiyv6dhw2fogtn6u2qh3jxk4)
