In re: to recent news about the Meta data center, Sheila Tahir and I are sharing our zine, "Ghosts in the Cloud: A Southern Gothic Approach to Studying AI Infrastructure" based on a trip to the hypderscaler construction site in spring 2026.
justine zhang
@tisjune.bsky.social
assistant professor in information, university of michigan. i have big intellectual feelings about language and technology. https://tisjune.github.io/ she/her
A feature essay by @andrew-brooks.bsky.social and me has just been published in our favourite magazine @parapraxismag.bsky.social — thanks to the legendary editors! www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/whe...
Where’s Daddy? — Parapraxis
Andrew Brooks & Astrid Lorange
parapraxismagazine.com
Got a useful question on the thread about student visas as to whether it's contradictory, from an abolitionist perspective, to describe the university as "a sanctuary for knowledge." The answer, for me, is both yes and no. Sharing an elaboration here.🧵
@avcx.bsky.social is great. i am approaching the end of their (extremely generous) free trial period and need to remind myself to subscribe. some of the clues are "text my funny and based friends immediately" tier, which is much more than i can say of the NYT.
Mx. Tiffany Leigh@tiffanyleigh.bsky.social · last yr.Alternatives to NY Times Games & Puzzles 🧵 If it bothers you that your passive games subscription and clicks to the NYT Games cartel is funding their awful OpEd army and "journalism," there are a wealth of puzzle/game options less iffy/yikes complicit, and many are direct clones to your NYT faves.
Why Bernie Sanders is wrong - and nationalizing AI is a bad idea "AI is, above all else, a weapon of class war from above. Whether it’s the state that wields it or corporations does little to change that fact."
The Socialist Case Against Nationalizing AI
AI is not a neutral technology whose benefits need to be redistributed. It is a weapon of class war from above, designed to cheapen labor and concentrate power. Nationalizing it does nothing to change...
jacobin.com
A university cannot be a sanctuary for knowledge while serving as an agent of the border. As long as some students can be threatened with deportation, no one's academic freedom is secure. 20/
much "critical" work on AI can be understood as attempts to elaborate an ethical consumerism around AI. that this work systematically exhibits contradictions is unsurprising, as ethical consumerism is a wildly inadequate frame for contending with the violent, hegemonic projects that AI indexes.
This episode recaps some of the highlights from this amazing set of speakers: aydelotte.swarthmore.edu/publications...
Just Tech: Take Back Tech Workshop Series - How to Stop a Data Center - Aydelotte
Across the U.S. data centers are being constructed at an unprecedented pace, raising concerns about the environmental impacts, energy costs, and the social benefits of A.I. technologies relative to th...
aydelotte.swarthmore.edu
Mél Hogan / The Data Fix@melhogan.bsky.social · 3w agoNew episode: pca.st/episode/5846...
Many faculty have been sounding the alarm about the problems generative AI poses for student learning. Strangely, some higher ed administrations seem have emerged as major AI boosters. Why? As I write in the latest @hedgehogreview.bsky.social it's a labor story: hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-f...
Every single paragraph of this peace is deeply lacerating, and incredibly insightful. An extraordinary essay by Abdaljawad Omar about the structure of feeling of Palestinianness: www.equator.org/articles/mor...
wow imagine playing an instrumental role in accelerating the evisceration of a social practice and then repackaging it as a purchasable aesthetic
Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 3w agoYou’ve heard of gorpcore? Well how about slopcore? techcrunch.com/2026/07/16/w...
Adam C. Jones discusses the relationship between social murder, capitalism and fascism. prometheus-mag.com/2026/03/26/t...
took that ai compass quiz... did anyone else get angine de poitrine??
Join our #FAccT2026 CRAFT session on resistance to & refusal of AI this Sunday, June 28 at 2:15pm! panel discussion w Renée Sieber @cyberlyra.bsky.social @ali-alkhatib.com @jordant.bsky.social @stoopt.bsky.social @hagenblix.bsky.social & collage workshop to explore resistance together
The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.
i will be talking about this paper at facct on friday morning. slightly horrified that this word cloud was in my brain.
justine zhang@tisjune.bsky.social · 4mo agoNew #FAccT2026 paper with Su Lin Blodgett and @ninamarkl.bsky.social on the ideological work performed by discourses that sell the capabilities of generative AI products tisjune.github.io/papers/facct...
at facct this week? wondering if "political economy" is a rich collection of intellectual tendencies and critical sensibilities, or concerned that it's yet another academic branding tactic?curious about the background text of this flyer? join us!! sat 7-9 at co-op BMP!!
something i've been thinking about is how such initiatives are ways for universities to convert political challenges (as seen in efforts at divestment and worker organizing) into speech problems, hollowing out their content while making them easier to manage into submission
Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 2mo ago“Based on the job descriptions, the new positions will consolidate into one role a variety of free expression–related responsibilities—such as crafting speech policies, training faculty in de-escalation tactics, monitoring protests and coordinating with law enforcement.”
Just finished reading and this is all so very important and spot on. There's value in countering specific claims - such as in my case AI's ability to actually create software not just generate code - but discourse whack-a-mole just flings rocks at the walls while the castle remains standing.
![An except from the above paper with the following text in which I've highlighted the first and last paragraphs:
As we’ve outlined in §2, a large body of scholarship has engaged with these discourses as collections of mistaken or absurd claims, to be debunked, corrected, or ridiculed with better scientific techniques, deeper engagements with social scientific theory, and more measured accounts of how the technology really operates. Such strategies can serve as useful ground-clearing for broader efforts, but are limited in their ability to check the power of the AI industry, because they risk drawing attention away from the ideological work these discourses do [29].
In the context of AI capabilities discourses, claims about what AI can do carve social life into discrete skills, capabilities, and use cases, and rerender these things in terms of AI. If the point is to contest the broader systems of exploitation that the project of AI is woven into, then simply offering better assessments of the ability of an AI model to do productive cognitive work leaves intact the reifying logics that continue to alienate people while organizing capital.
Critical scholarship on AI should therefore aim to interrupt the ideological work performed by these claims, dismantling the grounds on which they are sayable rather than simply interrogating their truth value.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:6nbmyxbzaccjk456zdwzb26a/bafkreibgm75n65tlvlwfginosq4sydqwvzjn6cizolsltfuldrto7rac4q)
New at PB: @riislover667.bsky.social interviews @durba.bsky.social about her new book “The Future That Was” (@princetonupress.bsky.social), the vital history of Third World feminism, and the place of feminist visions for the future in our world now.
“Seize the Means of Knowledge Production”: Durba Mitra on Third World Feminists and Their Fight Against Patriarchal Authoritarianism - Public Books
“I suggest that the building of women’s organizations through cross border collaboration leads to a total transformation of civil society.”
publicbooks.org
my paper "Hyperscalers as logistical regimes" was published last week! Read on for a story about how Silicon Valley adopted ideas from the world of shipping to make (and to some extent, fulfill) promises about scale and the fluidity of the circulation of capital www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Hyperscalers as logistical regimes: software containers and the circulation of cloud capital
This article analyzes the software container as a device central to the rise of cloud capitalism. Firms like Google pioneered software containers internally as infrastructure for their own producti...
tandfonline.com
individuals obviously have their own motivations, but i interpret the structural role of such work as attempting to articulate uses for AI products and hence helping to secure the inevitability of the whole project.
Peter Whitewood@pwhitewood.bsky.social · 2mo agoRebranding a hallucination as a ‘critical confabulation’ that can fill archival gaps is a big no from me.
As part of our series “Reimagining the Future of Digital Health,” @puellaludens.bsky.social considers what historical and contemporary practices of mutual aid can teach us about how to develop skills for the collective governance of healthcare at a grassroots level. datasociety.net/points/lesso...
if i had to pick one moment to put into that "you bolt awake in the mountains of carthage" meme it would probably be when people started earnestly talking about using AI agents to do stuff
feeling sad and fantasizing about the two semester seminar style course i would teach if i had, like, a completely different job... semester 1 would be focused on language and political economy, often together... semester 2, of course, would be "oops all wittgenstein"
new article out in Current Anthropology today on raciolinguistic ideologies of listening (+ labor) in mental healthcare AI! feat. dream team commentary pieces by Josh Babcock, Michael Berman, Jay Ke-Schutte, @nickseaver.website, Summerson Carr, and Rihan Yeh www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
The Talking Lure Raciolinguistic Ideologies of Reception and the Listening Subjects of American Vocal Biomarker AI: Raciolinguistic Ideologies of Reception and the Listening Subjects of American Vocal...
In the United States, vocal biomarker AI is on the rise. The discourses encircling this interdisciplinary subfield propose that AI can identify discrete biological indicators of mental disability supp...
journals.uchicago.edu
i've been thinking about the work we're doing at varying levels to organize against AI, and maybe i've also been in the headspace of gardening and getting rid of weeds. i can't shake the feeling that AI takes up space opportunistically where people's needs are not being met. a little like weeds.
Ali Alkhatib: Weeds tend not to grow where they can't take root
ali-alkhatib.com
Also in the special issue: "AI as a War Issue, War as a Workers’ Issue" www.aaup.org/issue/spring...
AI as a War Issue, War as a Workers’ Issue
The fight against the University of Michigan–Los Alamos data center.
aaup.org
Read @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social 's review of @anniemcc.bsky.social 's Beneath the Wage ( Zone Books , @princetonupress.bsky.social ). Brouilette highlights the book's focus on the new terrains of antagonism and solidarity afforded by service labor. spectrejournal.com/service-with...
Service with a Scowl – Spectre Journal
Sarah Brouillette reviews Annie McClanahan's Beneath the Wage.
spectrejournal.com
“I do not invoke love as a universal unit of analysis or a private, hyper-commodified emotion emptied of history, but a revolutionary commitment to the land and its liberation.” -Laura al-Tibi, on Martyrdom and the Palestinian Wedding-Funeral www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/bri...
