Vanessa Chang
@vxchang.bsky.social
Writing, thinking, curating: art, technology, people, planet. Dreaming, making, clowning by way of Singapore, Sydney, San Francisco. Author of The Body Digital (Melville House, Nov 25). http://www.vanessa-chang.com
Had a fabulous chat with Brianne Kane about about writing, bots, cities, and design justice in my book, The Body Digital, on Science Quickly.
Scientific American@sciam.bsky.social · 2mo agoToday on the pod, a new look at how everything from handwriting to AI quietly reshapes our bodies, habits and sense of connection
Check out my interview with author Vanessa Chang about what AI, microphones and QWERTY keyboards can tell us about our relationship to technology 🤖📚🧪
Scientific American@sciam.bsky.social · 2mo agoToday on the pod, a new look at how everything from handwriting to AI quietly reshapes our bodies, habits and sense of connection
“Once you call students consumers, you have already restructured every relationship on which the university depends.” hyperallergic.com/the-death-of...
The Death of the Art School
The rampant corporatization and "administrification" of American higher-education institutions has turned students into mere consumers.
hyperallergic.com
That concrete box off the freeway wasn’t designed for storage so much as capture — of markets, workers, and, now, people detained by immigration agents, as the federal government turns warehouses into million-square-foot concentration camps. It is a disappearing machine. We need to see it clearly.
The Warehouse, in Plain Sight
That concrete box off the freeway wasn’t designed for storage so much as capture. It’s a disappearing machine. We need to see it clearly.
placesjournal.org
the Artemis crew took photography classes so they could take the best photos possible up there 😭
RIT alumni train Artemis II astronauts in photography
The four NASA astronauts on the Artemis II Moon Mission are well equipped to document their mission because of two years of training from RIT alumni.
rit.edu
I genuinely think the president and many of his advisers, scammers, hustlers, and keyboard gangsters, don’t understand this concept at all and you can see it in the pattern of their mistakes from Minneapolis to Tehran www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/o...
“The workers in Kenya say that it feels uncomfortable to go to work. They tell us about deeply private video clips, which appear to come straight out of Western homes, from people who use the glasses in their everyday lives. Several describe video material showing bathroom visits, sex…”
She Came Out of the Bathroom Naked, Employee Says
Bank details, sex and naked people who seem unaware they are being recorded. Behind Meta’s new smart glasses lies a hidden workforce, uneasy about peering into the most intimate parts of other people’...
svd.se
And formally provably so because to drive you need theory of mind. You can indeed show with maths the limits of maths since it's a formal engineered system with knowable limits, see Gödel etc. We created trains which ban humans from tracks so the system can be safely automated, not so for roads. 1/n
Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ@olivia.science · 6mo agoThese companies are always lying about the extent of their automation because some things cannot be fully automated in principle futurism.com/advanced-tra...
“Insisting on technical precision when it matters can help us resist the easy idea that AI is a helper, ready to assist. Instead we must keep our focus on the uncomfortable thought that these systems partly and covertly structure what we say, think and learn.”
Generative AI is not just a tool for learning. It shapes how students think
Framing this technology as a helpful ‘tool’ disguises how much it guides every element of critical thinking that academics seek to cultivate, says James Garvey
timeshighereducation.com
"Women adopt AI at rates 25% lower than men. This isn’t a guess. It’s the finding of a Harvard Business School meta-analysis examining eighteen studies, over 140,000 participants, across multiple countries." "Every AI Company Is Building a Different Wife" abiawomosu.substack.com/p/they-built...
Anna Kornbluh@annakornbluh.bsky.social · 7mo agoone of many reasons that the organized critique and refusal movement is overwhelmingly led by women (yes including women computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and engineers)
OK! I collected much of what I @spookyachu.bsky.social @andreaeyleen.bsky.social (and other collaborators not on here) have said on the Turing test (from critical, gendered, etc. angles) as it keeps being relevant: olivia.science/turing — hope it's useful for others too. Happy Sunday! 🤖💭
Turing test
On this page are some resources for analysing the Turing test.
olivia.science
Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ@olivia.science · 6mo ago"A behaviourist framework is [...] related to the perspective on [cognition] granted by the Turing test (cf. Guest and Martin, 2023; Erscoi et al., 2023). [We must address] when [it] is unethical (e.g. applied to treatment or education, Kirkham, 2017; Kumar and Kumar, 2019)" doi.org/10.1007/s421...
they’re talking about the decision to add facial recognition to the camera glasses. this company needs to be shut down.
Well of course there's nothing to worry about anyone being able to deploy facial recognition anywhere. Yikes.
Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 6mo agoI remember this because a FB exec came after me on Twitter when I said FB would do no such thing, re: “very public discussion.”
I remember this because a FB exec came after me on Twitter when I said FB would do no such thing, re: “very public discussion.”
Ryan Mac 🙃@rmac.bsky.social · 6mo agoIn 2021, I reported on an internal meeting at Facebook about discussions to put facial recognition on new smartglasses. One of their execs complained about the coverage and said the co would have a "very public discussion" about the tech. They never did. And now: www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...
1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken. Hundreds of kids are still detained. We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵
wild to advertise a massive surveillance network, but since it can find a lost dog it’s good now
Phil Lewis@phillewis.bsky.social · 6mo agoHere's that Ring #SuperBowl commercial:
In this conversation on the #NoSuchThingpod, I got to talk about how the ongoing dialogue between bodies and technologies might shape learning and education - really, some of the most urgent questions of our time. Listen here: shows.acast.com/nosuchthing/...
The Body Digital | No Such Thing
How our tools shape attention, learning, and our bodies in the world
shows.acast.com
Enjoyed taking a pause and reflecting on #thedigitalbody, what is gained and what is lost with tech, and a more thoughtful future with AI in this interview with bsky.app/profile/anne... on #CultureStudy Read it here: www.patreon.com/posts/much-m...
A Much More Interesting Way To Think About "The Digital Body" | Culture Study
Get more from Culture Study on Patreon
patreon.com
data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-wall-l... "There is another America inside this one, visible in the statistics of nations that made different choices. Call it Latent America: the nation that would exist if our democracy functioned to serve the public rather than protect the already powerful."
The Wall Looks Permanent Until It Falls
On the optimism of preparation in a time of democratic decay.
data4democracy.substack.com
“i want back my rocking chairs, / solipsist sunsets, / & coastal jungle sounds...” A poem by Renee Nicole Good, who was murdered by ICE earlier today. lithub.com/renee-nicole...
Renee Nicole Good, murdered by ICE, was a prize-winning poet. Here’s that poem.
Renee Nicole Good, 37, mother to a six-year-old boy, was murdered earlier today by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, a few blocks from her home. According to the Minnesota Star Tribune: [An ICE agent] s…
lithub.com
Just discovered an insane new form of co-intelligence where you briefly share the mind of a great thinker in history and then a portion of their mind travels in yours for the rest of your life. Calling it a "book."
Let me tell you a story. Perhaps you can guess where this is going... though it does have a bit of a twist. I was poking around Google Scholar for publications about the relationship between chatbots and wellness. Oh how useful: a systematic literature review! Let's dig into the findings. 🧵
Latest post live on Substack... a companion piece to my book review in Science Magazine of @vxchang.bsky.social's 'The Body Digital.' apothek.substack.com
Excited to see my book reviewed in @science.org It means a great deal to see the book's ideas about embodiment, technology, and humanity resonating across disciplines and communities. Thank you to @amitchandramd.bsky.social for engaging so thoughtfully with my work!
Amit Chandra, MD@amitchandramd.bsky.social · 8mo agoSharing my book review of @vxchang.bsky.social's book, The Body Digital, published yesterday in @science.org: 🧪 From phonographs to AI, Chang traces the impact of technology on the human experience. A poetic meditation on the machines that make us human.
ChatGPT is 3 years old this week — what was the world like in late 2022, and how did that shape what ChatGPT has become? I wrote about ChatGPT as a pandemic technology, centered on expectations of social isolation in ways that continue to define it. mail.cyberneticforests.com/what-was-cha...
What Was ChatGPT?
A Chatbot Optimized for Social Distance Three years after the launch of ChatGPT, we can finally speak in hindsight about what it was and how it came to be. Its meteoric rise shocked the world, gather...
mail.cyberneticforests.com
Sharing my book review of @vxchang.bsky.social's book, The Body Digital, published yesterday in @science.org: 🧪 From phonographs to AI, Chang traces the impact of technology on the human experience. A poetic meditation on the machines that make us human.
A human history of machines
Our lived experiences inform technology and are, in turn, transformed by it
science.org
This study show that using poems to jailbreak LLMs is... super effective? What the heck.
Charlie Stross@cstross.bsky.social · 9mo agoLooks like LLMs are *very* vulnerable to attack via poetic allusion: "curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding 90% ..." https://arxiv.org/html/2511.15304v1
@vxchang.bsky.social examines intimacy in the age of chatbots: “If the myth of Pygmalion imagines love perfected, distilled from the body, digital platforms deploy that ideal as a design principle.” lithub.com/pygmalions-c...
Pygmalion’s Chatbot: Vanessa Chang on Intimacy in the Age of AI
When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that ChatGPT would soon be able to talk dirty, the Internet erupted in equal parts fascination and moral panic. Think pieces proliferated, debating the ethics o…
lithub.com
From player pianos to ChatGPT, every generation fears its machines will colonize human experience. Yet we always find ways to reclaim them. I talked with Andrew Keen about why our bodies have always been technological—and who gets to design that change. 🎧 keenon.substack.com/p/why-our-fe...
Why Our Fear of Technology Is Nothing New—And Why That Should Give Us Hope: From Cuckoo Clocks to ChatGPT
Episode 2606: Vanessa Chang on the promise of The Body Digital
keenon.substack.com
My debut book The Body Digital launches next week! Join me Nov 4 at 7 PM at Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, Berkeley for a conversation with NPR's Kara Platoni about how our bodies and technologies shape each other—from Walkmans to AI. 📚 Free + open to all! #TheBodyDigital #BookLaunch #BerkeleyEvents
