Very normal in a functioning democracy to receive threatening text messages from a Republican SuperPAC suggesting that if I don't fill out my "voter profile" something something consequences?
Author | Watching Women: Militant Suffragists Write the British Surveillance State | U Toronto Press, 2024 Assoc Prof English in Tucson | Surveillance | C20/21 Caribbean and British Lit | GWS rock scrambler | hawk enthusiast | she/her
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Very normal in a functioning democracy to receive threatening text messages from a Republican SuperPAC suggesting that if I don't fill out my "voter profile" something something consequences?
This is not the AI boom creating a new type of work, this is a classic example of managers using automation to deskill old ones. Creative workers who once made a higher wage creating original art and writing are now paid in piecework to edit automated output. Bosses are using AI to cut labor costs.
Surveillance & Society has published a great new issue—w/ articles on data leaks, ceasefire monitoring, campus #protests, & much more! The journal is always fully #openaccess. Check it out, and please spread the word: ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/su...
Because it never stops being relevant, I'm re-sharing this piece I wrote in Time Magazine in 2023 about how surveillance of immigrants and xenophobic fears of immigrant crime re-made US policing into something more repressive for all people.
Please continue with updates as admin delusion encounters real-world working conditions 🤡💀
Love the premise of this workshop we're hosting -- "Everything Librarians Wish Graduate Students Knew About the Library" (I'm not involved, but what a great idea) libcal.library.arizona.edu/event/15215479
On of my weird beliefs is that if your sense-making and worldview are primarily informed by right-wing concepts, imaginaries, conspiracy thinking, alternate histories, etc, you are just a part of the right-wing noosphere even if you think you’re a dem elected or leftist podcaster or whatever
Side note: I look forward to Chicago and any other schools suspending PhD admissions and hiring also suspending publication requirements for current faculty in those fields since such reqs presuppose the existence of an adequate pool of peer reviewers
while it’s right and necessary to be disgusted and horrified by the concentration camps, it’s also important to remember that they are an almost seamless outgrowth of our existing prison system
Sorry, meant to add link: www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brian...
Is @bcmerchant.bsky.social's Blood in the Machine too far afield?
Re-upping: if you work at EPA, NOAA, FEMA, NIH, CDC, USDA or other agencies that involve really any sort of science in their work, and you have something you want the public to know, I would always love to hear from you. Signal is davelevitan.26 and you can remain anonymous.
🧵1/ Our branch just passed a motion condemning the stealth closure of the MA in Black British History. We did this to demand accountability — for the future of the MA and for the College’s promises on racial justice and equality. shorturl.at/gIUVG
Beautiful: "I am a hater, and I will not be polite. The machine is disgusting and we should break it. The people who build it are vapid shit-eating cannibals glorifying ignorance. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself." (from @anthonymoser.com) anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/h...
Hope to see you soon!
Re-organizing my work schedule for the next few days because my pre-order of "Claude McKay: Letters in Exile" arrived a week early 💜💜💜
... you just haven’t made sense of things, in your story, through the stories of anyone else. So you have a story that leaves you very lonely, and the people around you unwilling to discuss the lives they make around their story."
"To walk around telling everyone their stories are meaningless is to miss the point of a story. A story is a way of saying: “this is how I have made sense of things.” If you call that meaningless, you may think you are very smart. But actually... mail.cyberneticforests.com/human-litera...
Congrats to @uncpress.bsky.social on a beautiful new website! The press is celebrating with a 48-hour flash sale! 🎉 You can save 50% off all books, including mine, for 48 hours with code 01NEWSITE50. Free shipping over $75, too! uncpress.org/978146968894...
Hmmm, did you forget to inherit wealth? I find I really messed up, as an academic, by failing to secure hereditary wealth before embarking on this whole journey.
Is this about how the discount hotel rate at a certain fall conference is $299/night? To your Q: my annual "research funds" as a tenured R1 prof won't cover the costs of that single conference. To think grad students can somehow manage this, with not a single cheaper hotel nearby, is delusional.
putting aside the trans rights issues specifically (lol), I think part of what has me so frustrated with the Newsom thing is that Pritzker, Walz, and Zohran are putting on clinics for a popular, progressive politics and we’re wasting time talking about this used car salesman ass goblin.
This is one of the absolute toughest things about predatory inclusion — the predation is often fun or a little useful. Criticism makes a reasonable person sound like an asshole. LowerEd weathered me for this kind of social death. So I’ll say it: your enjoyment does not matter & should not matter.
They do NOT, this was much discussed when Tucson recently blocked the plan for a data center here; their best estimate was 180 jobs over 10 years which is basically nothing.
Putting the phrase "It’s as if they think every one of us fished our brains out of the Cracker Jack box" in my pocket for a rainy day.
Let's be clear: all the AI in edtech stuff (Canvas, Blackboard, Grammarly, Duolingo, OpenAI, the rest) is all about the "lock-in" - locking in students as subscribers or institutions via long-term license agreements for value generation. Is there good pedagogic evidence for it? No.
The very intentional purging of highly-qualified Black experts from media, higher ed, and gov't is going to have serious repercussions for our shared ability to understand the world around us and give an accurate account of it, until we reverse course on *all* of this.
So, went to a fancy bed store, and when we laid down to try the fanciest bed, they had us do this, and I deadass looked the salesperson in the eye and said "yeah, I know *exactly* how this works on the CNS; some of us have been to therapy."
...but then again, if this is SEO, I'd be so angry if I'd written a chapter for them, and they slapped a bunch of inaccurate keywords on it that meant that my writing wouldn't get in front of the people I was hoping to reach.
That might make sense--it was so odd! The essays in the back half of the book are about surveillance, and it really did sort of feel like they didn't tell the part 1 authors what the project was? (Also, parts 1 and 2 did not feel like halves of the same book...)
Reading a collection from #Routledge with "Surveillance" in the title and the word "surveillance" first appears in Ch *8* and I think maybe the first 7 authors...did not know that they were supposed to be writing about surveillance? I know Routledge is sus, but is this...AI? Truly I am puzzled.
Something that’s lost in the disc of “small majors.” I majored in religion bc I loved the subject, but a huge part was that it was a tiny major where I could know all the profs and they could know me. For a first gen student who was completely overwhelmed in college I needed this, desperately.
It is VIOLENCE. It is gleefully destructive. It is backpacks with inhalers, it is documents you need to apply for jobs, and most importantly it is the homes your most marginalized neighbors have pulled together from almost nothing. It is often the entirety of their possessions.
If you comment with the 📌 on the post itself and then follow the feed called "📌", it collects all those posts for you.
Reminder! Deadline to sign up for @moderniststudies.bsky.social seminars at this year's conference, including mine on Surveillance Modernity (described below), is August 31. #surveillancestudies
If you don’t do it every year (including a separate “narrative of achievements and accomplishments”), you’re not eligible for raises.
Yes—everyone, tt or not, on year-long contracts (including, spitefully, people retiring) is required to use software that was apparently built by the failson of one of the uni admins. It does not work, takes HOURS every year, and I hear we paid a lot more for it than similar commercial software.
This academic year, call out tactics from the CIA’s 1944 Simple Sabotage Field Manual each and every time someone attempts one in a meeting✨
The UCLA Faculty Association has filed a California Public Records Act request for the DOJ ransom letter sent to UCLA, after it was learned yesterday that the UC and the Regents and UCLA administration has no intention of sharing it with faculty.
This whole website is making me feel less alone in my resistance to AI in my classroom. This page in particular is legitimizing what was previously feeling like a personal rant I was going to make my students sit through… against-a-i.com/first-day-sp...
Yet more resources! Honestly, it's great to see how many people pulled together "AI can fuck off into the sun" resource guides for the beginning of the academic year."
"Representing the canon that scholars of Asian American literature have built, it is the most expansive dataset to date on Asian American literature." Data and essay: doi.org/10.18737/092...
Resources!
6 years as a contingent faculty member and now 5 years tt/tenured, and I will say that you can tell a LOT about a tt person by how they respond when you refer to a lecturer as a colleague.
I'd also, needless to say, be very wary of schools whose promo materials are centering their "AI partnerships."
those stats show which institutions are invested in the quality of teaching, and especially research-informed teaching, which is where most of the benefits to students lie. If I were helping a future student decide where to go, those would be numbers that I'd take seriously.
Most of this stuff is happening everywhere--I'm at a state uni and it it describes us too. I think a few of the best metrics for quality of education are average class size, and % of classes taught by tenure line faculty. Not because tenure-line folks are better teachers (we're not), but because...
One of the big lessons I try to leave audiences with is, on average, the humanities subsidize STEM fields. This is true across the country. Of course, it's an average, so there are exceptions. But the typical college uses humanities money to prop up STEM.
...the line bemoaning how "economics PhDs are going unemployed" is, hmmm, at best unaware of the Chicago School economics grads' history. Hard to think of another single PhD program with as disproportionate a negative effect on the world as the boys from Chicago Economics.
This article about the University of Chicago's finances is one of the clearer short(ish) explanations I've seen of how universities are ending up where they are, financially. Probably a good piece for sharing with people outside the academy! However... www.compactmag.com/article/the-...
Troops "are not there to solve a real problem; there is no actual crisis for Trump to exploit. They are there, instead, because the president wants to send a message: that cities and states that are not sufficiently deferential to him in law will have his will imposed on them by force."
would love to see more of this, as my sense has been that the grotesque dynamics of academic labor have meant that it is most often precariously positioned colleagues, including non-TL faculty in writing, who are targeted by admins whose goal is to secure “faculty buy-in” for AI mainstreaming
I know I'm stuck on this data center business, but: we only need more data infrastructure if we need more data, and the only people who need more data are the owners of tech companies who are actively trying to make our lives worse. We need to start cutting this shit off at the knees.
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...it obscures the actual human agents involved (programmers and police, respectively). And that's in service of describing responsibility for harm in such a way that makes accountability impossible: "AI-hallucination" and "officer involved shooting" are, grammatically, the same logical contortion.
I'm sure that I'm not the first person to notice this, but I've been thinking a lot about how language choices (including #AI itself) that humanize the products of machine learning are basically the tech writing equivalent of exonerative tense:
This whole 🧵 is great but the phrase "big legacy tote-bag shops" is perfect.
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This is the core problem with the Buttigieg "we have to find common ground" framing. The question isn't sports, it's whether trans people will be allowed to exist as trans in public. Everything else—politically and strategically—is downstream from that.
No doubt it's convenient for Sam Altman types for us to use this kind of shorthand to describe what's happening, but that's precisely why we shouldn't.
Right, but they don't? The chatbot isn't "entering a delusional state," because delusions require consciousness or sentience, which a chatbot doesn't have. It's operating according to it's programming, which causes it to provoke delusions in the human it's interacting with.
Just like chatbots don't hallucinate, they also can't have "delusions." You can't critique #LLMs by using language that ascribes consciousness to them. That accepts the faulty premises of the same AI booster cons it's supposedly criticizing. #Tech writers with big audiences need to do better.
I don't *have* a gym enemy but this makes me wonder if I *am* someone's gym enemy?
The reason the Dems are a failed party is because they have collectively decided that the best policy for any issue is a halfway compromise between a good idea and fascist bigotry, rather than fighting for any sort of coherent ethical framework
Anyway, the fight isn’t between AI and not AI. The fight is between unaccountable, proprietary, and for-profit technology that exists outside of an incentive structure to protect human lives and well-being, and open-source, ethical, equitable science that liberates knowledge in all of its forms
Cutting your humanities programs is performance art in the guise of budget cuts and everyone in academia knows it and everyone outside does not and that's why they can keep going doing this bullshit.
To be fair, it's pretty clear that the people around Vance loathe him and are tipping the press whenever he does something embarrassing, so that they can report it in detail, with (in this case) in-depth lake-level-tracking graphs. Which would motivate most people to not do this sort of dumb shit.
Imagine getting the *army corps of engineers* to set up "ideal kayaking conditions" so that you can pretend to have the shoulder/core strength to do a little chill family paddling.
The Tucson City Council has unanimously rejected a proposal to build up to 10 data centers on the city's outskirts, bowing to overwhelming public opposition. tucson.com/news/local/g...
Not sure where this will go next, but this is excellent, excellent news. So many Ls lately, so going to celebrate the fact that the city council has committed to safeguarding the desert aquifers from Amazon's predations. azluminaria.org/2025/08/06/t...
Totally normal stuff: Two sections of the Constitution, about due process and foreign gifts, just vanished off the Congressional website, a site that has not changed in many many years www.404media.co/constitution...
One point from @frankpasquale.bsky.social’s “New Laws of Robotics” is the reminder that AI and automation will not replace human labor for all of us. Wealthy people won’t send their own children to AI teachers or their elderly parents to robot nursing homes.
Eugenics as national health policy
Reposting for the work week crowd:
Every rich person is going to tell *you* how great AI teaching is while sending *their* kids to the kind of schooling the Ancient Greeks would recognize. I just wish everyone would think about why that is.
Well, then I guess I'd hope such a class would at least come with a "hey, this class requires you to use LLMs, feel free to pick something else" *in the course description* so that students can opt out. (Ideally they'd get such a warning before registration, but for Fall 25, that ship has sailed.)
An admittedly strained analogy: you wouldn't try to coerce a vegan into eating meat in order to get them to understand the drawbacks of meat-eating, so why do the same to students with principled objections to LLMs/AI?
some of them are going to be alienated (rightly, I'd say) by a class that forces them to use unethical tech in order to make a point. Some of them already have strong ethical stances on this tech.
Yeah, I'm not saying you can't see those textual effects the way you describe. I'm saying that there are lots of other effective ways of getting those problems across that don't require students to use the shitty tech, and, as someone else here has pointed out,
If you wanted a resource for helping them understand the nuts and bolts without actually having to use the tech, I think this piece is quite good: ig.ft.com/generative-ai/
at the wires," and can't necessarily be observed or understood clearly from that approach. Yes, the actual product is intellectually vacuous, but that's probably not the main objection to the tech. So kind of unclear what the pedagogical value of coercing students into using those tools would be?
Most of the strongest critiques of LLMs/AI--on grounds of environmental costs, cognitive offloading, labor issues, use of people's intellectual property without permission/attribution, racism/misogyny/other effects of the data sets they trained on, etc.--aren't necessarily evident from "poking...
This mostly just demonstrates that the authors of this "research" don't know what these jobs entail?
I have been embarrassed that it's 100 dollars! (People: so I can buy your book now? Me: Yes, but...) Glad that you got a discount!
Everything from U Toronto Press (@uoftpress.bsky.social), including my book, is 50% in their summer sale! Code is SUMMERSALE50. utppublishing.com/doi/book/10....
Reminds me of the time I put myself up for the “interdisciplinary scholar rep” position in one of my professional orgs with a “interdisciplinary work is a labor issue” candidate statement and the deanlet running the committee refused to add me to the ballot. They are aware!
I never have my students free write but I absolutely would if I thought I'd get 1000 words on the X-Files.
If the name Project Blue isn't familiar, @azluminaria.org has been doing great reporting on the dangers of the azluminaria.org/2025/07/21/t... and the local organizing to resist it, including here: azluminaria.org/2025/07/28/c...
Fellow Tucsonans! Watershed Management Group is doing a virtual education and advocacy event tomorrow (7/30) about the proposed, and potentially devastating to our water supply, Project Blue (an Amazon front). Please share! watershedmg.org/event/virtua...
Not an essay, but a string of episodes (6-9) in the current season of the American Vandal podcast includes interviews with higher ed scholars like Tressie MC, and a throughline about how tech companies' targetted HBCUs first to get AI into unis. Feels at least adjacent to what you're thinking?
The (Ed) Tech Industry has made citizens believe that the problem with education is reading, thinking, and writing when the problem with education is austerity. Reading, thinking, and writing are not the problems to be solved. Austerity is.
Ok, I know it's time to be done for the day because I read this after clicking on it *from your post* and then thought to myself "I should send this to someone at our library."
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Read @biancatherosestone.bsky.social's What Is Otherwise Infinite in the same week as Koleka Putuma's Collective Amnesia and it was the perfect accidental pairing--excellent on their own, and better together.
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Canvas just became one of the most powerful surveillance, IP theft, & data monetization tools in the world. OpenAI bought a user-base locked in to long-term contracts. But they can’t make us use their trashware. Boycott. Luddify. Open source. Don’t let them have your work or your students.
Study finds A.I. LLMs advise women to ask for lower salaries than men. When prompted w/ a user profile of same education, experience & job role, differing only by gender, ChatGPT advised the female applicant to request $280K salary; Male applicant=$400K. thenextweb.com/news/chatgpt...
Last reminder to get your name in for the lottery if you want to write for March Sadness 90s Edition 2026. We will start pulling names TOMORROW: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...