in a soon to be published paper we wink at how anthropic is better than openai at crafting marketing narratives that prospect personhood, packaging aspects of self and sociality into commodifiable nuggets. slicker sales copy for the same world-annihilating projects, so to speak
i don't care about keeping squirrels away from birds, i just want to produce high quality entertainment experiences for my dog
we are planning to make it hybrid!
Title: Taking Back Technopower: STS and strategic interventions for the fight against technofascism with authors and research areas
The current moment is characterized by resurgent struggles against technofascism. These struggles include community resistance against data centers, strategic actions against tech companies complicit in genocidal violence, and organizing efforts across many sectors against the proliferation of AI in the workplace. This open panel gathers people engaged in these sites of struggle to collectively consider the following question: how can STS approaches advance these struggles against fascist technopower, and work towards constructing more liberatory futures? In addressing this question, we seek to surface the incipient militant potential of STS, often submerged under scholarship that muddies strategic analysis and disarms political action through the register of subversive critique. Through close attention to relationality and sociality, STS may help build solidarities while unsettling the sedimented categories that impede movement building (Breymen et al, 2017). By incorporating materialist, political economic accounts of technology, STS may help push beyond the boundaries of "ethical tech” by revealing the imbrications of economic and financial processes with technoscience (Birch, 2013). And as a roving, interdisciplinary field attuned to embodied and situated practices (Haraway, 1988), an STS lens may help ensure that analyses are constantly attentive to the lively contingencies of on-the-ground struggles.
We seek to explore theories born through political struggle, and examples of how STS theory informs praxis. Submissions may include, but are not limited to: strategic reflections from organizers and activists; historical accounts that can inform future organizing and activism; or the analysis of organizing artefacts (e.g., propaganda, slogans, campaigns) and their role in advancing political struggle. We will facilitate this panel as an open discussion among folks situated across different sites of struggle, aiming to provide a space for advancing the struggle against technofascism through the development of relationships, theories, and strategic insights.
hi STS people! are you engaged in political struggle against fascism? do you have things to share: strategic reflections, organizing artefacts, etc.? do you have thoughts about how we will win? if so, you should submit something to our open panel at 4S this year! www.4sonline.org/accepted_ope...
a close up of the first image from the last post. you can more clearly see that my dog's face looks distressed (it's just that the camera caught him at a particularly unflattering moment)
reading the news:
@emmamay.bsky.social, Serita Sargent, and I analyzed the 2023 SAG AFTRA contract on AI to inform bargaining around AI across sectors as a lever for more meaningful worker control technology in the workplace. Out today in Big Data & Society
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
I think that we have to look at AI as less of harbinger of some new technological future than a way of managing the effects of a declining empire.
a german shepherd sitting with a chew bone between his front paws. his ears are upright and he looks nervous
a german shepherd all contorted as he plays with a stick in a field. he looks kind of like the star wars lightsaber video kid
a german shepherd lying on a wool blanket licking his lips and looking behind him into the house. in front of him is a dog bone, and beyond that is a field
in the field, the german shepherd dog is stretched out and wiggling on the grass. his front paws are curled up like a t. rex
the satirical potential of "human-centred AI" seems underexplored as of yet
"Tip of the Spear argues that prisons are war" is a hell of a thesis statement. it makes most academic work look bloodless in comparison. i'm so excited to read the rest of the book!
when i saw this article & the surrounding discourse last week:
i kind of think the left is too busy cultivating sociotechnical assemblages of collective care and political struggle in a time of violent imperial decay punctuated by liberatory possibilities to worry about having to manage some peoples' weird feelings about AI
thought this review, on knowing your enemies and/from your comrades, was extremely good.
I'm not sure if it's worth adding this, but in case anyone's wondering, @AmandaAskell is a brilliant philosopher doing by far the most important philosophical research anyone in the world is doing right now (in terms of both impact and philosophical interest). I've had the privilege of seeing her at many stages along this journey, from a chance meeting in the hallways of Coombs (the building where ANU Philosophy used to be) back in about maybe 2015, to a visit with her at OpenAI's offices on the day, more or less, that she and others decided to leave OpenAI to form Anthropic, to a number of workshops and other things since, where she showed an incredible generosity of spirit to the folks both in philosophy and in the FAccT community who most needed to learn from her work.
I helped build the FAccT academic conference, and white men like Seth have to come along and make sure that the people we tried to get away from, the TESCREAL eugenicist ghouls, have every academic space in addition to the billions they're drowning in.
good morning, it’s day 4 of strikes at the University of Essex to save 400 jobs across all departments, the Southend campus and our Foundation programme — many members are worried about making ends meet. if you can, please donate to our strike fund: gofund.me/059af6be8
sometimes you can tell when someone's entire theory of change amounts to ctrl+f+replace-ing jargon
sorry for the dumb ai discourse subtweet but i would really love to see a language ideological account of the political work done by the distinction between "the drudgery" and "the creative, expressive part"
This is a genuinely huge, sweeping victory today for the University of California—or rather, for us, its faculty, acting through our faculty associations, while the UC itself maintained a strict policy of deer-in-headlights silence.
The Trump admin has given up its appeal of a powerful injunction:
if you're interested in reading Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt by Orisanmi Burton, my reading group (Thought Soup) will start discussing it in a week (next saturday). see replies for links to buy it to raise money for Palestinians:
It specifically annoys me when people fantasize about language models but seem deeply uncurious about how language actually works---the material conditions that enable languaging, the situated labour of interpretation, the contingency of meaning-making. Go touch grass!
Of course everyone is welcome to daydream, so long as they realize that repressing the necessity of infrastructure to the fantasy of AI, and papering over the mottled, heterogeneous, inevitably-contested nature of infrastructural work---while claiming to do serious commentary---is deeply unserious.
Accounts of AI that glide over AI infrastructure, as it actually exists, don't really say anything about AI so much as project desires onto an imaginary wish-fulfillment object.
The defining feature of AI today is infrastructure: the rapacious buildout of data centres; the transnational configuration of labour exploitation; the grafting of AI onto processes of capitalist accumulation.
a brown dog with pointy ears, a black snout, and white sock feet. he is lying on his side a bed. his back legs are tucked into his body and his front legs are sticking out, extremely straight.
jumbo shrimp
New commentary by @cellllla.bsky.social, @perhaxis.bsky.social and myself: "The tech worker movement and the rise of the tech oligarchy". www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Join us for BD&S 2026 Colloquium, Panel 1: Constructing Alternatives through Community Data & Data Activism
Jan 21 | 16:00–18:00 GMT (11:00 AM–1:00 PM EST)
uky.zoom.us/j/85254638887
#DataActivism #CriticalDataStudies #DataJustice
sorry (said canadian-ly)
a german shepherd in a forest clearing smiling
a german shepherd facing away from the camera and looking back. in the background is a person out of focus, wearing a coat
a german shepherd running toward the camera on a walkway covered in leaves. in the background is a woman out of focus
a woman in a green coat walking up a leaf-covered path toward a bench. she's looking back at the camera and the sun is striking her face as she looks back. ahead of her is a german shepherd sniffing the ground
thought we might need photos of dog
it would be fun to compile a cross-university wall of shame
