Slowly working my way through _Insolvent: How to Reorient Computing for Just Sustainability_ and basically retyping the whole book as I take notes, pumping my fist, yelling "yes, this yes!"
direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...
If an AI future is what I'm getting left behind from, then Christ, just leave me behind. A girl can only pivot so much, hoss, and I hung up my pivotin' boots some time ago. I don't make videos even though that was supposedly the future of writing ten years ago — I mean, I guess I do, but they're little banjo practice videos for my friends, not expressions of a desperate careerist impulse. I use social media with the attention-crazed dopesickness of an addict, not the care and forethought of a professional, as any cursory read of my posts will confirm. I'm a writer by trade — a creative, as you might say — and here you are, running a business you don't even understand into the ground, deskilling my trade and expecting a thank you when you explain how you're doing it. If I don't devalue myself the way you continually devalue me, you warn, I'll be left behind. Okay, says I! Quit making it my problem and go! The dust you leave me in will settle, and in the meantime, I will keep doing my work in much the way I've done it since I first became literate.
‘if you don’t learn to use AI, you’ll get left behind!’ 🍆✊
www.patreon.com/posts/155290...
Here we go. A running list of studies that show the harm of using "AI" has on individuals. docs.google.com/document/d/1...
say it with a full chest: "SHARED GOVERNANCE IS HOW UNIVERSITIES STAY HONEST"
I was listening to IBCK on bullshit jobs and thinking of how essential so many jobs turn out to be in our bot-age, that we need people to maintain systems, build institutional memory, provide real customer service and information. The zeal to replace people is making people seem irreplaceable.
Well done.
Can't recommend enough organizing spaces for AI skeptics and haters in higher ed to talk to each other!
SHOULD THE U.S BLOT OUT THE SUN AND USHER IN AN AGE OF ETERNAL DARKNESS? - Gallup 2/20/26-3/5/26
NO - 41%
YES - 38%
UNSURE - 21%
There are a lot of people who see this shit for what it is and want no part of it
Picture of a panel in a conference center. There is a dias with a black curtain at the front, and a gray podium. Behind the dias sits Carmen Maria Machado, a fair-skinned femme wearing glasses with dark hair, Umair Kazi, a brown masc with dark hair, Alex Hanna, a brown butch trans woman with short brown hair, and Vauhini Vara, a brown woman with long black hair wearing a red blouse.
There were 250 people in the audience, at the biggest available room for our #awp26 panel, Resisting AI in Writing and Teaching.
It was invigorating; hearing about how writing instructors are pushing back against their institutions was inspiring. Thanks to my co-panelists Carmen and Umair.
As I get older I’m coming to increasingly radical views like “eradicating peoples jobs is bad, actually” and “a necessary part of having skills is taking responsibility for the outcomes of those skills”
New post: Can AI Replace Social Science Researchers? (No. No it can't. Come on, now.)
davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/can-ai-rep...
Imaging a human saying to you, "i will only ever tell you what i think you want to hear, based on what i know about ppl like you, how you start our conversation, & what you say during it. Sometimes that will sound like truth, sometimes like errors or lies. Now: Let's talk about your medical history"
I have said this before, but eliminating programs that teach a lot of students but don’t have many majors is like a restaurant not buying flour in its grocery delivery because people aren’t ordering flour on the menu.
In honor of the publication day of The Enclosures of Free Verse (uncpress.org/978146969306...), here's a little thread about what the book does and does not offer.
Hooray, congrats!!
Thank you, Elizabeth!
Thanks, Amy!
so exciting that this book is in the world it is fierce and rigorous and also fun to read
Thank you! It does fit into the story, but I don't write about Pound in this book. Too many other figures to highlight/threads to pull
💖
I read an earlier version of this book and cannot recommend it highly enough. If you're out in these streets teaching modernist poetics then you NEED this sharp and sensitive account of the racialism attaching to narratives of poetic form in the early twentieth century.
Thank you, Natalia!
Like all books, this one has its flaws, and if I could start again, there’s lots I’d do differently. But this is the book I could write given the kinds of jobs I was able to get between 2014 and 2024. I’m proud of the good work that’s in it, and I hope it’s useful to at least a few people.
I am claiming that the explicit racialization of free verse as a white form has been edited out of our accounts of the rise of free verse, and that this matters to our contemporary theories of rhythm and prosody.
I’m not claiming that everyone in the modernist era bought into the theory that free verse was a form generated by whiteness. I’m not saying this is the only story to be told about modernist free verse.
I also read E. Pauline Johnson’s inclusion in the famed modernist anthology The Path on the Rainbow to show how her use of poetic convention goes against essentializing theories of Native American and First Nations poetic rhythms.
I show how Fenton Johnson used his celebrated free verse poems to ironize white ballad readings of Black folk culture—modes of racialized reading that were an integral part of the theory that free verse was a form generated by whiteness.
The book also offers two case studies of how differently racialized poets navigated the enclosures generated by white supremacist theories of free verse.
We can still see tendencies to narrate poetic rhythm as a progressive march to freer, more modern rhythms in contemporary teaching texts, making it important to unpack where that idea of a progressive rhythmic development comes from.