wow just got a note that I was voted Outstanding PhD faculty member this year by our Rutgers SC&I grad students for being an advocate for grads. I have never been more proud of an award!

Stellar Rutgers PhD student Serita Sargent helped with this in their work with BPL prison library services!

One of the biggest labor battles in the US is happening right now in Los Angeles, at USC, where our faculty-union campaign with majority support is being met by nasty, corporate-grade administrative resistance, and national press won't cover it.

Thank you!!

Listening to this now and it's fantastic.

From the @aaup.org mothership:

"Collective Bargaining Win in Maryland Makes History"

You're damn right it does.

Honored—thank you for the kind words and truly wonderful to see you today, Matt!

WE DID IT!

Our illegal union @uam-umd.bsky.social is a lot less illegal today. 12,000 contingent faculty in MD just won the right to collectively bargain. Life-changing win for teachers and students. Only happened bc thousands of people worked together to beat our bosses in the statehouse.

OpenAI funding fears hit memory chip prices Spending cuts at OpenAI have hit memory chip prices as fears grow about the tech company’s ability to fund its expansion.

Good news! OpenAI is canceling so many large purchase orders and datacenter expansions that the global price of RAM is dropping.

Importantly, you have to demonstrate the power of membership behind these demands. Kudos to NYU contract faculty on their contract language around AI and organizing to get some big wins in their recent strike! nyucontractfacultyunion.org/2026/03/24/3...

4 suggestions that arise for article development strategy from the review: 1 & 2 entrench and expand rights around technology that already exist; 3 update language so that they explicitly apply to AI concerns; 4 enforce existing CBA articles can apply to the current technological landscape.

CBAs can't do everything, and not everyone has them, but they can be useful tools in pushing back against AI in higher ed. Here we offer a short review of the CBA landscape in education on tech/AI 🧵👇

Bringing the Fragments Together At the bargaining table and in shared governance, faculty members must demand a meaningful role in decisions about the procurement and use of AI and other technology.

At the bargaining table and in shared governance, faculty members must demand a meaningful role in decisions about the procurement and use of AI and other technology, @hellobrittparis.bsky.social and @rebeccareyn.bsky.social argue in a new #Academe article:

haha yeah I thought so! I remember because it's also my birthday ;) I think Kadija Ferryman told me because she's also got a birthday near us. Happy Birthday!

Congratulations on the hard copy! I have no idea where mine is. Also I think I remember—happy birthday this week!(?)

Talked about the new book Radical Infrastructures, gave a chapter rundown and chatted about relates to the current moment with AI and the difficult but possible path ahead with the wonderful Megan Finn for @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social
newbooksnetwork.com/radical-infr...

People Have the Right to Refuse AI Britt Paris is the author of Radical Infrastructure: Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up, a new book published by the University of California Press.

You don’t have to participate in AI’s massive hype inflation, writes critical informatics scholar Britt S. Paris. You have a right to refuse the ‘inevitable’.

They want to get rid of faculty so bad, they are like slavering at the prospect

People Have the Right to Refuse AI Britt Paris is the author of Radical Infrastructure: Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up, a new book published by the University of California Press.

"If AI is inevitable, why is it being shoved down our throats? What options do we have?" writes @hellobrittparis.bsky.social in @techpolicypress.bsky.social. Refuse! Don't be a mark!

Thank you so much, Shannon! 💙

Quit ChatGPT: right now! Your subscription is bankrolling authoritarianism | Rutger Bregman As a historian, I’ve studied the major consumer boycotts of history. We can take down ChatGPT and send a powerful signal to Silicon Valley, says author and historian Rutger Bregman

Just shared this piece with a friend and he replied back with a screenshot cancelling his subscription.

BOYCOTT BABY!

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

"AI is not simply a discursive formation that stands as a ‘common sense’ foregone conclusion, it also obfuscates large-scale, transnational coordination of resources, labor & people who make up the infrastructures that are required for artificial intelligence." journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

@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/...

Cover of "Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age" by Lindsay Weinberg

“AI might have arrived in higher education without invitation—but not without resistance,” writes Robert Ovetz in a review of Lindsay Weinberg’s Smart University, which forecasts what "awaits us if we do not organize and escalate our refusal of AI." www.aaup.org/article/refu...

ugh i kno. I cleaned out my car. it always brings "the weather".

I spent a year inside the content moderation workforce in Nairobi and Manila — the human cost of making AI 'safe' is a class story nobody wants to tell - Silicon Canals The people who teach AI the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable content earn $230 a month in Nairobi and Manila. The companies whose products depend on that labor are worth trillions. This is...

“the story of making AI ‘safe’ is fundamentally a story about class, about which humans absorb the costs so that other humans never have to think about them.”
siliconcanals.com/sc-d-i-spent...

Radical Infrastructure by Britt Paris - Paper Scholarship is a powerful tool for changing how people think, plan, and govern. By giving voice to bright minds and bold ideas, we seek to foster understanding and drive progressive change.

My book Radical Infrastructure came out last week! It goes deep into the political and economic roots of technological infrastructure to explain hype around various technical projects, and counters it with cases of people pushing back.
Download OA: www.ucpress.edu/books/radica...

Telling that this attack on good scientists doing good jobs, without any pretense of due process is 1) at an HBCU 2) in the agricultural extension. Decades of underfunding mean HBCUs are testing grounds for the austerity we all get later. Ag stations are isolated and full of workplace abuse.

Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras Anger over ICE connections and privacy violations is fueling the sabotage. PLUS: 10,000 drivers call on Uber to repay stolen wages, a man is arrested at a public hearing about a data center and more.

Across the US, people fed up with Flock cameras surveilling their communities, and with local governments that are often unwilling to listen to concerns over privacy violations and ICE data sharing practices, are taking matters into their own hands—and tearing them down.

Yesterday Cory Doctorow argued that refusal to use LLMs was mere "neoliberal purity culture". I think his argument is a strawman, doesn't align with his own actions and delegitimizes important political actions we need to make in order to build a better cyberphysical world.