Add to this, of course, the 100s of previously employed academics who are now out of work or whose jobs are at risk and the 100s of academics in fixed term positions trying to find permanent roles.
🚨NEW ESSAY ALERT🚨Broken Connections: Fieldnotes from the Old Internet. The most personal thing I've written in years. I trace my history with internet communities & online relationships & how much of that is now gone. And a lot about LiveJournal. Open Access! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
1. Amazon has built powerful pricing algorithms that have learned how to steer prices upward — not just on Amazon, but across the web. I have a new piece on how these algorithms work, and how they help sustain Amazon’s monopoly.
A couple points on this manifesto, apart from the racial superiority subtext others noted.
Palantir is a company built on public contracts, they bill the state billions to surveil and target the state's population. The manifesto exists to justify their demand for even more.
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Increasingly impossible to exist at all without a tech company claiming control or ownership over you, your identity, and/or any information about you.
And, no, "just stay offline" isn't really a solution. We've all but made living without using the internet impossible.
We need a better compact.
Lovely piece from @helenpearson.bsky.social on how evidence (especially but not only RCTs) have improved so many areas of life including policing, tackling poverty, and medicine
www.ft.com/content/9b8e...
She wanted to pry her late mother’s Oregon vineyard from two of her brothers. Instead, her lawyers were fined nearly $110,000 for citing bogus case law generated by A.I.
Silicon Valley’s next great leap may be built on videos of people folding laundry.
Start-ups and entrepreneurs are trying to make robots smart enough to help with house chores. But adapting artificial intelligence to new tasks requires example data.
Sentiments are changing and fast. "More Europeans see US as threat than China. Washington outranks Beijing as a threat in Spain, Italy, Belgium and Germany, according to POLITICO Pulse survey." www.politico.eu/article/poll...
Israel is doing to entire neighbourhoods and communities in Lebanon what it’s done to the entirety of the Gaza Strip in Palestine. Razing human life and civilization to the ground.
Loads of chat and even discourse about so-called AI literacy, but I don't think most realise you need to teach things from quite a few angles and zoomed out.
If people want to just know how the models work, that's not always possible without a much wider base anyway...
Our offering below:
I used to write the WaPo editorials on US-Africa policy, as well on as human rights and politics on the continent.
To describe hundreds of thousands of deaths on the continent as “messy” is an absolute abomination.
Bahahahahaha
When Trump says “Two Weeks” he means he has no idea and to stop asking him about it. From 2025:
Welcome to our new Deepfakes Tracker, your hub for tracking and understanding synthetic media. Take a quick video tour. deepfakestracker.org
To read Devina's review in the British Journal of Sociology, see: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
'The emphasis on the book's scope, the inclusion of appendices detailing participant demographics and ethical considerations, and Gerrard's scholarly and public writing credentials are not mere paratextual elements but central to establishing trustworthiness in a contentious field.'
🥹🥹🥹
I've just returned from my maternity leave to an emailing linking me to the first scholarly review of my book: The Kids Are Online (@ucpress.bsky.social). I feel *so* honoured that @devinasarwatay.bsky.social has taken the time and care to write such a thorough piece. www.ucpress.edu/books/the-ki...
This is called “strategic defeat.” You have ended up in a worse position than before you began, with your adversary, while battered, emerging in a stronger position than before.
Here's the link to the free pdf of my new book The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet. Access is so important and I'm grateful that the press is platforming it as one file that is easy to download. www.upress.umn.edu/978081669906...
One of the things I've been keen on is bringing academic insight into the policy sphere. So I'm really happy we are placing 7 academics in Whitehall to help think about sustainability matters
www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/news/the-bri...
Breaking: the DOGE deposition videos have been taken off YouTube. On Friday the government asked a judge to intervene, said the videos could cause reputational damage, death threats. Judge agreed, ordered them removed: www.404media.co/doge-deposit...
I met with AI data labelers in Kenya who are organizing their colleagues to fight the brutal working conditions and horrible pay given to the workers at the "bottom of the AI supply chain." They believe the NDAs they've signed are unenforceable so are speaking out:
www.404media.co/ai-is-africa...
Palantir CEO promises that his technology will reduce educated women's economic and political power newrepublic.com/post/207693/...
Imagine if Obama or Biden had done something like this.
Yes, the illegal war is unpopular, damaging to the stock market, and making everything more expensive. But are we talking about Epstein? Mission accomplished.
One of my favourite sides of politics/media.
Few pre-book copies of "Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution" arrived in package, and some kind endorsements from scholars whom I deeply respect. The book is going to be published in late March through MIT Press.
A screenshot of Rachel Dratch from SNL. She's a white woman with short dark hair and blue eyes, and she's making an awkward expression that implies, "Sorry I have to tell you this and ruin your good time. But also I'm kind of not sorry about it." I've added a subtitle that reads, "That's AI."
an updated debbie downer sketch but it's friends showing her funny videos and she has to respond like this to every single one like this:
Yet another reason to always keep humans in the loop ... "AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations. Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases" www.newscientist.com/article/2516...
