Join fellow workers for food, games, and camaraderie as we celebrate International Workers' Day.
Connect with union members, hear contract organizing updates, and build our collective power!
Family, friends, and community members are welcome!
RSVP here: bit.ly/4ectQxU?r=qr
three more weeks to submit abstracts to our 4S open panel, that articulate STS-flavoured responses to the most important question of our times: "how do we win?"
The fight against the University of Michigan–Los Alamos data center reveals the “political and planetary stakes” of AI and the threat of “tech-enhanced militarism,” @tisjune.bsky.social , @shreyachowdhary.bsky.social & @nathanckim.bsky.social write in #Academe:
this immobilizing hatred of the world that prevents me from having a real job and means I need to do something like this [operating effectively on some strange form of social welfare] to survive
Many people have discussed how graduate programs can lead to depression, but in my experience it is often the other way around: I am in this graduate program because I am depressed. For many reasons (my upbringing, inflated ego, the current conjuncture, etc) I have (1/2)
"AI as a War Issue, War as a Workers' Issue"
Couldn't be more clear than this headline. @tisjune.bsky.social, @shreyachowdhary.bsky.social, and @nathanckim.bsky.social share their reflections on Organizing Against the Machine 👇
new writing from @tisjune.bsky.social @shreyachowdhary.bsky.social and myself on AI, nuclear weapons, worker power, and the "biggest, baddest, fastest computer in the world" being built by UMich and los alamos national labs
www.aaup.org/ai-war-issue...
The federal government is explicitly arguing that "wearing black clothes" at a noise demonstration is "enough to convict the eight defendants accused of material support" for terrorism. The outcome of this trial cold be catastrophic.
Every single person in the entire chain of command that massacred the schoolgirls in Minab, and that is currently carpet bombing Iranian civilians, needs to be tried and jailed in The Hague. Sick, depraved monsters drunk on imperial hubris.
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...
HVDSA members Dave Zeglen and Yousef Rabhi are challenging Ann Arbor’s Democratic Party establishment, running for city council and mayor!
www.michigandaily.com/news/ann-arb...
I'm a proud democratic socialist running for Ann Arbor City Council because we deserve a city for the people.
UM FOIA office denies my record dated... Nov 2026? one of the funnier denials given that
(query was in response to www.justice.gov/epstein/file...
www.justice.gov/epstein/file...)
I presented @nathanckim.bsky.social and my "How Big Cloud gets Bigger" paper analyzing crunchbase to show how:
*Google/Microsoft/Amazon invest at rates rivaling the largest VCs.*
Big Cloud = Critical Infrastructure *AND* Venture Capital.
here are the slides:
funny letter, from a frustrated scientist reacting to the University of Michigan seeking to distance itself from the defense industry, 1972. From an ongoing project on UMich's relationship to national security since WWII
As a VA nurse, Alex Pretti was a member of AFGE. This union also reps Border Patrol, and may have repped Pretti's killer. I talked to VA workers who are furious and want Border Patrol out of AFGE. "For a union member to kill another is a fundamental betrayal of what a union is supposed to be.”
What all the crowd shots won’t show you is this energy extends to the rest of the metro. There are additional huge gatherings of people all around the cities, ICE watch is visible on so many street corners, walk a few blocks and you’ll pass people clearly in the middle of distro
The Tigray genocide was, in part, actively facilitated through social media platforms, @nuredinali.bsky.social writes, and inadequate content moderation was part of the problem. On Points, he lays out how better moderation can make a difference, and what it requires. datasociety.net/points/how-t...
Piece I wrote with some other organizers. Happy with the reception locally and the conversation had because of it. Please read!
whatsleftypsi.com/2026/how-we-...
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
I’ll respond to this disingenuous question exactly one time.
Maduro’s rule does is immaterial to the violation of sovereignty and international law that this strike represents. Go bother someone else with this nonsense.
Writing down…. Underwear factories just like AI
I graduated in 2022. I used blue books every semester in 2018,2019,2020,2021, and 2022
It’s such a non-story to me like they are just part of being a college student that never went away nor were the subject of students’ biggest gripes
Thread of 2025
NEW: A variety of military and intelligence contractors have already signed on to help ICE's immigrant bounty hunter program. A review of procurement data shows 10 companies stand to make up to *ONE BILLION* dollars from the program by 2027. theintercept.com/2025/12/23/i...
The New School owns about a billion dollars worth of art, most of which is not on display. They could sell the two Warhols they own and raise $100 million tomorrow. But they’d rather close academic departments.
Considering developments in Michigan as a case study, Nathan Kim and Ira Anwar say current state incentives for data centers reflect a false binary between new jobs and detrimental community impacts.
Nathan can have a little LLM sensationalizing as a treat
