New MSA contingent / independent scholar essay award h/t @nissaren.bsky.social and @cupress.bsky.social ! libraries.clemson.edu/press/2026/0...

These same boards are the same ones pushing “AI literacy” into every corner of our institutions, so the convergence-effect Ted describes in this thread—increasingly powerful boards filled w/ rich ppl whose anti-intellectual, airport-book obsessions drive research & teaching—is also the story of “AI”

Sometimes you really do have to put on your “I know you fucking lying” eyes.

Data Borders by Melissa Villa-Nicholas - 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.

Finally got to Data Borders after three people recommended it to me basically unprompted in the same week.

It's a brilliant (and sobering) book, but for #surveillancestudies in particular, can't recommend Ch4 "The Good Citizen: Citizen Milieu" strongly enough.

www.ucpress.edu/books/data-b...

Video Shows Amazon Delivery Drone Dropping Package Directly Onto Concrete, Smashing Its Delicate Contents Prime Delivery drones are spewing out packages full of breakable objects onto the concrete from 10 feet in the air.

They don’t need to work effectively. They just need to have the drone program running long enough to pivot to surveillance.

Being friends with creative writers is great; sometimes you read about a historic pangolin and try to figure out if you can get e.g. @angermonsoon.bsky.social to write a whole thing about it.

this is what i meant weeks ago when i said so much of the aggressive surge in migrant policing felt like a boundary test, where a period of highly visible violence would eventually recede in favor of less visible and more "professionalized" migrant policing at a level beyond its baseline pre-trump.

🚨: My new monograph ARRESTING ECOLOGIES: GLOBAL LITERATURE ACROSS AIR, LAND, and SEA, 1926-2014 is available for preorder from OXFORD UP, with 30 percent discount.

This might be close to what you're looking for? ig.ft.com/generative-ai/

Blah blah blah gender stratification but also if you ever say the words, “make girly jobs more manly” to me, I will laugh in your face. Just a full on guffaw. What is wrong with you?

📣 New opportunity for early-career scholars!

We’ve partnered with the Women’s History Association of Ireland (@whaireland.bsky.social) to award £500 for the best first monograph in women’s/gender history

❗Deadline: 31 July 2026

Find out more & apply: womenshistorynetwork.org/womens-histo...

Coming up: Hit Repeat Until I Hate Music Tucson book launch event w/ @marchxness.bsky.social. 4/19 6pm 600 S. Meyer feat karaoke, books, readings by @stephjayb.bsky.social, @raquefella.bsky.social, Drew Krewer, @suburbanprairie.bsky.social, John Melillo, @angermonsoon.bsky.social, & Laura CJ Owen

An image from David Taylor's COMPLEX exhibit, titled "Surplus Modular Cell Units, Eloy Detention Complex, Eloy, AZ, 2021," provides an aerial view of a desert scrub landscape, with four rows of modular cell units of difficult-to-determine size stacked against one another.

The photographer David Taylor came to talk to my grad class this week. This image, from his project COMPLEX, which documents the network of private ICE prisons across the US, has just been staying with me since.

www.dtaylorphoto.com/projects/com...

Image of a post that reads "from my lunch today; 'the trouble is not so much AI making you more productive, but that it's tripling the output of the biggest f***ing idiot where you work.'"

This one haunts me:

The TikTok girlies (gender neutral) are hatching a plan to all buy copies of communion by hooks on Vance's release date. I will be participating.

Someone with actual medical expertise once told me that you don't do this sort of thing unless you're prepared to handle the clinical responses meditation can induce in people with PTSD.

You definitely don't do it in a work setting where people didn't consent and can't opt out!

"criticizing AI use in journalism or other creative industries is classist" NO IT IS NOT

there is a class that benefits enormously from cognitive surrender, epistemic warfare, and the enclosure of all hitherto produced culture and it is NOT THE WORKING CLASS

I don't need a summary of what's available online, in biographies, or even in my own notes. I need to comb through and find the great details, decide what interests ME. No, it's not efficient. It's slow and painstaking. But I don't believe in efficiency as an ultimate good, especially in writing. /

Hit Repeat until I Hate Music is out!

If you've been reading essays about sadness for the @marchxness.bsky.social tournament, my Sugarhill Gang chapter here is doing...something entirely different. (No one has ever turned away sorrowing from Rapper's Delight. It's right there in the title.)

It’s actually not okay to pay someone with a PhD $2500 to teach a college course

Nnedi Okorafor coining Africanfuturism for her own work and elaborating it as a genre specifically in opposition to Afrofuturism (not as a critique of Afrofuturism, but as a way of rejecting the label that people persistently try to stick to her work)? Unless you're not looking for self-description?

Let’s also kick edtech out of schools because I promise you Palantir has that data too

It's been a bit worrying the extent to which a lot of people seem to assume doing a task at all is doing it well.

New story up today in @tucsonessayclub.bsky.social's Significant Objects 2026, it's "White Paper" by @meganc.bsky.social:

www.ebay.com/itm/26762190...

#significantobjects #significantobjects2026

There’s little weirder to me about this moment than seeing wired, the publication that for decades paved the road to US technofascism with their ridiculous propaganda of “tech optimism” & technolibertarianism, running articles like this. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they are—it’s just ironic as hell

Four portraits of Minnesota residents inside and outside their homes. From left to right: A woman in a hijab, an older woman wearing a red whistle, an elderly couple in winter coats standing in the snow, and a woman wearing a buttoned-up cardigan and dark blue jeans.

The news has moved on, but ICE is still in Minneapolis.

My neighbors are still patrolling streets, driving strangers to work, and providing aid. As a photojournalist at @propublica.org, I wanted to know: What do they look like in their daily lives?

So I picked up my camera 👇

4S 2026 Conference Logo

I’m organizing a panel on "Interrogating State Surveillance in Authoritarian Times” at the next 4S [@4sweb.bsky.social] conference in Toronto. Please consider submitting an abstract!
#surveillance #authoritarianism

Submission deadline: April 30, 2026
Website: www.4sonline.org/accepted_ope...

Congrats on the house!

Whereas the last question is a reminder that I, um, need to do the Excel one, too...

Yes, absolutely!