personal site
People have asked what I use for video, and I’ve always been reluctant to list everything I’ve got. A lot of it is redundant, involves lots of compromises that normal people wouldn’t want to make, or is wildly over-budget for normal people looking to get a good video for zoom or even video recordings. But I also realize sometimes people are just curious . So in the interest of satisfying that…
I’ve been participating in organizing around stopping an AI project in my community (namely a data center collaboration between the University of Michigan and Los Alamos National Labs ), and I’ve been thinking a lot about how merely stopping these initiatives seems insufficient. I’ve been thinking about what would be sufficient, and I’ve come to appreciate, through organizing, that as much as…
I’ve got a longer draft in the works, but I don’t think that’s going to become a blog post , so I figure it might be useful to publish something here and solicit feedback, or just plant a flag in the ground that this was a thing I did. Last week Several weeks ago I gave a talk at Wayne State University titled “the uncanny pessimism of techno-optimism”. In this post I’m going to breeze through some…
Hi all, it sounds like there’s enthusiasm for a reading group. That’s exciting and scary! I’m going to make a few unilateral decisions: We’re going to start with Ruha Benjamin’s Imagination: A Manifesto . I’ll draw up a reading calendar, so if you were pulling for another book, stay tuned. Now some overwrought thoughts. I want to try to give as complete an experience as I can to everyone, in…
I’ve been hinting for a little while on social media like Mona Lisa Vito hinting about her biological clock in My Cousin Vinny but I would be very open to participating in a reading group for certain works. I would be so amenable, in fact, that I might be open to starting one if there’s interest. If anyone would like to read any of the following books, please let me know. Ideally, @ me with…
The main issue I have with a lot of work that tries to define AI is that the criteria they use to draw boundaries often turn out to be functionally useless for my needs; these definitions lead us to weird places, letting scholars fixate on strange, unworkable frameworks. Those pedantic fixations don’t really benefit the organizers, activists, regular people who are getting crushed by the systems…
I’ve been seeing this image floating around and I mentioned intending to provide alt text , which led me down a hole for a little while, including sifting through links that don’t work anymore, tweets that don’t exist anymore, twitter users who have deleted their accounts, etc… so I wanted to compile information in one place in case more of the web becomes impossible to search and archive…
I’ve been struggling to articulate this idea, and maybe the problem is that it’s actually kind of simple once you put it out there, and there’s really no good reason to unpack a whole case for it once you put the thought on paper. I’m gravitating away from the discourse of measuring and fixing unfair algorithmic systems, or making them more transparent, or accountable. Instead, I’m finding myself…
I’ve been trying to dig myself out of a pretty deep depression for some time now, and while I still don’t feel like I’m out of it, I have at least found some sense of where some of this depression is coming from. I mean… in addition to all the other stuff. A while back I wrote this paper where I tried to describe the kinds of violence that I was observing in complex algorithmic systems (let’s call…
I’m not sure exactly what I’m waiting for (I mean, I know why I’m waiting, but that’s another post), but in the meantime between now and when I make the paper more publicly available, I’d like to unpack a few things that I didn’t find time to talk about in the paper itself. This is a weird experience for me to have a lot that I wished I could have talked about so soon after wrapping up a paper…