iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

There are so many reasons for people to be suspicious of one another right now. It’s tiring. I think we are all weary.

Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

Yes, I wrote something about brainrot. Yes, I know you may find this cringe. But I wrote a whole dissertation about the way animals shape culture. I see it happening now, with AI & can’t help worrying that our attachments to nature might be used make us more comfortable with the new unrealities.

open.substack.com

The Cuteness Trap: Do Animals Make AI Disarming?

I FOUND ITALIAN BRAINROT not because it emerged magically in my TikTok feed, as many strange things do, but because I went looking for it.

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

We’re back to using paper again on campus, and the debates are heating up in the faculty copy room.

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

Maybe you’ve seen those viral TikTok bunnies, on trampolines? If you have, don’t judge me, but I was briefly fooled by them. I wrote about thieves of joy, and how those unknowing bunnies are a little icon of this moment: one where our sense of reality is starting to glitch.

open.substack.com

Unknowing is a Technology for the Digital World

Surviving the new unrealities

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

Professors are being encouraged to assign less reading material, because the kids can’t process it. But I am genuinely concerned about kids losing the ability to effectively skim: a crucial navigation skill. Preference-based scrolling through slip doesn’t teach this.

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 06/08/2025

I’ve started to feel like friction (something I’ve never particularly liked) has become a weird attractor for me. It’s like some mineral that I’m missing from my diet, and I have to eat bitter things in order to get it.

open.substack.com

Friction is Therapeutic

Against easiness

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Jesse Dukes @curiousdukes.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

Trailer is out! This summer we're releasing a seven episode limited series podcast on AI in schools called The Homework Machine. Its based on over 100 interviews with teachers and students, and the student interviews especially are funny, gut-wrenching, real talk from the youth.

teachlabpodcast.com

Coming Soon: The Homework Machine

Most education technologies are invited in by schools. But generative AI crashed the party.

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

If I could like this ten times, I would. Reading it felt like a big, long, yes. Thinking about having my students read it in the fall.

open.substack.com

compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting

why the death of nuance should scare you -your fav gen z philosopher xx

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Keegan Osinski @keeganosinski.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

"I am less like a moth, when I read a book, and more like a mammal." I always love @beamarovich.bsky.social's work, and I can't wait to read more of her reflections on mystery and others' interior lives in the digital age.

beatricemarovich.substack.com

Watching People Read (Interiority After Mystery I)

A series on inner life and algorithms

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

Performative reading is getting dragged online. In part, it’s triggering suspicion: there’s a lot of moral outrage about technology, so it’s a good time to virtue signal with a book.

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

AI like ChatGPT is trained to follow a protocol when they talk about religion: no bias, no advocacy (essentially no theology). But ChatGPT admits that complete neutrality might be impossible. What happens when a machine built for objectivity starts doing theology anyway?

open.substack.com

AI and the Illusion of Religious Neutrality

Even ChatGPT can see its religious bias. Why can't we?

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 06/07/2025

“If the hipster represents cultural taste as sorting algorithm, and the nerd represents cultural taste determined by sorting algorithm, the zombie is the point at which we stop consuming culture-commodities altogether and start directly consuming the sorting algorithm itself.”

open.substack.com

In my zombie era

The third stage of culture in the age of infinite information

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 06/07/2025

I just picked my 9 year old daughter up from summer camp this weekend, and I can’t look at news about the Texas floods without crying.

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 05/07/2025

“What people describe as ‘the end of the Internet’ isn’t a real end. We are waking up—the Otherworld’s glamor has faded and we are coming to in the mortal world.” Loved this; though I’m pretty convinced that otherworlds are a feature of our mortality, not a bug.

open.substack.com

The Internet as the Astral Plane. The Internet as Fairyland

from the Philosophical Research Society panel with Tara Isabella Burton, MemeAnalysis, and Gary Lachman

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

Sean Illing interviewed The NY Times reporter who wrote that now infamous article about everyone cheating their way through college.

podcasts.apple.com

If AI can do your classwork, why go to college?

Podcast Episode · The Gray Area with Sean Illing · 06/30/2025 · 59m

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

For my religious studies & theology friends who have been interested in the spiritual uses of AI: “Within self-optimisation culture online, where some want a weekly workout routine, others essentially want a personal spiritual trainer.”

dazeddigital.com

When ChatGPT becomes your spiritual guide

As more people turn to the chatbot for immediate answers about all things metaphysical, are we losing our patience for truly transformative experiences?

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

Forty years ago Donna Haraway proposed the cyborg as an ironic feminist myth of resistance. Today, I feel more like a cyborg than ever & authoritarian-style politics are infused with the destabilizing irony that Haraway used as a tool of critique. I wanted to see how her political myth holds up.

open.substack.com

I'd Actually Rather Be a Goddess Than a Cyborg

Craft, Power & the Politics of Myth-Making

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Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa @benjaminschultzfig.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

My prediction for how this will play out: Most colleges will doubledown on AI even as employers realize their graduates know next to nothing. Elite colleges will market themselves as being non-AI. Not using AI will be a bespoke luxury commodity that's highly sought after.

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

For those of you who’ve read that piece in The NY Times on ChatGPT and spiritual psychosis (or that similar Rolling Stone piece), Katherine Dee explains it as just another enchanted response to a new technology (it’s happened before, it will happen again).

open.substack.com

Let's Talk About ChatGPT-Induced Spiritual Psychosis

yup, still thinking about it

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David W. Congdon @dwcongdon.com · 12/06/2025

Is theology dying? Personally, I think it is. @beamarovich.bsky.social interviewed me and many others on this topic and wrote an excellent piece for The Other Journal. I recommend reading it. theotherjournal.com/2025/06/is-t...

theotherjournal.com

Is Theology Dying? - The Other Journal

People often assume that theology is only for true believers: those who want to defend the existence of God against the skepticism of secular outsiders. But there’s an old open secret in the field: th...

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

Like you’ve never dared to do before, lol

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Contimentalist @contimentalist.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

“But perhaps the affirmation of being valueless to a culture with questionable values…is one of the best things we can pass along to others, in whatever conditions of struggle they might find themselves in, and in whatever form they stumble upon theology.” Great piece from @beamarovich.bsky.social

theotherjournal.com

Is Theology Dying? - The Other Journal

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Keegan Osinski @keeganosinski.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

It's been a really rough week at my place of work, but this conversation with @beamarovich.bsky.social and many of my friends has made me feel buoyed and accompanied in my professional despair theotherjournal.com/2025/06/is-t...

theotherjournal.com

Is Theology Dying? - The Other Journal

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

This is the weird paradox that makes the continued existence of theology so tenuous and unlikely…

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

What do you do when your academic field feels like it’s on life support? I talked to some of my colleagues in theology about the difficult feeling of watching something important change (maybe even end). We also talked about what it means to keep showing up anyway. open.substack.com/pub/beatrice...

open.substack.com

Field Notes from a Discipline in Decline

And imagining what comes after

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

Steak & Shake, cashing in on the sexual politics of beef tallow.

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

Remember when Republicans used to be really into states’ rights?

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

Land snorkeling - paying attention to where you actually are, in the flesh, and what you’re actually seeing - is apparently a summer travel trend this year. Being where you actually are, and paying attention to it, is a travel niche that people will shell out $ to do.

landsnorkel.com

Landsnorkel

Land snorkeling is taking the time to savor aspects of nature we ordinarily don’t see or pay attention to.

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Elizabeth Gish @elizabethgish.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

I often hear that things feel overwhelming and that people aren't sure what to do to make things better. Here is a "what to do 101" with lots of great baby steps that move us toward the world we want to live in. kettering.org/feeling-para...

kettering.org

Feeling Paralyzed, Helpless, or Hopeless? 10 Things Everyday People Can Do

Are you feeling overwhelmed by everything happening in our world? Maybe you want to do something about what is happening but aren’t sure where to start or if you’re doing anything that will actually m...

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Reposted by Beatrice Marovich

Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

As many of us people who study or work in tech tried to tell y’all, move fast & break things was always about POWER, not progress.

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

This very old tree on my street just fell down the other morning. I heard a large boom, and there it was.

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Brent S. Sirota @brentsirota.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

Death spiral. AI-edited 'nonprofessional' opinion content will erode what's left of your credibility as an actual news journal *and* still fail to outcompete with the frothing ragebait and unhinged conspiracy theory people can get from a million other places. I give this paper three years.

boingboing.net

Slop-eds: Washington Post to use AI editor for opinion page content

The Washington Post is going to license Substack posts and use AI to polish content from "nonprofessional writers", reports the New York Times. Owner Jeff Bezos's plan to have his…

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

From protest anthems to whale songs, music has always played a vital role in the environmental movement. But what if singing, itself, is a form of environmental activism? Hildegard of Bingen probably would have said that, at the very least, it was activating something important in and for the earth.

open.substack.com

Maybe Paradise Has a Sound, and It Comes From the Earth

I wanted to think about why it is that having a voice, and using it, makes me feel like I’m growing roots that I’ve forgotten to water for a long time.

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

An idea: a course (religious studies/theology) on reading. The content could source primary texts in different traditions & engage with secondary lit to help students understand practices that have developed for reading and talking about these texts (lectio divina, midrash, etc…)

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Jeff Sharlet @jeffsharlet.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

"AI is no problem because I can always tell the difference between real human thought and crap computer writing" is the new "Donald Trump will never be elected President of the United States."

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 01/06/2025

What is a reasonable time limit for an academic talk in the year 2025, in this time of depleted attention spans? How long do you think you’re physically capable of listening to someone talk about a complex idea that you might only be half interested in?

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 01/06/2025

Another piece on the rise of Christianity among Gen Z. From the interview sound bites, from young tradcaths, it’s really difficult not to read the rising interest in Christianity as clearly correlated with a hard rightward turn, and a sense that the left has abandoned family, marriage, and virtue.

podcasts.apple.com

How Gen Z found religion

Podcast Episode · Today, Explained · 06/01/2025 · 33m

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 31/05/2025

An insanely good piece on the history of literacy, and a reflection on how generative AI in its origins is both similar and different: on the origins of writing as statecraft, it’s transformation into soul craft, and the question of whether AI will be similar.

open.substack.com

How To Do Soul-Craft With State Tools

On Literacy and AI

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Donovan Schaefer @feelingtheory.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

No, seriously. It's a colossal hype bubble. VC tech bros have poured 100s of billions into it and now they need to keep inflating it for as long as possible. It's their only chance of seeing actual return on their investment.

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

I just finished teaching a college course called Doing Nothing. I thought that teaching a course about doing nothing, and wasting time, might heal me from the post-pandemic teaching burnout that’s never quite gone away. It didn’t, exactly. But it did do something else.

open.substack.com

Teaching a Course About Nothing

WE ALL KNEW that nothing was going to be the same, after the pandemic.

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