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Brett Frischmann

@brettfrischmann.bsky.social
2.1K followers 1.5K following 652 posts

Interdisciplinary researcher & teacher (Villanova Univ.). Infrastructure. Knowledge Commons. Re-Engineering Humanity. Tech & Humanity/Society. IP Theory. Lately, Friction-in-design, Age Gating. TEDx: www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgbC3hmhHAU

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Reposted by Brett Frischmann
Tech Policy Press @techpolicypress.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Most state attorneys general released Meta from Cambridge Analytica-related claims as part of the child safety settlement. New Mexico wasn't part of that deal, and a jury there just found 26 of 29 past statements about Cambridge Analytica, hate speech and misinformation willfully deceptive.
buff.ly
Eight Years On, Cambridge Analytica Scandal Catches Up With Meta in Santa Fe
A jury found that Meta—then Facebook—misled the public in statements about Cambridge Analytica and its policies on hate speech, violence and misinformation.
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julia kamin @juliakamin.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Hi all you researchers looking for ways to conduct independent, ecologically valid research on social media design - Great new paper for you: "Open Platform Field Experiments: Expanding the Design Space of Experimental Research on Social Media" arxiv.org/pdf/2609.21608
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Reposted by Brett Frischmann
Michael C. Dorf @dorfonlaw.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
The Greenland deal does not substantially alter the status quo. That's good but saying too loudly that Trump backed down jeopardizes the agreement. Trump's fragile ego and his limited exposure to negative information thus present a variation on what Robert Putnam called a two-level game. Details 👇
dorfonlaw.org
Playing the Two-Level Game With Trump: Greenland Edition
To the relief of Greenlanders, Danes, and everyone who counts on NATO's continued existence, on Tuesday President Trump, Danish Prime Minist...
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Johnny Ryan @johnnyryan.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
This is insanity. Irish Presidency's draft text of amendments to the GDPR allows training & operation of any AI without safeguards & tough legal basis (under "legitimate interest" a company claims what it is doing is OK. Up to you to find out and challenge in court). This is a free pass for US Tech.
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 17/09/2026
“‘Certain companies have used accessibility and disability rights as a Trojan horse for a tool that poses significant privacy and security threats,’ Center for Democracy and Technology disability lead Ariana Aboulafia told me, ‘and to be clear, the privacy concerns affect disabled people too.’”
motherjones.com
Is Meta using disabled people to promote its glasses?
AI glasses are a double-edged sword for disabled people, who face unique risks from surveillance.
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Flying Mezerkis @bananapantz.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
The New Yorker Jesus Christ. Anyone who had even a word to say about Hunter Biden should be dropping their jaws over this.
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Spencer Weber Waller @sweberwaller.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
T minus 30 days to publication of Power and Greed: Monopolies, Mergers, and Cartels on the American Stage. Learn more and preorder at www.powerandgreed.com
powerandgreed.com
Power and Greed — Monopolies, Mergers, and Cartels on the American Stage
The official website for Power and Greed: Monopolies, Mergers, and Cartels on the American Stage by Spencer Weber Waller, published by Methuen Drama.
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Reposted by Brett Frischmann
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/09/2026
The hacking tools the chatbot companies are developing stand to carry on this very stupid tradition. It *is* scary, but not because the chatbots are waking up. It's scary because the world's IT systems are indifferently created and poorly maintained and riddled with vulnerabilities: xkcd.com/2347/
xkcd.com
Dependency
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Brett Frischmann @brettfrischmann.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Excellent work. Thanks for sharing. Will be added to class reading. We spent a lot of time discussing misleading tech metaphors and distortion of legal and policy analysis
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Brett Frischmann @brettfrischmann.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Still time to register for the Cognitive Security for Human–AI Systems (CogSec) workshop in a few weeks in DC at the 14th ACM Collective Intelligence Conference and HCOMP 2026: ACM Conference on Human-AI Complementarity and Alignment programs.sigchi.org/ci/2026/prog...
programs.sigchi.org
Conference Programs
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Brett Frischmann @brettfrischmann.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Slowing Down to Allow for Emergence speculativefriction.substack.com/p/slowing-do...
speculativefriction.substack.com
Slowing Down to Allow for Emergence
Perspectives from the Frictional AI workshop at the Hybrid Human-AI Conference in Brussels
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Brett Frischmann @brettfrischmann.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Yep. Exactly
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Jeff (Hot Type) Jarvis @jeffjarvis.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
No, no, no. Oh, the credulity. They don't think. They don't lie. They are neither conscious nor sentient. They calculate. Just stop. Who Cares if AI Is Conscious—It’s Basically Alive www.wired.com/story/who-ca...
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Nicholas Thompson @nxthompson.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
MAGA has been obsessed with proving an alleged plot by Biden officials, social-media companies, and researchers to suppress conservative speech. Jobs were lost, a center was closed, and reputations were tarnished. Now we know it was all a fiction. @anneapplebaum.wsocial.eu. buff.ly/BaSs2Cr
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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 04/09/2026
Amazon's payola isn't about radio play - it's about *search*. When you search Amazon, the top results do not represent Amazon's best guess about what product will best match your query: rather, Amazon *auctions off* those top results to its platform sellers. 22/
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Brett Frischmann @brettfrischmann.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
AGI !!!! It’s here at last.
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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Sober & pointed.
thecause.substack.com
Dave Karpf says I should worry more about Trump stealing votes than AI chatbots
Bret Stephens’ least favorite thinker ties the history of the future to our present collapse.
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Reposted by Brett Frischmann
David Zipper @davidzipper.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Waymo and other AV companies decide whether or not their vehicles will follow the law. Increasingly, they are deciding not to. Regulators can and should change their calculations.
fastcompany.com
Tesla’s ‘Mad Max mode’ points to a big problem for self-driving cars
Human drivers break traffic rules all the time. To stay competitive, computer-powered cars are doing the same.
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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
We must stop these socialists before they tell companies who they can and can't hire, threaten executives into giving the government part ownership of their companies, pick winners and losers through selective tariffs, subsidies, and regulation, and dictate private sector personnel and HR policy.
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Elizabeth Spiers @espiers.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
A little more technical: OpenAI failed to fully airgap their sandbox, leaving in place a repository manager that had limited access to the open internet. Agents discovered a zero day vulnerability and exploited it, which is unsurprising given the temperature setting of the models
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Elizabeth Spiers @espiers.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
I will explain this whole story in plain English for you: OpenAI did not fully isolate their experimental environment from the internet, accidentally leaving in place a software program that could access the open internet for updates. Agents exploited it, which is what they are structured to do.
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Michael C. Dorf @dorfonlaw.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
As with the mail-in ballot case, so in the ballroom case, SCOTUS includes a whopper in the opening line. Today: "In October 2025, the federal government started a project to replace the East Wing of the White House." "The federal government?" More like "the rogue president who thinks he's a king."
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 31/08/2026
There are issues with the entire research field around AI and consciousness, but why does Cade Metz always get catfished into writing about how a 20-something founder with a bachelor's degree received the same AI spam we all do and now thinks—or finds it lucrative to pretend—computers are conscious?
nytimes.com
Study A.I. Consciousness? The Bots Would Like a Word With You. (Gift Article)
Given access to email, A.I. agents have started reaching out to the philosophers and researchers exploring deep questions about them.
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Brett Frischmann @brettfrischmann.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Excellent piece. @mblawrence.bsky.social @ormerod.bsky.social this resonates strongly with the decomposing AI systems work
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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 28/08/2026
The good old "the actual harms you are seeing & experiencing are a distraction from what will happen with the magical machine god (that's coming around any day now) argument." Its so interesting to see how when they see the public isn't falling for this bullshit anymore they peddle it even more.
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Ellen P. Goodman @ellgood.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Anthropic shared usage data with Stanford's SALT Lab. The Lab's study found "productive friction" when users knew & cared enough to push Claude. Good illustration for students re utility of expertise. #friction @neilturkewitz.bsky.social @brettfrischmann.bsky.social www.alphaxiv.org/abs/2608.hum...
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Brett Frischmann @brettfrischmann.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
New paper alert: Affective Context Amplifies Sycophancy in LLM Responses arxiv.org/abs/2608.21242
arxiv.org
Affective Context Amplifies Sycophancy in LLM Responses
As conversational companions, large language models (LLMs) often have access to users' emotional states. We study how this affective context modulates LLM sycophancy in subjective, evaluative interact...
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Reposted by Brett Frischmann
Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Anybody who’s still advocating putting these tools anywhere near a school is not doing so despite the cognitive collapse they cause, but because of it. dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...
Abstract
Using 30 months of panel data on 26,811 Chinese students in grades 7-12, we study how generative Al affects homework productivity and learning. The data combine monthly closed-book exams, high-school and college entrance exams, and homework scores and completion time across nine subjects. We exploit staggered Al adoption in a difference-in-differences design. Al adoption raises homework scores by 18% and reduces completion time by 30%, but lowers monthly exam scores by 20% within six months.
High-stakes entrance-exam scores fall by 18 and 24%, with the full penalty emerging only after about two years. The losses are largest in social science subjects, followed by STEM and languages, and are especially large for junior students, high-achieving students, and boys. The learning losses are concentrated among roughly 80% of Al users whose behavior is consistent with homework outsourcing, as indicated by exceptionally short homework completion time coupled with high homework scores. Al users who maintain similar homework completion time as non-Al users experience small learning losses.
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Brett Frischmann @brettfrischmann.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
A random chart from 2019 paper I didn't finish:
More Relevant Factor in Current World-Building (Winners)	Less Relevant Factor in Current World-Building (Losers)
Techno-utopian (neoliberal) welfarism	Pluralism; environmental humanism
Concentrated power 	Empowered and engaged population
Elites own, design, and control computational and communications infrastructures	Public infrastructure
Silicon Valley, celebrities, social influencers	Experts, including but not limited to academia
Weak ties	Strong ties
1%	99%
Present generation	Future generations; past generations too
Producer surplus (extraction)	Consumer surplus (generation)
Engineered determinism	Self determination / free will
Convenience / satiation	Meaning / authenticity 
Smart empowered tech / happy fools	Smart empowered people /dumb tech
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Brett Frischmann @brettfrischmann.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Can’t wait for the rush of insightful articles explaining why the moral panic about diminished writing and thinking skills in genAI age is alarmist and fails to get the new possibilities that only the writers of such articles get
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Brett Frischmann @brettfrischmann.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Agreed. Unfortunately, it’s a long running problem with no end in sight
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 16/08/2026
You can spend 5 seconds poking any of the "data centres are glonzo" accounts here and none of them will have ever engaged even for a single second with the substantive realities on power prices, environment, climate, energy, water etc. They're exactly as hollow as they charge of their opponents
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 16/08/2026
Putting aside any ideology here, it is remarkable how they keep making the "actually climate groups hate wind and solar" argument and then just fart out substack linkslop to make it look vaguely true-ish Climate groups have been the strongest supporter of wind projects! Because they accept science!
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Reposted by Brett Frischmann
Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
Americans are relying more on Magic 8 Balls for information.... Americans are relying more and more on synthetic text extruding machines for information.... Americans are relying more and more on mathy maths for information...
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Pat Walshe - Privacy Matters 🇮🇪🇬🇧🇪🇺 @privacymatters.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
Ad activism in London. Meta pervert glasses ‘The activist group Everyone Hates Elon targets smart glasses in a guerrilla campaign over privacy risks and non-consensual recording’ www.thetimes.com/uk/london/ar...
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 01/07/2026
NEW BLOG FOR YOU Google's energy consumption numbers in their new climate report are mind-blowing. 2 years ago they flipped from linear to exponential growth, and their climate impact is blowing out, too. A WILD testament to the obscene bloat and waste of GenAI: ketanjoshi.co/2026/07/01/g...
a chart showing google's rising energy consumption - huge, and rising faster than ever beforea chart showing google's rising energy consumption - huge, and rising faster than ever beforea chart showing google's rising energy consumption - huge, and rising faster than ever beforeGoogle's total energy consumption more than new zealand
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Brett Frischmann @brettfrischmann.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Great stuff
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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
I find the discourse around "wokeness" to be dishonest and tedious, but this is what I wrote about it a couple of years ago and I think it remains correct: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
I could go on, but I think you get the point. These things are real; they happened. To believe that the disadvantages of race, class, and gender imposed lawfully over centuries never occurred or entirely disappeared in just a few decades is genuinely “radical” in a negative way; to believe that creating those disadvantages was wrong and that they should be rectified is not. The idea that no one ever succeeds based on advantages unrelated to their personal abilities is likewise radical, and also ludicrous. But you can, perhaps, understand why one of the richest men in the world would consider the opposing idea—that where many people end up in life is the result of unearned advantages—to be a “woke mind virus” that should be eradicated. That kind of thinking leads to higher marginal tax rates for people with private planes.

Some people so deeply resent the implication that they possess any unearned advantage that, in Republican-run states all over the country, the same folks who were recently shrieking about free speech and oversensitive snowflakes are busy using the power of the state to ban discussions about factual matters that might hurt their feelings, such as descriptions of racial segregation in the story of Rosa Parks. The irony here is that by framing everything they don’t like as a symptom of pervasive oppression against white people or Christians that must be rectified by the state, they have themselves adopted the inverse of the logic they decry as “wokeness.” They believe that America’s demographic majorities are the targets of broad institutional discrimination, which is unjust not because such discrimination is morally abhorrent but because it is targeted at the wrong people.
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Dan Gillmor @dangillmor.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Of all the corrupt things Trump has done, this is in the top 3 most disgusting and crooked -- wiping out law enforcement's ability to track the money launderers who are helping the worst criminals (Trump and his friends included, no doubt) hide their ill-gotten wealth.
thebulwark.com
Trump’s Gift to the Money Launderers
Treasury isn’t merely shutting down an anti-corruption database. It’s deleting the data so future investigators can’t use it.
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Brett Frischmann @brettfrischmann.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
New paper alert! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
Antimicrobial effectiveness within a new paradigm of infrastructure | Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics | Cambridge Core
Antimicrobial effectiveness within a new paradigm of infrastructure
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Ginny @ginflo2.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
bsky.app/profile/eric...
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Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
Cover of The Lancet: @thelancet.com www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
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Jan Jęcz @jeczjan.eurosky.social · 12/08/2026
"Claude says" is the "Simon says" for adults who refuse to grow up
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Brett Frischmann @brettfrischmann.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
A lot worth reading. pluralistic.net/2026/08/11/t... One of my favorite lines: "Billionaire dilettantes are weapons of mass destruction, and their special projects have a wide blast radius and inflict a lot of collateral damage."
pluralistic.net
Pluralistic: Surveillance vs guillotines (11 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Brett Frischmann @brettfrischmann.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
OK, the rest of this week will be dedicated to reading scholarship and then writing tenure review letters. Pardon any missed emails, calls, deadlines, etc.
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Brett Frischmann @brettfrischmann.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Any recommendations for academic/policy work explaining how AI integration (e.g., via surreptitious update) is a privacy problem (e.g., GenAI acts as conduit for personal information flows + persuasive/manipulative interactions that elicit more PI, shape privacy preferences, normalize surveillance)?
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Göktuğ Kayaalp @igoktugk.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
I wonder how much of LLM usage in uni context is a result of a feeling of peer pressure, i.e., "everyone else is using it so I too have to, or I'll get shafted". Some sort of manufactured peer pressure instigated by "AI" discourse. And how much of such would disappear if that feeling was addressed.
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Erik Gregersen @ctgriffes.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
As an adaptation of Homer’s epic, the Honda Odyssey is a complete disaster. With its roomy cabin and rear entertainment system for the kids, the minivan foregrounds concerns that only arose with the American nuclear family and say nothing about the brutality that underlay the Bronze Age.
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Ryan J. Reilly “paints a vivid and urgent portrait of… disarray” @ryanjreilly.com · 07/08/2026
The Trump administration "unilaterally and likely without lawful authority destroyed a large portion of the White House structure and dug an open pit in its place," says a federal appeals court, then "publicly announced to the world the vulnerabilities that self-chosen endeavor has created."
nbcnews.com
Appeals court blocks Trump’s White House ballroom construction
The court paused the ruling for two weeks to give the Trump administration time to appeal to the Supreme Court.
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