iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 8h

The intellectual history of scientific instructions shows just how deeply the #history of #science was shaped by the histories of #colonisation and #aesthetics. Here, the letterhead of the Baudin expedition to #Australia 1799-1801, shows the navigator’s instruments paired with the artist’s easel.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Self-regulation of AI by the corporations controlling AI development. What could possibly go wrong?

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

On the 17th of August 1803, Enlightenment speculation on racial variety ran aground on Wreck Reek, just off Australia's north eastern coast. This is just one of a surprising range of unlikely settings in which @lindaaburnett.bsky.social and I pursue the intellectual history of race & Enlightenment.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Today’s class ‘the empire of Enlightenment’ and an opportunity to engage with the iconography of Captain Cook, and reinvention by First Nations artists.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

The first critique of the #Enlightenment idea of #race in Australia was uttered in 1790 by Patyegarang, a young Gamaraigal woman of the Dharug nation. She told William Dawes: "I shall not become white" when he "told her, if she would wash herself often, she would become white". #C18th ...cont.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Two magnificent portraits of Bungaree (1775-1830) by Augustus Earle (c.1826 and after 1830). Bungaree was the first Australian to circumnavigate the entire landmass (as far as we know) in 1801-02. Pictured here as a public figure in Sydney, wearing one of Governor Lachlan Macquarie's dress coatees.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Our immediate response to the rapidly unfolding existential problems caused by the creation of AI should not be a recourse to ethics, or even regulation. These are both crucial, but they need to be preceded by a public reengagement with histories of enslavement, colonisation, and imperialism.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I learned today that ‘data ingestion’ is the process of scraping up raw data, ‘cleaning’ and storing it to train AI. So I guess the old saying ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’ needs a new caveat ‘except for AI which can eat as much as it likes and we’ll all pick up the bill.’

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The point has been made so many times, yet our political and corporate elites are impervious to it. Science untethered from ethics, from history, philosophy, literature and art is not a means to progress. It is a tool of oppression. The confirmations of this axiom grow more ominous daily.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Santa Maria del Fiore, Firenze.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Johann Zoffany's Death of Captain Cook (1795) is a head spin. It portrays Cook as a Dying Gaul mercilessly killed by neo-classical Hawai'ian Islanders, one of whom looks like a Greco-Roman Discobolus.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

As the century advances we can all watch democracy being killed. Not by populism, nor by extremism of various sorts, and certainly not by terrorism in whichever guise. Democracy is being killed before our eyes by something far more lethal: corruption, aided and abetted by indifference.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

This is not new, but I still find it remarkable. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the proportion of Australian residents who were born overseas (first generation) or had a parent born overseas (second generation) is currently over 51.5% of the total population.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

The nihilism of modern consumerism is being sold the soporific that nothing matters. The bankruptcy of modern politics consists in being told that the we can’t believe anything that is said. The horror of modern geopolitics is being served daily vision of a genocide our leaders will not stop.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Australia's Department of Trade lists our first colonial exports: whaling (1791), coal (1801), & wool (1807). Yet one 'export' predates them: the skulls of First Nations people (1790). Australia's first trade would endure for another 160 years. Read more here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

tandfonline.com

Enlightenment enslavement and the Indigenous dead: trafficking slaves and skulls in the early colonisation of Australia

In 1787, as the First Fleet made its way across the Atlantic to colonise Australia, it traversed an ocean made synonymous with the violently forced mobility of enslavement, then reaching an unprece...

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Why did medicine and moral philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment give rise to a global and colonial science of race? Find out here! @lindaaburnett.bsky.social and me in History of Science, Volume 64 Issue 3, September 2026. Out now, open access: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.....

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

“Colours are not Qualifications of Light, derived from Refractions, or Reflections of natural Bodies (as 'tis generally believed) but Original and connate properties, which in divers Rays are divers.” - Isaac Newton, 1672. - Leonard French’s windows, National Library of Australia, 1967.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

The Australian government is banking on an AI boom ushering in new productivity & wage rises. It’s tragic to survey the wreckage of this former worker’s party, suborned by the career-killing aspirations of AI corporations desperate to debauch human endeavour, & bequeath environmental catastrophe.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

How should intellectual historians work with texts that were never completed, and cannot now be reconstructed? What is the value for intellectual historians in piecing together the fragments of failure? Find out here. #18thCentury #IntellectualHistory #ScottishEnlightenment #Colonisation

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Augustus Earle's wonderful caricature of the young Charles Darwin collecting natural history specimens aboard the Beagle c.1832. There's everything here from fossil tusks to dried fish. The detail shows there's also a human skull. I'm no Darwin scholar but I have a question for those who are...

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

There is a quiet, agonising crisis unfolding across our globe. It’s not visible in riots or battles, but its effects will unfold as remorselessly as war. Whether bees or birds we’re killing billions; sowing graveyards in our wake. What grief will ever encompass the lonely vacancies we are making?

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Anthropocene is a maligned term, yet it encompasses many measurable indexes. There’s another index yet measured. It’s the burgeoning of a new vocabulary to name our polluted precarity, our carbon-hooked anxiety, our burning rage, and the lonely grieving for the species we are hungrily extinguishing.

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Reposted by Bruce Buchan

Amy Elizabeth @amyelizabeth.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

I've added a section to my syllabus to address students recording their peers or class with their Meta glasses. I would love to know how other folks are handling this issue in their courses.

- To protect student privacy and maintain an open, respectful learning environment, students may not record, photograph, or otherwise capture audio or video of class without the prior consent of the instructor and all students who may be recorded.

- This policy applies to recordings made with phones, laptops, tablets, smartwatches, or
any other device.

- Respecting the privacy and participation of classmates is an essential part of our classroom expectations. Unauthorized recordings may not be shared, posted, or distributed in any form.

-Any recording for an academic accommodation must be approved in advance by the instructor and handled according to school policy.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

A former #Australian PM recently wrote, “[f]rom the outset [1788], Sydney could hardly have been less like a slave colony”, and thus embodied noble aspirations of Europe’s #Enlightenment. A haggard trope, that fabricates myth in service to a facile truism. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Now that Google had released its Pervert Glasses, and knock off pervs can be bought cheaply via Temu or other outlets, are university colleagues aware of any policies anywhere to prevent their use in lectures or tutorials?

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Precisely now, when the future being foisted upon us is entirely mediated by a welling tide of plausible yet thoroughly specious AI slop in service to corporate interests, why would we not choose this moment to invest in a species-centred, life-affirming, humanistic education for a humane future?

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

It is not irrational or in any way unreasonable to believe that AI has nothing to say to me worth reading, watching, or reflecting on, that any living (or once living) human could say with infinitely greater meaning or feeling. To believe this is simply to affirm our own humanity.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

On the subject of AI, Australia’s politicians evince the almost unvaried gullibility of the true enthusiast. Some simple, unvarnished scepticism would be a blessed relief.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Since 2022 academics have been adapting to widespread AI cheating, even as managers actively encouraged its widespread misuse. If we want to protect university education academics needs more public funding to teach & research, as do our students to learn. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

theguardian.com

ANU accused of ‘hysterical’ response to students using AI to cheat as unis scramble to ‘secure’ assessments

Australia risks ‘shipping’ intellectual capability overseas if educational rigour not restored, experts warn

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

‘After the end of the world’ by Danie Mellor (Art Gallery of NSW) poignantly captures colonial necropolitics. First Nations ceremony and ancestral remains become matters for colonial curiosity and involuntary repossession. This is a continuing subject of my and my colleagues’ research.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

I spoke today at the AHA conference on scientific enslavement in Australia, with @amywayness.bsky.social and Gemmia Burden. Calling stolen First Nations body parts enslavement is a provocation to rethink our colonial history. More on this with @lindaaburnett.bsky.social in History Australia soon!

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

Sharing the news of the Royal Society's Notes and Records Essay prize winner Maria Florutau. Her essay, ‘The manul or Pallas’s cat…’, was deemed by the judges as ‘outstanding’ and rich in primary sources that insightfully ‘encapsulates the entanglements of knowledge and empire in Eurasia’.

royalsociety.org

Notes and Records Essay Award | Royal Society

Open to early career researchers in the history of science.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

A new front in the global war against the humanities “…although staff across the academic body were impacted, the cuts were "disproportionately concentrated in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS), where 85% of all staff placed at risk of redundancy (445 out of 523 FTE) are based".

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

This should become an axiom in political science: a government is beyond all hope of survival when it begins arresting its citizens for publicly witnessing a metaphor of its own corruption.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

It’s a swamp. A stagnant pool of water filled with algae. Trump didn’t “drain the swamp.” He made one, right in from of everyone’s eyes.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

I’m no psephologist, nor any kind of expert on British politics, I just hope these low figures indicate that voters for the Raving Loony Party and Count Binface have been strategically voting. And that British voters more generally have started composing the political epitaph for Reform and Restore.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

The Age of Trump demonstrates the value of an education in the humanities every day. It poses hourly questions of ethics and epistemology, repeatedly shows the relevance of history, demonstrates distortions of language. Even the Reflecting Pool has become a gaping metaphor in paint and algae.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Australians have indulged Pauline Hanson’s public career for 30 years. She’s rusted into our political establishment. Yet in all that time she has only manifested a relentlessly sour, ignorant, resentful, narrow, and miserably bigoted point of view. What in heavens does that say of us as a nation?

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Each year Griffith University campus becomes an arena for a struggle between males of two different species moved by bloody minded wilfulness as the hapless ground staff do battle with the male Brushturkeys assembling their incubating nests. The current score is 1 - nil to the Brushturkeys!

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

A new policy I’ll be adopting in my course in the coming months: if the student uses AI to produce their assignment, I will not provide any personalised feedback.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

It’s is seriously beyond irony that as elected centrist governments face ever more stridently racist and fascist insurgencies, they are presiding over the wholesale destruction of universities, and making a university education prohibitive for those who most need it: their own citizens.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

I firmly believe that what activates ordinary people politically is not ideology, justice, corruption, hate, or even patriotism. It’s aesthetics. That is why culture wars work. It’s also why Trump is losing.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

If algae in the Reflecting Pool is a metaphor, the removal of his name from the Kennedy Centre is an allegory.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

Australian universities are being driven off a cliff by an empowered managerial class with no accountability.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

It only took 50 years of neoliberalism to rebuild the ancien régime. The billionaire class is not united, but they all know they are defined by their interests. They act accordingly. Their chief interest is to ensure that the populace remains unable to act in its own interests. They are succeeding…

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