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Jillian Powers

@drpowers.bsky.social
1.4K followers 3.3K following 74 posts

Sociologist, ethnographer, reppin’ the undercommons; perpetually wondering how I got here. Ethical tech, data & AI, memes, Disney-princess animal love, house music. 🦝🏳️‍🌈 🇵🇷

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Reposted by Jillian Powers
hammancheez but spooky @hammancheez.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
we're investing millions to make it easier to have your passports stolen before delivery follow me for more process improvement life hacks
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Anne Helen Petersen @annehelen.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
This is *the* piece. Kate Manne, professor of philosophy at Cornell, speaks truth to the totality of failures at the university — and why students protesting the war in Gaza have faced far harsher consequences than any of the Cornell 7: www.thecut.com/article/what...
thecut.com
What It Feels Like at Cornell Right Now
As a professor at the Ivy League school, Kate Manne has known many, many victims. There’s a palpable feeling on campus, she writes, that this is big.
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Dave Levitan @davelevitan.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Every Pete Hegseth speech just sounds like the worst kid in middle school fell asleep watching Patton and forgot he had to give a book report in English class the next day
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Patrick Chovanec @prchovanec.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
This would be the equivalent of sports coverage devoting itself to reporting on gambling markets instead of the game. Because real reporting on real stories is hard.
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Jake Wright @bcnjake.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I don’t wanna hear SHIT about woke run amok when protesting genocide gets you banned from campus and sexual assault gets you an apology letter.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
In practice, AI literacy doesn’t start with building the tool for your personal use. It starts with understanding yourself as a collection of tasks who should subcontract those out to a machine. Almost no regular person’s life currently exists as such.
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
President Trump is spending your tax money on a campaign ad promoting President Trump
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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 28/09/2026
Similarly, the sexism women in such fields (e.g. computer science) is very scary and different to what happens in the humanities. Unsafe in our own fields. Occasionally, it feels like some prefer to study us in STEM as objects of research than treat us as colleagues worthy of dialogue and empathy.
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Ashley Lynch ✂️🎞️ @ashleylynch.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
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ProPublica @propublica.org · 26/09/2026
In response to our reporting, Susan Collins has mustered a defense that is full of incorrect and misleading claims. We’ve reviewed FBI evidence, examined thousands of pages of records and interviewed dozens of people. Here are the receipts.
propublica.org
ProPublica Debunks Susan Collins’ Claims About FBI Anti-Corruption Probe
ProPublica revealed that the FBI was circling Sen. Collins over a defense contractor’s donations — until President Trump gutted the unit in charge. Collins has since mustered a defense with a series o...
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 25/09/2026
an ai system doesn't have a will, intention or feelings. nor the capacity to want or care. a neural network does not go rogue, escape, or rebel. just tech bros' narratives projected onto machines. and pls, don't mansplain my post to me
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 24/09/2026
over the past few weeks several AI evaluation/cybersecurity experts have explained how what's happening is a result of human incompetence rather than "AI going rogue". I'm begging the media to show a shred of journalistic integrity and stop parroting what altman or amodei say
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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
"RKF took money earmarked to provide health care for Black infants and spent it on his personal security detail" is a ludicrous headline. Comic book villainy.
wsj.com
Exclusive | RFK Jr.’s Enhanced Security Was Funded With Money From Minority Health Office
The cost of the health secretary’s security grew from roughly $10 million in fiscal year 2025 to $17 million in fiscal year 2026.
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Bruno J. Navarro @brunojnavarro.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

FLOCK OFF
CEO of Flock Garrett Langley doesn't like his photo being shared publicly
NOTICE NEWS
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Josh Sternberg @joshsternberg.com · 25/09/2026
it's quite remarkable how a failed war in iran has pushed: -american mortgage rates up -bond rates up -consumer price index up -gas prices up -stress levels up -the president's net worth up.
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Maryn McKenna @marynmck.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Fake. USDA. Seals. Used by an NC meat processing plant on 83.5 TONS of meat. Produced entirely outside the federal inspection system, according to news reports. We are pretty close to The Jungle (second ed.) now, no? www.scrippsnews.com/life/recalls...
scrippsnews.com
Interactive: Meat recall linked to fake USDA labels
Pork, beef and goat products are being recalled after a company allegedly used fake USDA inspection labels. Explore our interactive guide to see which products are affected and what to look for.
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Remmelt 🛑 @artificialbodies.net · 25/09/2026
A hidden list of 100 abusers in Silicon Valley. Left unstated: some are abusing *men* Sam Altman used to date Peter Thiel, known for recruiting young men for sex (one died of suicide). Sam's sex parties are notorious for how hard they go, and the abuse. Three sources told me about this:
nypost.com
Silicon Valley ‘sex assault list’ with ‘over 100 ‘ names circulated, warning female tech workers of predators to avoid
“Some of them were very prominent names, you know? People who were famous investors. Businessmen who were in the scene”
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R.T. Ester @shoutoutmapes.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Congressional Black Caucus links up with Palantir to honor Shirley Chisolm's legacy
A digital banner inside the Walter E. Washington Convention Center shows Palantir and their brand logo listed among the Congressional Black Caucus
Annual Legislative Conference's "top
supporters."Palantir Named A Top
Supporter' At CBC
Foundation's Annual
Conference
The controversial data and Al firm
which has millions of dollars of
contracts with ICE, has been trying to
curry favor with Democratic-aligned
groups.
By Brianna Tucker
Sep 23, 2026, 06:53 PM EDT
Updated 21 hours agoOn one digital banner that led to the
vendor hall expo, the firm was listed
among the conference's "top
supporters." The background
featured a faded portrait of Shirley
Chisholm, the first Black woman
elected to Congress, whose
campaign motto "unbought and
unbossed" symbolized resistance to
corporate influence
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Oligarchs. The word for very rich businesspeople directly connected to the top of the government and playing a role in high-level government functions is “oligarchs.” Way beyond lobbying, donating, and advisory councils. Trump brought them on his trip to China too. America has oligarchs now.
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Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
i really can’t bring myself to care about AI anthropomorphism debates. “is AI thinking?” i don’t know. is a calculator calculating? questions for the philosophers. what’s important is that we put sam altman in prison.
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Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
DoorDash spent $1.4M trying to stop Zohran Mamdani from becoming mayor. This week's historic $131.5M enforcement action against DoorDash for underpaying NYC delivery workers shows why. Yet another reminder that the only thing that can beat organized money is organized people.
theintercept.com
DoorDash Spent $1.4 Million Trying to Stop Mamdani From Becoming Mayor. Now We Know Why.
In a wage-theft settlement, DoorDash now has to pay its workers around 100 times what it spent trying to beat Zohran Mam
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Ed Overbeek @edoverbeek.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
h/t @jbakcoleman.bsky.social
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Wear The Peace @wearthepeace.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Actress Susan Sarandon being arrested earlier today for protesting Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations. One is speaking out against genocide, one is committing it. One was arrested, one was not.
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Jay Willis @jaywillis.net · 23/09/2026
There have been lots of malevolent Supreme Court justices, but there's not really a precedent for a Supreme Court justice who is as *dumb* as Brett Kavanaugh. A complete rube. Shows his ass every time he tries to write down more than two sentences of original thought.
ballsandstrikes.org
Brett Kavanaugh’s Imaginary Immigration Stops Opinion Gets More Embarrassing Every Day
The fact that ICE officers do not allow wrongfully detained people to “promptly go free” is a surprise to only one man in America.
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Michael McDonald @electproject.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Every. F*cking. Time. The. Same. Story. Make a big fraud claim that doesn't hold up on inspection. The goal is to create doubt, not provide truth www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/u...
nytimes.com
From 15,000 to 185 to Zero: Trump’s Claims of Illegal Voting in Nevada Fizzle
It was the Trump administration’s latest stumble in its effort to find proof of widespread noncitizen voting, despite decades of evidence that it is extremely rare.
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Whitney Curry Wimbish @whitneycwimbish.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
The youngest person his pager attack killed was 9-year-old Fatima Abdullah, who had just started 4th grade. The pager was on a table when it went off and she picked it up to take to her dad. It exploded in her face and reports said it covered the room in her blood. She wanted to learn English.
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Tech Policy Press @techpolicypress.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Flock is "a visible manifestation of a much larger transformation in American surveillance that should alarm Americans," write Access Now's Michael De Dora and EPIC's Maria Villegas Bravo, who argue the backlash "has created an opportunity for real change."
buff.ly
A Flock of Problems with Mass Surveillance
Flock cameras are part of a larger problem whereby governments are deputizing private companies for surveillance, write Michael De Dora & Maria Villegas Bravo.
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Niko Bowie @nikobowie.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Deep dives like this really put into perspective what Chief Justice Rehnquist was doing in 2000 when he resurrected the Court’s precedents of the 1870s and 1880s, writing that their authors “had intimate knowledge and familiarity with the events surrounding the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
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shauna @goldengateblond.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
god this is giving me such trauma flashbacks to how all of us who worked at twitter felt when the acquisition finally went through. just abject despair.
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Stardust 🌏🎬 @stardustbluepr.com · 22/09/2026
Tribal consultation isn’t optional, but the corporations building data centers in New Mexico are acting like it is.
truthout.org
Big Tech Is Trampling Native Treaty Rights to Build Data Centers
Tribal consultation isn’t optional, but the corporations building data centers in New Mexico are acting like it is.
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Quinn Slobodian @quinnslobodian.com · 22/09/2026
"more spending on AI tokens means less money left for salaries and so—even without any clear sign that AI uptake is paying off—employers are forced to weigh AI against their own workers." www.theideasletter.org/essay/syndic...
theideasletter.org
Syndicalist Valley
The tech-worker movement that emerged in the 2010s has been transformed by layoffs, higher interest rates, and the enormous investment flowing into AI, which have eroded the bargaining power of…
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Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @mayor.nyc.gov · 22/09/2026
DoorDash has ripped off more than 260,000 NYC delivery workers. We’re making them pay $131.5 million — the largest worker settlement in City history. This is New York, where hard work pays and greed will cost you.
DoorDash messed up.
They repeatedly left more than 260,000 NYC delivery workers underpaid or paid late, causing them immense stress and financial difficulty.
That's unacceptable.
We've secured a $131.5M settlement from
DoorDash - the largest worker settlement in NYC history and largest delivery worker settlement in
American municipal history.
Every worker will be paid what they are owed, and every company will be forced to abide by the laws of this city.

LOGOS:
The OFFICE of the MAYOR of NYC
NYC Consumer and Worker Protection Mayor Mamdani and Deliveristas representatives stand behind a podium.Mayor Mamdani signs a giant check.Three delivery workers holding a giant fake check for $131.5M.
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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
According to the Swan/Haberman book, Trump became an evangelist for AI after someone used ChatGPT to turn one of his executive orders into a poem.
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Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Communism has no place in America, the President declares the day before rolling out his new state television station.
The White House •
...
WALLE HOUSE
1d•
Communism directly opposes the United States
Constitution and American values.
While every Democrat voted against the largest tax cuts in American history and over 100 refuse to condemn socialism, President Trump will ensure that communism never has a place in America.
ПОЛЕННІ
COMMUNISM HAS NO
PLACE IN AMERICABenny Johnson • • Follow
... X
TRUMP TV IS OFFICIALLY LIVE 24/7
The White House just launched "TRUMP TV: The Essentials Station" — a nonstop stream featuring President Trump's speeches, major announcements, past highlights and administration updates, refreshed in real time.
The launch comes amid Trump's escalating fight with
CNN, MS NOW and Politico, which have sued his administration after being barred from White House access.
Americans can now watch the White House's own selected footage and announcements DIRECTLY,
24/7.
The media landscape just changed in a BIG way. •*
TRUMPOV
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Sahil Kapur @sahilkapur.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Troy Jackson responds: “This is corruption of the highest order. Susan Collins delivered millions in taxpayer dollars for a corrupt donor bankrolling her campaign, & then Donald Trump helped her cover it up. No wonder she voted with him 96% of the time & has rubberstamped his agenda to hurt Maine.”
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 21/09/2026
This shit is so infuriating. We should make these parents famous. Get their faces out there: "this is the couple that demanded the right to beat and intimidate their children without interference."
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southpaw @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Yes having our fertilizer shipped from a Russian proxy dictator half the world away is surely a better way to arrange things than getting it from our democratic, once-friendly neighbor here in the North America
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Dr. Cara Berg Powers @clbergpowers.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
As a sociologist, can confidently say, this is not an ethical experiment.
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Jason Leopold @jasonleopold.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
HUGE EXCLUSIVE from @bloomberg.com Inside the US ‘Kill Chain’ That Destroyed an Iranian School Pentagon investigators discovered that flawed intel, outdated imagery & overreliance on AI contributed to a missile strike that killed 123 children in Minab 🎁 www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...
bloomberg.com
Inside the US ‘Kill Chain’ That Destroyed an Iranian School
Pentagon investigators have discovered that flawed intelligence, outdated imagery and an overreliance on AI contributed to a missile strike that killed 123 children in Minab.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
One more example of how a personalist regime they cannot conceive of a bipartisan institution to the point they would prefer to destroy it if they cannot repurpose it to their ends. See, also, much of the rest of the federal government, our military, science, higher education etc.
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Philip Bump @pbump.com · 21/09/2026
ICE shot a DoorDash delivery guy.
statesman.com
Attorney: Austin man shot by ICE agent was making DoorDash delivery
A Venezuelan man shot by an ICE agent in Austin was making a DoorDash delivery, his attorney said. Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, 28, was later released from the hospital into ICE custody.
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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 23/04/2026
Oh, even from sensible people because it's a really big trap if they never studied this angle. Explained a bit here actually, see screenshot: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia. doi.org/10.5281/zeno... CC @irisvanrooij.bsky.social @fellowesin.bsky.social
of scientific terminology.
3 Higher education, critical thinking, expertise, & academic freedom
The culture of AI encourages a firm, even snide, conviction that it’s just a matter of time.
It thrives on exaggeration and refuses to examine its own failures.
Tom Athanasiou (1985, p. 18)
When it comes to AI technology used in a university context, it is important to focus on the rela-
tionship between a technology and society at large. The value of scholarly analyses of sociotechnical
relationships can be seen in cases such as the following. In the UK, a school shooting in 1996, the Dun-
blane massacre, led to stricter gun control laws. Since then, the sociotechnical relationship between
citizens and guns has remained unchanged, therefore handgun privileges have not been reintroduced
to the public (N. Brown 1996; Shapiro et al. 2022). This relationship is different to that captured by
the right to bear arms in the USA. Such analyses illustrate how different societies may create different
legal frames to match how they perceive their relationship to technology.
Furthermore, problematising sociotechnical relationships itself allows for reclaiming AI as a sci-
entific field from the grips of industry or hype (Birhane and Guest 2021; Guest and Forbes 2024; van
Rooij, Guest, et al. 2024; Wendling 2002). Moreover, it allows for ruling out reclaiming as a function
of opinions about possible and impossible changes to society, the technology, and their relationship
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
AI didn’t “go rogue.” People connected a computer system they know can mess with another computer system in unpredictable ways to less advanced computer system and it messed with that computer system in unpredicted ways. As @tressiemcphd.bsky.social argues, don’t lose sight that *people* did that.
nytimes.com
Opinion | Panic Won’t Fix the Looming A.I. Threat. Politics Will.
The threats from A.I. are real — and they’re ones we know how to deal with.
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 19/09/2026
When we talk about the costs that LLMs impose on society we should not forget the fact that nothing works anymore because everyone is so scared of getting their shit scraped. I can't even use google scholar from my university or starlink because they send too much traffic.
Google	
Sorry...
We're sorry...

... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.
See Google Help for more information.
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 19/09/2026
"For a man whose academic field was built largely on faulty studies to ignore the intellectual fraud in his circle and lash out at people like Arday for bad scholarship – well, psychologists used to call that projection" @virginiaheffernan.bsky.social www.thenerve.news/p/steven-pin...
thenerve.news
From celebrity intellectual to anti-woke outlaw: how Steven Pinker lost his way
The pop psycholgist’s new book seems to betray a lurking fear of others’ criticism – about his Epstein links, his manosphere admirers and his discredited former field of study, writes Virginia Heffern...
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Larry Glickman @larryglickman.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
This makes sense because no president has promoted policies that were obviously going to exacerbate inflation, and no leader has made less of an attempt to convey that he cares the problems he has caused, all while he builds monuments to himself and and he his family enrich themselves through grift.
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Comfortably Numb @numb.comfortab.ly · 18/09/2026
Post from Amy @lolennui.bsky.social

So cool that whenever someone asks the president, "did you eat the Lindbergh baby" he's like, "no but I'd be allowed to, I have the right to, I might do it later"
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 17/09/2026
Nick Beckstead, noted longtermist and "effective altruist,” just comes out and says it: "But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal."
This is precisely why Nick Beckstead, a noted EA, argued in 2013 that, given the "overwhelming" moral importance of the far future - "millions, billions, and trillions" of years from now - we should prioritize saving the lives of people in rich countries over those in poor countries, other things being equal. The reason is that people in rich countries are better positioned to influence the far future.

To take another example, saving lives in poor countries may have significantly smaller ripple effects

than saving and improving lives in rich countries. Why? Richer countries have substantially more

innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive. By ordinary standards at

least by ordinary enlightened humanitarian standards saving and improving lives in rich countries

is about equally as important as saving and improving lives in poor countries, provided lives are

improved by roughly comparable amounts. But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life

in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things
being equal.
Screenshot from Beckstead's 2013 PhD dissertation, regarded as one of the founding documents of longtermism, one of the main cause areas of EA.
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