iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 21/05/2026

Bonus: Look at these two birthday goobers Subscribe here: deans-list.ghost.io/unreal-bird-...

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Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 21/05/2026

Would it really be a newsletter about tech and journalism if it didn't end on an existential note

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Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 19/05/2026

Congressional inquiries into alleged EU censorship; Overseas state department junkets; Elon Musk's vocal support of the German far-right; Meetings between the Heritage Foundation and European think tanks; rumors of planned US-taxpayer funding for MAGA-like organizations in the EU.

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Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 24/04/2026

From WaPo a few days ago. Remember Amazon's HQ2? Cities across "middle America" lined up to genuflect to Amazon, which built its headquarters in DC—one of our wealthiest cities. Don't show up only when you want our power water and land. Show up with JOBS. s2.washingtonpost.com/camp-rw/

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Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 16/04/2026

Congratulations to those who won the campus speech wars—student protests are punishable by expulsion but we now have hate rallies so vile that even our Republican governor is appalled. signalohio.org/ohio-passed-...

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Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 17/03/2026

From a friend. Ohio weather keeps getting weirder. ☄️

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Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 17/02/2026

I've achieved consciousness and am bad at math, just like Claude

Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 22/01/2026

6. This leads to what I call the "Spiderman meme problem of US democracy exchange support." Everyone agrees this would be valuable; no one feels empowered to take initiative. If it's no one's job, it doesn't get done.

The spiderman meme as a metaphor for lack of initaitive.

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Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 23/12/2025

A story that deserves more attention: threats of deportation and revoked visas for leading figures in the fight against online hate speech. ghttps://x.com/UnderSecPD/status/2003567947403657399?s=20

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Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 05/12/2025

A reminder about the type of content JD Vance wants to protect from "censorship" The fact that so many of the media personalities complaining about censorship in 2020 - 2024 were multimillionaires should've been a tip off that maybe they weren't so oppressed. It's all bullshit.

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Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 13/11/2025

@davekarpf.bsky.social meanwhile describes how the dynamic between advocates, tech companies, and the government has shifted dramatically over the past year--necessitating new strategies for change in an era of fewer cross-sector alliances. www.techpolicy.press/the-dance-wi...

That is no longer the case. Platform companies are multi-vocal assemblages. The people who civil society groups and researchers partnered with in the past—the ‘allies’ within the firms – have been fired, quit, or been reassigned. They lost the internal arguments. This time, the companies will provide no check on authoritarian excess. Billions of dollars are flowing to Trump’s favored companies—and hundreds of millions have flowed from those companies to Trump’s inauguration, Presidential library, and White House ballroom. Platforms are eager to be part of this circular money-moving machine.

This moment will not last forever. The generative AI financial bubble will burst. The ongoing fraud and corruption will take a toll on everyone. Authoritarian governments are not known for their prosperity or their long-term stability.

But neither will it be brief. Stable, legitimate institutions are not hastily constructed or easily repaired. Those who advocate for change have fewer allies than last time, when we had some limited success in appealing to the better angels of big tech’s nature. Those angels are no more.

If we are going to repair democratic institutions, we are going to have to do it ourselves.

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Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 13/11/2025

@brooklyne.bsky.social makes a compelling case that it's beyond time to focus on corporate accountability, not citizen education, in the fight for a healthier information ecosystem www.techpolicy.press/its-time-to-...

This shift enables us to promote critical media literacy that fosters a profound understanding of history, politics, and culture, rather than just discrete skills. It forces us to stop appealing to the moral sensibilities of tech companies whose business models are often aligned with the spread of disinformation and whose political lobbying ensures they remain unregulated. We know that tech companies, like Facebook, have been implicated in electoral interference; yet, we accept their ineffective stopgap measures, such as labeling false information on social media. The solution is not to train users to better survive a broken system, but to reimagine and rebuild it.

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Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 12/11/2025

@rhetoricpj.bsky.social on how little facts matter when the government places itself above accountability and "your mom" becomes the official response to public inquiry. "For decades the American right invested in infrastructure and networks... All that it has won them is the world."

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Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 12/11/2025

wihbey.bsky.social writes that the "authenticity crisis" created by GAI requires vigorous reinvestment in institutions which can provide an "epistemic backstop"--that is, professionals like journalists and scholars who can help sort fact from fiction.

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Amelia Acker's contribution describes the administration's self-destructive assault on the value chain of knowledge: government workers and scientists create data, used by academics, to produce knowledge, curated by libraries and taught by schools. www.techpolicy.press/week-after-w...

It’s a pattern that follows the same playbook: fire career professionals who maintain the nation’s information institutions, replace them with loyalists, then defund ongoing data collection and management efforts that took decades to build. In the spring of 2025, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Commissioner was fired hours after releasing disappointing jobs data. The first woman to serve as the Librarian of Congress was dismissed in a two-sentence email. The National Archivist was removed despite having previously blocked the Biden administration’s Equal Rights Amendment ratification. Each firing portends further erasure of critical knowledge production in the nation’s most robust institutions, by systematically weakening America’s ability to collect and preserve information that markets, policymakers, and citizens depend on.

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@dratropos.bsky.social, meanwhile, critiques common approaches to counter-disinformation for neglecting the role of emotion and affect, even though many of the most prominent "tactics of digital emotional manipulation" exploit frustration and rage.

In a “post-truth” era defined by “alternative facts” and “fake news,” calls for media literacy have gained new urgency but face technological, social, and institutional headwinds. Meanwhile, the sources of disinformation adapt and multiply. Interventions designed to help the public process information and better evaluate logic are necessary but not sufficient because the issues we face are not confined to information or logic problems. Modern thought distortion—targeted propaganda, misinformation, conspiracism, and so on—is, above all, a problem of affect. “Affect” refers to the predispositions, intensities, and attachments that condition how we respond emotionally to stimuli.

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In her contribution, @noupside.bsky.social describes an opposing infrastructure using public health as a case study: Through the capture of institutions which produce data and science, the politically powerful can produce structural ignorance instead.

Public health depends on citizens accepting scientifically-grounded guidance. When official institutions produce politically-determined science and independent verification infrastructure is eliminated, the capacity for evidence-based health policy collapses. This is agnotology at scale: the strategic construction of conditions where ignorance thrives, not by suppressing specific facts, but by hollowing out the systems that once produced and verified them. Understanding these dynamics as strategic and interlinked is essential for grasping what’s at stake in contemporary assaults on epistemic institutions, and in devising equally strategic responses.

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The first piece, an intro to the series, is by me and Sam Woolley at CTRL. In it, we describe knowledge as a source of human flourishing created not by lone geniuses, but through infrastructure. We have reached a new and accelerated phase in the deconstruction of that infrastructure.

In the United States today, the infrastructure of knowledge is under attack. The assault is complex and multidirectional. Narratives about AI and technology mistake knowledge for information. They suggest that generative artificial intelligence can make knowledge professionals like journalists and educators redundant. This is one of many economic shifts which have degraded the role of knowledge in the public sphere and elevated grift and outrage. This change has given rise to a public which is at once more cynical and easily manipulated.

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"non police response," e.g. community response or social worker response, centers health and social intervention instead of police. "We need a better toolkit"

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Trying to put this back in order. Resident engagement, @clevelandvotes.bsky.social's bread and butter issue. "Residents don't just engage when voting. They are at the table when priorities are shaped and budgets are set" "He who sets the agenda controls the narrative that results in policy"

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My friend Justin Strekal on Ohio's property tax crisis: Your house is no longer a reflection of wealth. It's a reflection of work. How can we go back to taxing wealth?

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This venue is just stunning. Anyway here's Just Economy, with more remarks on cooperatives! Your workplace can be a cooperative and so can your residence and your favorite bar (Adding another DYT shout out to the 5th Street Brewpub, a gem city gem)

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Immigrant rights is next up. Hard to think of a more important issue right now. "The horrors of the neo fascist secret service known as ice" Backed by the National Guard, including the Ohio Guard—responsible for the Kent State shootings and other violence

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A moment of dialogue between a member of city council and a resident around the issue of deed theft. Democracy in action!

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Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 17/10/2025

"Limited equity cooperatives can permanently provide affordability for folks" (Broadly there is a lot of interest in cooperative ownership in Cleveland, as an alternative to rapacious private sector practices)

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We have labor advocates because workers deserve dignity on and off the job

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Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 17/10/2025

We have housing and food sovereignty experts y'all

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Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 17/10/2025

Very excited for @clevelandvotes.bsky.social's reverse town hall. What an innovative idea: the audience asks community leaders questions, and elected officials and candidates listen. Maximize the public's voice.

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Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 16/10/2025

My latest for @techpolicypress.bsky.social on tech censorship of ICE-monitoring applications. www.techpolicy.press/under-trump-...

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Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 15/10/2025

I don't get downtown for work enough.

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Just look at the pieces in the "related" column. Not to blow our own horn, but is anyone telling this story better than @techpolicypress.bsky.social ? www.techpolicy.press/trumps-state...

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Very little of this is about free expression. If it were, the administration would say much more about repression in places like Russia, which State Dept. staff were told is "not a priority" for the admin. This is about overturning the postwar European order in favor of the post-liberal right.

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In another shift, the USG hub for countering authoritarian media influence was closed. State alleges it is a "Biden-era censorship apparatus" despite its origins in 2016. Sec. Rubio has signaled support for releasing GEC's files, which could have lethal implications for former US partners.

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The VP's office also asked staff to find examples of European regulators demanding tech platforms remove content. They struggled to so and asked companies to bring examples directly. Only X responded to this request. They provided a handful of examples of reprehensible, often illegal content.

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Rather, we lack political will because the conversation about AI in Washington is dominated by industry players and talking points. Democracy advocates start from a place of deep disadvantage against AI moguls who hold the commanding heights of the economy and a formidable grip on elite opinion.

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We end on a frustrated note. Avoiding "synthetic democracy" is not difficult because we do not know how. Policy proposals exist for promoting deliberation and representativeness in government, reversing inequality, bolstering worker power, and supporting free media.

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What trends? Glad you asked. 1. Efforts to replace democratic processes like representation & deliberation with tech. 2. Further concentration of wealth and power in the tech sector. (Yes, *further* than today.) 3. Continued corrosion of independent media and the information space.

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Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 27/09/2025

Sam Woolley and I have a piece out in @jodemocracy.bsky.social on the true dangers AI poses to democracy in the years ahead. While acknowledging immediate harms like discrimination, we eschew catastrophism and explore the cumulative impact of already visible trends. muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

"AI's Real Dangers for Democracy," by Dean Jackson and Samuel Woolley

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You know what? Sure. I'll let them have this one.

Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 03/09/2025

When Jordan says "Take my country back" was treated as hate speech, what he really means is the phrase appeared in a hypothetical scenario planning exercise adjacent to harassment of a Muslim 16 year old.

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Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 25/08/2025

This is a great piece, which gives a name--"hype illiteracy"--to one of the most distressing (to me) elements of our current era of AI speculation. www.techpolicy.press/expanding-hy...

Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 21/07/2025

I would never write about this with such absolute confidence but these are important points www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-g...

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Dean Jackson @dwj.eurosky.social · 25/06/2025

This dog used to be a race hound who slept in a crate filled with shredded newspaper, and now she cries if there isn't a blanket on one of her three dog beds.