iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Zohran’s Mommy Dommey @loridiletto.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Punishment is so ingrained in our cultural way of relating that even progressives want to believe it can accomplish behavioral change but guess what? That is its own poorly-evidenced belief, sorry!

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

I would like to suggest both that you watch For All Mankind and that you make a podcast about watching it; as a longtime FAM fan I am super curious to know how it looks from your angle of approach

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

I think it's really underappreciated that a large chunk of people across the world are everyday being served images of the world's worst atrocities, essentially live as they happen, in ways previously only experienced by people on the frontline, who have historically had years of trauma as a result.

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Meredith Rose (from the grave) 👻 @mrose.ink · 21/04/2026

I've said this a million times, but copyright policy work has made me into a pretty radical UBI supporter. I don't think people's ability to feed their families should depend on locking down the commons and rolling the dice that they'll have a bestseller!

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

“Two traits you almost never see together in one person” that’s funny, I can definitely think of a non-person social agent that operates in exactly this way

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Literally everybody is more committed than Apple+ to publicizing this show

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Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

I met with AI data labelers in Kenya who are organizing their colleagues to fight the brutal working conditions and horrible pay given to the workers at the "bottom of the AI supply chain." They believe the NDAs they've signed are unenforceable so are speaking out: www.404media.co/ai-is-africa...

404media.co

'AI Is African Intelligence': The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back

Kenyan workers are still the underpaid labor behind AI training, moderation, and sex chatbots. The Data Labelers Association is fighting back.

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Chantal James @chantalalive.blacksky.app · 19/02/2026

People can say it’s utopian or dreamy but it’s a fact that you have to believe new things are possible, fundamentally, in order to make them real. You have to make the choice to believe that more than this is possible & not be resigned to this being the way things have to be because it’s not at all.

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Possibly this reflects and impulse to outsource and naturalize my own violent impulses, but I spend an increasing amount of time fantasizing about feeding certain people to charismatic megafauna

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

I’ve long felt that, as a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, there was some kind of something I understood deeply that most other people didn’t, and you’ve nailed it — it’s the knowledge that this isn’t true

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

This has been an incredible thread, thank you

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Gordo Stevens is an incredibly rich and layered character. You really don’t start getting texture from him until late in S1, but on rewatch it’s all there. (Favorites are still the women though: Margo, Aleida and Molly.)

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

I'm used to having to convince coastal types that there are people out there who genuinely believe in libertarian and traditionalist principles (rather than as laundry for regular bigotry). rarely, however, do you see those types publicly confronted with how little company they actually have

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Juliette Kayyem @juliettekayyem.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

I have begun to think that Minnesota pushback to ICE was unique and a model because it gave people something to do. It wasn’t about just going out in streets for rallying purposes. People had a mission: videos, whistles, information and communication flow to communities. They had something to do.

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

I don’t want to posit some mythical before time in which jobs (compensated positions within an organizational structure) and work (stuff that needs doing) were perfectly aligned, but we’re in a moment of particularly egregious misalignment and LLMs are making it worse

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

(The preview photo is unrelated to the story itself)

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

Oh you know what another one that might appeal is E M Forster’s The Machine Stops, which was published in 1909 and no doubt felt like a generic future dystopia as recently as 25 years ago but which really hits now: www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teach...

cs.ucdavis.edu

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

I’d also recommend Vajra Chandrasekera’s work more generally: the story I wanted to link, Applied Cenotaphics in the Long Long Longitudes, doesn’t seem to be online anymore (possibly because Strange Horizons has closed?) but everything of his I’ve read is really interesting

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

A griefbot story doing something much more trenchant and interesting (imo) than a lot of the others clarkesworldmagazine.com/jia-wen_06_25/

clarkesworldmagazine.com

If an Algorithm Can Cast a Shadow by Claire Jia-Wen

Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine and Podcast.

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

If you’re interested in short stories as well as novels, I can recommend several! This one isn’t cyberpunk, but it is near-future and technosocially disconcerting www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

newyorker.com

“Asleep at the Wheel”

“She’s smiling as he comes up to the car, and he’s smiling, too, and now he’s reaching for the door handle . . . but the door seems to be locked, and she’s fumbling for the release.”

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Mark Abraham @markabraham.bsky.social · 16/11/2025

New feature article from TNJ (nation's best student magazine): Inside Yale’s Quiet Reckoning with AI thenewjournalatyale.com/2025/10/insi...

By the end of the spring semester, Gwen reached a breaking point with AI. “I felt like I didn’t deserve to be a Yale student,” she said. She thought that she was throwing away her education and the scholarship paying to support it.

She decided to quit using ChatGPT altogether. She didn’t ask AI to help her sentences flow or to strike the right tone. She didn’t even use it to brainstorm. “I think that’s a skill you need to have on your own. That’s the core of being original, anyway.”

Gwen recalled completing her final assignments without AI, sitting in the middle of a crowded library so that she felt watched. “I struggled. And they weren’t very good.”

It was only then, she said, that she started to understand just how much learning she had missed out on. ∎

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Samer Hassan @samerp2p.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

I was very happy to join the AI Ethics conference ACM AIES 2025 in my hometown, Madrid, at @ieuniversity.bsky.social The program was amazing, I encourage to check out the lineup and proceedings: www.aies-conference.com/2025/ I'll share some highlights in this thread🧵 #AIES #AIethics #AI

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Brendan Keogh @brkeogh.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

This is possibly the most fucked thing I've ever seen but also the bit at the end where the grandmother is straight up being tricked into providing training content for the app feels particularly revealing.

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Hagen Blix @hagenblix.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

I do, of course, have a paragraph from "Why We Fear AI" for this

An
LLM is an abstraction over the status quo (or rather, the text of
the status quo) that has, at its core, no other aim than producing
more text that is just like the text already in existence. One result
is that the dominant ideas, the dominant textual patterns of our
time, are recast as “intelligence” per se. We might call the complex
mass of concepts and ideas, the channels into which ideas flow
often and easily, or the boundaries of what is reasonable to debate
in so-called “polite society”—the dominant ideology of an age.
An age’s dominant ideology tends to presuppose that the power
of that age is natural; the hallmark of ideology, in this sense, is
that it is easy to recognize only when it’s past its time. We may
no longer think that an almighty god appointed a king to rule
us, that women are naturally unfit to vote, or that sex outside of
a heterosexual marriage is immoral. But at various times, to think
otherwise (to think of replacing the monarchy with a republic, to
affirm that women are people, or being in favor of sexual or gay
liberation) was the far more difficult, even dangerous thought—if
not to have, then at the very least to put in writing. Ideology, of
course, is never complete, other thoughts are always possible.
But ideology is easy to think, it’s what our thoughts are already
marinated in. And hence, ideology will be dominant in the textual
patterns of an age. Seen in this light, what is called “intelligence”
in a language model, is really that—ideology as a thing that can
pretend to be a person.

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Oh that sounds so good! We watched BODKIN on the strength of an old-fashioned recommendation algorithm (a human friend told us that it was similar and they’d liked it) but it was only ok. We’ll give BS a try!

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

…which is that the fantasy of objective knowledge is not benign: it gives you permission to launder your own founding premises into some kind of universal truth, and the whole project of research can get remade into a search for the method that gives you plausible cover for that laundering

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

I ground my whole approach to teaching ethics (to CS students) in epistemology, bc I think anyone working with data & information needs to understand that those things are created & constructed rather than found in some kind of natural state, but this is the other reason I think it’s so important…

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

And for some strange reason — who can say, really — isolating and identifying the kinds of racism that are acceptable for Science Knowers is a very high priority research project

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

Yeah there’s an alarmingly large number of people who agree that racism is bad if it’s rooted in bias (ie human weakness & limitation), but that if you ground it in “pure data” (heavy scare quotes) it’s somehow legitimate

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Lynda Lopez @lyndab08.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

A family friend was telling us about what her husband shared about his experience in Broadview before he was deported back to Mexico. She's been sharing to friends and family because she's just in disbelief & horror what her husband told her. She wasn't able to talk to him until he was in Mexico.

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

This reminds me of when some right-wing commentator — I want to say Dinesh D’Souza? — said smugly in the mid-aughts that queer people had the exact same marriage rights as everyone else, which is to say the right to marry a person of the opposite sex.

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 06/11/2025

It’s going to be whack-a-mole as long as people in AI understand the barriers to credible phrenology as a data-and-implementation problem rather than a “that’s just racism in a scientific bow tie” problem

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 06/11/2025

I want to say “are we really doing this again” except we’ve never stopped doing this

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 05/11/2025

Well, we’re glad to have you in Chicago

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Meredith Shiner @meredithshiner.com · 31/10/2025

On the occasion of Halloween, @newrepublic.com asked me to write about what’s going on in Chicago and I wanted you all to know what randomized terror feels like. And also that as the federal government fails our kids, everyday Chicagoans are showing the courage of trying to protect them.

newrepublic.com

ICE Is Terrorizing Chicago for Halloween—and Parents Are Fighting Back

Fear and a whiff of tear gas hang over festivities this year. In response, even people who aren’t usually politically engaged are mobilizing.

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

I’ve spent almost 25 years waiting for Georgian food to be the next big thing and it still hasn’t quite happened, and now you too understand why this is a travesty!

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

No I do NOT want a free sample, I know how this works

The storefront of a shop selling Turkish delight, with a shop worker standing in the doorway with a tray of free samples

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

We’re maybe two hours into AIES 2025 and there have already been some terrific papers. This is shaping up to be an amazing three days. Please enjoy my garbage photograph of the conference stage #aies

The presenters’ stage at the AI, Ethics and Society conference, dominated by a welcome slide that gives the conference title.

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Maine Pianist @mainepianist.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

I remember Joshua Meyrowitz saying that TV, as a medium, supplies you with an interpretation of the events you're seeing, as you're seeing them; TikTok seems like TV on steroids, in that respect. You can't learn to chew if mama bird chews your food for you!

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Emanuelle Burton @emanuelleburton.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

I feel like we have really lost the thread on the difference between “you and I share the same basic moral/civic commitments and disagree about the best way to realize them” and “you think I should be murdered and work actively to shift the Overton window in that direction.”

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