iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Nick Hall

William Gibson @greatdismal.bsky.social · 8h

Having long been aware of those tech bros who read my work as utopian porn, where they’ve taken that doesn’t exactly surprise me.

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 8h

Giving corporations human rights diminishes our rights and giving them to machines will be no different

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Yeah meta (insta) basically put my partner out of business as a vintage store in Pittsburgh despite a strong community. Feels like they've replaced word of mouth with algorithmic micro-broadcast media and now squeeze out everyone but comedians and sexualized 20-somethings making content full-time

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Reposted by Nick Hall

Julia Coronado @jc-econ.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

💯 the internet boom was wildly popular because it came with a job market boom, it was exciting, good for the average person and contributed to inflation going down not up. In so many ways the AI boom is the inverse of the late 90s not a repeat

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Haven't personally encountered these dummies thank god but people comparing the ai and dotcom bubbles are just as obtuse We wanted the web! It connected us, in ways a BBS or MOO couldn't, to information and each other Capitalism broke that and now wants to get the magic back without the connecting

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Check out my soundcloud, which is an exposition of this fear

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The future of voter turnout operations

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Outlaw replacing Vignelli designs

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I stuck with taxis through the rideshare hype cycle and they remained at all times better in every big city I've gone to. Even in Pittsburgh zTrip is vastly superior if you can plan ahead at all

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

That shit didn't happen! Probably! But its elements all grow more likely to happen every election until we regulate inauthentic mass political speech, or its precursor concentrations of wealth and 'technological' power (data, compute) And that is in my opinion the real, immediate threat from ai

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

That transition continues to be the goal of the inauthentic social media account network, and maybe of now easily-consolidated traditional mass media. The structural bias in the US press for the Republican party naturally dovetails with this effort. The supreme court's queued to defang any oversight

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Because those tens of thousands are all in the targeted districts, the absence of their votes for Kamala Harris shifts the totals by a few points here and there. Donald Trump is elected president again, with a mandate to cheerlead a transition of the US towards a competitive-authoritarian government

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

[welding a hydraulic bunker door] By the law of large numbers, this leads hundreds of thousands of fairly random but statistically Democratic voters to feel a little more disgusted by Biden's and Harris's strategy for Israel and Occupied Palestine. So tens of thousands of them don't vote

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

[shelving bags of rice and cans of beans] The operators of the bots don't necessarily care or know about these issues. They're paid to find points of disagreement in the Democratic coalition and push out at scale posts that engage on the topic in the most annoying way possible, COINTELPRO at scale

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

[cnc milling a lower receiver] With millions of posts from thousands of accounts, the messaging shifts the "discourse" subtly to include new extremes and to break along newly subdivided fault lines. We agree Gaza is a genocide but do we agree Zionism is strictly post-colonial? And so on ad absurdum

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

[dying my hair green] The bot swarms aren't just targeted on geographies but prompted with demographics and, for non-anonymous accounts, relevant records from purchased databases of financial, criminal, reproductive and other histories of accounts they reply to. It's sloppy but who would notice

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

[sawing a traffic barrel into shields] The bots don't really advocate for or against things. They make semantic arguments, deploy inflammatory metaphors and dunk on each other. Any human-observed debate, the definition of the word genocide or the validity of mass economic vibes, goes into a prompt

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

[sewing a butlerian jihad patch on a flak jacket] They "geofence" the bots in voting districts, in their profiles and somewhat on the accounts they reply to, quote-post, etc. They also coordinate posts to seem to be thousands of unrelated Real Americans arguing in big accounts' mentions

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

[sits on an ammo crate] There are humans in the loop, studying all the post-situationist shit that came out of the troll farms in 2016. But they're not trying to sow discord in US politics generally. They're targeting the US left's internecine fights, like 10/7 and the subsequent genocide in Gaza

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

[serenely hoists a sign that says the end is nigh] Imagine that somewhat hidden in elon musk's 2024 trump campaign operation was an early agent swarm built on a then-frontier model, prompted to use a huge collection of inauthentic social media accounts to generate and post divisive left-coded takes

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

[solemnly dons a tinfoil hat] I've been uncharacteristically paranoid since November 2024 that #3 (the article's focus) obscures a novel hazard: Social media becoming news media and LLMs becoming writers converts voter turnout into mass voter suppression, employed asymmetrically by the right wing

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

My 401k is patronage from a new generation of progressive patriarchs to write post-slam overly-consonant epic blank verse

Screenshot of my bluesky "for you" feed showing two posts, mainly one from @lingdustin.bsky.social that reads, "I've heard people make claims that AI would lead to a new Renaissance, but I didn't imagine it'd happen like this:" It includes an image of a tweet from @pontifex that reads, "In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before and aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity." Below that is another post from @mayor.nyc.gov that reads, "Calling all NYC artists — painters, filmmakers, poets, musicians and more! Did you know our city provides grants to support your work every year?"

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I think the technical knowledge required not to lose touch makes this fact unavoidable and therefore good, for now Everyone from domain expert scholars like Dr. Gebru to long-vaguely-interested nerds like me to nontechnical folks can tell that this ai cycle is very bad The details don’t matter yet

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Mechanical scapegoats needed. Also I always thought that in their hearts they want to give machines human rights to devalue them for the humans

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Reposted by Nick Hall

Brian Whitton @noslouch.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

If someone you love has or had ALS, you know the psychic horror that takes up residence in your mind, thinking what awaits my dear friend and his family. It happens all at once, like a smack in the face, and it lingers. If you know what I'm talking about, please consider giving gofund.me/bab5253f8

gofund.me

Donate to Support Joe Ammon's ALS Care, organized by Kirby Salvador

Joe grew up in Mt. Lebanon, a suburb of Pittsburgh, PA. After graduating from high school … Kirby Salvador needs your support for Support Joe Ammon's ALS Care

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

A core belief of mine is that basically all people are truthful, hard-working and well-intentioned But the truth is an ongoing social effort that breaks down easily, especially in unequal societies And working hard is more privilege than obligation And good intentions are necessary not sufficient

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

React.js colonized those diverse spaces by replacing an open, diverse, accessible technical practice with a bunch of homogenous, CS-pilled, over-engineered mechanism that runs (and imo ruins) the web and so much of our society to this day. And it was sold on what it could do, not what we could do.

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

That was a whole profession, “frontend” developers, which was in my experience a much less male-dominated field than the rest of tech. It was essential to web 2.0, known now as the internet. It was central to how Apple created everything from at least the iPod to the iPhone. Then Facebook killed it.

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Reposted by Nick Hall

THE AUTOnomous BODY SHOP @theautobodyshop.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

We are assisting 2 abortion seekers with upcoming 2nd trimester procedures and need $2000 total to close the gap for both of them! If you can assist, donate and/or share! Our fund’s Venmo is @ CaravanFund 🌺

the powerful girls stanced up: text - come on girls! let’s fund abortion

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I’d work in the design or product team and internalize their goals for the end users’ experience of the web site. And I’d enforce that with the engineers as they relentlessly built thing that were so reductive, so database-brained, that they were useless. It structured my empathy for each group.

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

(Please point me at this work if you know or find it! My ruined mind and our ruined web aren’t turning it up so far.) I was obsessed with the framework, and applied it to great effect in my early career translating between the two as a UI developer building, in HTML and CSS, the layer between them.

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I’m reminded daily of research I read probably over a decade ago about UX design, in which the researcher observed a spectrum of styles of engaging with new technology. They defined the poles as “butch” and “femme.” The former asked, “what does it do?” The latter asked “what can I do with it?”

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Reposted by Nick Hall

The Fact of Other Minds Stan Account @csilverandgold.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

It continues to be the case that bespoke personalized “art” has its own lane that needn’t cannibalize the art we all love, the fundamental purpose of which is intersubjective exchange.

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Would seem more natural if they advanced, ultimately merging with the beard

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I think it is likely that this story will split off a multiversal thread where the total failure and humiliation of this rightwing senator simply never happened

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

This would also explain the timing of the Axios VP fluff

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Happened to tune in just in time for this I have never in my life seen someone show his ass so entirely

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Reposted by Nick Hall

Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Sigh. This is assuming that the action is shaping the language. The language is shaping the action. It cannot do a good job at doing what private dialects are actually doing — building social cohesion, communicating power relations, connecting events often in non-linear and hard to categorize ways.

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Sorry, by persistence layer I mean basically a database that distributed computer systems share to collect the data they process, for further processing or view by a user. So kind of what you said? And I think the answers they stored *were* like their minds, compressed and shared over the database.

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I don’t think that’s necessarily the clear assumption? Since pretty much all modern computing depends on parallelism and multicore CPUs it seems descriptive to call a bunch of instances of a model that share a persistence layer one big thing even if they of course have something like different state

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The idea than an agent is a distinct thing is the labs’ framing. An agent is a context window, toolchain, loop, etc. running against a model. It can be useful to call that a distinct thing but it’s also useful to think of it as an instance of the model with distinct state like any parallel execution

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

This is explicitly the labs’ framing of the behavior and the writing assignment was to try and not use that. Also generating a persistent cache of prompts in a shared service to expand their context does seem to me like a way of agenting harder

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I think that for a totally nontechnical audience it means as much as such an audience is prepared to get until how all this works is more common knowledge

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Are you thinking I’d be on OpenAI’s or the plaintiff’s side?

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Oh fun writing workshop!

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Reposted by Nick Hall

Kate Jackson @katejackson.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

One thing about being a business law professor with a PhD in political theory during These Times (tm) is that once you realize that Silicon Valley has become a vanguardist (fascist) political project, you see its fingerprints *everywhere.* From dual class shareholding to repealing 14a-8, from

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Reposted by Nick Hall

lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The old line that analytic philosophy is answering questions that come naturally to toddlers via methods that come naturally to lawyers remains undefeated.

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Nick Hall @inck.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Another group then used similar text-assembling code to create text describing exactly what OpenAI’s code did. It assembled a story similar to past stories about code being used to break other code.

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