iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Emily

Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

My book REWRITING THE MECHANIC comes out in in a month! Please preorder to read the 18th-century prehistory of the tech bro (aka the way that literary speculations crafted the models of technological power that still shape our horizons of possibility) www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/bucknell/rew...

rutgersuniversitypress.org

Rewriting the Mechanic

Rewriting the Mechanic examines how written descriptions, circulating across genres in eighteenth-century Britain, transformed certain mechanical arts by imagining them as newly innovative, authoritat...

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Here's the last paragraph of the coda, which draws on work by @jordanscarroll.bsky.social and @mattseybold.bsky.social to argue that contemporary "AI" executives use the methods for foreclosing the future forged in eighteenth-century fictions of white masculine power

By building AI systems that function through consuming existing bodies
of text, these systems’ developers also position the future their mechanisms promise to realize as something that has already been written. In his analysis of contemporary right-wing imaginaries, Carroll points out how alt-right activists who cling to white masculinity as the primary site of human possibility “say they want tomorrow to reveal that they have infinite potential to be anything and everything,” but “really want a future that merely confirms who they are as fixed and inevitable.” AI instrumentalizes this deterministic vision by mining past texts to make
a future that is restricted within those texts’ bounds, thereby attempting to turn “what may be” into a recursive reiteration of what was and what is. Rather than AI’s speculative possibilities being endless, then, they are trained on the endless reproduction of systems like white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and ableism. And, as a story already written, AI’s futures are presented to us as proleptically realized: the new, old world is already here, and we need to catch up. Returning to the historical texts in which (and from which) these forms of possibility are made, however, can remind us that though this story is authored, it is not yet something
that “Shalt be.” There remains the potential to rewrite these eighteenth-century fictions, and so to remake the collective futures that may be.

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

rutgersuniversitypress.org

Rewriting the Mechanic

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Susan Stryker's "My Words to Victor Frankenstein" ❤️

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

(I just finished Moby Dick, 19 years after attempting to read it for the first time.)

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

"God keep me from ever completing anything."

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

So glad you like it 😭 thank you so much for posting this excellent frog

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

I loved this so much I made a linocut inspired by it (and Frank Truman from Twin Peaks) youtu.be/4qOMtPMp6kw

Linocut print of a frog on a penny-farthing surrounded by the words “my the road rise up to meet your wheels”

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Reposted by Emily

祖思薪 Eugenia Zuroski @zugenia.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

Y’all, @irmavep.bsky.social’s forthcoming book is so fucking good—do not miss this one!!!

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

😭😭 thank you Gena!!!

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

The wretched AI generated promo photo is the icing on the cake

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

I'm so glad you're doing this!! I just finished the book a couple of weeks ago and I've been thinking of it ever since. It's so amazing.

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

I always show my students this illustration when we talk about poetic descriptions of women (it makes all the conventional metaphors and similes literal) digitalcollections.folger.edu/img6873

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

Anyway now I'm listening to this as I contemplate the end of humanity www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgPo...

youtube.com

Get Naked (I Got a Plan)

YouTube video by Britney Spears - Topic

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

Somewhere sometime on some corner of the internet I saw Britney Spears's (masterpiece) Blackout described as "voidier than the darkest black metal." I just finished reading Shelley's The Last Man and that's the description that keeps coming to mind.

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Reposted by Emily

Marsh's Library @marshslibrary.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

A break from Christmas content to enjoy this capybara eating a banana. From François Froger's 'A relation of a voyage ...' (London, 1698).

17th century engraving of a capybara under a palm tree eating a banana

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

The phlebotomist described my blood as “nice and juicy” today

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 13/12/2025

And the fact that the only thing I feel like I can trust is work they've done in front of my eyes is exactly the issue

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 13/12/2025

Also when I say this I hear some bro in the distance shouting "well if you just have them write stuff in class everything will be fine!" I overhauled my entire approach to assessment this semester to foreground analog and in-class work but it's still not enough.

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 13/12/2025

One of the things I hate most about AI is the way it poisons my relationship with my students. I'm constantly unsure if what I'm reading is their thoughts. I feel at once like a chump for potentially responding earnestly to AI and a cop for questioning if this is really their work.

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

The closest I got to understanding Fahrenheit was the 5 months I lived in LA and listened to David Lynch’s daily weather reports, but it still doesn’t really make sense to me

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

I’m so sorry ❤️💔

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

You should do a giveaway and the entries can be “favourite weird thing in c18 writing”

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

It’s fine!!! Now you can give that copy to someone else!

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

Finally I can hold it in my hands!! 💓 @zugenia.bsky.social

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

I just read the intro to this book while procrastinating on grading and it could not be more extremely my shit...can't wait to read the rest

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

Hearing Canadian accents on tv makes me so deeply homesick (yes I am watching Heated Rivalry)

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Hello everyone I am so depressed about AI. Every time I think about AI and my students and my job and what teaching is now for more than 0.01 seconds I get so sad and upset I feel like I need to crawl in a hole. So that’s fun

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Emily @irmavep.bsky.social · 03/12/2025