Sign in

Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy)

@johntmurphy.bsky.social
209 followers 211 following 217 posts

PhD, MA Ed. Former researcher at Argonne National Lab, University of Chicago, and Northern Illinois University. Archaeology, Anthropology, and Computation. Finding complexity in the past to build a better future.

PostsRepliesMedia
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Artificial Intelligence. (The word being changed is the wrong one; it _is_ artificial; it is _not_ intelligence, as I wrote last year: perfectknowledgedb.com/essays/AI_Is... ) Hold the line, everyone.
perfectknowledgedb.com
AI Is A But Not I
010
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Google, part of a company worth $4 trillion, part of the 'tech leader' industry that we are supposed to believe are the best of the best and who are the smartest software developers on the planet and are leading us to a glorious future, just sent me an email with the salutation "Hi null."
A slightly redacted email from Google that begins, "Hi null."
010
Reposted by Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy)
Evan Urquhart @evanurquhart.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
I'm increasingly frustrated that people who are anti-AI aren't being taken seriously, and taking a page out of my thoughts on why the anti-trans backlash got as far as it did I'm starting to think the anti-AI side isn't extreme enough.
481842325
Reposted by Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy)
Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
NEW: In March the White House released an FY27 budget request that zeroed out the National Science Foundation's directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). For months it was unclear what would happen. Now, with FY26 over, the damage to SBE is coming to light. My reporting:
science.org
‘Complete devastation’: How NSF gutted its social sciences research
Agency body that funds sociology, linguistics, and archaeology studies in U.S. gave 90% fewer new grants this year
9665515
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Internet security is like a wood-frame hotel. It's generally going to hold, and it's good enough, but it's never been perfect; breaking in is possible, so we made that illegal. Hacking is like poking to find drafty cracks and sneaking in. I worry that AI attacks might be more like fire.
100
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
This is a lot to digest, even before you get to the part about 'Golden Tickets'.
000
Reposted by Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy)
Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Heartily endorsing this important piece! As I argued earlier this year, social research did not just emerge from a prior moment of social change, it did crucial sensemaking about that change, up to and including the present. That work must continue and be independent. www.amacad.org/publication/...
amacad.org
Field Theory: AI as Social Science Question, Object & Tool
Uses of advanced artificial intelligence are changing how societies organize labor, govern, produce knowledge, and make meaning. In light of these developments, this essay argues that AI models, tools...
14420
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Social science is the most heavily funded activity in our country right now - if you count all the data being collected in data centers and everything that is being learned about us by corporations. *Public* social science, where we all get to benefit, is being written out of existence.
120
Reposted by Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy)
Kim Lane Scheppele @kimlanelaw.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Zero new NSF grants in sociology, anthropology, political science and economics. The agenda of this US govt is to stop documenting the society in which we live while they are destroying it. We will find other ways to track and explain our times and fight to restore our research funding.
15893454
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
1) No one should do any of this. 2) Unchecked, it will eventually be built into the entire system, so the *only* way to buy something is to 'authorize an agent,' and trying to do it by yourself (especially anonymously) will be seen as weird (literally, "discredited").
000
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
This is very good. To the quote in the image I would add that the 'undervaluation' is deliberate and purposive: One way to corner a market is to acquire what you can and destroy the rest. AI is doing this with all of cultural heritage. It will claim to know 'everything' bc nothing else will be left.
A block of text: Written off for its title online, “Drone Disorientations” would make a fascinating teaching object. Of course, the capacity to do that kind of interdisciplinary work in the classroom is rapidly dwindling. Harvard University just laid off its Writing Program Director along with dozens of other staff in a “restructuring” that many speculate is motivated by the school’s embrace of AI models. [HIGHLIGHTED] We’re occupying a strange political moment in which humanities work is both massively undervalued and everywhere extracted as a valuable resource.[END HIGHLIGHTING] Recently, the AI company Anthropic settled a $1.5 billion lawsuit involving over 300,000 plaintiffs for stealing archives of 7 million digitized books without compensation. During the proceedings, internal documents emerged revealing what the company called “Project Panama,” “our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” not just digital ones.
011
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Agree, and Doctorow's posts take you to work by Lauren Leek that also looks phenomenal. Diving in now...
020
Reposted by Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy)
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/08/2026
One of my favorite rhetorical and analytical moves is joining things (showing that different, seemingly unrelated ideas are part of the same phenomenon) and taking them apart (resolving paradoxes by demonstrating that what appears like a contradictory thing is different things, lumped together). 1/
A collage made of architectural features from 'Variae Architecturae Formae' (1636), a collection of engravings. The architectural arches, buildings, fountains, etc, are layered atop each other and placed around each other to create an infinite, recombinant built environment.
325491
Reposted by Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy)
the Juice Media @thejuicemedia.com · 11/08/2026
The Government™ has made an ad about Ai Data Centres, and it’s surprisingly honest and informative.
youtube.com
Honest Government Ad | Ai Data Centres
YouTube video by thejuicemedia
25701419
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
An interesting take by @jamellebouie.net (Short version: (Some) Millennials are politically gifted b/c they grew up in a different media environment and are used to discourse in the public view.) Responses:
youtube.com
Do Millennials have the political juice?
YouTube video by Takes™ by Jamelle Bouie
100
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
People feel like AI is being forced on them, but lack a good framework to understand that it is actually a political project, not a technical one. We're taught that tech opens possibilities, but we're not taught that our own capacity for political imagination does so as well.
nytimes.com
Video: Opinion | What Is A.I. Populism?
Is public backlash to artificial intelligence really about the technology, or is it a resistance to Silicon Valley elites forcing their vision on society? The writer Jasmine Sun joins “The Ezra Klein ...
100
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
👇🧵
011
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
This begs the question of what is the downstream effect of offloading so much of our cognitive exercise onto external systems like GPS or AI, and whether maybe it's just better if we think for ourselves - or even to build a world that is designed for us to think in.
000
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Yes to this, and to the reading list the NYT article proposes. Lots of work to do.
000
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
I really hope this doesn't include a way to make fake archaeological sites. I know this is a niche concern, but the profusion of fake archaeology on social media is astonishing. The part that is most disappointing is how amazing *real* archaeology is. It just isn't the story some people want.
020
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Can confirm: I looked at the cited websites yesterday and linked to one of them in one of my posts; now that page is gone.
000
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
I recently declined to be considered for a remote asynchronous university teaching job, and one reason (of several) was because I simply couldn't figure out how it could possibly work. If I'm ever in a classroom again, it will be pen, ink, and blue books.
100
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
My contribution (at least, to the 'stop dating machines' part): perfectknowledgedb.com/essays/BASIC...
perfectknowledgedb.com
BASIC Grace
000
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
A video for fun; mainly a test. Includes a thank-you to @emmablackery.bsky.social for being awesome and fearless. It has nothing to do with my real work, it's a trial to film/edit/post more videos- stay tuned! But if you like stuff from the 1970's, esp. the US Bicentennial in 1976, check it out.
youtu.be
Something fun (test video mostly)
YouTube video by Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy)
000
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
I'm strongly opposed to AI, but my opposition is to _generative AI_ (trained on intellectual property, emulating humans, surveilling us, eating the planet, taking the place of building actual communities). This AI is more like medical imaging (for example). It seems very cool.
110
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
This 💯 And deploying this fake persona robs us all of the quality of 'human-ness' that they are imitating and exploiting.
010
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
Social science will go on, if you mean data collected on human behavior; there will be a lot of that. What do you think those data centers are for? What we won't get is any public benefit- including learning how to pass laws to protect ourselves from what the co.s running those data centers learn.
theatlantic.com
The Trump Administration Is Done With Social Science
The National Science Foundation division that covers social, behavioral, and economic sciences is in the crosshairs.
010
Reposted by Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy)
Gillian Brockell @gillianbrockell.com · 29/05/2026
NEW: A group of activists have built an awesome new tool to help immigration attorneys and the general public know when an ICE flight is headed to their area. gillianbrockell.com/habeas-fligh...
gillianbrockell.com
Habeas Flight Watch: New tool helps track ICE flights to your city
Activists have been quietly piloting a live map of ICE flights to help immigration attorneys with habeas filings. Now they say it's ready for everyone to use.
737801893
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 24/05/2026
It's (past?) time to advocate for some projects to commit to having an AI-free version always available. I posted a request on the Zotero (reference/citation manager) dev forum; Zotero is awesome (used it abt 20 yrs), but I'd have to ditch it if it integrated AI without at least an opt-out.
100
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
If Schrödinger had been an archaeologist.
A section from a 1993 dissertation in which the author, describing an archaeological site, writes, "It is possible, but not possible, that this is a remnant of an old training track for horses." How it is simultaneously possible and not possible is a genuine extension of quantum mechanics that, presumably, both can and cannot open up new avenues of theory.
110
Reposted by Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy)
Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com · 18/05/2026
The thing is, he didn't mean anything he meant in the first paragraph about "the future hasn't already been decided," which you can tell by the second paragraph, where he says the future has already been decided.
15565100
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
It's almost as if building a society of peers all deeply trained in a field of knowledge and able to assess each others' work because they know and use the collected and common foundational citations and understand their meaning is more valuable than a machine that can make things that look truthy.
110
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
I just saw that in a review I submitted for a paper I misspelled a word, and I feel a small sense of shame. Meanwhile, the automated boilerplate email from the publisher that should tell me their decision says, "Having considered these reviews" and then just trails off, as if they forgot that part.
000
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
I just declined to review a paper because the journal's submission/review process uses AI. I know I'm on the extreme re: refusal to engage with AI, but I just can't justify it. Can't we do better with - and by, and for - real people?
000
Reposted by Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy)
MdDoogie3 @mddoogie3.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
I don’t really know what I expect in posting this, but maybe some people see it and can learn from it. I’ll call it “lessons from an unwilling immigration attorney.” 1/
8452172636
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
Thank you @aliciamenendez.bsky.social and @theweeknightmsnbc.bsky.social for asking about this 'day doesn't mean day' thing. This has been weighing on me for a long time. What other words could they redefine?
010
Reposted by Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy)
Sarah Taber @sarahtaber.bsky.social · 08/02/2026
It's officially up on the youtube
youtu.be
How Did Farming Become Conservative?
YouTube video by Farm to Taber
1023274
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 07/02/2026
I didn't post on this yesterday bc I thought I could let it go but.... "... he would certainly have ... asked for a lot more aesthetic detail. (This is how men behave.)" No, it's not. It is not normal to send a letter of recommendation and get asked, "Sure, but is she hot?" It is also not OK.
352
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
This was in my high school library. I've since taught an entire course on fraud in archaeology. There's a lot, but EvD gets his own, special place. Peace to those who loved him. For everyone else, there's this, with an epic takedown by Carl Sagan & reminder the book was 'reworked' by a former Nazi.
nytimes.com
Erich von Däniken, Who Claimed Aliens Visited Earth, Dies at 90
010
Reposted by Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy)
Sarah Taber @sarahtaber.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
If you needed bracing commentary in your day about rural politics & how playing victim isn't the flex we think it is... here you go. youtu.be/hAbU5J-5Z_k
youtu.be
Farmers: "Why Don't Politicians Care About Us?"
YouTube video by Farm to Taber
57518
Reposted by Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy)
Naomi Klein @naomiaklein.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
AI is a climate issue. AI is a climate crisis.
14837298
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 22/11/2025
Imagine a world in which this kind of experimentation and customization to local conditions, and the rich variety of foods and flavors that come out of it, were the norm instead of the exception.
010
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
My 'one happy thing' post today: A puzzle that's been in my family since it was originally bought (for 87 cents), showing some real celebrities. Apropos of nothing.
A puzzle box depicting the astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission, with Earth, the Moon, and the Command Module and Lunar Excursion Module in the background. The puzzle is Milton Bradley, 500+ pieces. The box is worn because it is over 50 years old.A puzzle box depicting the astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission, with Earth, the Moon, and the Command Module and Lunar Excursion Module in the background. The puzzle is Milton Bradley, 500+ pieces. The box is worn because it is over 50 years old.Corner of a puzzle box commemorating the Apollo 11 mission, with the price tag of the puzzle when sold (around 1970); the price was 87 cents at Gold Circle department store.
020
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 30/10/2025
Everything is hard right now, but I'm going to try to post at least one thing every day that makes me happy. Today it's this picture I took early this morning of the leaves that fell overnight in the chilly October rain.
Fall leaves, wet, on a dark background.
010
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 28/10/2025
I had a chat yesterday about whether archaeology would accept being marginalized and retreat to a safe, "we just study old stuff," or embrace its theoretical critique of power and be assertive in current political discourse. Careers may be at stake- but less is at stake for us than for others.
000
Reposted by Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy)
derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 25/10/2025
this is what will happen if mamdani makes bus rides free
A cat is seen riding a bus. They are standing up and have their front paws on the back of the front seat.
809338234727
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 17/10/2025
I worked on a National Lab-run project on Puerto Rico's energy grid. I was one of the authors on Energy Justice; much of the project concerned renewable energy. The results were placed in a full website at pr100.gov . That site is now gone. Maybe it's just because of the shutdown....
An image showing a browser URL bar for PR100.gov, and the response from the server, "Page not found".
120
Radical Complexity (John T. Murphy) @johntmurphy.bsky.social · 22/09/2025
Worth reading; discusses challenges that need to be addressed (e.g. Americans pay more but are sicker, and "... a lot of medical research is junk that can't be reproduced..."). Key quote: "The problem with Dr. Bhattacharya is not that he’s cynical... It’s that his theory is naïve about power..."
nytimes.com
Opinion | ‘The Power of Science to Solve Problems Is Almost Limitless’
010