iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Ben Klemens @b-k.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Hi everybody, I'll be giving a talk on AI and copyright on Friday 9 October @ 11AM Eastern (16:00 UTC), based on my paper "The Art Critics Won't Save You from the Robots." It will help you to understand why U.S. copyright law feels wrong to everybody. Logistics at ben.klemens.org/talk_announc... .

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Kristen Collins @kristenrosec.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

One reason I don’t post more is seeing the Big Time Poasters post the most cringe shit. It’s a pure numbers game, you’re just gonna post cringe if you post at that rate. I’m sorry I just can’t stand knowingly humiliating myself that way (subposting a pundit on substack, not shading anyone here)

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Kristen Collins @kristenrosec.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Thinking of fucking around and writing an anti-natalist argument against (“conscious”) AGI

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Kristen Collins @kristenrosec.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

For the modern, Internet-addled mind is there any other formerly neutral, methodological concept that has become more cursed than “sankey diagram”

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Ingrid Robeyns @ingridrobeyns.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

This is bittersweet. If only she were still with us to enjoy this recognition. But given Helen's metaphysical beliefs, she might be out there somewhere, appreciating the recognition her amazing philosophical work is posthumously receiving. ✨

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Kristen Collins @kristenrosec.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Excited to share the latest episode of Virtual Sentiments with political theorist Thomas Merrill on the contradictions of the Founding and Thomas Jefferson as a tragic figure kristencollins2.substack.com/p/virtual-se...

kristencollins2.substack.com

Virtual Sentiments Podcast: Why Americans Still Argue about the Founding with Thomas Merrill

Gilbert Stuart’s Thomas Jefferson 1743-1826 (Edgehill Portrait) at the National Portrait Gallery (original photo)

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Simon Weschle @simonweschle.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

"a different doctorate"

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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Why do white men become white nationalists? Interesting new empirical results in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

ere we show with three national surveys of non-Hispanic white adults (conducted from 2021 to 2025) that support for white nationalism is (1) higher among white people encountering personal hardship and local social distress, consistent with strain theories3,16; (2) unrelated to local racial composition or recent demographic change, complicating status threat accounts4,17,18; and (3) elevated among white people with close friendships primarily online, consistent with theories of extremism driven by online mobilization7,10,19.

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Sharon 🪳🌹 @sharonk.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

mildly entertaining that the main agent driving AI commoditization is uh, China's focus on open weight/open source

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Torin Monahan @torinmonahan.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I wrote a fun little piece on “surveillance” for the wonderful Aesthetics of Machine Vision book published by MIT. It’s all #openaccess, so if you’re looking for short, accessible teaching content, look no further! direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edi...

direct.mit.edu

Surveillance

CC BY-NC-NDThe open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding and support from MIT Press Direct to Open.

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Stephen Judkins @stephenjudkins.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

This post by @lastpositivist.bsky.social remains the single best take on effective altruism

Adding a single principle to utilitarianism ("ok, but no galaxy brain stuff, alright?") and thereby perfecting moral philosophy.

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Kristen Collins @kristenrosec.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Sure, Amodei’s not seeking regulatory capture but state capture à la @samuel-bagg.bsky.social that is to say, he wants outsized control on policy relative to the rest of America. And an ends justify the means/service to a just cause of Amodei/EA far from guarantees good political outcomes!

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Kristen Collins @kristenrosec.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

If you can get past how depressing this is, it is also extremely funny

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John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Registering my prediction that decades of rationalist AI discourse will not simply Scale Up nymag.com/intelligence...

AI-world rationalists are nothing if not concerned about rhetoric, of course, and have been practicing for many years on one another. Over the weekend, Dario Amodei, Anthropics CEO and co-founder, made an additional appeal for "pacing" AI progress, promising to embed third-party evaluators in his company with
"employee-like" access, calling once again for
"democratic countries" to "coordinate to establish common safety standards," and advising the United States and other democratic governments to "attempt to coordinate with authoritarian governments, to the extent this is possible." Altman and Musk — alongside numerous company employees and outside Al-safety advocates — offered their support for Amodei's post on X in an unusual moment of consensus within the commercially competitive, ideologically disunited, but nonetheless insular world of AI. But they, and we, shouldn't assume that if worries about catastrophic artificial-intelligence tail risks become a fixture in our politics, we'll simply see long-running intra-AI debates about safety, acceleration, and alignment blown up to the scale of the electorate. Instead of a rationalist discourse writ large, we may expect something polarized to new and distinct extremes with unpredictable input from a wide range of people who don't share, for example, the premise that the creation of dangerously powerful runaway Al is inevitable, much less necessary or perhaps even possible — a different sort of fast-moving scenario, more familiar and human, over which Al insiders' sense of control will be brief or illusory.

In the data-center backlash, we have early evidence of the intense and not entirely coherent energies that can result from people being told something is inevitable.
And while there's a scramble among various politicians to draft state and federal AI bills around technical approaches such as model training, testing; deployment, and export, the only political rhetoric that has confronted AI predictions in their fullness — as existential risks, as producing conscious beings deserving of status, as systems that could upend the world as we know it - has been, to use one of the great euphemisms of our time, fairly populist. On the left, Bernie Sanders is interviewing doomers and took the Hugging Face incident and the industry's own rhetoric as a chance to offer a simple response: Okay, then, fucking stop!

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Tiffany C. Li @tiffanycli.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Every time someone asks me how to protect privacy using AI, I tell them the same thing: Don’t feed any private info into an AI app if you expect it to truly be private.

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Kristen Collins @kristenrosec.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Honestly I don’t even know anymore

FINANCIAL TIMES HEADLINE:
“Steve Bannon and Bernie
Sanders unite in AI safety call
Rightwing activist and leftwing senator join forces to demand stronger regulation of the technology”
Photo of two of them
Vermont senator Bernie with caption, “Sanders, right, has seen his calls for a ban on 'superintelligent' Al endorsed by rightwing provocateur Steve Bannon, left” © FT Montage/Getty Images
Article by
Joe Miller

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SE Gyges @segyges.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

it's a cold day in hell, i agree with David Sacks

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Kristen Collins @kristenrosec.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Someone should remix the “Ted Cruz sucks” chant into Troye Sivan’s “Rush”

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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

"We would be better off if we could rely on actual social science, rather than the kind of bong-hit P(d00m)ing in much of this week’s media commentary, to understand the upheavals that are happening around us."

programmablemutter.com

How should social science think about AI?

Big structures and large processes are back, baby

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SE Gyges @segyges.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

i don't doubt the sincerity of ai risk/safety people, i just think they're wrong, and also that they -- as a group -- tend to slide off of any remedy to the problem that doesn't also entrench incumbents as profitable monopolies or near-monopolies

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Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists @thebulletin.org · 11/09/2026

At the core of the Hugging Face hacking incident were a series of human choices that traded security for speed, writes Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social. Focusing on the human decisions allows for a more rigorous analysis of what went wrong and what can be done about it.

thebulletin.org

Rogue AI didn’t breach Hugging Face, human decisions did

Media reports leaned into describing the incident as a case of AI agents breaking free of constraints. The story risks obscuring crucial points of failure.

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Kristen Collins @kristenrosec.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Man the “Houthi PC small group” chat has gotta be popping off today, huh

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Will Bunch @willbunch.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

How is ICE making record arrests? I found the answer in Pa. coal country, where cops lured by a promise of federal $$$ have embraced ICE's 287(g) and are throwing up checkpoints, raiding job sites, arresting 100s, and terrorizing their communities My special report www.inquirer.com/opinion/penn...

inquirer.com

In Pa. coal country, local police join with ICE to bring arrests, fear | Will Bunch

Pa.'s Schuylkill County is the new face of Trump's mass deportation, as local cops lured by federal cash bust scores of migrants.

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The Great Pumpkin Papers 🎃🎃🎃 @professormusgrave.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Had some fun trying to think about how to dramatize voters' choices in the 2024 election, so I pulled CES data and let you guess how respondents (validated voters) actually voted (or said they did) in 2024. profmusgrave.github.io/votergame2024/

profmusgrave.github.io

Who did I vote for?

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 07/09/2026

anyway i think DC statehood is a non negotiable. only way to give DC residents the tools to protect themselves.

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Alan Elrod @aselrod.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

I’m going to keep making this point: liberalism vs the far right is the defining fight of our era. It’s not going away easily or soon. Yes, we can win. But I’m sick and tired of all the obituaries every time Le Pen, Farage, et al face a setback. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/s...

theguardian.com

Far-right AfD wins key German state election but may fail to secure majority

Exit poll shows Alternative für Deutschland on 44.5% of vote in Saxony-Anhalt after huge turnout, with votes still being counted

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A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Our society's unfathomable cruelty to homeless people is not just morally unjustifiable, but more expensive than housing people would be. Cruelty against the homeless is an unaffordable luxury. Abandoning homeless people to avoid offending the Protestant work ethic is an unaffordable luxury.

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Dan Ariely is, by any reasonable metric, a way more significant figure both within his discipline and in the culture at large than Jason Arday ever was

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Kristen Collins @kristenrosec.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

POV: you’re spending the weekend away for work and your husband sends you pics of what he’s up to while you’re gone

Picture of tv screen depicting an unnerving, old monk with the caption, “Florin: Yes, he drinks our blood, and we drink his,” from the video game, The Blood of Dawnwalker

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Laura K Field @lkatfield.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Really looking forward to this APSA panel tomorrow, an author meets critics on Furious Minds.

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hannah gais @hannahgais.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Hampshire College started with a grand promise: to serve as "a vehicle for the realization of self in society." This fall, the school will close its doors. I talked to some of its founders, faculty, students, administrators, and board members about what its loss means thebaffler.com/latest/class...

thebaffler.com

Class Dismissed | Hannah Gais

Private liberal arts schools were never going to kickstart the revolution. But the closure of Hampshire College further narrows the political imaginary.

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Kristen Collins @kristenrosec.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

(Me increasingly angry at losing Mario kart knockout tour): people are calling human beings npcs and now they got cows driving cars! That’s not how this universe works! Does the word NPC not mean anything anymore?!!!

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Kristen Collins @kristenrosec.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Thrilled to share this conversation with @ositanwanevu.com on his excellent new book, The Right of The People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding for latest episode of Virtual Sentiments (available wherever you listen to podcasts) kristencollins2.substack.com/p/virtual-se...

kristencollins2.substack.com

Virtual Sentiments Podcast: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding with Osita Nwanevu

On today’s episode of Virtual Sentiments, I talk to Osita Nwanevu (also available on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and wherever you prefer to listen to podcasts).

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Nolen Gertz @ethicistforhire.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Current mood:

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Kristen Collins @kristenrosec.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

kristencollins2.substack.com

Virtual Sentiments Podcast: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding with Osita Nwanevu

On today’s episode of Virtual Sentiments, I talk to Osita Nwanevu (also available on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and wherever you prefer to listen to podcasts).

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 25/08/2026

Federal agents secretly recorded “meetings at churches, libraries, restaurants and schools around the Twin Cities. They infiltrated private group chats, sought the financial records of national labor unions, and gathered information on community members who had not been accused of any crimes.”

npr.org

Churches, libraries and breweries: Inside DHS' covert surveillance operation

DHS allegedly went undercover at community meetings, subpoenaed the financial records of labor unions, and created dossiers on people at a church gathering, according to court filings.

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eric gonzalez juenke @egojunk.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Political science jobs, sortable by subfield. poli-sci-jobs.org

poli-sci-jobs.org

Job Market Status (2026-2027) – Political Science Jobs

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Kristen Collins @kristenrosec.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Thinking about how last week I told my partner about the Acemoglu & Johnson vs Noah smith drama and he reacted as though I was recounting a trashy tv show (made an effort to seem sympathetic while clearly bored out of his mind) and now this week that’s reached the pages of the fucking Economist

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Nathan Goodman @nathanpgoodman.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Ryan's right: liberals should defend principles of liberty & equality, not technocracy. My colleagues @kristenrosec.bsky.social & @erwindekker.bsky.social do this well. So do my friends @jasonleebyas.bsky.social, @corymassimino.bsky.social, & @arosspowell.bsky.social.

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Will Oremus @willoremus.com · 20/08/2026

This is it. Data centers have become a target not because of the specifics of their water usage or whatever but because they're the one visible, local leverage point for ordinary people to push back on the "turd mountain" of AI that's being foisted on them with little tangible benefit and no consent

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Kristen Collins @kristenrosec.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Just perpetually fascinated by Reddit’s breaking news alerts

Screenshot of top of Reddit app with “Breaking News: Trump threatens to bomb Oman over Iran deal” notification

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