iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Shaily Patel @vox-magica.bsky.social · 6h

exactly this. at their best, the humanities facilitate perspectival agility and empathy. it is precisely this that animates so much of the ongoing right-wing attacks against humanities education.

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Alan Lester @alanlester.bsky.social · 7h

Just a reminder: 163 articles were published on Jason Arday in the week after he resigned. Same outlets: 13 articles on Cambridge academic James Orr after allegations of misconduct & a broadcast showing him seemingly engaging in illegal activity. bylinetimes.com/2026/08/18/t...

bylinetimes.com

The Peter Thiel-Linked Race Science Network that Penetrated Cambridge University and Targeted Jason Arday

The media's coverage of the academic's life was fuelled by the campaign of an established far-right network

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Sarah Fackrell @design-law.bsky.social · 7h

We've got lots of IP profs writing about what "AI" programs might do someday. Are there any torts profs writing about what "AI" makers are actually doing today?

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Ruth Deyermond @ruthdeyermond.bsky.social · 8h

Trump lifting sanctions on Russia should be no surprise to anyone who's paid attention to Trump for the last decade. The diesel/midterms issue may be the excuse to do it now, but it's not the reason for it. He's doing it because he's always wanted to lift sanctions on Russia.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 17h

As VAPs go, this is a pretty great one for 3 years at Amherst College in Law, Jurisprudence, & Social Thought for a law & humanities scholar. Amazing colleagues and I’m just down the street. 🗃️ apply.interfolio.com/195062

apply.interfolio.com

Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

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Matty Dubs @theycallmedubs.bsky.social · 17h

As these applications no doubt include “penalty of perjury” rules and the like, the only appropriate response is to arrest the employees responsible for this.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The American Dream is amazing: within just a few years you can go from being the child of Cuban immigrants to the great-grandson of Spanish settlers.

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Cate Denial @cjdenial.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

People who say that we should be careful to be nice to computer systems do not have the sense they were born with. Do not listen to a word they say.

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If you know you know @privatechand.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

This essay by the incomparable Adriano Prosperi explains exactly the emotional regime that such early modern practices of public executions were meant to instill. It is a politics of terror enforced through the public demonstration of arbitrary power. www.jstor.org/stable/24720...

jstor.org

Client Challenge

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Justin (seasonal) @justinskolnick.com · 09/10/2026

The proper category for “things made by human hands displaying qualities of sentience” is the demonic

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I can’t stress enough that this notion of if and when It will gain consciousness is Bible fanfic. It’s not real.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The proposition of sentience or intelligence is part of the AI Industry’s agnotology gambit. Just as Big Tobacco funded red herring research to flood public discourse with doubt, so this industry poses inane talking points as existential questions and even funds research into them.

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Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

whether by guillotine, which arrived in Algiers in 1843, or, as for the vast majority of Algerian colonial subjects who lived under military rule and military justice, firing squad.

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Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

So they kept/revived the old, absolutist modes of public execution in order to demonstrate their sovereign power to the Algerian population, to terrify them into submission, and to convince them that French legal institutions had the capacity to do justice

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Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The French, like most Europeans, believed that Islamic law was inherently despotic and that Muslim Algerians only understood rule by force. And the strength of Algerian resistance to French invasion made them extremely anxious about the security of their power in the colony.

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Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

In light of current events, it is very telling that the place that the French state continued to stage public executions on the site of crimes and in central urban spaces was in colonial Algeria. Islamophobia and anxious imperial sovereignty perpetuated practices rejected in continental France

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Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The worry was that witnessing executions would “demoralize” the spectators, who were also the sovereign people. And good popular government requires the people be moral and rational. Inviting them to participate in an anachronistic absolutist spectacle would turn them back into absolutist subjects.

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Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

And then against the publicity regime entirely. Guillotines were moved gradually out of center cities and into more marginal spaces, closer and closer to prisons, and then into prisons entirely. Hence the opening scene of the Battle of Algiers, where a prisoner is guillotined in the yard.

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Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

19th century reformers argued first for moving executions away from the site of the crime, both for the sake of economy and because after the Revolution, executions were supposed to be the simple application of the punishment prescribed by law.

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Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

*The Terror obviously violated this principle, but also accelerated the turn against public executions by giving a powerful example of their political dangers.

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Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

In France, death sentences issued by civilian courts were required to be public until 1939, for the sake of transparency. But during the Revolution, legislators began pushing to make them less spectacular out of concern for the effects of watching executions on their audiences.*

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Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Popular sovereignty changes this logic dramatically. If the people constitute the sovereign, then executions are done in their name and on their behalf. And their relationship to state violence matters beyond whether they are terrified into obedience or convinced of the ruler’s omnipotence.

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Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Carrying out executions on the site of a crime showed the local population that the ruler had the power to do justice, as both a deterrent against future crime and as an act of repair to the community and victims of the crime. But it’s still about showing off sovereign power

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Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

This is also fundamental to the publicity regime of capital punishment. Under absolutist forms of sovereignty, public executions were about demonstrating the sovereign’s power to an audience of their subjects.

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Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

And summary justice is a feature of absolutist power, of royal rather than popular sovereignty. When the execution is a manifestation of the sovereign’s will and power, due process doesn’t matter. The monarch (or military hierarchy) cannot be questioned, the monarch can do no wrong.

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Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

That these are now considered especially horrific instances of reactionary political violence reflects the association of firing squads with summary justice—armies use them because they are portable and fast. They are for speedy results, rather than due process or the mental health of executioners.

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Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

This is the execution of the Communards of Paris in May 1871 or the execution of the mutineers in 1917. But most familiar is Goya’s Third of May 1808 (1814), depicting French soldiers gunning down Spanish insurgents during the Napoleonic Wars. All now seen as martyrs for liberty

A moody painting of a group peasants being shot by a phalanx of booted and hatted soldiers. At the center of the dark scene is a brightly lit man in a white shirt, standing arms upraised as if for crucifixion, ready to accept his fate

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Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

There is a related conversation to be had about the use of the firing squad, rather than more “modern” and “merciful” forms of killing (guillotine, lethal injection, etc.). Firing squads in the modern Atlantic world are used in armies and for political enemies.

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Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Yes, and…. As a performance of sovereignty, the purpose of public executions has changed over time with shifts in the nature of sovereignty. The spectacle Hegseth intends is a largely a return to an earlier mode of public execution associated with early modern monarchies 🧵

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Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Thanks be to God that we no longer have to live under the tyrannical yoke of the woke radical left language police.

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
The White House considers anyone that uses the term, "Artificial Intelligence," as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term,
"Super Intelligence," THE ENEMY! President
DONALD J. TRUMP
524 ReTruths 1.73k Likes
10/8/26, 12:14 PM

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Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

God the homophobia and transphobia is vile, but also, imagine thinking it would even work in the Year II of Heated Rivalry

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gamera obscura october edition @ohrobin.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I think what frightens me most is that the sheer volume of things to be horrified by has become its own kind of protection for the people responsible. Nothing has to be explained or resolved becuase a story or a scandal or a tragedy only has to survive until the next thing happens in five minutes.

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Gerry Doyle @mgerrydoyle.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

credit where credit is due, this is straight ahead factual and well written

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Nicolas Hénin @nicolashenin.net · 09/10/2026

Si j'étais sociologue, je me lancerais dans un archivage et une étude des pancartes brandies durant cette mobilisation lycéenne. Depuis Mai-68, je n'ai rien vu d'aussi créatif.

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Joshua Holland @joshuaholland.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The media calls him a “moderate”

Newsweek headline from 2023: “Republicans Choose Emmer, a Moderate, as their Third Speaker Nominee”

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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @ocasio-cortez.house.gov · 09/10/2026

My statement on the ICE shooting in Marble Hill ⬇️

"Today in Marble Hill, ICE agents fired multiple shots at a man in his vehicle while his 5-year-old child was in the back seat.
ICE's already unwelcome presence in our city has been growing more escalatory and dangerous by the day. Today's shooting is a grave development that requires a swift and immediate response to protect the safety of all New Yorkers.
First, we must have a full and independent investigation of this incident.
"There must also be a full and immediate release of all body camera footage of the incident.
In addition, the Target Corporation must stop offering their Bronx properties as private staging sites for ICE, in compliance with requests from New York officials. Target opening up large, active retail parking lots for paramilitary activity is unacceptable and places the entire community at risk.
ICE is a rogue, lawless paramilitary and surveillance agency.
It does not belong in New York City and it should not exist in the United States of America. Abolish ICE.”

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Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Two most useful things have been these two by Paul Friedland and Emmanuel Taïeb, but also dipped into some of the parliamentary debates of the 1820s and 1830s, where Destutt de Tracy had some very interesting things to say. Nobody seems to have really worked on him.

Cover of Paul Friedland’s book Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in France (Oxford UP)

Cover of Emmanuel Taïeb, Hiding the Guillotine: Public Executions in France, 1870-1939

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Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

What a day to be writing about 18th and 19th century views on public executions. Needless to say, 250 years ago, the same European thinkers that conservatives want us to read more of thought it was an archaic, barbaric, tyrannical practice that brutalized its spectators as much as its victims.

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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Anthropic banning “abusive or cruel behavior” toward Claude in its new usage policies is proof to me that tech companies are going to moderate violence against AI before they ever moderate violence against women and minorities

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Ernest Luckman @ernieluckman.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The first thing that underfunded schools have cut near me was bussing. It forces parents to drive their kids and get stuck in traffic and it’s driving them all insane.

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Seth Rockman @sethrockman.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Don't buy me a Claude subscription. Buy me a round seminar table around which 15 students can sit for a sustained conversation!

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Kristen Collins @kristenrosec.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Not disagreeing but I’d be more precise and say it’s not just this, but that the mercantilist doctrine is spread by “those that live by profit” to benefit themselves over the country’s poorest workers, the country itself, and even those beyond its borders (via the injustices of empire)

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Butlerian Jihadist of House Dornick @shimminykricket.blacksky.app · 08/10/2026

The average increase on code volume after the adoption of agentic AI studying 700 firms is 4,000 additional lines of code per programmer. The advantage of junior engineers writing code without the use of AI is senior engineers had to spend less time on code reviews.

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Butlerian Jihadist of House Dornick @shimminykricket.blacksky.app · 08/10/2026

Harvard just dropped a study AI productivity in software engineering and it found the average increase in productivity from using Claude code is.....zero and for exactly the reasons you'd think fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf

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Rachel Holliday Smith @rachelholliday.bsky.social · 23/10/2024

get in loser we’re hating leaf blowers

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Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Thank you for this piece and perspective on this travesty.

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