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Lisa Messeri

@lmesseri.bsky.social
6.1K followers 1.1K following 938 posts

anthropologist of sci & tech. Prof @Yale. author of "Placing Outer Space" and VR book "In the Land of the Unreal". tech criticism with good vibes.

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Reposted by Lisa Messeri
永原宣 Hiromu Nagahara @hiromunagahara.bsky.social · 20h
MIT's Anthropology program is now searching for a tenure-track assistant professor to fill the Fang Chair in Chinese Languages and Culture! Anthropology also shares a thriving PhD program (HASTS) with History and STS. Please share and apply!! careercenter.americananthro.org/job/714273/a...
careercenter.americananthro.org
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Margaret Mitchell @mmitchell.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
This is getting a lot of quotes, so I feel I should correct this a bit (sorry @anildash.com!) “AI” was 100% born toxic! The first AI workshop was born from the field of “automata studies”, and…1/ (Pictured: the folks who convened for the first workshop. Notice anything notable here?)
A group of white men, sitting on the grass and smiling at the photographer. Black and white photo (1956).
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
"de-risk" is a totally normal, non-rationalist way that people talk.
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M.J. Crockett @mjcrockett.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
As @lmesseri.bsky.social and I have been saying
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
i live in waking dread that it will be discontinued or even more enshittified.
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
i love zotero! my go to for citation management
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
i'm still dependent on google scholar. but trying to make better use of my university's library and databases.
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I've just been trying to learn how to better use my university library's database system. Because of when i went to grad school (post-google scholar), i never learned this basic skill. So i'm trying to re-skill
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
one of the reasons that I warn researchers away from adapting commercial LLMs into their pipeline is that Big Tech has a history of sunsetting popular, usable products and replacing them with worse ones. (i'm trying to ween myself off of google scholar, but it is hard).
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
it is just so stupid that someone who responds to me on social media every time i mention how he doesn't deserve the credit he gets for VR is now in this position. so so stupid.
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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
This is horrifying and exactly what a lot of us have been warning against for years. So fucking frustrating. We could have had better—politically, technologically, socially, and economically. We need far better leadership in all fields, at all levels.
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Laine Nooney @ 🔥🗑️🔥 @lainenooney.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
This is such an unbelievably, historically unserious bad take from Steven Levy, the light from bad takes would take a million billion years to reach it. www.wired.com/story/war-br...
wired.com
War Bros Didn’t Always Rule Silicon Valley
Some say that tech was always about the money and the military. Don’t buy that argument.
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Very helpful, thank you!!
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Here are some anthropologists smartly responding to the Vanderbilt report. These were written prior to Heinrich releasing his more detailed report. www.anthropology-news.org/topics/anthr...
anthropology-news.org
Anthropology Defended Archives - Anthropology News
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
i love these answers. I was talking about academic pre-prints (like journal articles before their publication). But as someone who has also written a book on hollywood and technology and did a lot of reading about the shift from analog to digital in production cultures, this was an awesome trip.
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
😂
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
has anyone written about pre-print culture in the snail mail era? What were the norms? At what point was a pre-print considered 'good enough' to send to colleagues? maybe @mbarany.com might have a lead here?
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
to the last part, he isn't interested in having the conversation I want to have. Rather he seems more intent on demarcating the very asking of these questions as antithetical to a human science. But the most human thing we can do is engage our values and our projects of knowing as always entangled.
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
(4) He does touch on what I think is an ongoing and important conversation in anthropology, which is who do we get to speak with and for? Have we gone too far to one end (where we can only speak from communities we represent)? What is an appropriate epistemic and ethical stance?
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
(3) He connects decline in quant methods to rise in analyses of power and advocacy. There /is/ sthng interesting here, but my interpretation would be that it signals the limits of what quant methods can and can’t speak to. And also epistemic fashions - ways of knowing go in and out of style.
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
(2) He fails to clearly distinguish institutional/structural problems from epistemological ones. While he states that correlation (btw closing anthro depts and decline in quant methods, for ex) is not causation, the report implicitly argues causation.
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
(1) Most significantly, he fails to take into account historical contextualization - from what motivated earlier crises in the field to the proximal causes of Trumpism, Covid, BLM for certain stances that he offers as evidence for the crisis of the field today (instead of crisis more broadly).
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I took the time to read this (and the appendices). Didn’t love it! But in the spirit of constructive engagement, a few take aways (and would love other anthropologists' thoughts as well)...
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
and you might be surprised to know that the positions that have more epistemological credibility have less political and economic power.
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Worth noting that some of these ideologies are empirically grounded and others are, like, not. So while this might be helpful in putting many players on the same stage, it doesn't do justice to the unequal epistemological credibility of the different stances nor the unequal political economy.
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
The mechanical Turk re-emerges (though it never left)
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
For those of us trained to think about tech as nodes in broader sociotechnical systems, this was (as John says) obvious. But few people have intuitively think this way. I see tremendous opportunity to change the narrative about tech benefits to be about the collective, not the individual.
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Meta VR glasses, you say? Happy to contextualize that in the corporate vision race that Meta and Apple have been playing the last few years. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
journals.sagepub.com
Visions of Computing Futures: Meta, Apple, and the Technological Fictions of Digitally Real Worlds - Lisa Messeri, 2026
The vision of seamlessly integrating virtual and physical environments—variously called spatial computing and the metaverse—has been around for decades. Recentl...
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alice e marwick @alicetiara.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
I am SO DELIGHTED to announce that our brand new report: The AI Factory: Data Centers, Power, and Resistance in Late Industrial Pennsylvania is out today. datasociety.net/research-lib... TechCrunch has the scoop: techcrunch.com/2026/09/22/e...
techcrunch.com
Everyone can find a reason to dislike data center construction | TechCrunch
Inside two years of fraught AI data center debates in Pennsylvania.
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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
I was prepared by this post. And yet I was UNPREPARED.
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Benjamin Breen's "Tripping on Utopia" has a little bit of the intersections! they are not central to what i carve out, but they are there and could be examined further....
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Yadda yadda yadda, this mid-century moment has direct ties to today's AI moment (and AI sex cults). it is a wonderful case study of how the pseudoscientific gains purchase in technoscientific communities. It's a fun article that i hope one day will be published.
The historical case study of Campbell, Scientology, and the sci-fi community illustrates how proximity to technoscientific authority allows for claims that might otherwise be deemed outlandish, to receive serious consideration. Throughout this article, I drew a comparison between Campbell and Yudkowsky, but I wish to conclude by listening for other echoes that are sounded out in this history, and how Sam Altman – a figure who looms much larger than Yudkowsky in today’s Silicon Valley power ranking – can also be situated within this critique.
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Cults aside, Hubbard also drew on the zeitgeisty sciences of the time - including cybernetics and general semiotics - to make Dianetics appeal to the Man Of Science reader of pulp sci fi. These fields trended toward a belief that the mind could be optimized like a computer.
While Hubbard drew on what he learned from Parsons and OTO as he built up the structure and mythology of Scientology in the years following Parsons’s death, the project of Dianetics was more connected to intellectual traditions that, as the 1957 “Thinking Machine” cover reflects with irony, desired to understand the mind as a machine that had the potential of being fully optimized. Campbell and other members of the sci-fi community brought to Hubbard ideas from cybernetics and general semantics, revealing an affinity between these projects of applying an engineering mindset to the psychological sciences. This was intrinsically appealing to the engineering and physics readership of Astounding, whose initial interest in Dianetics helped Hubbard’s approach reach unfathomable success. Even as Dianetics and Scientology are today seen as pseudoscience and pseudoreligious, the optimization objective at the heart of this project as well its particular appeal to technoscientific practitioners resonates strongly with the Silicon Valley rationalists. The parallels, as will be seen, are not entirely coincidental.
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Hubbard learned a thing or two about sex cults from Jack Parsons, one of the founders of JPL. Parsons was a walking example of how the science and the occult can exist in harmony within individuals. While Parsons was a true believer of sex magic, Hubbard saw the potential for his biggest grift yet.
Both Heinlein and Hubbard ended up back in Los Angeles after the war. Heinlein was returning home, but Hubbard’s last posting had been a short stint in Monterey, California where, upon Heinlein’s encouragement he connected with the sci-fi community and particularly with Parsons (Nevala-Lee, 2018, p. 204). Parsons, a fan of Hubbard’s fiction, enthusiastically welcomed him into the fold and was immediately impressed by his innately Thelemic aptitudes (R. Miller, 1987, p. 118). Hubbard became a lodger at Parsons’s Pasadena house-slash-OTO-lodge and, despite Hubbard immediately stealing the affections of Parsons’s mistress,  Hubbard became Parsons’s most significant magical partner.
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I consider how science fiction was a genre that attracted mid-century men of science, and became a fascinating place for ideas of science and fiction to blur to the point of indistinguishability. SciFi was prophesy. This made it a rife place for Dianetics to be first published.
This alluring potential of science fiction - and the esteem in which the golden age men of the genre held themselves - explains in part why, in May 1950 (a decade before it would be rebranded as Analog), Astounding published a long article teased on its cover as “A New Science of the Mind.” Having predicted the key advances in the physical sciences for the previous decade (as the haughty “science-fictioneers” told themselves), it was to the mental sciences that Campbell felt his authors ought to turn their collective attention. And riding on a certain amount of confidence when surveying the scientific achievements of the previous decades, why ought his authors limit themselves to fiction? Might they also be able to convert prophesy into scientific reality?
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
since we are all talking about AI sex cults, here are some snippets from an article stuck in peer review purgatory that weaves together the rationalists (ground 0 for AI sex cults), mid century science fiction, sex magick, and scientology.
While the Zizians break through the fog of modernity to reveal its status as “cult,” proclamations by Sam Altman that AGI will bring “abundance and prosperity” (quoted in O’Donnell, 2025)  or by Elon Musk that we are most likely living in a simulation (Powell, 2018) are instead appraised as an innovator’s (if not genius’s) rational musing on the world. Examining prior cases where the boundaries between science and non-science are transgressed can expose today’s “innovators” as instead false prophets whose promises extend far beyond what might be strictly considered the technoscientific.
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
"Several other studios considered buying “Artificial,” including the indie A24, which seemed like a natural fit. But among that company’s backers are Josh Kushner’s firm Thrive Capital — also one of OpenAI’s backers — and, as of June, Google’s DeepMind A.I."
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
fascinating: "Amazon MGM confirmed it had dropped “Artificial,” [about Sam Altman]. Publications reported that the film was nearly finished and had tested well with audiences. An Amazon spokesperson told Variety that “Artificial” would “be better served if it were released by a different studio.”
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
oh this is very funny. a mid-40s man sporting the haircut that zuck made famous in his 30s is just excellent.
image of Jeremy strong playing Mark Zuckerberg in "The social reckoning"
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
"But such films may be at the mercy of the companies themselves." Totally! Which is why i spent nearly a decade of my life thinking about how the tech industry and entertainment industry are intertwined, and wrote it all down in a nice little book. www.dukeupress.edu/in-the-land-...
nytimes.com
As Big Tech Takes Over Hollywood, the Picture Onscreen Gets Darker
“The Social Reckoning” and other movies reflect growing discontent with Silicon Valley founders. But such films may be at the mercy of the companies themselves.
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Benjamin Tausig @burrata.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I think the very sudden switch from in-person meetings to zoom made the difference between those modalities (and the paucity of the latter) apparent in a way that was harder to pick up with digital reading, since it came on slower. But I think the difference is similar.
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Shobita Parthasarathy @shobitap.org · 17/09/2026
In my new Expert Voices column @science.org, I argue that the Trump admin's science strategy (as written in Kratsios' Science: A Golden Age)--which gives more authority & funding to the private sector to direct the research enterprise--will harm science, and further erode its public accountability.
science.org
Escaping a downward spiral for science and public accountability
In late July, Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), released Science—A Golden Age, setting forth a strategy to revitalize US research and innova...
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
The media coverage has been all over the place with covering the latest from AI CEOs. This is an excellent piece, which jives with my own research and reading of the situation.
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Rebecca Ingber @becingber.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
In 1909 E.M. Forster wrote a short story, a warning about a world in which humans would cease to understand their own technological creations. It’s a quick read; here’s the PDF. (Apropos of nothing … )
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M.J. Crockett @mjcrockett.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
The AI industry claims their products will "improve efficiency" and "accelerate science" but I'm able to do less science because I have to spend more time screening applicants to my lab. LLM noise drowns out signal- last year I shortlisted unqualified apps, and surely missed some gems.
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
also, the class comprised of mostly seniors were FRESHMEN IN HIGH SCHOOL during COVID remote teaching.
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
I spent a good 10 minutes explaining to my undergrad class why i'm going analog, how to purchase their course reader, the value of taking notes by hand, etc. When i asked if there were any questions, a student tentatively raised their hand and asked "What is a course reader?" I'm dead. old and dead
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
i saw this and immediately popped over to your feed for a good take :)
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M.J. Crockett @mjcrockett.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
This summer I led a series of conversations in my lab about "AI" and our research. Some colleagues have shared "AI policies" for their labs and we discussed whether this would make sense for us. We decided it did not, and came up with a different approach. Please feel free to share & adapt!
zenodo.org
Crockett Lab Statement on AI and Scientific Research
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Jeff Sharlet @jeffsharlet.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
I’m a Dartmouth professor. Pres. Beilock implies in this piece that she speaks for us as a college. She does not. I don’t permit AI in my classroom. Not because it stole my work; because as I wrote in @chronicle.com, most of my students hate it—and feel betrayed by the college—even more than I do.
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