iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Meredith Broussard, PhD

Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.bsky.social · 8h

BREAKING: A federal judge has ruled for the first time that a Flock search was unconstitutional and violated a woman's Fourth Amendment rights. Oklahoma cop pulled over a woman and searched her in Flock "because he saw her license plate was from California" www.404media.co/federal-judg...

404media.co

Federal Judge Rules a Flock Search Was ‘Indiscriminate Mass Surveillance’ and Unconstitutional

Flock’s nationwide network is quickly “approaching dragnet-type law enforcement practice” and the cop should have got a warrant, the judge wrote.

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Reposted by Meredith Broussard, PhD

Randolph Potts @rpotts-sawubona.blacksky.app · 01/10/2026

Timnit Gebru, 2026 Right Livelihood Laureate & pioneering AI researcher challenges the concentration of power in the tech industry, argues that behind "autonomous" AI systems are humans deciding whose data is used, what resources consumed, who owns the technology-and are responsible when harm occurs

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404 Media @404media.co · 28/09/2026

Human contractors are reviewing Copilot users’ prompts and uploaded images, 404 Media has learned. The contractors are also bombarded with users’ requests for sexual AI images. @evystadium.bsky.social has more. Sccop here by @josephcox.bsky.social: www.404media.co/humans-readi...

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Luke LeBrun @lukelebrun.ca · 26/09/2026

Tech companies suddenly decide they can, in fact, moderate content on their platforms after all

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Paris Marx @parismarx.com · 25/09/2026

An individual in Canada used ChatGPT for eight months to plan one of the country’s worst mass shootings. Yet, if you listen to politicians and media, the real threat of AI is a fantastical scenario where it might wipe out humans in ten years. They need to stop getting fooled by tech deceivers.

disconnect.blog

The media has the AI threat all wrong

Generative AI is harming people today. We don’t need to waste time fantasizing about science fictional scenarios.

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ZP Rosen @zaqdelinguist.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Listen, these things can’t go “rogue”. It’s just a basic LLM stuck in a while loop. But this kind of attack is possible by doing something as simple as that, and that means that more people can set up programs to do terrible things like this moving forward on a whim.

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Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

It's funny that for years now people have been saying that using generative AI very obviously deskills you, and people kept going no no you're wrong you Luddite And now all the genAI CEO's keep coming out in public to announce they forgot how to read and do math and can't remember their address etc

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Meredith Broussard, PhD @merbroussard.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

This is going to be such a fun conversation. Join us at NYPL!

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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 23/09/2026

More accurately, OpenAI developers and management built an automated system with unfettered access, unmonitored agents, prompting an LLM with zero safeguards and trained to be persistent until it drops, suggesting an increasing number of crazy activities, and running it for days without monitoring.

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Drew Harwell @drewharwell.com · 23/09/2026

Five cops in Indianapolis were just criminally charged with abusing Flock to spy on their ex-wives, their wives' ex-partners and women they met on duty. Audit was triggered by us at the @washingtonpost.com, the prosecutor said. From last month: wapo.st/4yfNHng

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Justin Hendrix @justinhendrix.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Flock is "a visible manifestation of a much larger transformation in American surveillance that should alarm Americans," write Access Now's Michael De Dora and EPIC's Maria Villegas Bravo, who argue the backlash "has created an opportunity for real change."

techpolicy.press

A Flock of Problems with Mass Surveillance

Flock cameras are part of a larger problem whereby governments are deputizing private companies for surveillance, write Michael De Dora & Maria Villegas Bravo.

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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Precisely this—the power attributed to technology makes it incredibly useful for laundering responsibility

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Dr. Chinasa T. Okolo @chinasa.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

"If Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI giants want to keep referring to themselves as labs, they should adhere to scientific best practices: open-sourcing code, preregistering studies, and, most important, subjecting research to independent peer review." www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

theatlantic.com

There’s No Such Thing as an AI ‘Lab’

The term lends an air of scientific rigor to what are really billion-dollar corporations.

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Meredith Broussard, PhD @merbroussard.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

AI deployed at DC airport today. Then a construction crew dug up a cable bundle and brought PHL air traffic to a halt. Now EWR is affected. My sympathies to all fliers and all who work at airports today.

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Sarah Posner @sarahposner.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

"some investors are voicing increasing skepticism about the growth expectations for data centers and the risks associated with their build-out, forcing industry executives and their advisers to recalibrate their plans" www.nytimes.com/2026/09/21/b...

nytimes.com

Wall Street Is Growing Skeptical of the Data Center Boom (Gift Article)

Several companies tied to the data center industry have delayed their initial public offerings amid the increasing public backlash to these energy guzzling facilities.

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Meredith Broussard, PhD @merbroussard.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I've been wondering for a while if other hobbyists have noticed how the quality of search info has deteriorated. Nice to have it validated.

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WIRED @wired.com · 20/09/2026

The Muse app continues Meta’s trend of opting users into data collection for AI training. It also nudges you to share your bank account, email, and passport information. www.wired.com/story/metas-...

wired.com

Meta's Muse Is Better at Surveilling Than Helping Me

The Muse app continues Meta’s trend of opting users into data collection for AI training. It also nudges you to share your bank account, email, and passport information.

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Amanda Katz @katzish.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

In short

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Kate Klonick @klonick.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

We’re going to look back at this time when we built machines to hack ourselves, and destroyed vaccines that saved our children and be like: “What? Were too many people _staying alive_?? Was _that_ the problem they were solving for??”

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Meredith Broussard, PhD @merbroussard.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

"...for the incidents we’ve seen so far, he believes local interventions could be enough. 'At a local level, making a kill switch or a cutoff switch is probably technically trivial. You literally unplug a cable,' he says." Always read @peterha2l.bsky.social!

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 18/09/2026

“The 230-page lawsuit, filed in a federal court in Northern California, accuses Meta of fraud and false advertising, along with violating other consumer protection laws in various states.”

latimes.com

Meta glasses captured and shared intimate images without users' consent, lawsuit claims

People who use Meta's smart glasses or were recorded with the gadget are worried about how the social media giant is using their photos and videos.

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Meredith Broussard, PhD @merbroussard.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

We need guardrails and global treaties to prevent the green orbs from developing recursive superintelligence and getting out of control.

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Brian Creech @briancreech.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Signal boosting, but I am pleased to share the annual call for Journalism History's essay competition, this year focusing on the intersections of theory and history. It's a great a way for historians outside of the AEJMC/AJHA orbit to contribute, and very much welcomes jr. scholars & grad students.

ournalism History essay competition, 2026-2027

Call for essays

What journalism history can do: Mending the relationship between theory and history in journalism and media studies

There appears to be a peculiar habit in journalism and media studies of treating history and theory as though they belonged to different rooms of the same house - usefully coexisting, sometimes engaging, but often content to remain in separation. This division of labor has produced excellent work in both directions, but it has also quietly reinforced the idea that history is raw material rather than an intellectual partner to theorization.

James Carey's founding provocation for this journal ran against exactly this assumption . He called for a history that would function as an intellectual history of journalism's ideas, one that asked not just what happened but what journalism thought itself to be at any given moment, and why.

That question has never stopped being relevant, but it has become newly urgent. The past decade has produced a wave of theoretical vocabulary in journalism and media studies, from metajournalistic discourse to field theory and boundary work. These largely language- and text-driven approaches are deeply amenable to historical insight, even if they do not always announce themselves this way. With increasing attention to how journalism's authority has been claimed, contested, and revised over time; how boundaries have been drawn and redrawn against competing epistemic and cultural forms; and how the discourse journalism produces about itself helps to constitute what journalism is allowed to be, the time is right to deepen historical engagement with the field's intellectual traditions. In other words, the theoretical tools currently reshaping the field are already asking historical questions, whether or not the scholars using them think of themselves as strictly historians.
This raises a problem worth confronting directly: if our best current theory is implicitl…

The fundamental questions for the call are:
How might scholars rethink and redefine the archive with relation to the current scholarly conversation about institutionalized silences and historical erasure?
How might theory intervene in how we interrogate what is present and absent in the archive?
How might journalism and media historians contend with the idea that historical accounts are themselves the reconstruction of power dynamics?
How has the growth of decolonial perspectives and subaltern epistemologies evolved into an important contemporaneous trend in the field?
Essay topics could include, but are not limited to:
Reviews of historiographic literature in journalism, public relations, mass communication, visual communication, and related subjects that have successfully incorporated theory into their premises and conclusions
Arguments asserting specific theoretical perspectives (e.g. social scientific, structural/ poststructural, post/decolonial, etc.) as pertinent to historical media research
Case studies applying theory to specific historical events or archives in journalism and mass communication fields
Archival analysis and questions about institutionalized silences in recovering media history
A sample of inspirational readings:
Adiprasetio, J. 2025. “Decolonizing Communication and Journalism Studies in Southeast Asia: Historical and Epistemic Excavations on Indonesian Scholarship.” Journalism History, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2025.2584024

Carey, James W. 1974. “The Problem of Journalism History.” Journalism History 1 (1): 3–27. doi:10.1080/00947679.1974.12066714.

Hartman, Saidiya. "Venus in two acts." Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Duke University Press, 2020.

Nerone, John. 2013. “Why Journalism History Matters to Journalism Studies.” American Journalism 30 (1): 15–28. doi:10.1080/08821127.2013.767693.

Roessner, Amber, Rick Popp, Brian Creech, and Fred Blevens. 2013…

he winning essay will receive a $100 (US) prize. Top essay(s) will be published in the Journalism History journal; runners-up may be published on the Journalism History website.

To be considered for inclusion in the essay series, please submit the following to jhistoryjournal@gmail.com by 11:59 p.m. Pacific time December 31, 2026:
A brief CV (including publications)
A 500-word synopsis of the topic you plan to discuss in your essay, along with a list of key primary and secondary sources you plan to draw from
An affirmation that the essay has not been proposed or published elsewhere
Essay selection will be decided by January 30, 2027, with a schedule of publication to follow. Completed essays will be due by April 30, 2027.
Completed essays will be 1,500 to 2,000 words, excluding citations. Authors should cite primary and/or secondary sources to support their arguments. Both abstract and full essay submissions must be in English. The Chicago Manual of Style must be used for accepted essays.
Questions may be directed to Josie Vine, online content and e

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Sheera Frenkel @sheeraf.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

NEW- For the first time, groups in Iran, China, and Israel have used open source AI models to run start-to-finish influence campaigns. They told the models to create fake accounts on social media, find an agenda, and push it. Some are already targeting the US. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/18/t...

nytimes.com

Iran and China Create First-of-Their-Kind Autonomous A.I. Influence Campaigns

The countries, along with Israeli firms, combined Chinese open-source A.I. models and A.I. agents for the campaigns, foreshadowing future online manipulation.

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Ingrid Burrington @lifewinning.com · 18/09/2026

funny seeing people get defensive about/dismissing the "AI/EA fucked up ideologies and sexual coercion" stuff in a time when anyone can read Jeffrey Epstein's emails and see just how fucked up rich people can get

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Jess Miers 🦝 @jmiers230.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

"Sexy apocalypse problem" is such an great way to explain the current AI drama

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Quinn Slobodian @quinnslobodian.com · 18/09/2026

“Scholars have groped for what even to call this dire diminishment of intellectual capacity. “Human enfeeblement” has been proposed, and alike “cognitive surrender” and even “cognitive extinction.” (You could also call it, “losing your mind.”)” - Jill Lepore www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

thecrimson.com

Artificial Education | The Harvard Crimson

Machine conversation is not free. It comes at the cost of our common life together as teachers, learners, and researchers, colleagues, mentors, and friends.

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BostonJoan 🏳️‍🌈 🦫 @bostonjoan.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Today at 1pm on @wgbh.org on THE CURIOSITY DESK, it’s the GLITCH REPORT! We talk to Astra Taylor about End Times Fascism, her new book coauthored with Naomi Klein. Watch livestream here: www.youtube.com/live/Q7G0Dho...

youtube.com

Boston Public Radio, The Curiosity Desk, & The Culture Show Live Thursday, September 17, 2026

YouTube video by GBH News

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Mark Hurst @markhurst.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

The oligarchs' warnings about AI are self-serving nonsense. But there are real harms from AI, as explored in the documentary "Ghost in the Machine." New from me: buttondown.com/creativegood...

buttondown.com

Ghost in the Machine shows what we're fighting against

If you want a good summary of what I’ve written and spoken about, here and on Techtonic, over the past decade-or-so, the new documentary Ghost in the Machine...

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Justin Hendrix @justinhendrix.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Surveying the AI ‘moment,’ Nathalie Maréchal says "the kooks are now in power, and they are using that power to dismantle the institutions designed to keep the rest of us safe, healthy, and free."

techpolicy.press

What Policymakers and the Public Need to Know About the Cult of AI

Nathalie Maréchal asks, why are we betting the economy and the future of democracy on cult-like beliefs?

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Meredith Broussard, PhD @merbroussard.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Okay, it's not a doomsday cult. But it's not *not* a doomsday cult, either.

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 14/09/2026

No one ever said, "Oh, great, they replaced their customer service department with AI chatbots!" My teenager and her friends use "That's so AI" as a shorthand for "That's low-effort shit."

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Justin Hendrix @justinhendrix.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Volunteer moderators are a big part of why some corners of the internet still feel human, writes Sarah Gilbert of Cornell's Citizens and Technology Lab. Without them, she argues, we face intertwined crises of knowledge and community.

techpolicy.press

Millions of Volunteers Are Keeping the Internet Human. For Now.

We’re never going back to the human internet we had. But we can hope for a better internet than the AI-dominated one that is emerging, writes Sarah Gilbert.

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Jess Miers 🦝 @jmiers230.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Here's what I actually think these incidents reveal (instead of a rogue AI terminator situation): Much of the infra we expect to be hardened is actually being held together by glue and popsicle sticks.

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Joseph Rezek @rezekjoe.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Mathematicians out here saying it is not the proof that matters, but the human understanding of the proof. We are all humanists now.

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 14/09/2026

a scooby doo "unmasking" meme. it reads:

highly capable, powerful, advanced super-intelligent AI

army of humans hired by OpenAI to read real ChatGPT users' chats

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

We want money and housing and healthcare, not a shortcut to living the most basic unfulfilled human existence that a coked up programmer can devise. Some of us are happy. Others of us fully imagine that we can become happy. Many of us aren’t afraid of what that costs.

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Cole Donovan @colesci.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Not even just privacy laws. Any laws (as @alondra.bsky.social and @linamkhan.bsky.social frequently pointed out) could be used in the context of AI and are frequently skipped over.

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Brooke Harrington @ebharrington.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

The letter from 25 Fields Medalists defending the practice of mathematics uses revealing language, describing math as a "creative" endeavor sustained by human-to-human transmission.After decades of contempt for the Humanities looks like we're all Humanists now. terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/11/a...

Often these solutions are announced in a rush, leaving no time for a proper writeup, the isolation of new methods and ideas, and citing relevant previous work of others. As in all creative professions, this raises severe attribution and plagiarism questions. Moreover, without the willing mathematicians who must take care of their development and integration into the mathematical canon, AI-conceived ideas would never become fully alive and the crucial human transmission chain between mathematicians would be lost.

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Fight for the Future @fightforthefuture.org · 12/09/2026

NEW: 56 public figures & content creators with a combined follower count of over 46 Million demand that Lowe’s Home Improvement & Home Depot terminate contracts with Flock Safety & remove all ALPR cameras from store locations.

Black graphic with text that reads ‘influencers tell Lowe and Home Depot : drop flock! ‘

It is absolutely unacceptable for hardware stores like yours to profit daily off of immigrant day laborers while allowing their data to be shared with hostile organizations that want to cause them harm. The letter reads. There is a blurred bavkground showing a white page with yellow font that’s large above text that says ‘the letter’

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Meredith Broussard, PhD @merbroussard.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

This is my favorite recent @doctorow.pluralistic.net 🧵. Setting up a bulletin board and posting on it is hugely popular and entirely trivial. Unsurprising that AI agents did it, and not at all a harbinger of doom.

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Meredith Broussard, PhD @merbroussard.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

A really good way to not let AI take over? Not building more data centers, and not building more AI.

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