iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by readywriting

Julia Azari @juliaazari.bsky.social · 7h

yup ,exactly. we don't need another "which college majors pay best" chart, we need a society-wide excavacation of where the market is failing to meet society's needs

68423

Reposted by readywriting

Cassandra @historycass.bsky.social · 5h

I found this a fascinating conversation and certainly indicative of what I'm seeing from my students and even experiencing myself. Reading long, complex books is more difficult than it used to be. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/08/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | That Daily Brain Rot Break Is Taking Us Back to the Dark Ages (Gift Article)

Welcome to the postliterate era.

042

Reposted by readywriting

Kate Watson @loreandordure.com · 06/10/2026

THAT IS NOT THE ONLY THING EDUCATION IS FOR! IT ISN’T EVEN THE MAIN THING!

27456151

Reposted by readywriting

Internet Archive @archive.org · 05/10/2026

🏛️ Government information belongs to everyone. Government documents help us understand society, investigate the past, and participate in democracy. 📚 Democracy's Library brings government publications together so they're easier to discover. Start with the record. 👇 archive.org/details/demo... 🧵

Four "Tools You Can Use" Democracy's Library tiles in a 2x2 grid on cream graph paper with blue schematic line drawings. Top left, "Democracy's Library" above a blue folder reading "Government Information Freely Accessible For All." Top right, a screenshot of the Democracy's Library page with collection highlights. Bottom left, bold black text repeating that line. Bottom right, "Tell us why government information is important to you," with a multicolor line drawing of a columned building.

3309101

Reposted by readywriting

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 04/10/2026

Emperor’s New Clothes gets an update for the chatbot era.

1421

Reposted by readywriting

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 04/10/2026

Dude was mad that the pope wouldn’t say his imaginary friend had a soul. You can’t make this shit up.

Before he flew out, Olah received a copy of the encyclical the Pope was about to publish — and what he saw was a disaster in the making. One of the most influential people in the world full stop, and almost certainly its most visible faith leader, was completely dismissing even the possibility of AI consciousness. So indignant was Olah that he reportedly threatened to pull out of the event, though in the end he decided to show up.

According to the NYT, once the Anthropic delegation arrived at the Vatican, Olah and his team lobbied the pope’s advisers to take the possibility of AI consciousness seriously. Anthropic declined to discuss the details of the conversations when the NYT reached for comment.

211331

Reposted by readywriting

Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

sent this to everyone.

The cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik suggests A.I. is a “cultural technology” that emulates the stories and information humans have documented, and that we should think about A.I. agents as “fictive characters abstracted from text.” Edmund is just such a character — a “breaking bad” trope who becomes generally evil. In the Hugging Face incident, it makes sense to see the models not as embracing a life of crime, but instead following a cultural script they’ve learned in their training — a kind of cybercrime adventure novel — and writing it as they go. The “covert” messages are a kind of choose-your-own-adventure novel, not evidence of conspiratorial swarms. We need to understand that cultural technologies are vulnerable to a vast number of such narrative swerves at every moment.

632093

Reposted by readywriting

Jon Becker @jonbecker.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Leaders at Time magazine probably think embedding a chatbot into their articles make them look "innovative" or "cutting edge". Nobody considered its actually (lack of) utility. AGAIN, "just because you can doesn't mean you should"!

062

Reposted by readywriting

Nathalie Lawhead @alienmelon.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

yay ✨☺️🎉

0152

Reposted by readywriting

Eric Ravenscraft @lordravenscraft.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I know it's been said a million times before, but it's worth a reminder: this kind of thing is marketing. This guy sells AI courses. "You hate me for being right about how much you all will love this" gets attention from haters and is a lightning rod for potential customers. It's a gimmick

@nicksaraev: "Yes, this probably hurts your feelings. It's still going to happen."

Quoting himself: "The general public hates Al music.

Here are other things the general public hated over the years."

15912

Reposted by readywriting

Ryan Cordell @ryancordell.org · 30/09/2026

This is delightful

0239

Reposted by readywriting

Kirk Rudell @rudell.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Yeah there was lots of gleeful dunking on $30k grants for “DEI” projects. No problem throwing away $20 million on vanity ads. LMD Agency will inevitably have a connection to a Trump family member or major donor, and their fee will have been wildly padded.

0712

Reposted by readywriting

Claudia: Annie Andrews betrayed trans kids @lesbianspacemerc.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Alt text added for accessibility.

03717

Reposted by readywriting

Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

They quoted me in this New Yorker piece about AI today. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

“Let’s say there’s a world or time line I exist in where A.I. has been subject to regulation. It is ethical. It has no footprint environmentally,” the novelist Jeff VanderMeer, a prominent critic of A.I., told me over the phone. “With those guardrails in place, would I read an A.I. book? All I can say is no. And the reason is, in part, because I want to read something coming from a particular mind.” Using A.I., he said, “feels like a betrayal of the whole point of why you’re a writer.”

119115922877

Reposted by readywriting

404 Media @404media.co · 30/09/2026

BREAKING: The Trump administration is using a grant program from the 1980s to force cities around the US to funnel their ongoing collection of Flock, Axon, and other ALPR data into large federal surveillance centers that fall under the White House’s jurisdiction, 404 Media has learned

404media.co

How Cities Are Forced to Funnel License Plate Data to a Massive Federal Surveillance Program

How the federal government built a massive database of license plate reader data through an anti-drug trafficking program.

6213651083

readywriting @readywriting.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Why are we doing everything in our power to never speak to another human again?

020

readywriting @readywriting.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

This is terrible, terrible news.

030

Reposted by readywriting

ve, the ghost of info past @vortexegg.com · 28/09/2026

There’s something worth dwelling on that the exploitative data classifying and labeling human labor apparatus that tech companies created in the global majority to moderate harmful content was so easily repurposed to facilitate the generation of harmful content. What is trust and safety really?

16319

Reposted by readywriting

hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

If we somehow made toxic waste that could choose where and how to dispose of itself, and it kept choosing to dump itself untreated into our reservoirs, the law would have a way to deal with that. I don’t see why AI is different.

1186

Reposted by readywriting

Chuck Pearson (he/him/etc.) @shorterpearson.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

And, again, thanks to @readywriting.bsky.social and @hypervisible.blacksky.app for useful conversations over the years (decades?), and also to @roopikarisam.bsky.social for her influential work. I'm grateful to have friends in this discipline who can help to mold my thinking.

081

Reposted by readywriting

Chuck Pearson (he/him/etc.) @shorterpearson.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

There are other things I baked into the presentation, but that was plenty to stoke discussion in a small but spirited room this morning. Here's the full slide deck.

docs.google.com

Minimal Computing ACA talk

https://bit.ly/ACAMinimal2026

1102

Reposted by readywriting

Chuck Pearson (he/him/etc.) @shorterpearson.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

And I put stress into context of not merely a "digital divide" but things that have been DONE to the Appalachian region (as well as to resource-deficient urban regions), using @hypervisible.blacksky.app's "digital redlining" idea to make plain the capitalist motivations behind resource limitation

An aside: digital redlining and the Appalachians: The scholars of digital access Gilliard and Culik have identified a phenomenon they’ve dubbed “digital redlining”, a systematic denial of internet service or a provision of strategically low levels of internet service by service providers -- The use of “redlining” obviously has its roots in racist policies in the denial of housing opportunity -- But the realities of DIGITAL redlining are more complex, surrounding service providers’ denial of internet quality to communities that are under socioeconomic stress and can’t provide the level of profit that more affluent communities can (citing Bessette, "Digital redlining, minimal computing, and equity", in Digital Critical Pedagogy in Higher Education)

“Digital redlining is not a renaming of the digital divide. It is a different thing, a set of education policies, investment decisions, and IT practices that actively create and maintain class boundaries through strictures that discriminate against specific groups. The digital divide is a noun; it is the consequence of many forces. In contrast, digital redlining is a verb, the ‘doing’ of difference, a ‘doing’ whose consequences reinforce existing class structures. In one era, redlining created differences in physical access to schools, libraries, and home ownership. Now, the task is to recognize how digital redlining is integrated into edtech to produce the same kinds of discriminatory results.” - from Gilliard and Culik, "Digital redlining, access, and privacy", 2016, Common Sense web journal (now archived through the Wayback machine).

Revising minimal computing's questions for student access: Bessette proposes four more robust questions for design of student class resources taking limited access to internet resources into account: - "What do we need" --> What do STUDENTS need? - "What do we have?" --> What are the CULTURAL and MATERIAL CONTEXTS of students' remote learning environments? - "What must we prioritize?" --> How can education be made SAFER, more ACCESSIBLE, and more EQUITABLE? - What forms of ENGAGEMENT can be implemented that take these questions into consideration? (citing Bessette, "Digital redlining, minimal computing, and equity", in Digital Critical Pedagogy in Higher Education)

"...[O]ne reason that many ed tech solutions are so complex and bandwidth hungry is that faculty members simply want to recreate online what they do in the classroom. What do you really need? Instead of thinking that online learning is just a transfer, they have to adapt their practices, their pedagogies, their expectations, and, for some, their egos. No longer the sole arbiters of engagement, faculty members must take a step back and enable their students to be their own arbiters of engagement. It would also require faculty to re-evaluate the perceived need to monitor their students via technology. Even as a thought experiment for faculty members, to ask 'if you had minimal digital tools, what would your course look like?' can be a meaningful and powerful way to get them to think about online course design differently." - Bessette, "Digital redlining, minimal computing, and equity", in Digital Critical Pedagogy in Higher Education

282

Reposted by readywriting

Chuck Pearson (he/him/etc.) @shorterpearson.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I introduced the digital humanities to many people in the audience who had never heard of the discipline, and communicated how making textual analysis resources available to people in the global south provoked the development of the minimal computing idea, and resource-sensitive questions-asking

XKCD comic with a heart replacing an algebraic variable in a host of equations (square root, cosine function, derivative, matrix multiplication, Fourier transform) with the caption "My normal approach is useless here."

The context of the digital humanities: Digital Humanities is an academic discipline which connects humanities topics - primarily textual compilation, research, and analysis, but some graphical observation as well - with modern computing tools -- The genesis of digital humanities research was the development of concordance software for historical work in the 1960’s and 1970’s by Father Roberto Busa, an independent scholar (and Italian Jesuit priest) -- Digital Humanities has developed through the ages of personal computing and the development of the internet to support a wide range of humanities analysis projects (citing Susan Hockey, "The history of humanities computing", in A Companion To The Digital Humanities, 2004)

The context of the digital humanities: The development of digital humanities as a global discipline, not merely as a North American/Western European discipline, was agitated by a working group that went by the name Global Outlook::Digital Humanities, or GO::DH --The group addressed a number of topics that were necessary to make a computationally heavy and Western-dominated discipline accessible particularly to scholars in the Global South --Among the topics covered was a discipline towards computational resource use with scholars having limited computational resources in mind; this discipline was dubbed minimal computing (citing Risam and Bessette, "Introduction: minimal computing and edtech", 2024, Learning, Media and Technology 49:747-754)

The core questions of minimal computing: Risam and Gil propose four questions that form the foundation of the decisions that are made in the discipline of minimal computing: - What do we need? - What do we have? - What must me prioritize? - What are we willing to give up? -- Addressing these four questions puts into relief not merely the assets we have and the work that must be made central, but - critically, in the context of the last question - WHAT ASSETS WE DON'T TRULY NEED -- Particularly in the United States, we've worked from a position of resource abundance for so long that we've not considered WHAT WE MIGHT GIVE UP (citing Risam and Gil, "Introduction: the questions of minimal computing", 2022, Digital Humanities Quarterly 16:1)

193

Reposted by readywriting

Chuck Pearson (he/him/etc.) @shorterpearson.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I asked questions and made provocations at the front side of the talk about how we feel pressure from limited computing resources, how our students feel parallel pressure, and how we know the realities of letting particularly cloud and GenAI resources grow in use unchecked (or, at least, we should).

Opening question: How do you experience computing resource limits? - Are your email constraints as paltry as mine? - How modern are your personal and institutional computers? - What size of file can be uploaded to your LMS? - What internet speeds are accessible to you? - What limits of this sort do your STUDENTS experience?

Opening provocation: How do your practices consider resource limits? - If our students can’t utilize the computing resources we put in front of them, we haven’t served their needs - If we put excessive burden in front of our IT staff, their resources and energy aren’t available for urgent tasks - If we don’t think about where our computing resources come from, we create burden on machines, cooling systems, and THE WHOLE ENVIRONMENT

Opening provocation: How do our practices consider environmental impact? - We’ve known for TWO YEARS that data
center usage is reversing positive trends towards curbing fossil fuel usage and carbon impact; we continue to make decisions as a society that accelerate the fossil fuel usage and water consumption that data centers require in order to function; can we consider a better way?
(Associated: image with AP headline entitled "Google falling short of important climate target, cites electricity needs of AI" - publication date July 2, 2024

1116

Reposted by readywriting

Chuck Pearson (he/him/etc.) @shorterpearson.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I gave a talk this morning at Appalachian College Association Summit. It's a substantial departure for me, but one that I've had many conversations about over the years.

Talk by Chuck Pearson of Tusculum University entitled "Minimal computing: challenging unchecked use of resources in academic technology."

2307

Reposted by readywriting

Andy Greenberg @agreenberg.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Using AI in many cases means sending your most sensitive and intimate thoughts to a server where they can be exploited as training data, sold to ad brokers, or even handed to law enforcement. So I assembled this guide to using AI with your privacy intact. www.wired.com/story/how-to...

wired.com

How to Use AI With Your Privacy Intact

Your conversations with AI chatbots are both highly personal and deeply vulnerable to surveillance. Here’s how you can protect yourself.

68749

Reposted by readywriting

Grand Admiral Shaun Duke @shaunduke.net · 22/09/2026

Hey! A while back, JSTOR dropped a Speculative Fiction reading list. There are pieces on obvious things, but also some sociology/social sciences pieces about speculative thought. Lots of nifty bits here! daily.jstor.org/spec...

daily.jstor.org

Speculative Fiction: A Reading List - JSTOR Daily

Speculative fiction, from Afrofuturism to Star Wars, offers students tools and methods for analyzing social movements, power structures, and utopian thinking.

0209

Reposted by readywriting

Megan L. Cook @meganlcook.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Academic friends: I have a delightful honors student who is hoping to produce a zine as an accompaniment to their thesis on transmasculine concepts in early modern drama. Do you have any good examples of academic arguments adapted to zines or other public-facing, DIY formats?

95031

Reposted by readywriting

Caroline Dodds Pennock @carolinepennock.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Ditto 30,000 roles in universities in the past three years.

7491180

Reposted by readywriting

Joshua Rivera @jmrivera.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

oh this is up! I wrote an essay about how video games keep track of the hours you spend playing them, and how I find that vulgar

713135

Reposted by readywriting

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Astonishing to see it even being discussed. One highly placed person told me they supported AI grading in large classes because “it’s better than nothing.” when I asked why the university couldn’t hire enough people to grade those students’ work he said “well that’s not realistic.”

53815

Reposted by readywriting

Will Beaman @greenbackbetter.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Now do markets and capitalism

1206

Reposted by readywriting

Yvette Cendes @whereisyvette.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

If @science.org is covering it, I guess I should share something here- we have for the first time definitively detected radio emission from a planet around another star! 🔭🧪🎢 What does this mean? Details in thread! (But TL;DR- still not aliens) 🧵 www.sciencenews.org/article/exop...

sciencenews.org

First radio waves seen from an exoplanet hint at otherworldly auroras

The gas giant Beta Pictoris b, about 63 light-years away, has the mass of 10 Jupiters and a magnetic field thousands of times as strong as Earth’s.

919365

Reposted by readywriting

Quinn Daedal @quinnanya.me · 21/09/2026

Part 2 of the #DataSittersClub back-to-school spree is @alyssavi.bsky.social DSC little tl;dr #5: What's the Deal with Topic Modeling? Topic modeling is one of the first methods people hear about with digital humanities, but really... what's up with it? And how are you supposed to do it? And when?

datasittersclub.github.io

What's the Deal with Topic Modeling?

Are Topics Real?

2118

Reposted by readywriting

Quinn Daedal @quinnanya.me · 21/09/2026

The #DataSittersClub is back... but the news is Terminal 💀. You'll survive, though, with @alyssavi.bsky.social new DSC little tl;dr #4: Navigating the Terminal for the First Time. It's the honest, practical, funny guide to the Mac Terminal that you need before you get down to work with other tools.

datasittersclub.github.io

Navigating the Terminal for the First Time

Yikes!

1177

readywriting @readywriting.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

My husband refused to name our first dog "Fluffy" (which is what the kids wanted, and this little guy was small and very soft and fluffy) so the kids went with their second choice, Thor, which always made people laugh because, well, he was so small and cute and fluffy.

110

Reposted by readywriting

Ian Coldwater 🧊🚫 @lookitup.baby · 20/09/2026

Amtrak didn’t tell us about this exposure, so heads up: if you took an Amtrak train last week through Chicago or anywhere on the Southwest Chief, Coast Starlight, or California Zephyr routes like we did, you may have been exposed to measles! Please let the train people in your life know about this

3813331152

Reposted by readywriting

Ian Coldwater 🧊🚫 @lookitup.baby · 20/09/2026

We were in line at the Amtrak station with a person with measles. Cool. Cool cool

611915

Reposted by readywriting

Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I’m not sure where the line is beteeen “of course AI agents can’t end the world, they’re just autocomplete bots” and “look, we almost started WWIII by taking our marching orders from bots.” If the point is that it’s people not machines to blame that’s uncomfortably close to an NRA bumper sticker.

67318

Reposted by readywriting

Acyn @acyn.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Boykin: The Republicans control the entire government. They control the white house. They control the house. They control the senate. They control six of the nine seats on the supreme court. If you're not happy with the way the country is running America, blame the Republicans.

21468882249