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Rebecca Williams

@rebeccawilliams.info
12K followers 3.4K following 2.6K posts

Writer, professor, and artist exploring the internet. Privacy @ACLU.org · Board @MuckRock.com · Teaching @PrattiSchool.bsky.social rebeccawilliams.info · rebecca.411 on Signal

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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 19m
like a moth to a flame (I’ve been thinking about this for years) like a month to a non-flame (I’ve shyed away from this, it’s too dark & cold)
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 23m
haters how you like me now (I’ve shyed away from you/I’m enjoying my desires)
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 26m
I might have accidentally figured out the perfect life (by shying away from things that seemingly hate me & moving towards my desires) once again
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 4h
I am so over optimized for words, the lyrics are my favorite part of songs, I love art with words all over it
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
Uh oh, did someone’s website and personal account experience a big drop in activity after Ukraine hit a Russian data center?
Elon Musk: “Zelensky has gone too far”

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2109033017184338141
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Andrew Couts @couts.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
NEW: We made a continuously updating tracker to help everyone make sense of Elon Musk’s America PAC spending on the midterms. Tool built by @dell.bsky.social, @dmehro.bsky.social, & @regret.bsky.social; reporting by @hugolowell.bsky.social www.wired.com/story/elon-m...
wired.com
Elon Musk’s America PAC Is Spending Big on the Midterms. We’re Tracking It Daily
To follow Elon Musk’s America PAC money, WIRED created a live-updating tracker that highlights the trillionaire’s overall influence on November’s elections.
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 11/10/2026
we need a Goodreads scoring system where you can rate how much type 1 fun, type 2 fun, and type 3 fun a book is (sketchplanations.com/the-fun-scale)
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 11/10/2026
It’s October and I filed and it was easy www.nyc.gov/main/click-t...
Screenshot of complaint: 

Review and submit your complaint
Business information
ADVANCE PUBLICATIONS INC
Conde Naste Publications
Main office:
9100 Wilshire Blvd Ste 710
Beverly Hills, California 90212-3461

What happened
Select all that apply for your complaint
It was hard to cancel the service
Describe your complaint
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 10/10/2026
❤️
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 10/10/2026
if you think about, pumpkin everything is one of the only modern popularized versions of seasonal eating, its ancient wisdom incarnate, we should all seek as much
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 10/10/2026
a friend’s brother that works at a bank told them today that they were ordered to remove “AI” from the slide decks, not to replace it with “SI” just replace it with anything else if it gets us away from “AI,” I’m open to it
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 10/10/2026
I wish everyone that was anti-LLM went vegetarian but I guess the difference is that LLMs are not that delicious
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 09/10/2026
everything feels uncertain but there are knowns, come sit by the fire and let me tell you about them
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 09/10/2026
I’ve been noticing people make little faux faustian bargains with themselves: “I’ll take this bad thing instead of this worse thing” you can just state what you like
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 09/10/2026
a real lozenge
Carson: Yes it is a mantle, the confidence that you can ever know what words mean because really we don't. They're just these signs that we pretend to nail own in dictionaries, tokens of usage, but frankly they're all wild integers.
Disassembling it is a way of exposing that myth at the bottom of language.Wachtel: Tell me a bit more about studying Greek. I mean, obviously you stuck with it and it became your subject, but can you say more about what attracted you to it: about the culture, the language, the complexity?
Carson: I think it's partly the content of the works. They're some of the most thoughtful pieces of literature anyone's ever come up with. But also the mental activity of being inside a translation is something I simply love. It's like doing an endless crossword puzzle but with a valuable product. And that puzzle mode of mind is simply the best thing.
Wachtel: You've said that the ancients don't necessarily have much relevance to our world today, and I have to say, that surprised me because we always seem to be able to extract relevance from everything in the past.
Carson: I didn't mean it that way, I meant it upside down—that it's more our task to be relevant to them, to go back and see what they were really doing, from their side. John Cage says, "No one can have an idea once he really starts listening," and I think that's what's important about studying the past, to listen to the ancients rather than replacing them with your own ideas of how they are relevant to you.Wachtel: You've noted that attention is a form of prayer, and from paying attention to who one is, one can then step beyond the border of oneself and then move from there to the creation of a work of art. Can you link that chain for me, tell me more about how that works?
Carson: Yes, well, maybe I can. I don't remember when I wrote that or what it meant at the time, but lately I've been studying John Cage and I think that's something I very much appreciate in him, that he moves or tries to move to a place of complete stillness and attention within himself. He says, "I want to get every Me out of the way in order to start doing whatever the work will be." And that is an ongoing struggle, to get every Me out of the way.
Wachtel: For you? You would like to eliminate the Me?
Carson: Yes, I would.
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Professa Murray @kalimurray.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
@amandacarpenter.bsky.social with a great article explaining why the ballroom is just sitting there as an Apportionment Black Hole, no-one has any idea of how it is being funded. It has a great link to: openomb.org, which @protectdemocracy.org is using to track apportionments.
openomb.org
OpenOMB | Tracking apportionments just got easier
OpenOMB is the easiest way to find and track apportionments. Apportionments are legally binding plans issued by the White House Office of Management and Budget that set the pace at which federal agenc...
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 09/10/2026
my fav short talk for the record
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 09/10/2026
a quote that is so Anne Carson AND so the opposite of “AI discourse” drink it up, I know you are thirsty
“The things you think of to link are not in your own control. It's just who you are, bumping into the world. But how you link them is what shows the nature of your mind.
Individuality resides in the way links are made.” — Anne Carson
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 09/10/2026
restraint / no restraint
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 08/10/2026
Some of my other reactions to this conversation: • “Recursive self-improvement” eliminates human accountability, it should be banned because we need accountability for democracy; many policy recs are missing this. • When Ezra puts on his “abundance hat” (& says don’t over regulate LLMs), I see red.
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 07/10/2026
I saw many minds of my generation have a child and then go work for Big Tech to ostensibly fund that child
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 07/10/2026
there are a lot unknowns in this space, but knowing him from DC days I know David to be a measured reliable narrator (I’ll trust the facts mentioned in this as actual facts)
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 07/10/2026
Mazzy Star’s Fade Into You playing in the background
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Dan Sinykin @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Working on this reported essay, just published, increasingly took over my life for the last two months. PEN America did a terrible disservice with its sloppy reporting about American Jews and Israelis in publishing in July. Josh Lambert and I tried to do better. jewishcurrents.org/what-pen-ame...
jewishcurrents.org
What PEN America Got Wrong About Antisemitism in Publishing
Misleading anecdotes, flawed data, and oversimplified analyses are at the heart of a narrative of Jewish exclusion promoted by the free expression…
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 07/10/2026
not sure I’d email them
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 07/10/2026
I was brainwashed today and I liked it
various slides about “life after data”
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 07/10/2026
little nonsense posts that barely contain any information are good for your feed and good for your soul
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 07/10/2026
this is the way to be anti/difficult/contrarian nowadays, I found it
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Forest Gregg @bunkum.us · 06/10/2026
a mysterious note to myself: "rewrite the top so it's about the bottom"
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 07/10/2026
they're all like podcasts but ephemeral and communal
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 07/10/2026
radical archives ftw once again
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 07/10/2026
before my meetup was my talk show, then the bookclub was my talk show, now my class is my talk show you just have to have a venue and an audience, then you can invite the people you want to talk to, it is that easy
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the Mountain Goats @themountaingoats.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
you’re half right. these are my clowns, but this still isn’t my circus
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 06/10/2026
he’s a great communicator and deserves it, but every event I go to mentions @doctorow.pluralistic.net’s “Enshitification” 1200 times; it feels bigger than “Surveillance Capitalism” as a slogan for the moment
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 06/10/2026
I’m gonna fight the ceaseless deepfakes by being a singular real person and it’s gonna work
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 05/10/2026
having the internet lead on the terminology makes it all funny “I’m a expert in slopolicy with some background in deepfake remedies and algos”
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 05/10/2026
this is fascinating though, I generally understood that folks need related priors or direct exposure to change their mind, maybe trusting the computer is the prior, maybe chatting feels like direct exposure
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 05/10/2026
get you an LLM that can make you believe crazy things and then talk you down after
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 04/10/2026
two additional different stations, maybe they’re like this everywhere
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 04/10/2026
I love satisfying my little whims whenever I can, it clears the cache/makes discipline later so easy — I already got what I want
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Electronic Frontier Foundation @eff.org · 04/10/2026
In a win for digital rights, a federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction blocking Utah’s draconian anti-VPN age verification law. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...
eff.org
Court Agrees with EFF: Utah’s VPN Law Demands a Technical
In a win for digital rights, a federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction blocking Utah’s SB 73, the state’s draconian anti-VPN age verification law. The decision comes as EFF submitted our
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amy brown 👻 @amybrown.xyz · 10/01/2025
could a robot do THIS? [fails to identify all pictures with bicycles in them, four times in a row]
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 04/10/2026
I will be in DC for approximately 1 second for this, if you are going, see you there
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 04/10/2026
If you need to teach a class on AI slop, you can get very far with these tags and the paper below which includes slopolicies (policy responses to slop). • www.404media.co/tag/ai-slop/ • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop
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Jonathan Gerhardson @jongerhardson.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
made a thing to search meeting minutes/agendas across ~1,700 cities and towns at once. I'll maybe make the design of it less of a slop fest tomorrow jongerhardson.github.io/municipal_pr...
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John Palowitch @johnpalowitch.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
great thread of common-person resistence at the intersection of tech & gov't data
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 04/10/2026
lovely, this series: www.theguardian.com/us-news/seri... not this story
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 03/10/2026
all of these examples are just an opportunity to uncover some preexisting psychological wound that needs tending to here the headline should be Parents Strapped for Cash Who Lack Aesthetic Discernment Are Grifted by Opportunists
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Electronic Frontier Foundation @eff.org · 03/10/2026
Site-blocking isn’t just theoretically dangerous. Italy’s system blocked hundreds of innocent websites. Spain’s swept up domains belonging to Greenpeace and Harvard. Now Congress wants to bring this to the U.S. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...
eff.org
Congress Has Another Site-Blocking Bill, And This One Targets VPNs
Congress is taking another run at site-blocking, a deeply flawed concept that would undermine basic internet infrastructure. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has introduced the American Copyright Protection
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 03/10/2026
NYC is a beacon of light weird esoteric internet things that I am into are a beacon of light there are less legal beacons of light right now, Chatrie and this are it
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