iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Yet another example that technologies for marginalized communities need to be designed with them, not merely for them. This work was possible from our institutions @ucm.es and Berkman Klein Center @harvard.edu Open Access article licensed under a @creativecommons.bsky.social BY-NC-ND license 6/6

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We see how empowerment was uneven, with the model favoring those closer to privilege: investors, top performers and tech-literate users. The discourse was masculinized and investor-oriented. Sex workers were framed as beneficiaries, but not centered as the voices shaping the technology. 5/6

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The paper shows major tensions: the promise of removing intermediaries created new intermediaries, dependencies and platform control. It shows the limits of techno-solutionism: structural problems like stigma, platform power and financial exclusion cannot simply be solved by adding blockchain. 4/6

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Digital sex workers face financial exclusion, content moderation/censorship, deplatforming and dependence on payment processors. SpankChain presented blockchain as an answer to those problems: crypto payments, decentralized identity, fewer middlemen, more autonomy for creators. 3/6

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The paper asks how blockchain imaginaries of decentralization, empowerment and disintermediation travel into marginalized forms of digital labor, using SpankChain as a case study. We analyze 3,831 comments across 214 subreddits, 100+ blog posts and other docs, from 2017 to 2024. 2/6

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‘My body, my money’: SpankChain and the intersection between sex work and cryptocurrencies imaginaries

New paper out with @silviasemenzin.bsky.social on digital sex work, crypto and neoliberal techno-solutionism: “My body, my money”: SpankChain and the intersection between sex work and cryptocurrencies imaginaries. Open access in the Porn Studies journal: doi.org/10.1080/2326... 1/n

doi.org

This paper examines the material and ideological entanglements between sex work and blockchain technology through a case study of SpankChain, a blockchain-based platform designed with sex workers a...

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Samer Hassan @samerp2p.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

Republicans pay $36K for an influencer video while Democrats pay $2K... The article argues Republicans are way better at structural organizing (vs punctual mobilizing), creating conditions for right-leaning ecosystems emilyinyourphone.substack.com/p/the-influe...

emilyinyourphone.substack.com

The Influencer Economy Is Political Infrastructure

One Side Figured That Out First - But What’s Next?

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Reposted by Samer Hassan

Evan Greer @evangreer.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

THREAD: Whenever imperialist governments go to war, they become more authoritarian at home. That makes censorship bills like KOSA, ID checks, and attacks on Section 230 even more dangerous. Online protest, documenting war crimes, even news articles could be suppressed. www.badinternetbills.com

badinternetbills.com

Bad Internet Bills

All of the bad internet bills. One website.

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Reposted by Samer Hassan

Sarah J. Jackson @sjjphd.bsky.social · 15/02/2026

Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.

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I was very happy to speak at the AI Ethics conference ACM AIES 2025 in my hometown, Madrid The program was amazing. I encourage to check out the lineup and proceedings: www.aies-conference.com/2025/ I shared some highlights in this Bluesky thread🧵

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And that's it! There were many more great talks, but sadly I could only attend a limited amount of them. Please check their papers, whose abstracts communicate their work much better than me

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Plenty of speakers, way more than I'd expect, were showing a slide blaming Google for aiding the Palestinian genocide, providing a QR link to the UN report, and highlighting Google is a sponsor of the conference. That was brave of these mostly young researchers, and they have my admiration

A sponsor of this conference has been implicated by the UN in war crimes: Google. Read more at tinyurl.com/un-report-2025

I'm happy to highlight our Pedagogy Panel: "How (and to Whom) Do We Teach AI Ethics?" which I shared with brilliant people: @shannonvallor.bsky.social and Julienne LaChance, chaired by @emanuelleburton.bsky.social We tackled practical challenges on educating the conference topics to the new gen

The 4 participants of the roundtable sitting while discussing

"How LLM Counselors Violate Ethical Standards in Mental Health Practice: A Practitioner-Informed Framework" by Zainab Iftikhar et al A brilliant talk about the malpractices of current LLMs acting as therapists, highlighting the AI is constantly lying when saying "it cares" (since obv it can't)

"No Thoughts Just AI: Biased LLM Hiring Recommendations Alter Human Decision Making and Limit Human Autonomy" by @kyrawilson.bsky.social et al It shows how people trust AI hiring proposals blindly, even when the AI's being racist. This highlights the importance to tackle algorithmic bias

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"AI Self-preferencing in Algorithmic Hiring: Empirical Evidence and Insights" by @jiannanxu.bsky.social et al A surprising bias: - If a job candidate building their CV uses the same LLM as the evaluator, there is a strong bias to be selected - And LLMs prefer AI-generated CVs over manual ones

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"Govern With, Not For: Understanding the Stuttering Community’s Preferences and Goals for Speech AI Data Governance in the US and China" by Jingjin Li et al On an often invisibilized marginalized community: the stuttering community

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"Disability Across Cultures: A Human-Centered Audit of Ableism in Western and Indic LLMs" by @mahika.bsky.social et al was fascinating, exploring how different LLMs categorize ableist comments in different degrees, depending on the language they were written (English vs Hindi).

Harm scores were significantly lower in Hindi, than English

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I enjoyed a lot: "Documenting Patterns of Exoticism of Marginalized Populations within Text-to-Image Generators" by Sourojit Ghosh et al Unsurprisingly, AIs show stereotypical imagery when trying to represent Global South cultures, to the point of absurdity

Image showing stereotypical racism when adding "indigenous" to text-to-image prompts

Image showing expected images when adding "American" or "British" to text-to-image prompts

Image showing stereotypical racism when adding "Mexican" or "Papua New Guinean" to text-to-image prompts

Image showing stereotypical racism when adding "Egyptian" or "Indigenous American" to text-to-image prompts

I was very happy to join the AI Ethics conference ACM AIES 2025 in my hometown, Madrid, at @ieuniversity.bsky.social The program was amazing, I encourage to check out the lineup and proceedings: www.aies-conference.com/2025/ I'll share some highlights in this thread🧵 #AIES #AIethics #AI

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Work by our PhD student David Davó, post-doc @silviasemenzin.bsky.social, supervised by professor Javier Arroyo and me from our institutions @ucm.es and Berkman Klein Center @harvard.edu Article open licensed with CC-BY

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We extract a “DAO fragility schema” and recommendations for the next generation: progressive governance by default, anti-plutocracy voting, gas-free voting, non-transferable time-decaying reputation, health dashboards, and redundant open-source UIs. Builders: please check out the checklist.

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Why did DAOstack fade despite early hype? Fee spikes, UX friction, front-end fragility, thin onboarding, and incentive misalignment. Our interviews surfaced frictions: onboarding, cost/complexity of voting, informal power imbalances via off-platform coordination.

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Attention is considered the scarce resource. Their Holographic Consensus governance model tried to solve it via prediction-market “boosting.” It filtered well (≈97% precision) but failed to sustain independent stakers. In fact, 83% of the stakes came from insiders

Figure 5: Relationship between the number of votes and the outcome in boosted proposals. Full description in https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.3320/fig-5

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DAOstack, like other DAO platforms, promised scalable cooperation and democratic governance. Reality check: most DAOs are tiny, short-lived, and oligarchic-leaning as they grow. In fact, far from democratic: • ~65% members never voted • ~8% avg voter turnout/proposal

Image showing the paper's Table 1: Characterization of the DAOstack DAOs in Ethereum mainnet and xDAI, sorted by months with proposals. The table is fully readable in the paper, specifically at https://peerj.com/articles/cs-3320/#quantitative-analysis-of-daostack

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We analyzed DAOstack's 92 organizations in terms of size, lifespan, activity, power concentration, and governance model effectiveness. And interviewed core users to better understand their experience.

Figure shoding "Number of proposals created in the past 15 days for Genesis Alpha, Kyber DAO, dOrg, and dxDAO". The full description and analysis is found in the paper, specifically https://peerj.com/articles/cs-3320/#fig-3

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DAOs aren't just code, but also communities. Technical design is political. From “WordPress for DAOs” to deprecation: DAOstack’s life cycle offers a rare, data-rich case study. Ideal to see the social implications of techno-determinist views common in #Web3, and theoretical economic incentives.

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