iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

yeah that would be really cool! i imagine the response would also vary with whatever minor/major traumas a field suffers (e.g., reputational crises, funding shortfalls, and the like)

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ah interesting... yeah "generally accepted" kind of embeds some sense of social relations (i.e., what's up with the group of people among whom a thing is generally accepted)

at one point Thurston talks about "a continuing desire for *human understanding* of a proof", in reference to computers proving the 4-colour theorem. don't read this as a romantic statement about unmediated cognition. in context this is about human understanding as necessarily collective enterprise.

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lest this come across as too ~*humanistic*~ the best parts of the essay are when Thurston does a back-of-the-envelope audit of the social infrastructure of math: do the conventionalized rituals (boring ass colloquium talks; status games; etc) build or undermine this infrastructure?

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ali alkhatib @ali-alkhatib.com · 22/09/2026

they're saying the AI can do math and science again, so it's time to reread Thurston's On Proof and Progress in Mathematics, a lovely articulation of the social work of assembling understanding, i.e., the best reason to tackle hard problems. www.ams.org/journals/bul...

When I started as a graduate student at Berkeley, I had trouble imagining
how I could "prove" a new and interesting mathematical theorem. I didn't
really understand what a "proof was.
By going to seminars, reading papers, and talking to other graduate students,
I gradually began to catch on. Within any field, there are certain theorems and
certain techniques that are generally known and generally accepted. When you
write a paper, you refer to these without proof. You look at other papers in the
field, and you see what facts they quote without proof, and what they cite in
their bibliography. You learn from other people some idea of the proofs. Then
you're free to quote the same theorem and cite the same citations. You don't
necessarily have to read the full papers or books that are in your bibliography.
Many of the things that are generally known are things for which there may be
no known written source. As long as people in the field are comfortable that
the idea works, it doesn't need to have a formal written source.

At first I was highly suspicious of this process. I would doubt whether a certain idea was really established. But I found that I could ask people, and they
could produce explanations and proofs, or else refer me to other people or to
written sources that would give explanations and proofs. There were published
theorems that were generally known to be false, or where the proofs were generally known to be incomplete. Mathematical knowledge and understanding were
embedded in the minds and in the social fabric of the community of people
thinking about a particular topic. This knowledge was supported by written
documents, but the written documents were not really primary.

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Today is my birthday. If you can donate to The Sameer Project, I would really really appreciate it. Thanks!

thesameerproject.org

The Sameer Project – Palestinian-led mutual aid group working towards liberation

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JS Tan @js-tan.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

In many of my book events thus far, one question keeps coming up: how should we think about tech workers, their class position, and organizing them in the AI age? I have a new essay with my friend @emilymazo.bsky.social that gets at exactly this question: www.theideasletter.org/essay/syndic...

theideasletter.org

Syndicalist Valley

The tech-worker movement that emerged in the 2010s has been transformed by layoffs, higher interest rates, and the enormous investment flowing into AI, which have eroded the bargaining power of…

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justine zhang @tisjune.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

had a dream last night in which i finally understood what this diagram is saying... on multiple levels, alas

Fig 1. Micro-contextual semiotic of indexicality. from Silverstein's Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life, a paper that my brain cells are floundering on

justine zhang @tisjune.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

lots of precedents for weird cults provisioning ideological resources for capitalism's weird material problems... see MLMs, eugenics, etc.

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justine zhang @tisjune.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

my take on "pacing the frontier" is that capitalists have lots of collective action problems that need to be solved, often by states, often shaped like "don't exploit things so hard that you destroy your conditions of existence"; it turns out that "AGI" offers new such solutions.

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justine zhang @tisjune.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

"the Right already knows that health politics is mass politics"

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justine zhang @tisjune.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

was trying to figure out what (else) this reminded me of and realized it's this article, which in my head is registered as an articulation of genre fiction as a way to metabolize politics, and political complicity. or as you say, something something (new mutations of) imperial core!

nplusonemag.com

Missing Time | Ari M. Brostoff

The series wasn’t science fictional at all, but took place in a world just like our own, where women being poisoned by their microwaves floated around with Lyndon LaRouche supporters and AIDS denialis...

justine zhang @tisjune.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

yeah i agree! i think it's useful to analyze which of these weird things becomes taken up as broadly important though, and how. like generally my work related crashouts are not treated as alarm bells for impending global catastrophe lol.

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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

new from me on the Verso blog: what happened to the U.S. climate movement? what can we learn from it's dissipation? and in a time of quietude, what can be gleaned from contrasts with the data center rebellion? www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/w...

versobooks.com

Where is the U.S. climate movement?

In the United States, there is a pervasive sense that the once-ascendent climate movement is in disarray or has even disappeared. The prior decade saw the actions and ambitions of climate activism bec...

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the mass popular opposition to AI is interesting/promising, maybe? but i guess i'd like to see more indications that people are actually doing the homework. most of the examples i can think of, re: doing the homework, don't really revolve around AI.

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i think one consequence of this distribution of attention is that the slow work of doing politics is set aside in favour of more spectacular responses, like endless no kings rallies. but maybe it also reflects gaps in the infrastructure for doing this sort of slow work.

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one other thought i'm working through: i see AI in part as a condensation of various forms of slow death; an extension of capitalism's myriad instruments of social murder. it is interesting how lots of people seem to latch on to more spectacular accounts of how AI will destroy the world.

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this collision of ZIRP-era xrisk cult cross silicon valley summer camp ghost story and credulous resistance-coded "listen to the whistleblowers" progressive tech politics is crazy. it is sort of like that time everyone was super invested in robert mueller, but with now with killer robots

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justine zhang @tisjune.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

interesting that the ready-at-hand political actions available to this framing of dangerous superintelligent AI are "pacing agreements between US labs" and not "build collective power to undermine the capital strike"

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reading a book review of a book that thoroughly irritated me, that clearly articulates the problems with the book that produced my irritation 👍💯

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David Harvey @davidharvey.org · 08/09/2026

Problems have solutions. Contradictions do not. They are permanent points of tension that can only be managed within the system in which they are embedded. They only go away when the system as a whole disappears.

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Death Panel @deathpanel.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

In our latest, we walk through what studies show are the health impacts of data centers on the communities they're built in and why the dramatic rise of anti-data center sentiment can't be dismissed as a "moral panic." www.patreon.com/deathpanelpo...

patreon.com

Indifference Engines (08/31/26) | The Death Panel

Artie discusses what studies show are the health impacts of data centers on the communities they're built in, how to think about data center

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justine zhang @tisjune.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

in the age of imperial decline you get to either be a harry potter adult or an xrisk dork

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justine zhang @tisjune.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

super excited to see how capitalism works its way through this contradiction! no offense to those invested in that effort but it'll probably involve lots of hci and digital humanities initiatives

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Beatrice Adler-Bolton @reallandsend.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

new essay from @avierkant.bsky.social on the double-bind health threat of data centers. "the 'promise' of AI is cancer alley everywhere." blindarchive.substack.com/p/indifferen...

blindarchive.substack.com

Indifference engines

Brief thoughts on AI and data centers

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Equator @equatormag.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

One of the most brilliant essays we’ve published. Magdi El-Gizouli’s singular and utterly unique analysis of the war in Sudan, blending revolutionary theory, sociology and frontline reporting. This is the first part of two: www.equator.org/articles/kha...

equator.org

Khartoum After the Storm • EQUATOR

How Sudan’s revolutionary generation was dragged into total war

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justine zhang @tisjune.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

please find me another tv show where such a screencap is possible

based weirdo sam campbell holding up a mini whiteboard that reads "free palestine" backwards, plus a badly-drawn dinosaur

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JS Tan @js-tan.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

My book AGAINST TECH OLIGARCHY, out Sept 15, is available for pre-order at againsttecholigarchy.com. It chronicles the rise of tech workers' activism, how they courageously came together to challenge the industry's most powerful bosses, and how their movement changed Silicon Valley forever. 1/

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Anne Elias @woodsfern.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Big tech is steeped in non-consent. We could argue all day what type of center this is: "research computing" "data" etc. Ypsilanti residents have repeatedly said no to this project, for a variety of well-researched reasons (environmental, community, ethical). The point: UM is forcing it on them.

record.umich.edu

University of Michigan selects Textile Road as preferred site for landmark research computing center | The University Record

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Sarah Brouillette @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

The introduction to my book is now available online, thanks @dukepress.bsky.social 🫶 The official pub date is in October www.dukeupress.edu/content-mach....

tinyurl.com

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justine zhang @tisjune.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

vaguepost i will not elaborate on but sometimes i think about using stuart hall's essay on PC as a way of appraising particular styles of critical response to AI

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jen liu @uilnej.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

In re: to recent news about the Meta data center, Sheila Tahir and I are sharing our zine, "Ghosts in the Cloud: A Southern Gothic Approach to Studying AI Infrastructure" based on a trip to the hypderscaler construction site in spring 2026.

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Astrid Lorange @alorange.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

A feature essay by @andrew-brooks.bsky.social and me has just been published in our favourite magazine @parapraxismag.bsky.social — thanks to the legendary editors! www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/whe...

parapraxismagazine.com

Where’s Daddy? — Parapraxis

Andrew Brooks & Astrid Lorange

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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Got a useful question on the thread about student visas as to whether it's contradictory, from an abolitionist perspective, to describe the university as "a sanctuary for knowledge." The answer, for me, is both yes and no. Sharing an elaboration here.🧵

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justine zhang @tisjune.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

@avcx.bsky.social is great. i am approaching the end of their (extremely generous) free trial period and need to remind myself to subscribe. some of the clues are "text my funny and based friends immediately" tier, which is much more than i can say of the NYT.

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Hagen Blix @hagenblix.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Why Bernie Sanders is wrong - and nationalizing AI is a bad idea "AI is, above all else, a weapon of class war from above. Whether it’s the state that wields it or corporations does little to change that fact."

jacobin.com

The Socialist Case Against Nationalizing AI

AI is not a neutral technology whose benefits need to be redistributed. It is a weapon of class war from above, designed to cheapen labor and concentrate power. Nationalizing it does nothing to change...

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Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

A university cannot be a sanctuary for knowledge while serving as an agent of the border. As long as some students can be threatened with deportation, no one's academic freedom is secure. 20/

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justine zhang @tisjune.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

yeah! email us!! and congrats!!!