Annie McClanahan

lol those blurbs are great. soooooo excited for this!!!! congrats!!!

amazing, congrats!

A one month chart of oil prices

Oil prices are going parabolic. This is insane.

So this is gonna be like when we all started following epidemiologists in March 2020, huh.

For reasons @ubiquity75.xyz helps unpack, this interview with UC President Milliken on why the UC refused to join THEIR OWN FACULTY in SUCCESSFULLY suing the Trump admin and preventing UCLA from being forced to pay 1 billion in extortion money is reeeeeeeeally something....

BENEATH THE WAGE | Kirkus Reviews Seeing service work as “labor exploitation.”

Kirkus Reviews calls Annie @anniemcc.bsky.social's "intelligent and timely" Beneath the Wage "an eye-opening look at today’s service work and the forms of solidarity that have emerged to meet it." Read the full review here:

A useful thread about today's UCLA lawsuit. He suggests that the significant narrowing from the "giant" Title VI case--involving a fine, funding freezes, and a slew of "demands"--to this might reflect an awareness of "the major weaknesses" of the Title VI case...which CUCFA/AAUP are so far winning!

Trump administration drops appeal of court order blocking $1.2-billion UCLA settlement The Trump administration dropped its appeal of a major higher education case in which a federal judge blocked its $1.2-billion settlement proposal to UCLA over alleged civil rights violations. It will...

UCLA faculty stopped a $1.2 billion ransom payment to Trump while their bosses hid in the corner

I find this question about whether chatbots are “alive” to be truly, truly boring. You can torture a definition of “life” so that it includes chatbots or you can listen to actual, unequivocal flesh-and-blood people talking about harm it does them *right now*.

To me the chatbots pose zero interesting questions about the ‘nature of selfhood’ but dozens about the nature of manipulation. Here the Claude team pretends they are programming the robot for ethical responses but they land on one that is false and disingenuous.

YouTube video by UCI Media What Matters to Me and Why: Annie McClanahan

I got to give a talk last week about one of my very favorite topics--prison education! So much gratitude to @ucilifted.bsky.social

"'AI' may simply be a way of papering over other forms of cost-cutting.

'Outsourcing is a very popular one,' he told The Register. 'They’re firing people because of AI, and then three weeks later they hire a team in India because the labor is so much cheaper.'"
futurism.com/artificial-i...

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW: “.. In our in-progress research, we discovered that AI tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it.”

hbr.org/2026/02/ai-d...

this has been going on in non-fiction and low content books for a long time -- it was only a matter of time; Ms. Hart is selling access to her technique and developing proprietary tech, just taking advantage of how many people out there are desperate for some kind of income

Beneath The Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work - Zone Books Zone Books

My book is now available for pre-order!

Comrade @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social has already boosted this excellent podcast episode on slop and fascist aesthetics but let me do so as well: open.spotify.com/episode/5Xxf...

but sarah, that's just a "supply side" solution to the problem of not wanting to pay workers!

ALMOST LIKE THAT indeed. god, i am so mad!

There's also a VIBE here that is so fucking econ--presenting a position as if it's brave iconoclasm when its the most dominant ideology imaginable. Like someone saying "Prepare to have your liberal priors destroyed by my brave truth telling!" but the argument is, like, rent control is bad.

precisely. it's revealed preference-pilled

This only makes sense if you accept the thinnest, most methodologically-individualist understanding of "social function," and only the sloppiest and least historicist definition of "can supply," and only the most banalized understanding of "demand." The argument itself is fucking slop.

I am fucking DYING inside: "AI Slop serves a social function: it offers a supply-side solution to a variety of problems in cultural and economic demand—that, collectively, people want more content than humans can supply."

Working more with adult students--many of them multilingual learners--who are wonderful thinkers and readers but struggle as writers really makes me reconsider my assumptions about the connections between writing & thought. I don't have a thesis about it but it vexes me in interesting ways!

2000 agents are still here. Woke up this morning to horns and whistles down my street -- panic jumped out of bed ready to run outside, but the cars were being pursued. ICE is still kidnapping people, still getting stymied at every turn, still brutalizing observers because they know they're losing.

Defending the Possibility of the University: A Roundtable on “University Keywords” - Public Books “What would it look like for faculty unions and graduate student unions to collaborate or work together with K-12 teachers’ unions to push back against anti-DEI legislation or book bans?”

I'm in the new look @publicbooks.bsky.social talking with @anniemcc.bsky.social, Vineeta Singh, Dan Nemser, and Rana Jaleel about higher education, how we have studied and organized around it, and what possibility lies therein.

There's a wonderful and still relevant scholarly book about this phenomenon of southern and midwestern flagship public schools pitching themselves to wealthy coastal students--Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton's _Paying for the Party_.

English Associate Professor Annie McClanahan talks about her upcoming book 'Beneath the Wage' (Zone Books, April '26) at UC Irvine Labor Center's 2026 Winter Quarter Research Talk Brown Bag Lunch from noon-1 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 26, in Social Ecology 1, Room 315. RSVP: https://ow.ly/JjsH50Y22JT

While I couldn't be farther from it today, I grew up *deep* in the Protestant church and I gotta say that I find the singing of hymns in this context almost unbearably moving & powerful.

Stand With Minnesota Donation Directory Stand With Minnesota is a hub for supporting, learning, and taking action to support Minnesotans impacted by ICE and federal enforcement.

I gotta go eat brownies and hang with people I love because they kidnapped a baby and I'm gonna lose it thinking about all the other children they've taken that I don't know about. Be kind to yourselves and your neighbors.

I'll also share this in case you're able to help
www.standwithminnesota.com

CEOs Say AI Is Making Work More Efficient. Employees Tell a Different Story. How much time workers say the technology saves them on the job is vastly different from what executives report.

The disconnect between management and employee on AI usage is big. At the same time, CEOs are reporting they aren't seeing any revenue growth from AI.

🤷

www.wsj.com/lifestyle/wo...