Alexis Lothian

Roddey Reid’s book, now revised and expanded, is the best text I have found that not only grasps the full meaning of Trump, but places him in the context of American business culture. Be afraid.

roddeyreid.squarespace.com/new-book-1

Deflating “Hype” Won’t Save Us The problem with AI isn’t hype. The problem is who and what it’s useful for.

We wrote a thing about AI, fascism, and why framing this as "hype" is too apolitical

www.liberalcurrents.com/deflating-hy...

AI Commons - One Project What if we could redefine AI? What if we could shift its development from a capitalist model to a more disruptive, inclusive, and decentralized one?

AI systems don't have to be controlled by fascist bootlickers. They don't have to be controlled by for-profit tech companies!

Check out our report on the possibility and necessity of an #AICommons: oneproject.org/ai-commons/

I missed this when it came out over the summer but it’s well worth the read. @biblioracle.bsky.social

The cover of my zine 'Iconic' about LiveJournal icons, a bunch of colorful 100x100 pixel images all set out in a grid "A zine about design, aesthetic and LiveJournal icons from the early 2000s"

Did you used to make LiveJournal icons? Do you still have some of the ones that you made? I'm looking to include more icons in the second print run of my LiveJournal Iconic zine and would love to see yours!

Share them here: form.jotform.com/252444103676...

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Celebrating the OTW’s 18th Anniversary

The #OTW is turning 18 this year! Look back with us on some milestones, and participate in our anniversary bingo at otw-news.org/yckwkcuj #18YearsOTW

Image that says: Have you considered NOT using AI? Funky font and flowers and a qr code that links to the open letter

Image that says: Have you considered NOT using AI? Funky font and flowers and a qr code that links to the open letter

Image that says: AI is evil. Funky font and flowers and a qr code that links to the open letter

Image that says: AI is evil. Funky font and flowers and a qr code that links to the open letter

Made these for fun — hope you get a chuckle at least & consider signing

Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia
openletter.earth/open-letter-...

💥🩷🌿‼️

Thread of the Day

I really think imagining what it would mean to develop technology for life, rather than for profit is a serious task of the political imaginary. The way things are now are so dire and dreadful, but there is also so much room beyond capitalist realism here

'OpenAI is the most prominent of many EdTech enterprises, most owned by venture capital and private equity, whose mission is to automate and gigify education, to surveil students, mine their data and modify their behavior.'

We're witnessing the dismantling of the very possibility of learning itself

a snippet of a mini-comic, at top - straight line stretches from point A to B. Immediately below, same dot at A, then becomes a curving, meandering line that winds through the page and ends at a point with rays and a question mark emanating from it. Text reads: "Nothing can do this for you - that robs you of experience and conflates answers with learning. Rather, it's all the decisions you make along the way, the mistakes, struggles, and surprises! These pathways you create - this is learning.

Pages from a mini comic

Pages from a mini comic

Pages from a mini comic

My drawn statement on Ai as standalone from my now finished minicomic as syllabus for new liberal studies class! As promised this is shareable, printable - all from my site, feel free to make use of it, cite me & let me know how it’s received. Share away all here! spinweaveandcut.com/fall-2025-sy...

AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event Three years in, one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.

Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it

This may also be why I dislike the use of "learnings" as a noun

Learning is not an object you acquire, it is a process that transforms you

From free article, look for "Red Lines": https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/on-palestine

sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/on-palestine

AGAINST AI

teachers!

excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone.

take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE
against-a-i.com

A large group of protestors against Trump in Edinburgh. Some are holding signs reading 'Nae Trump', 'Stop Trump, Welcome Immigrants' and 'No fascists, no rapists, no Trump'.

Scottish Green MSP Ross Greer speaks to anti-Trump protestors.

A sign held above a crowd reads 'Stop Trump, Migrants Welcome'.

A large group of protestors against Trump in Edinburgh. Two signs are visible, one reading 'Scotland hated Trump before it was fashionable', the other reading 'Stp Trump, stop the far right.'

Donald Trump is not welcome in Scotland.

A paperback volume, the journal Utopian Studies, with its orange cover and logo

Just received this at home, from the Society for Utopian Studies: Utopian Studies vol. 36 no. 1, Special Issue on Queer Utopias. Props @alothian.bsky.social, @tavia.bsky.social, Rebekah Sheldon. Tributes to José and to Frederic Jameson, as well. Looking forward to next issue where I have a review

China is cracking down on young women who write gay erotica At least 30 writers have been arrested across the country since February, a lawyer tells the BBC.

I have been interviewed by BBC News concerning the recent Haitang Incident: after last year’s detention of over 50 women danmei writers who produce explicit male-male romances and erotica in China, more women writers have been summoned this spring for www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

this is terrifyingly plausible: if you want your AI to be taken seriously as an intellectual, you can't present it as a Stupid Woman

Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy - Reactor Perihelion and its crew embark on a dangerous new mission at a corporate-controlled station in the throes of a hostile takeover… Novelette | 7,540 words They were still three hours out when Perihelion...

The new Murderbot short story is up at Reactor Magazine: reactormag.com/rapport-mart... Edited by Lee Harris, art by Jaime Jones.

Guns or Fireworks America is not its government and normal does not mean right.

New article! On a complicated Fourth of July and not letting cruelty win sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/guns-or-fi...

Over and over, the language of “safety” put to work to protect epistemic and material violence. Sickening.

Utopian Studies 36.1 out now, with articles by Jack Halberstam, @sean-seeger.bsky.social & @alothian.bsky.social which I'm excited to read. Oh, plus my review of @danhf.bsky.social Janelle Monáe's Queer Afrofuturism: Defying Every Label scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/utopian... #academicsky

“When the battle’s playing out on a hundred fronts at once, we have to remember that there’s no single court ruling, no existential moment, no single referendum on ‘transgender rights’ that’ll decide how this struggle will go.”
Jules Gill-Peterson in @wired.com+@them.us
www.wired.com/story/histor...

A white mug with the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction logo holds a spray of lavender next to a stack of the eight books shortlisted for this year's prize: North Continent Ribbon by Ursula Whitcher Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins The City in Glass by Nghi Vo Archangels of Funk by Andrea Hairston The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera The West Passage by Jared Pechaček Blackheart Man by Nalo Hopkinson

We're thrilled to present the shortlist for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction:

US supreme court upholds Tennessee ban on youth gender-affirming care Ruling is devastating loss for trans rights supporters in case that could set precedent for dozens of other lawsuits

This is horrifying and will shorten trans lives.

At the same time, we know that trans people have survived attack and erasure many times over, providing each other with love, care, and basic needs. We won't stop or be stopped.

www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Event poster: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Large Language Models and the Returns of Critical Theory, June 19, 14-15.30. University of Copenhagen.

✨Looking so much forward to welcoming @whkchun.bsky.social at @ucph.bsky.social next week to discuss the politics of data loss w our @erc.europa.eu Data Loss project. Please feel more than welcome to join us for Chun's public lecture June 19, 14-15.30 co-organized w @mariaa.bsky.social @aicentre.dk.

We’re at a point where the "news" (both local and cable) are adopting the propagandist rhetoric of the regime by describing what's happening in L.A. as "riots." They fail to acknowledge who actually incites and escalates the violence, namely ICE, the new Gestapo.