britt paris

There Might Be Giants - Limn Very tall gateways into alternate realities

What a fun "Ghostwriters" issue of Limn released at time when we reflect on seasons' passing and other haunting concerns, featuring Tamara Kneese, Brooklyne Gipson + more.

It was truly a pleasure to write this piece with Jeremy Butman on the epistemic function of giants. limn.press/article/ther...

To be sure, Amazon appears to be cutting staff in anticipation of AI productivity gains, rather than in response to them. A spokesperson for the company said AI advancements were not responsible for the vast majority of the 14,000 cuts the company announced Tuesday. Although CEO Andy Jassy has warned about AI “agents” replacing workers, there is no indication that is happening yet.

In the media coverage of Amazon layoffs this week, how many of the headlines and press hits conveyed the point below?… or are most media outlets lazily providing a completely different message to the public?

www.cnn.com/2025/10/28/b...

‘One timeline after the other was not met’ – UCLA’s $213 million project is failing - Daily Bruin This post was updated May 22 at 9:48 p.m. UCLA has spent at least $213 million on the Ascend Finance Transformation project, and yet, seven years after the project’s launch, it has few concrete accomp...

Thank you to the Daily Bruin for reporting on the latest of a string of big-ticket IT failures (article from May, but ever-relevant, esp in light of current efforts to centralize IT) dailybruin.com/2025/05/13/o...

A chatbot for the soul: mental health care, privacy, and intimacy in AI-based conversational agents - Communication and Change Artificial intelligence-based conversational agents—chatbots—are increasingly integrated into telehealth platforms, employee wellness programs, and mobile applications to address structural gaps in me...

🚨NEW PAPER ALERT 🚨 @tamigraph.bsky.social @briana-v.bsky.social and I discuss wellness chatbots, their labor implications, & "private vibes" vs "privacy". We call for critical human-AI communication scholarship that takes into account context & political economy: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

In our union comms we always say admin are keen not to let a crisis go to waste. Heck, better yet they’ll even invent one.
True at Rutgers and I thought…everywhere. Fwiw to anyone interested: Join the @aaup and or your local union

From an Amazon Employees for Climate Justice statement:

“They’re pushing this narrative that AI is transformative and that’s why they’re making these cuts. But leadership is spending 100 billion this year alone on the new data centers; they have to find that money elsewhere,” said one AWS engineer.

How to start a worker-led news outlet: A tale of two newsrooms How two newsrooms — The 51st and COYOTE Media Collective — launched their worker-led organizations

"Cooperatively run structures are a path forward when we're seeing systems collapse."

Proud to be one of 6(+???) worker-led newsrooms in @tinynewscollective.bsky.social.

Here's how to join us, feat. interviews with our co-founder @maddiepoore.bsky.social and @soleilho.com of @coyotemedia.org:

It's not going to be fun when the bubble pops (and it won't even make AI go away). Disaster capitalism will be ready.

I think we need to figure out what it would mean for us to get ready in turn.

Let Them Eat Large Language Models: Artificial Intelligence and Austerity in the Neoliberal University Martha Kenney and Martha Lincoln Abstract This article examines the expansion of generative artificial intelligence (genAI) into higher education. We argue that genAI’s incursion into university systems represents an effort by Silicon Valley to capture lucrative new markets for their products, as well as enhanced credibility by association. Drawing on our experience as faculty in the California State University (CSU) system—the first university system to contract with OpenAI to provide ChatGPT Edu system-wide—we assess the rhetoric that justifies and legitimizes genAI contracts in higher education. We suggest that the uncritical adoption of genAI in higher education poses problems for labor conditions, the integrity of intellectual property, and student learning on campuses, particularly under the conditions of austerity that are commonly found in public universities.

New preprint alert! 🚨

“Let Them Eat Large Language Models: Artificial Intelligence and Austerity in the Neoliberal University”

Please understand that the only reason this has been released is because of the UCLA faculty association who filed a request and challenged the refusal in court. If you are a UC faculty member, join your FA!

Together we can push back on big brother software & more!

cucfa.org/2025/10/lett...

Great article—AI in higher ed is about the crisis of higher ed, long in the making. Cites the AAUP report on AI. we are seeing cracks in the inevitability framing of AI—the only way out of this is together!

Resist the introduction of Al in our own software. Ban Al use in the classroom. Cease normalising the Al hype. Fortify our academic freedom. Sustain critical thinking on Al. It's with these five action points that Olivia Guest, Iris van Rooij and a bunch of colleagues conclude their open letter directed to Dutch universities and colleges. Guest and van Rooij know what they're talking about: both work at the School of Artificial Intelligence and the Donders Centre for Cognition of Radboud University in Nijmegen.

Belgian AI scientists call on colleagues to keep AI out of the classroom. apache.be/2025/10/24/-...

Here’s the AAUP letter with CUCFA demanding UCOP stand down on the surveillance software mandate:
cucfa.org/2025/10/lett... big thanks to @gleemie.bsky.social !!

University of California faculty push back against Big Brother cybersecurity mandate School officials defend software as bulwark against ransomware, but professors fear potential surveillance of their devices

UC faculty and the @aaup.org demand the end of mandatory surveillance software use across the UC system. The future belongs to people, not to big brother!
www.science.org/content/arti...

NY school district's AI-powered classroom surveillance worries civil liberties advocates | StateScoop The New York arm of the ACLU says the XSponse system was installed without public disclosure and risks student privacy.

Actual panopticon.

“AI is washed” meetup?

"unless you are building war tools for a US government program"

*glares at the university of michigan's planned billion-dollar AI datacenter project in collaboration with los alamos national laboratories*

Next Weds 10/29 at 7 PM, we're having a party and panel at Busboys Takoma DC for @jacobsilverman.com's Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. All welcome! Because we're in DC, Corey Frayer, Sandeep Vaheesan, and I will join Jacob to talk DOGE, crypto, and the tech right.

Can AI Avoid the Enshittification Trap? Cory Doctorow’s theory of “enshittification” explains how tech platforms rot from within. As AI grows more profitable—and powerful—it risks the same fate.

brother it *is* the trap

Grew up messing around with these bad boys. And dog have I got some bone chilling stories. Nothing to be more careful about than maybe a fucking grain auger.

In about three years the entire university pivot to AI curricula and schools and programs is going to be so deeply embarrassing. We will all pretend it never happened and I will be standing there, looking at people with a mirror in my eyes. This is all so embarrassing.

Dan! Great minds! was just having this exact slogan convo in comms cmte yesterday. Did not come up w “earning conditions” tho. it’s a genius even if it rhymes too well

On November 18, join organizers and experts for a cross-issue panel discussion exploring how workers and communities are pushing back: From Our Workplaces to Our Communities: Stop the AI Surveillance Pipeline Now! bit.ly/stopAIsurveillance

"chill is an especially harmful but efficient form of speech control, as the Administration well knows. Direct censorship is laborious, ad hoc, and happens only after the fact. Chill, by contrast, is a form of prior restraint administered by the speaker themselves out of fear"

📊 New in Big Data & Society!

Lindsay Weinberg examines how Microsoft’s Power BI is reshaping Danish higher ed governance—turning students into data points, linking programs to job metrics, and pushing new forms of accountability.

🔗 Read here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

trade meme. open ai receives: total sum of creative output from all humanity, $500 billion valuation you receive: polluted internet, polluted world, collapse of society and nature of truth, no jobs, can put your face in my slop app

i made this meme which is better than the article:

WE WON: "This case -– perhaps the most important ever to fall w/in..this district court squarely presents the issue whether non-citizens lawfully present here in US..have the same free speech rights as the rest of us. The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally “yes, they do.”"

AI Data Centers Are Sending Power Bills Soaring Wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. That’s being passed on to customers.

You all probably saw this already.
www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...