Vee Lawson

A brown and orange tabby cat naps in the sun, using a treat puzzle as a pillow.

Happy #Caturday! Here's Meep figuring out how to use her sister's treat puzzle

The Cal State Long Beach campus in Long Beach on April 24, 2024. Photo by Jules Hotz for CalMatters. Hed:

California State University’s trustees will vote tomorrow on whether to increase how much the system’s 22 campus presidents and other senior executives earn. bit.ly/4oHbzv6

📝 @mzinshteyn.bsky.social
📸 Jules Hotz

This thread, and to be frank, it's interesting to see that posting figurative death threats is the hill so many leftist men are willing to [redacted] upon. See you all on fedsky, I guess

Want to support workers on strike?

✅ Follow us + share our posts about NOT BUYING STARBUCKS!
✅ Sign our No Contract No Coffee pledge, & we'll send you local calls to action throughout the strike: nocontractnocoffee.org
✅ Donate to our strike fund: sbworkersunited.org

When I worked for Starbucks full-time, I'd routinely get scheduled to close the store at 10pm then come back and open it at 5am. For a fun bonus, management would schedule full daytime shifts, then send us home halfway through to cut labor costs.

Starbucks workers deserve a fair contract.

Visualize All 23 Years of BYTE Magazine in All Its Glory, All at Once Software engineer Hector Dearman built a zoomable map of every issue of BYTE magazine.

Behold: you can now see all 23 years of BYTE magazine in all its glory, all at once. Every issue on a single zoomable interface

www.404media.co/byte-magazin...

"At the heart of our work together was the question: How can the online communities that we participate in use tools that truly reflect our values?"

This looks so useful for #TeamRhetoric folks seeking to reframe our social media pedagogy!

so Grokipedia is really bad, in case anybody was wondering, but I'm going to just kind of quickly write a short thread about why. I'm going to focus on the article of neo-fascist William Luther Pierce, because I just published my MA thesis on him a few months ago.
Which Grokipedia cites.

a laptop with a picture of a kitten on it Alt: A cat is frantically "typing" on a laptop. An image of a kitten yelling is superimposed over the typing cat's face.

Me adding all the Grokipedia pages to the @waybackmachine.bsky.social archive for future research use

Last week, I wrote about Doublespeed, essentially a click farm that sells “synthetic influencers” to astroturf whatever product or service you want across social media, despite it being a clear violation of every social media platform's policy on inauthentic behavior. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. a16z’s Speedrun is also backing: Creed: An AI company “rooted in Christian Values” which produces Lenny, a “Bible-based AI buddy who's always got your back with wise words, scripture-inspired guidance, and a listening ear whenever you need it.” Zingroll: The “world’s largest Netflix-quality AI streaming platform,” which is another way of saying it’s a Netflix populated exclusively with AI Slop. Vega: which is building “AI-powered social orbits.” What does that mean? Not entirely clear, but the company has produced one of the most beautiful Mad Libs paragraphs I’ve ever seen: “We’re building the largest textual data moat on human relationships by gamifying the way people leave notes for each other. For the first time, LLMs can analyze millions of raw, human-written notes at scale and turn them into structured meaning, powering the most annotated social graph ever created.” Moona Health: an AI-powered Sleep care app the company says is covered by insurance. “Our AI-powered platform automates insurance claims and scheduling and analyzes sleep data – providing personalized session guidelines to therapists,” Moona says. Jooba: “The world’s first autonomous recruiting firm.” Margin: “The World’s first AI powered credit card.” Margin says “Customers earn points, with dynamic rewards that adapt to their preferences in real time.” First Voyage: A wellness app that gives you AI “mythological pets that turn wellness into play.” Axon Capital: billed as “DeepMind for Finance,” Axon says it has “pioneered brain-inspired, low-latency AI for financial markets.”

This is so bleak:

www.404media.co/a16z-is-fund...

If you see this, post a vampire that isn't Dracula

Remember those times i said we were headed for an epistemic crisis because bad people were gonna use deepfakes to make propaganda & conspiracy theories & destabilize consensus reality-making & how the central paradigm of "generative AI" enables, encourages, & was indeed built on this premise?

Yeah.

Attn: Everybody with good music taste:

Following a fit of delusion during race signups back in January, I'm attempting a trail race in which I will be #running (read: speed hiking) overnight, and I'm putting together a playlist to get me through.

What are your best bangers, any genre/any language?

Empty Set is founded on the idea that technology writing is at an impasse. Despite growing interest in "tech criticism," the genre has found itself flattened and constrained in recent years. As publications dedicated to grappling with the many contradictory shades of our techno-culture have shuttered-Real Life, WIRED Ideas- -the industry has shifted towards hype cycle-based business reporting, at best, and thinly veiled advertorials at worst. Though there remain a few bastions of critical thought, these have mostly survived as watchdogs, too tired from keeping up with a neverending cycle of abuses to speculate more broadly on what our evolving relationship to technology is doing to us.

We believe that technology writing can be so much more. After all, despite what we so often assume, technology isn't synonymous with the latest gadget, or digital this-and-that. It is ancient-as old as our bodies and words. If language was one of our first technologies, then shouldn't technology writing give rise to poetry? If our bodies were the basis upon which all technical prostheses emerged, then shouldn't technology writing know how to move? The tech writing remaining today is too sober, too timid in style and subject matter to capture what it feels like to inhabit our world: the millenarian fervor of the techno- evangelists, the riptides of rage and desire we traverse daily on our devices, the anxieties and distant hopes that shimmer on the horizon. We need writing that not only thinks about technology, but with it.

The stakes are clear. Having failed to address this latent world- where technology becomes religion, flesh and code intermingle, and ghosts haunt the machine--we've let the worst among us steer the conversation. Peter Thiel sells out lectures on the Anti-Christ while pseudo-intellectual bloggers peddle dollar-store fascism by misreading Hegel. In our failure to experiment boldly, to speculate and myth-make and take all the strange corners of our techno-culture seriously, leftist technology criticism has handed over the reins of sensemaking to feudalist wannabes and reactionary trolls. Donna Haraway once wrote that "it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with…. what thoughts think thoughts." Empty Set is dedicated to finding the concepts and thoughts that we'll need in order to tell a new story about our technologized lives.

Writing in the dust of this critical landscape, it's only fitting that our first issue takes on decay. Though the promise of technology is one of eternity (living forever, endless access to information) it's rot that undergirds our world today: brainrot, entropy, planned obsolescence, 404 errors, poor images, lossy compression, nutrient-rich humus, carbon- rich biomatter turned oil and coal. Rot is a process that encapsulates the short-sighted excesses of our techno-culture, as well as a potential force we might channel into new hopes. After all, without decomposition there could be no regrowth, nothing underfoot for life to arise in. By sitting with this decay, we hope something new might take root.

For my buds still sad about the end of Real Life mag, and anyone else bored of the current state of writing-about-tech, it's time to get excited — a very exciting new left tech-etc magazine is dropping later this month. Empty Set! No website yet but follow on insta www.instagram.com/emptysetmaga...

It is Book Launch day for @amaramarasingam.bsky.social and My edited volume "Contemporary Far-Right Culture The Art, Music, and Everyday Practices of Violent Extremism"

www.routledge.com/Contemporary...

Hardly, it's a move to curtail criticism.

"The filing added: 'Very few would-be commentators are prepared to bear costs of this magnitude. So, when word gets out that the price tag of criticizing Ethan is this high—that speech will disappear. But that is precisely what Ethan Klein wants.'"

Feminist Fridays graphic with text reading: "Tell us about your scholarship and accomplishments!"

Celebrate #FeministFridays with us! ✨ Got an article published, written a book review, received a teaching award, or reached another milestone? We’d love to highlight your achievements!

Use this Google Form to share your wins! forms.gle/6JiytdhVS5oT...

San José State University - Details - Assistant Professor - Assistant Writing Programs Administrator

Hey #TeamRhetoric, SJSU is hiring an Assistant WPA! We're a union campus (@cfaunited.bsky.social), and in my first year here, I've found the department to be welcoming + supportive. There's a strong community especially among the junior faculty.

jobs.sjsu.edu/en-us/job/55...

Dear Professor Lawson, Congratulations! I am delighted to let you know that the following proposal(s) has been accepted for the 2026 CCCC Annual Convention, "Conference and Our Conversations," taking place in Cleveland, Ohio, March 4-7: Wresting Power Back: Tactical Technical Communication for Social Media Under Rising Authoritarianism

This doomscrolling break is brought to you by #4C26 announcements: See you all in Cleveland for "Wresting Power Back: Tactical Technical Communication for Social Media Under Rising Authoritarianism"

The fundie-snarking communities have been celebrating all day. There are no words for the harm Dobson caused so many children.

For the unfamiliar, D.L. & Krispin Mayfield's "Strongwilled" describes Dobson's child abuse advocacy & its role in Christian Nationalism (www.strongwilledproject.com)

Peitho Special Issue, Summer 2026 Call for Proposals Academia in Crisis: How Feminist Rhetorical Scholars Respond Editors: Patty Wilde, Erin Costello Wrecker, and Justine Trinh Submissions: 2026peithospecialissue@gmail.com Proposals Extended! due August 15

🩵 Friendly reminder! 🩵

If you're still revising your ideas for Peitho's Summer 2026 special issue, Academia in Crisis: How Feminist Rhetorical Scholars Respond, be sure to send them by tomorrow, August 15.

CFP: tiny.cc/PeithoSummer...

Two cats lay on a rug, recreationally kicking each other in the head.

This is how Meep and Mushroom celebrate #InternationalCatDay

Ralph Wiggem “I’m in danger” meme

*Academics in early August

ACLS Digital Justice Grants The ACLS Digital Justice Grant program is designed to address the inequities in the access to support for digital work across various fields.

For any BlueSky friends engaged in Digital Humanities projects, here's a place to apply for seed money

www.acls.org/programs/acl...

I'm adding a blurb to my syllabi clarifying that I will never use AI to evaluate or respond to student work. If I can't be bothered to read it, why should students be bothered to write it? This ends up with bots responding to bots all the way down, imo.

A grey and white cat sits on a soft blanket in front of a table and laptop. A presentation is blurred in the background.

Mushroom and I are catching up on #FemRhet2025 virtual presentations--I love that there's a space to leave comments or questions for presenters.

Here, we're listening to Dr. Julia Allen's talk on feminist rhetorical furtherance.

#FemRhetHappensHere

Peitho Special Issue Summer 2026 Call for Proposals Academia in Crisis: How Feminist Rhetorical Scholars Respond Editors: Patty Wilde, Erin Costello Wrecker, and Justine Trinh. Submissions: 2026peithospecialissue@gmail.com Proposals due August 1.

If you're still buzzing from #FemRhet2025, consider submitting to Peitho's upcoming special issue, Academia in Crisis: How Feminist Rhetorical Scholars Respond. As our time together at the conference made clear, the value of feminist rhetorics is higher now than ever.

CFP: tiny.cc/PeithoSummer...

Reposting for the evening crowd

Sending up the #TeamRhetoric bat signal--who's writing on tech comm + social media + trans rhetorics (aside from Avery Edenfield, whose work is great)? Grad students?

Am trying to recruit for a 4Cs Virtual Institute proposal!