beth semel

ai is a rhetorical technology.

when it produces a list of permissible targets, its value is not producing targets but producing permission

(am not a horse historian just saying that atanasoski and vora's point re the impoverished ahistorical and race-evasive imaginaries of labor and freedom that arguments in favor of automating everything portend continues to track in these ted talk-/VC pitch-afied framings)

famously horses that were no longer pulling carriages were "freed" and definitely did not become glue or jello or dog food

need her now more than ever

Policing Surveillance: Films by Young People's Race, Power, and Technology In partnership with the TREE lab in Northwestern's School of Education and Social Policy, the Block Museum presents a special online screening of three documentaries…

As part of this sociotechnical education, students can share what they learn through compelling artifacts.

A few years ago, as part of the Young People's Race, Power, and Technology Project, we worked w local youth to create documentaries on issues such as gang databases and ICE. Watch the docs at:

beautiful

sorry for the dumb ai discourse subtweet but i would really love to see a language ideological account of the political work done by the distinction between "the drudgery" and "the creative, expressive part"

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology | AAA Journal | Wiley Online Library This article analyzes how engineers in Amman, Jordan involved in making large language models (LLMs) conceptualize their labor in relation to language and technology. Specifically, it focuses on clai...

subscribed ( / closest thing i've read thus far that heads in this direction, which i also want, is this, which is superb anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... about to teach it alongside your 2023 CSCW talk)

if you're an intellectual busily imagining capacious future for AI, not a little bit embarrassed taking so much effort to ridicule folks for not being creative enough w/AI when the reality of it looks like this, we are fundamentally different creatures. you must have lost the shame gene or something

(this is what i'm researching instead of reading the left don't like AI article)

did you all know that the guy Disney hired to do the Our Friend The Atom show was an Operation Paper Clipped Nazi, i certainly did not

“The bus driver made sure that all of the students made it to class safely by circling back to the bus stop multiple times, according to the district.”

Thank you to the bus driver for showing what it means to protect our communities.

Google Fulfilled ICE Subpoena Demanding Student Journalist’s Bank and Credit Card Numbers Amandla Thomas-Johnson didn't know how much information ICE requested in a subpoena now. Google never gave him a chance to fight it.

Google gave ICE this British STUDENT JOURNALIST's personal info bank account numbers while they were trying to detain him for attending a protest at a job fair at Cornell for just 5 minutes. Not a crime. He fled to Switzerland & EFF is representing him now. theintercept.com/2026/02/10/g...

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology | AAA Journal | Wiley Online Library This article analyzes how engineers in Amman, Jordan involved in making large language models (LLMs) conceptualize their labor in relation to language and technology. Specifically, it focuses on clai...

and if you want to read actually good, actually empirically grounded nonanthropomorphizing work on the politics and ideologies of language in LLMs might i heavily suggest this recent paper by Tariq Adely on LLM engineers in Amman, Jordan anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

companies pull massive profits by defining the human in the same limiting manner it's been described for decades / in ways currently used to sanction putting people of all ages in concentration camps, while asserting that their product actually exceeds the limits of the human, like, shut the fuck up

a "machine that talks like us" ok who is us, what definition of "talking" is being operationalized, who is it excluding, along what historically predictable lines? these are the questions i ask my undergrads, surprise, they're able to answer cogently and critically b/c they don't buy into this shit

also the hand-sweeping work that "we" does even as it's appended by the same qualifying asterisk that appends the liberal human subject (#notallhumans)..it's almost like Jennifer Rhee, Atansoski and Vora, and many other feminist STS and Black feminist scholars have written entire books about this

"When I asked ChatGPT to comment on its chief rival, it noted that Claude is “good at ‘helpful & kind without becoming therapy.’ ... Claude was, it italicized, “less mad-scientist, more civil-servant engineer.”"

Yeah, well I asked the Lady of the Lake about DeepSeek; she said it was a Commie trap.

A point I make in my work on this subject is that we need to reject the insistance that convos abt commercial AI products should be about the tech. Determining whether AI is “conscious” is a Smartwashing exercise in solipcism that distracts from the material conditions of the product’s distribution

paging @saraevogel.bsky.social, @sciedhenry.bsky.social, @charleswlogan.bsky.social, anyone else??

Check out my list on Amazon

Hey folks! Street Medics in Minneapolis have reached out to us asking for help boosting another wishlist!

Everything on this list is going straight to Columbia Heights.

(If you hate amazon, please visit www.standwithminnesota.com and find a different way to help! just help, that is what matters)

what a time to be pouring hours into fine tuning the nuances of the various arguments in my book that certainly many people are going to read and take something important and impactful away from :)))))

this is why i can never abide by the "ethnographic studies of earlier forms of AI don't track when applied to genAI" haters, the study concluded almost exactly what Diana Forsythe concluded re symbolic AI decades ago......it's almost like......presentism / tech determinism are ideological traps.....

charles briggs screaming dot gif

"Knowing what questions to ask a patient and what information might be withheld or missing during an examination are nuanced skills that make great human physicians; based on this study, chatbots can’t reliably replicate that kind of care."

‼️ NEW JERSEY ‼️ Share this resource widely.

If you see ICE activity, call/text the NJ Rapid Response hotline for your county. #ICEoutofNJ

This document is one of the great political failures of our time. It must be immediately denounced by all people of good will. And it will be a major scandal if any "civil rights" organization gives cover to this capitulation to fascism.

Screenshot of a map and table listing ICE warehouse purchase data.

🚨 New: We built a visual tracker of the warehouses ICE is targeting across the US.

Working off an idea from @actualkatherine.bsky.social, we’ve mapped active searches, canceled deals, and linked state property records.

Explore the map here: tinyurl.com/ICEWarehouse...

It’s hard to put into perspective how truly massive the warehouse is that was recently sold by the Rockefeller Group to the Department of Homeland Security for $70 million to build a concentration camp in Surprise, AZ. Across the street is a huge neighborhood and a school. It’s 400,000-square-feet.