justine zhang

I'm not sure if it's worth adding this, but in case anyone's wondering, @AmandaAskell is a brilliant philosopher doing by far the most important philosophical research anyone in the world is doing right now (in terms of both impact and philosophical interest). I've had the privilege of seeing her at many stages along this journey, from a chance meeting in the hallways of Coombs (the building where ANU Philosophy used to be) back in about maybe 2015, to a visit with her at OpenAI's offices on the day, more or less, that she and others decided to leave OpenAI to form Anthropic, to a number of workshops and other things since, where she showed an incredible generosity of spirit to the folks both in philosophy and in the FAccT community who most needed to learn from her work.

I helped build the FAccT academic conference, and white men like Seth have to come along and make sure that the people we tried to get away from, the TESCREAL eugenicist ghouls, have every academic space in addition to the billions they're drowning in.

Donate to Stop the cuts at the University of Essex, organized by Billy Woods The University of Essex senior management team have announced their plans to make… Billy Woods needs your support for Stop the cuts at the University of Essex

good morning, it’s day 4 of strikes at the University of Essex to save 400 jobs across all departments, the Southend campus and our Foundation programme — many members are worried about making ends meet. if you can, please donate to our strike fund: gofund.me/059af6be8

sometimes you can tell when someone's entire theory of change amounts to ctrl+f+replace-ing jargon

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"

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...

This is a genuinely huge, sweeping victory today for the University of California—or rather, for us, its faculty, acting through our faculty associations, while the UC itself maintained a strict policy of deer-in-headlights silence.

The Trump admin has given up its appeal of a powerful injunction:

Thought Soup This is a reading group to help people read books from the Workshops4Gaza bookstore, to raise money for Palestinians through The Sameer Project. Please share with your friends.

if you're interested in reading Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt by Orisanmi Burton, my reading group (Thought Soup) will start discussing it in a week (next saturday). see replies for links to buy it to raise money for Palestinians:

It specifically annoys me when people fantasize about language models but seem deeply uncurious about how language actually works---the material conditions that enable languaging, the situated labour of interpretation, the contingency of meaning-making. Go touch grass!

Of course everyone is welcome to daydream, so long as they realize that repressing the necessity of infrastructure to the fantasy of AI, and papering over the mottled, heterogeneous, inevitably-contested nature of infrastructural work---while claiming to do serious commentary---is deeply unserious.

Accounts of AI that glide over AI infrastructure, as it actually exists, don't really say anything about AI so much as project desires onto an imaginary wish-fulfillment object.

The defining feature of AI today is infrastructure: the rapacious buildout of data centres; the transnational configuration of labour exploitation; the grafting of AI onto processes of capitalist accumulation.

a brown dog with pointy ears, a black snout, and white sock feet. he is lying on his side a bed. his back legs are tucked into his body and his front legs are sticking out, extremely straight.

jumbo shrimp

The tech worker movement and the rise of the tech oligarchy Published in Science as Culture (Ahead of Print, 2026)

New commentary by @cellllla.bsky.social, @perhaxis.bsky.social and myself: "The tech worker movement and the rise of the tech oligarchy". www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Join us for BD&S 2026 Colloquium, Panel 1: Constructing Alternatives through Community Data & Data Activism
Jan 21 | 16:00–18:00 GMT (11:00 AM–1:00 PM EST)
uky.zoom.us/j/85254638887

#DataActivism #CriticalDataStudies #DataJustice

sorry (said canadian-ly)

a german shepherd in a forest clearing smiling

a german shepherd facing away from the camera and looking back. in the background is a person out of focus, wearing a coat

a german shepherd running toward the camera on a walkway covered in leaves. in the background is a woman out of focus

a woman in a green coat walking up a leaf-covered path toward a bench. she's looking back at the camera and the sun is striking her face as she looks back. ahead of her is a german shepherd sniffing the ground

thought we might need photos of dog

it would be fun to compile a cross-university wall of shame

"That’s why I hate these New Year’s that fall like fixed maturities, which turn life and human spirit into a commercial concern with its neat final balance, its outstanding amounts, its budget for the new management. They make us lose the continuity of life and spirit."

a pointy eared brown dog with a black snout and orange eyes staring into the camera against a sunlit background. he is trying very hard to look serious despite the fact that he is very silly.

henlo

been thinking a bit with la paperson's "a third university is possible," where the first university accumulates, the second university critiques, and a third university strategizes. catastrophizing, zingily, is not strategy!

if the best you can do is the continual inauguration of critical whatever studies, calling forth the interdisciplinary melding of x and y, you are simply enacting the abundance agenda of academia, and doing capitalist accumulation under the alibi of academic production.

your institutions are, in their silences and their petty punitive moves, green-lighting the annihilation of people, the AI-ification of everything, the continued and accelerated alignments with capital. roll up your fucking sleeves!

high-minded appeals to the sanctity of education under the present conditions aside...this is the terrain!! academic workers getting fired for dumb shit is the terrain!!!

Michigan Offers Handouts for Data Centers Promising Jobs. Will Those Jobs Come? | TechPolicy.Press Nathan Kim and Ira Anwar say current state incentives for data centers reflect a false binary between new jobs and detrimental community impacts.

Considering developments in Michigan as a case study, Nathan Kim and Ira Anwar say current state incentives for data centers reflect a false binary between new jobs and detrimental community impacts.

Flyer text: Say no to the umich - Los Alamos Data Center! UMich is building the world’s “biggest, baddest, fastest” supercomputer for the US military-industrial complex, in conjunction with Los Alamos National Labs. It will consume more power than all of the homes in Ypsi Township combined and more than 40 times the power draw of UM’s existing computing facilities. This facility will primarily be used for nuclear weapons development and production. The good news? Community activism works. We forced the University to push back construction of the data center two years, to 2028 – let’s keep going and shut down the data center project forever. Sign the petition today! DOWN WITH THE WAR MACHINE! PROTECT THE HURON! FIGHT FOR YPSILANTI! INVEST MONEY RESPONSIBLY! TAKE BACK OUR UNIVERSITY! STOP THE DATA CENTER!

Are you a UM student or worker? DEMAND a better world!! We will not be the war machine!!

Sign the petition @ bit.ly/UMNoDataCenterPetition

a german shepherd perched on a computer desk, looking at a glass of water. i'm also looking at the glass of water, intently

a german shepherd perched on a computer desk, looking at the desk with ears perked up. i'm looking at the dog tentatively

a german shepherd booping me in the face. i'm closing my eyes

a german shepherd perched on a computer desk, looking in the direction of the camera, but off into the distance. i'm in the middle of asking if he wants to get off

he's so close to starting a newsletter.

(i've been staring at the Anthropic website and taking screenshots like a crazy person again...for work...)

debug wedding video? build bedtime story app? develop student thinking through Socratic questioning? sure, as long as the task is vaguely cognition-shaped, for a cognition voided of content and containerized for efficient AI delivery.

AI companies claim that AI can do everything by having substantive commitments to absolutely nothing; an omnidirectional blob that mass produces shit.

Flyer for event with QR code (main details all in the above post)

December 4 at 10am @ UMich and on Zoom, I'll be talking about the labor & environmental impacts of AI in historical context. Computing's long history of automation & pollution reframes how we understand capitalism in the digital age.

Register for free: sessions.studentlife.umich.edu/track/event/...

UMich says the Ypsi Data Center won’t “manufacture nuclear weapons.” What does Los Alamos think? University administration must make a choice: Will it side with the public and live up to its stated ideals of serving the public good and public interest? Or will it side with LANL and spend hundreds...

Did you know that the university of Michigan is building the world’s largest supercomputer for Los Alamos National Labs’ nuclear weapons production programs, and paying for $830 million of it despite not being able to use >90% of it?

I wrote about it here:

www.michigandaily.com/opinion/umic...