Lee Vinsel
@STS_News
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I do technology studies, make Peoples & Things podcast, co-founded @The_Maintainers , and profess Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech.
Blacksburg, VA
Joined December 2011
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A friend on reading Donna Haraway:
"It is fundamentally unjust and a mark of privilege that a select few are allowed to write as if they have just taken a massive bong hit while journal editors and others push the rest of us to write clearly and make actual sense."
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I am adding my voice to
@PsychedelicSTS
's important post about what she experienced under
@SJasanoff
in the
@HarvardSTS
program. In this post, I describe my own experiences. It was a toxic place because Jasanoff made it that way.
#MeTooSTS
#WeDoSTS
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Judy Wajcman's _Pressed for Time_ is the free e-book from University of Chicago Press this month. It is one of my favorite books on the sociology of technology of all . . . time, and you should take the opportunity to check it out if you haven't already.
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One of my jobs at VT is to teach a course called "Innovation in Context."
I taught someone else's course the first time, but swore I'd go my own way the 2nd.
I've come up with a draft reading list the finally feels right.
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When I was a PhD student, the "Sandage Method" for reading in graduate school was handed around samizdat style. Put together by a grad student without
@ScottSandage
's permission, I think, it's now something I give to all my grad students. Mine is a copy of a copy of a copy of a
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I have mixed feelings about members of the hist of tech and STS communities sharing this new Morozov effort because, like others, I believe he effectively plagiarized Eden Medina in the New Yorker when he was a relatively well-known writer and she was a junior female scholar.
I'm happy to announce The Santiago Boys, a podcast that kept me busy for two years. Drawing on more than 200 interviews in multiple languages, it tells the forgotten story of Allende's tech legacy. The trailer is up. The 9-part podcast is coming in summer.
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One environmental motto has to be, "Think very seriously about why you want to put a computer chip into a product that we've used perfectly well for decades upon decades without computer chips."
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I do not know the specifics of this case, nor can I vouch for them. But this rings very true with my experience and the experience of my peers in the Harvard STS program. It was toxic and abusive, largely because Jasanoff made it that way. It took me years to recover from.
Finally public! My story of how I was sexually harassed, marginalized, silenced, excluded, and gaslighted at/by the
@HarvardSTS
Program. Join the
#MeTooSTS
and
#WeDoSTS
movement to fight together against abuses of power in STS/academia! 🤬😱😲😭😳🤮🤢✊
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Once again, a “tech” leader says we “need” a field that has existed for 50 years. It’s called Science and Technology Studies.
What we really need are leaders who feel a duty to do a bit of research before talking out of their necks.
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Fair warning that some of my work may become somewhat polemical. I've been holding back what I think and feel about so many topics.
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Our culture really needs an autopsy of why folks, especially journalists, thought the "sharing economy" was a technological revolution.
If anything, as several have argued, it was a legal innovation based on mis-categorizing workers as contractors.
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Folks,
After months of work, I'm really excited to launch our new podcast on human life with technology, Peoples & Things.
The first episode features Ruth Schwartz Cowan talking about her career and the genesis and legacy of _More Work for Mother_.
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I have experienced this every semester I taught CS majors - who are mostly young men, white guys to be precise - about the historical and social dimensions of computing: the deathless assumption that other people's jobs, especially those of secretary's, are dumb and automatable.
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Dreams of massive automation usually involve (often young white) dudes fantasizing about how simple other people's jobs are.
Administrative/secretarial labor is a classic example. AI enthusiasts assume it is simple, when in fact it is highly varied and involves improvisation.
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I'm teaching a six-week Intro to STS this course this summer and have decided to go light on theory and heavy on rich case studies.
This led me to a fun thought experiment:
If you had to choose/highlight only 6 STS concepts, what would they be?
I'd love to hear from any & all
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This is the best version of the trolley problem I've seen in years. V insightful.
Thanks,
@wellerstein
.
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Interviewing the great JoAnne Yates about her classic book _Control Through Communication_ today. Let me know if there's anything you'd like to hear her discuss about it or any of her other work.
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My sense is that very few universities, including ones with STS programs, offer courses on the economics of technology that includes reflections on industrial organization + shakeouts, market sizes and capitalization, growth accounting, how bubbles work, etc. But . . . we should!
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After 15 years of studying and writing about technology, I have basically given up hope that better ideas displace bad ideas.
The unfounded, repeatedly debunked notion that teaching lots of people coding somehow solves deep social and economic problems is a great example.
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By the way, if not obvious, use of conceptually thin and largely un-insightful multisyllabic neologisms - like co-production, sociotechnical imaginaries, civic epistemology, and such - was very intertwined with the toxic power relations and cult of personality around Jasanoff.
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This claim is crazy. Many departments founded since the late 60s focus on technology and responsibility. Loads of people looking into algorithms. (Maybe even too many, when compared to other mundane tech.) From this NYTs op-ed:
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I enjoyed this WSJ piece, "Tech Giants Pour Billions Into AI, but Hype Doesn’t Always Match Reality"
This excerpt is the heart of it for me. So much energy put into the ethical, legal, and social implications of "AI," when the main point is it's failing.
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Last summer,
@LeapingRobot
,
@dcbrock
, the historian of business and technology Margaret Graham, and I held a workshop, which included a bunch of smart people, on the notion of the "4th Industrial Revolution." Today we are publishing the papers from it.
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In my grad methods seminar, I often talk about John Levi Martin's brief, very funny essay, "The Project," poorly defined projects that appear to have their own needs and take over scholars lives.
Well, a grad student sent me this perfect meme.
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Alright, gang.
I'd like to make this better (and shorter) but the reality is that I have other stuff looming in my life.
Here are my first reflections on criticism that feeds/feeds upon hype. What I jokingly refer to as criti-hype (and hype-o-crit).
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You know what's even funnier now than it was a year ago when it was already pretty funny?
The idea that MOOCs were going to be a highly effective and popular way to provide education.
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I've had a lot of people - both young and old - who were hurt by Sheila Jasanoff reach out in the past few days. They are feeling a lot of pain right now. If that's you too, you do not need to be alone. Feel free to contact me, or talk to a friend.
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I am giving a talk tomorrow about ways in which we need to improve technology studies, including by making them more materialist (and less discourse-centered). One thing I will say is we need to re-learn old methods from social and economic history for studying matter.
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>
@ChrisPerkinsDnD
,
@shellymoo
,
@gregtito
, here's my 3 yr old son's drawing of Xanathar the beholder. Thought you might get a kick out of it.
#dndkids
@Wizards_DnD
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Forget the
#innovators
. What about The
#Maintainers
? A Call for Proposals.
#histstm
http://t.co/34wNuEmLwS
http://t.co/i7U7FTb8cm
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Virginia Tech has a nice tradition where they buy a book for the library collection in your honor when you get tenure. I wanted to get something older, so I had them pick up a book by the great Peter Winch that was not in the collection.
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Talking to one of my grad students and we realized one reason why
#edtech
is such a hellworld:
It combines two very American ideologies - the idea that education is the solution to every social problem, and the idea that technology is the solution to every kind of problem.
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Prepping for the first round of interviews for Peoples and Things, my forthcoming podcast about human life with technology.
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This WSJ headline - "Generative AI Is Already Changing White-Collar Work as We Know It" - got me excited and then pissed me off. The article presents zero evidence of change. It's misleading but in a way that's fairly common, so here's a thread about it.
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It's wild when you look for syllabi on race and technology how many classes focus almost exclusively on digital technology . . .
As if there weren't differences around technologies and technologies weren't used in oppression and resistance since "race" first emerged.
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Let's say you want to avoid "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" because of the open question about the veracity of the bridges example.
What would your go-to text/case be to teach - FRESHMEN! - undergraduates the artifacts-have-politics idea?
Should be both approachable and juicy.
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Writing about the history of mass production is always a nice excuse to revisit Thomas Thwaites' _The Toaster Project_, in which Thwaites made a toaster from scratch and found that it cost 250 times what a toaster go for in a store.
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I wrote a whole book on this!
If you want examples of success, you probably can't beat the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1970 leading to the catalytic converter.
hivemind, what’s a good case where a regulation has actually encouraged innovation? (eg forcing a fleet of cars to be energy efficient presumably has pushed electric cars forward.)
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My parents have moved their big ol’ camper to my forested property. I’m considering turning it into a writing retreat for technology studies nerds.
Would come with optional hikes, meditation and motivational sessions, consults, and campfire songs.
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I am re-upping
@ScottSandage
's method for how to read in grad school because a first year grad student was talking to me yesterday about having trouble keeping up. I found Scott's approach very helpful and others have too.
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I’ve been practicing for hours upon hours these past weeks because on Saturday morning I’ll be playing music at the Blacksburg Farmers Market under my (powerful) stage name, A Basic Dad. It will be my first time playing a whole set of music in front of an audience.
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After months of planning, I've kicked off a new newsletter about technology studies called Peoples & Things. On it, you'll learn a lot about the podcast of the same name and see me reflecting on how to do technology studies well. GET EXCITED!
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So after all the educational experiences during COVID, we'll never have to hear that online education is the future again, right? Right?!
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LOL.
@RussellProf
and I are headed to a writing retreat in the mountains to work on our
@The_Maintainers
book, and some fool rental company gave us an (un-requested) Dodge Challenger.
We are going to Dukes of Hazzard the $&@# out of this thing.
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Increasingly when I give talks, I show the Ngram for "technology," which demonstrates it is primarily a post-WWII term. We have to be very careful to distinguish actual material change from the ideology of "technology," which has been and is extremely potent and often wrong.
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Found this 1957 Virginia state grade school history textbook at a local thrift store. It was apparently widely used in the state.
It’s treatment of slavery is about as bad as you’d expect.
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An academic friend is going to stop publishing on the history and sociology of computing and start working on "yard cultures," which is just him doing yard work and writing about it.
He's going to call it "auto-ethnography" to make it sound fancy.
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SUPER stoked to teach this grad seminar this fall - Communicating Academic Ideas to Non-Academic Audiences - with my friend Fabian Prieto-Nanez + my beloved Peoples & Things production crew.
Put it in a google doc, if that's easier. Feel free to comment.
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Just got done interviewing the great Ruth Schwartz Cowan for my forthcoming podcast, Peoples & Things. We talked about the genesis and legacy of her classic book, More Work for Mother, and what it was like working as a woman + tech historian in the 1970s. Wonderful conversation.
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I'm really disappointed to see the Harvard STS program putting out calls for fellows, like all is business as usual, given the horrors that came to light last fall (links below). I *STRONGLY* recommend junior scholars talk to trusted mentors and others before applying.
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Now that I've posted "Start Where the Pain Is," I'm starting to work on "Method in Technology Studies," which argues that we'd better do work that allows us to account for material reality and not get stuck at the level of ideas/discourses/ideologies.
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Enjoyed this paper, "The Fallacy of AI Functionality," by
@rajiinio
,
@ziebrah
,
@Aaron_Horowitz
, and
@aselbst
. Too often critics of "AI" assume it works, leading to a poor information environment, including for policy.
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Just thinking about all of the ordinary technological systems causing real suffering at this precise moment (broken elevators, bug infested public housing, crumbling mobile homes, opioid overdoses) while this stupid fucking AI story hoovers oxygen.
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>
@RussellProf
and I finished the first full draft of
@The_Maintainers
book this weekend. There's still a LOT of work to do, and our editor
@derekreed
certainly has his work cut out for him. LOL. But it's a world apart from where we were.
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This will be a central part of my Innovation in Context course. I believe that learning to spot + question bullshit should be a core outcome of education, especially college education. It's an important skill to have in all walks of life, inc. business.
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Technologies that would be easy to cover in a race and technology class because there's already books on them:
Slave ships
Guns
Agricultural traditions, including rice
Cotton and the cotton gin
Medical technologies, including phrenology
Railroads, including Plessy v Ferguson
It's wild when you look for syllabi on race and technology how many classes focus almost exclusively on digital technology . . .
As if there weren't differences around technologies and technologies weren't used in oppression and resistance since "race" first emerged.
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McKinsey's record on these topics is absolutely dreadful. As I wrote in my recent MIT Sloan Management Review essay, consultants, conferences, vendors, and industry analysts should all be avoided when trying to think realistically about new technologies.
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Can I just talk about how much I HATE HATE HATE the mini-essays that come before online recipes these days?
WHO are they written for? Or are they all about juking search engine results?
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I’m thinking about how I would teach a class on the technology bubble that is currently popping. Not sure when to periodize. Let’s say 2011-2021, for now. Interested in what you all would assign, but here’s a thread with some initial thoughts.
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Feels good to hold it in my hand.
A Maintainers essay I wrote with
@RussellProf
in the new issue of Technology & Culture.
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Just hooked this up to a drip feed. It's going directly into my veins.
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Has anyone written yet about how the framework of "Public Interest Technology" focuses so heavily on digital technologies to the exclusion of . . . . . . . like, all other technologies?
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Apparently I started writing this in 2015. Man. So much energy and sadness and anger. I'll scrub it up in light of
@PsychedelicSTS
's Medium piece and post sometime this week.
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LOL
Like I said before, self-driving car hype was real. Investors and journalists went for it big time. But so did STS scholars - and that's a shame.
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Woke up to this in my inbox from a friend. I've been laughing about it all morning.
The metaphor line - lololol
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So happy that I've found a reason to use this image in a talk for design students.
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A student I know is studying engineers in their first years on the job after graduating. When asked what they’d like to tell their former selves, they often say, “You don’t know shit.”
Instead of Design Thinking’s “creative confidence,” we need to teach creative humility.
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Today I sent the index for my history of automobile regulation (and the role standards played in it) to the press. And unless something needs tweaking, my role is done.
Felt odd - kind of like saying goodbye to nearly a decade of my life.
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Today my interview with the great JoAnne Yates went up on the Peoples & Things podcast. We focus on her classic book _Control Through Communication_ but also cover the arc of her career. It was a lot of fun for me.
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Some of the people arrested while protesting peacefully at Virginia Tech are my students. They are also my friends. I love them. I am very proud of them. And I will do whatever I can to support them.
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People are loving this Tweet.
It's a great example of our moment, as probably best exemplified by Design Thinking and Elon Musk: take something that's existed for a long time, wrap it in buzzwords, call it new.
Thus, geography (old, tired, boring) becomes "Urban Science."
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LMAO. It's been far too long since I've been in an airport to see what kinds of ridiculous "tech" books are out there. This one has me in stitches. I'm in pain.
REVOLUTIONIZE EVERYTHING
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I am really happy and excited!
The STS Department welcomes Assistant Professor Lee Vinsel to our faculty beginning in fall of 2017!
@STS_News
@VT_LiberalArts
#sts
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I wrote about Morozov's borrowing when it first happened. I still stand by what I wrote there.
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Putting the final touches on
@The_Maintainers
grad seminar I'm teaching this semester. The syllabus has mostly lived in my head until now.
I'd like to make the first few weeks less male-dominated, but it's getting there.
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What's the best piece of writing that defines and criticizes solutionism, the technological fix, and the like?I'm looking for something that is conceptually rigorous and clear, not loose pop criticism stuff. Like, I would almost like an analytical philosopher's take . . .
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In case you were confused about whether
#innovation
is a religious cult, Audible has just opened an "Innovation Cathedral" in Newark, NJ.
My favorite part? The highly un-innovative and inefficient/unproductive open office plan. Really "disrupting"!
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When STS folks tell me they study emerging technologies, I’m going to reply that I’m into emerged technologies.
It’s very difficult to study things that don’t exist much beyond hype.
A good laugh: revisit early anticipatory governance and see how it focuses on . . . nanotech.
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I'm so shocked my mind is having trouble functioning. Turns out self-driving car boosters were overly optimistic.
"'We overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles,' Ford’s chief executive, Jim Hackett, said at the Detroit Economic Club in April."
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A lot of times when I hear people talking about "design" today, I am like, "Hold on, are you talking about professional design, such as industrial design, graphic design, etc.? Or are you talking about some kind of mystical-theological movement meant to encompass all of reality?"
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We will need to think and talk more about how the idea of an "STS identity" was used as a tool of power and exclusion.
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I'm sure this has been said millions of time before, but every time I'm around the non-profit sector I'm blown away not just by the innovation-speak but by the high modernist trappings - like "framework" and "tool kit." Seems the rhetoric is mostly for funders who want "scale."
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Just learned that
@The_Maintainers
essay
@RussellProf
and I wrote “,After Innovation, Turn to Maintenance,” will be published in the January issue of Technology and Culture.
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A friend who must remain anonymous for work reasons asks me to add this to the conversation, "Can we add to the thread sheila enabling men in the group to publish research done by women without their authorship?"
@LibertyChee
@HarvardSTS
You are spotting sth important here because I was also noticing how they were targeting other great female scholars in the group. It definitely is a pattern they use to get rid of or dominate female competitors.
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@daspitzberg
@STS_Rebecca
@tristanharris
@aza
@HumaneTech_
@4sWeb
Yeah. I love it when people say we “need” fields that already exist. These unsubstantiated absence arguments are almost always self-interested: “There’s a gap . . . and I WOULD BE HAPPY TO FILL IT FOR YOU!!!”
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Slowly working on a video on why I don't go in for "futures" of any sort. I am really enjoying this John Levi Martin essay on Horkheimer on imagination.
Horkheimer saw imagination as "something that strengthened the hold of the existent on us, not the reverse."
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I had a lot of fun writing this one. It started life as a Twitter thread deconstructing a hype-y WSJ article on AI. Then my editor at the Management Review said, “Good, but what advice would you give business leaders about generative AI right now?” This piece is the result.
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A friend on the digital studies/STS job market, "Everything is either AI or misinformation."
Ah, yes, because we academics and our organizational units are also shallow fad followers.
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Something I heard last year at a friend’s book manuscript workshop has really stuck with me. Someone said, “Your book needs a conclusion, but please don’t have it end with the cliche, ‘There needs to be collective action.’” Since then, I’ve seen that concluding tick so often.
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Even more damning is
@merylalper
's piece on the issue from the time, which demonstrates that Morozov was drawing on Medina's original research without making that clear to readers. Alper presents receipts.
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My colleague Matt Wisnioski and I have a piece up in the
@ChronicleReview
about the Virginia Tech-Amazon "Innovation Campus" and why such initiatives usually fail to deliver on their promissory notes.
(Paywalled so please contact me if you need access)
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