This. I’m still baffled at how few academics get this, but that’s what happens when you don’t see yourself as labour

I'm stoked to say that Beneath the Wage was shortlisted for the Deutscher Prize--especially honored to be in the company of so many rad scholars, especially @alybatt.bsky.social, whose book Free Gifts is AMAZING!

This is your occasional reminder that generative "AI" in particular could have been developed on public domain materials and/or licensed and compensated works but the major players intentionally, methodically and systemically chose to steal labor from working creative folks instead

We have been laying off staff. Berkeley is hiring 72 tenure-line faculty this year. UCLA is hiring 8. The chancellor has announced two new vice-chancellor direct reports for himself. We are told there is no money. Class sizes have been doubled.

YOU LOVE TO SEE IT!

I used to have a joke with Joshua that just like they used to say you should only eat oysters in months with an "R" in their name, you can also only get good marshmallow-based candy in those same months: the great Halloween-Easter candy cycle.

Yo. This is the union calling for a boycott. Here in America people like to say "Well I was already boycotting Starbucks!" No you were not. You were just choosing not to buy their stuff. That is not a boycott. A boycott is an organized, collective activity. "I" don't boycott: we do.

This op ed was so unbelievably stupid (and frankly fucking offensive to actual rural ppl) that the reveal in his bio that he's an editor for Compact wasn't even that surprising.

"When a bridge collapses, you don’t analyze whether the bridge was ethical or sentient or why it decided to collapse. You ask, who built this bridge to be so flimsy? There are permits you have to acquire [& supposed] tests. When you ask about the bridge collapsing itself, you’ve lost the thread"

These AI-LMS integrations typically do not allow opt-out by students or faculty. All inputs and interactions are used as training data to build new models meant to replace faculty entirely with digital avatars. Actual human empathy & expertise to train simulations of empathy & expertise.

ez mode solidarity opportunity you might not have been aware of. No Starbucks till the union gets a contract.

From The Crimson editorial board: “…to encourage unfettered use of AI, especially for “writing-intensive” courses, is antithetical to promoting learning and jeopardizes the purpose of a liberal arts education.”