It's so disappointing, and yet not at all surprising. Particularly how the surrender & anticipatory compliance has been in part led by scholars positioning themselves as the defenders of "classical liberalism" & their visions of science, objectivity, & professional neutrality. Reactionary centrism.

Other HASTAC impact: running into a fellow former HASTAC Scholar at The University of Michigan's Digital IDEAS Summer Institute last year, & reminiscing about Digital Fridays.

I realize you have to frame everything in terms of AI to make anyone care abt anything today, so… These free pubs are the collective effort of ~40 knowledge + creative wrkers celebrating the misfits ideas + entities and aberrant modes of exploration that defy AI’s disciplining, extractive logics :)

To me, HASTAC was a space to think through weird side projects that didn't have the same kind of weight & disciplinary heft of a dissertation. Where I could collaborate w/ PhD & Master's students from a range of disciplines & fields. Where I could learn & practice critical making & tech inquiry.

I participated in a small virtual gathering today reflecting on @hastac.bsky.social. It will be missed, & I'm grateful that @hastacscholars.bsky.social was an early & formative part of PhD my experience. Digital Fridays were fun, as was the collab book review. HASTAC 2023 was a fantastic conference.

"The overpasses are designed for larger animals, but through surveys and trail cameras, biologists have spotted even smaller ones, like bunnies and northern leopard frogs — which have seen dramatic declines in population over the last few years earning a protected status — using the crossings."

The U.S. federal government is enlisting artificial intelligence to help decide what public records you get to see, reports Nate Jones for the Washington Post. .

Being GenX/Millennial is such a trip. In our lifetimes, we saw people our age getting wild criminal penalties for pirating music and now have to sit and watch as companies gobble up our work with impunity.

We're planning a public execution. We only admit white "refugees" from a former apartheid state. Our domestic security service uses white nationalist messaging. And the president routinely appears to encourage or endorse violence against his opponents & the media. Nothing subtle or complicated here.

It feels like pretty soon I'm going to need a bot to contain all of the bots sending 2026 midterm campaign fundraising texts. Really getting out of hand (and rather annoying) at this point.