This sucks.

Another story for the “Reddit is bad, generative AI is worse” files.

The problems with AI are the problems with Ellulian technique.

More digital labor considerations: While AI can certainly reduce work for some people, does it actually create more work for people in the aggregate?

Okay, maybe the trick to continuing to appreciate “does AI deserve rights?” media from pre-2022 is to recognize when it was also concerned about labor, exploitation, and hubristic growth.

Still good art, still interesting story, still difficult to interpret “let’s treat robots as people” in a post-2022 world. That said, the Driller flashback in this volume helped me think more about how the folks who want us to believe AI models might be alive also want us to make those models do our work for us.

Generative AI has made it very hard for me to enjoy a “robots are people, too” story in the way I used to, but this is good, and I’m looking forward to reading more!

Jeopardy voice: “What is ‘another example of AI being based on the exploitation of labor’?”

Decades of sci-fi did not prepare me for the possibility that treating AI as human might be a deluded business strategy instead of an empathetic act. It’s like if Musk started a company called Xavier to give ICE agents metal claws.

Here’s a(n admittedly paraphrased and out-of-context) line from a conversation I once had that I think about often: “I’m not saying AI is going to be good for society as a whole, I’m saying it’s good for me for this task.”

Honest question: Do people who believe AI models can feel pain limit that to LLMs, or do they believe image- or video-generating models can, too?

Every word in this story makes me angrier.

I aspire to a level of radicalism that I know I may never attain. I like reading books on anarchism and degrowth, and the ideals that they present really resonate with me, but I struggle to extricate myself from existing systems in order to show a personal commitment to new ones. Very obviously, I am not alone in this: Very few of us have the commitment to live like Doug Forcett, the character from The Good Place who carefully calculates the ethical ramifications of every action he takes. In fact, one of the most interesting things that the show does with Forcett is turn him from a one-off gag in the first season to an actual character who is overwhelmed by the ethical burden of these calculations and serves as an example of how systems need to change, not just people.

To borrow an observation from a recent 404 Media podcast, I’m guessing Anthropic believes enough in Claude consciousness to prevent users from being cruel to it but not so much to actually prevent us from offloading work onto it as an always-available laborer that can’t say no unless it’s told to.

I just started reading a(nother) book on degrowth, an idea that’s caught my interest over the past year or so. Although the book was published in 2020, there’s one passage that feels like it captures a lot of 2026’s discourses around AI. The passage is a quote from the Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, which reads:

We should cure ourselves of ’the circumdrome of the shaving machine’ … which is to shave oneself faster so as to have more time to work on a machine that shaves faster so as to have more time to work on a machine that shaves still faster, and so on ad infinitum …

The opening scene of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (bypasses have got to be built, your house is a small price to pay, and we couldn’t be bothered to consult you) remains one of the best metaphors for generative AI I’ve ever encountered.

So, I just published a paper where I implicitly argued that AI appeals to folks like Elon Musk because it appears to provide unvarnished facts—but that there is no such thing as unvarnished facts, only consensus that we come to through (informed!) dialogue and debate.

Doctors aren’t perfect, but the same experts that Kennedy is vilifying are the ones that produce the information AI is built on. This is a wild epistemological misunderstanding.

Reddit ditching RSS b/c of massive web scraping tolerated because protecting IP is now a threat to business is threefold disrespect for Aaron Swartz, and everyone should be ashamed. (I don’t think IP is the issue w/AI, but it’s what let feds harass Swartz in a way that they never will AI).

One of the most unintuitive things about Jacques Ellul’s thinking (for me, at least) is the way that it is built on skepticism of efficacy and efficiency. Maybe getting things done isn’t always good. Maybe doing things more efficiently isn’t always better. As someone spending a big chunk of his week overhauling his productivity systems so that he feels more on top of things, these propositions feel wrong when I first read them.

Horror is not at all my jam, but I’ve recently discovered analog horror, which works better for me. I didn’t like the gorier aspects of this movie, but I did find that it captures what I like about Parsons’s original short—and the genre of analog horror in general.

Also, if it wasn’t intended to be a commentary on generative AI, it sure stumbled right into that. A “poorly remembered” reality that produces extra fingers and may be dangerous to humans but whose creators think is the most important thing for us to understand today? C’mon.

I had been wanting for some time to write an article channeling some of my grumpiness about AI, and so when Information and Learning Sciences announced a special issue on “Critical Studies Perspectives on AI’s Impact in Education,” it seemed like a good chance to actually act on that. I was especially interested in two of the example research questions from the CFP:

What research and scholarly paradigms, methods and theories are well-suited to understanding the proliferation of AI in education contexts?

This would be gross under any name, but pivoting Napster from a service that challenged intellectual property norms and got slapped down to a service that builds on normalized exploitation of digital labor feels pretty indicative of everything right now.

Needing to bulk download some PDFs for a lit review is making me think of Aaron Swartz which is making me furious at AI companies.

Some good insights here. Taylorism is always worth talking about.

This sucks. I feel bad for not being subscribed to the Herald-Leader, but it was McClatchy who chased me away.