Adding some nihilism to my Tuesday morning, just for fun.

Good interview, and yet another thing reminding me that I need to read my copy of the book!

No surprises here but still worth bookmarking.

Honest question: Is Grokipedia a wiki? Or just Grok output?

Easy to dunk on Grokipedia, but this article gets at some ideas that I think are particularly important. If I had more time for blogging this semester, I’d write something up on Ellul’s image vs. word dichotomy and how it aligns with Koebler’s thoughts here.

Honestly trying to figure out whether the reason I see Ellul everywhere is because I’m excited about a new scholar I’ve discovered or because his ideas are so well suited for the current moment. “We can be a leader or we can be left behind” captures the opt-in determinism of Ellul’s technique so dang well.

Of course, how the heck am I going to keep expressing concern about AI (through an Ellulian lens or otherwise) if the university has already decided that we’re all getting on board?

Universities are too platform dependent, and even those platforms are too dependent on the next layer of the stack. What a mess.

Some good observations worth bookmarking.

Technology, efficiency, and growing public and private power—this has Ellul written all over it. Gift link.

Who could possibly have anticipated this?

Finally got this book, so I guess I need to read it now.

Not sure if I agree with everything here, but it’s important reflection.

Booooooo. That Wikipedia is being mined by AI scrapers and negatively affected by AI search is such a perfect encapsulation of my concerns about generative AI.

Good reporting from the Kernel on a really disappointing set of changes at the university.

The Onion is truly one of the media outlets we need most during these times.

Some good (scary) observations in here—not least speculation on what xAI’s version of Sora would look like.

Well, this is terrifying.

Strong Ellul vibes in this passage:

The tech could represent the end of visual fact — the idea that video could serve as an objective record of reality — as we know it. Society as a whole will have to treat videos with as much skepticism as people already do words.

Unclear, though, whether Ellul would be cool with increased skepticism of the image or angry at the technology causing it.

Look, maybe this is a genuine misstep on OpenAI’s part, but it still feels to me like the company started with the guardrails off so that it could use this kind of user backlash to push the Overton Window in conversations with rightsholders.

Also, remember that we small potatoes rightsholders will never be able to have our voices heard like Disney or Nintendo.

Something feels off here. An AI CEO who claims they genuinely didn’t anticipate copyright and deepfake concerns is either dumb or playing dumb. I can’t help but suspect the latter, which is arguably worse, since it suggests an effort to shift the discourse before complaints come in.

This is a good article; it would be easy to just roll eyes at Cruz, but this goes further in explaining how Wikipedia actually works.

Just bookmarking everything I read on Sora for future grumpiness.

Wish I’d made more of a stink about Lexington adopting Flock cameras. It’s a creepy-as-hell technology, and we need to get rid of them.

Platformizing AI video generation in the way OpenAI is doing right now just makes me grumpier than I already am.

Good connection of the worrying story about removing anti-ICE apps to bigger problems in tech.

This never occurred to me, but distupting interlibrary loan is a mortal sin.