I would be more critical of generative AI than Punya, but this is a solid, important argument.

This project is one of my favorite things to come out of the program I teach in, and I’m glad Meghan’s work is getting recognition!

One of the most frustrating experiences I’ve ever had with a journal appears to be coming to a happy conclusion, and that’s not a bad way to start a Monday.

This video has been on my mind all morning, and it makes me so sad.

I don’t personally need research funding, but I work in an academic ecosystem that’s highly dependent on it. Things aren’t looking good.

I hate doing anything that seems to give Skinner any credit—especially after seeing how critical of him Ellul has been—but associating cleaning off our breakfast bar with lighting a scented candle has worked some behaviorist magic on me.

I was already planning to voice skepticism about Apple partnerships with universities in a manuscript I’m writing, but now I’ve got this to cite as well.

Masnick’s writing has never struck me as inflammatory or rushed. If he’s using this language, we should all be worried.

This is unlikely to make a difference, but I’m grateful anyway.

This is what my employer cut ties with.

This is an ambitious book—probably overambitious, and I don’t agree with all of the claims, especially with 60-70 years for Ellul’s ideas to marinate in continued technological development. Yet, his ideas are valuable and prescient—I don’t buy his claims as an ontological argument, but I think they make for a compelling theoretical framework for making sense of lots of what’s happening today.

Last month, I wrote on both my reading up on Jacques Ellul and on concerns about how we understand the purpose and value of research. I’m continuing to read—or, rather, listen to—Ellul’s The Technological Society, and I was interested to find a passage that brought together these two ideas. Here’s Ellul, writing in the mid-twentieth century:

We have already examined the requirement of immediate applicability; here we meet it again on the state level. The state is not disinterested any more than private capitalists, but it is concerned in a different way. The state claims to represent the public interest and hence to have the duty of being a “good manager,” dispensing the public revenues only on condition that they mean something, that they pay off. Disinterested activity on the part of the state is inconceivable. Some may such that such activity should not be impossible; but in fact it is impossible. Neither individuals nor public opinion nor the structure of the state is oriented toward the acceptance of the kind of culture pure scientific research would represent.

Look, I don’t have experience running an academic publishing company, but I don’t know if I’d activate the experimental AI summarizer on an article exploring the ethics of generative AI.

Thanks to this article from The Atlantic that I saw on Bluesky, I’ve been able to confirm something that I’ve long assumed to be the case: that my creative and scholarly work is being used to train generative AI tools. More specifically, I used the searchable database embedded in the article to search for myself and find that at least eight of my articles (plus two corrections) are available in the LibGen pirate library—which means that they were almost certainly used by Meta to train their Llama LLM.

“My anxiety is really high; taking some time off during spring break would be the healthy thing to do.” vs. “Not using spring break to get caught up is making me anxious about work I feel behind on.”

So, it turns out that spending time with Jacques Ellul’s mid-20th century critiques of systematization, abstraction, “productivity,” and “efficiency” does NOT make it any easier to write letters evaluating colleagues’ progress toward tenure.

C’est du n’importe quoi, ça. Quelle honte, ce pays.

On one hand, if the university’s connections are tenuous, I can understand making the easy move to get the administration off our back—especially when I’m confident that UK is pushing back against NIH indirect costs and other issues. On the other, I certainly hope that our response to every attack isn’t going to be to roll over and wash our hands of things.

I mean, I’ve always wanted to live and work in France, but I’ve never wanted to feel like I would have to.

I’ve been teaching my department’s class on content management systems since Fall 2019, which means that I’m coming up on my seventh(!) time with the course next August. Every time that I’ve taught it, I’ve used the Hugo static site software and the WordPress CMS as examples of content management concepts. WordPress is the more (most!) popular web CMS out there, and so it’s always been my main area of focus; I think that Hugo does a wonderful job of illustrating some CMS concepts, but it also has a higher technical learning curve, so I’ve always felt conflicted about its role in the classroom. Since the very first time I taught with this combination of software, students have expressed a clear preference for WordPress, and so every time I teach the class, I think that I’m going to give it up and just focus on WordPress the next time around.

Laugh to keep from crying.

Hmmm. Don’t love this.

In the past 24 hours, I’ve seen two different CFPs that apply perfectly to a paper I wrote and then abandoned after a rejection and a paper I’ve wanted to write but had no good reason to. This may be what gets me back into a research groove this semester.

This last weekend, I made a brief appearance in an article from the Salt Lake Tribune discussing the influence of social media on Mormon masculinity. As I’ve noted before, the Tribune aggressively paywalls, but it’s hard to fault them. I get access to their religion coverage by paying $3/month to the Patreon for their Mormon Land podcast.

My appearance is brief—a simple mention that Jordan Peterson is mentioned a number of times in a forum site I’m studying with colleagues—but those colleagues (Levi Sands at the University of Iowa and Amy Chapman at Arizona State) have more to say about the unsurprising, ambiguous, and worrying overlap between figures like Peterson and Andrew Tate and online Mormonism. Indeed, the article later quotes one Mormon influencer as describing “Guys like Andrew Tate” as “colleagues of mine,” and the influencer in particular is a familiar face from the work Amy and I have done on the DezNat movement from Mormon Twitter.

This is very cool, especially the SSO bit.