Innovations in scamming: Folks are predicting that AI will supercharge scams alongside any technical and administrative innovation. Here’s one example of an unethical use of AI, where an internet-based GLP-1 hub used AI to generate fake product images and before and after photos of smiling patients.
AI
Enh: Describing the development of agentic AI as a natural evolutionary transition naturalizes specific design choices made by specific people at Google et al. It makes it harder, not easier, to find out why this path? Who decided? What was not built?
I heard a good talk on “slow brain” activities this week and have been thinking about that alongside indie web practices. I’m not alone: how to leave your feed and go exploring again.
Testing a new feature I created using a mix of open source code and Claude, hoping I didn’t break my own site. I pulled together a dynamic link library using a Hugo partial and some shortcode that automatically catalogs all of my outbound links into sortable lists.
The cost of moving to token-based access to tech, rather than seat-based licenses based on employee headcount.
“Last mile” issues around AI in Harvard Business Review. Digital technologies work best in optimal environments, while most real world environments are nonoptimal and arguably non-optimizable.
An observation on feminist writing and Jezebel: Throughout history, a lot of time and energy has been spent mediating how and whether certain kinds of people talk to one another. The feminist blogosphere, for all its faults, was the first time lateral, public, unmediated conversation happened among women at scale. Many kinds of women were there that had no space at other tables. And it was very messy, and very revealing, because it was the first time that happened at scale for all to see.
Some thoughts:
- When I started in 2001, the most viewed website about feminism on the internet was a solo blog by a man in Portland.
- I just pulled Mindy Seu’s “Cyberfeminism Index” off my shelf, a veritable tome, and the feminist sites don’t even make the table of contents. Which is not an indictment of the book, but an example of how ephemeral all this is online.
- You can see this on Twitter in the live debate about what Jezebel was and wasn’t, a conversation happening mostly through collective remembering. Jezebel joined the pack of blogs at some point, and they were big dogs, but they weren’t responsible for the creation or steering of the digital movement. They were a glossy, spendy repackaging of the organic thing, backed by real investors. It’s wild to see the entirety of the movement attributed to Jezebel by young Twitter, given that most of the indies kept Jezebel at arms’ length until much later. They were pretty widely considered a corporate interloper in a grassroots arena, though in hindsight that wasn’t right either.
- The first time the indie bloggers gave Jezebel their day was when they published the untouched photographs of Faith Hill on the cover of Redbook, a women’s magazine. The Redbook post tore the veil off the beauty industry in real time. Until then, the idea that “celebrities are photoshopped” and “photos are retouched” was almost an urban myth, which is easy to forget given the ubiquity of filters and AI now. Then, you heard about it but couldn’t confirm it for yourself unless you had firsthand experience. Retouching was a discrete industry practice, digital tools were still expensive and clunky, and all of it was surrounded by a lot of tradecraft and secrecy. The mystery of celebrity image management exploded with an animated gif on a public-facing post, and it was rad.
What Midjourney (AI) thinks university leaders look like. Of course, the technology reflects old ideas about expertise and leadership, but AI adds the ability to reproduce these biases times infinity.
Another AI writing tell that annoys me is the preoccupation with describing what “exists,” and what is “structural” or “architectural” to an ephemeral idea. LLMs seem tuned to describing physical presence and connections even where they aren’t appropriate and don’t make sense.
A couple of weeks ago I had an interesting convo with Jessica Grose on Threads about the rise of the “Luddite teen” trend. I largely suspect neo-Luddism is a class-related trend and will not be durable. In short, I remain unconvinced that the concern of white collar professionals and parents about the attention economy can be universalized to everyone in the actual economy. This weekend, the NYT reports that the “one laptop per child” goal we’ve been living with in public education may be on the way out, like I hinted in that thread. As the anti-AI backlash develops in real time, it will implicate other tech trends like so.
I’ve been dismayed to find out how much schoolwork happens in Google Classroom in 2026, especially since the COVID shutdown accelerated the shift. My kiddo has received a good deal of math instruction through digital modules, and I’ve learned that if I want her experience to be different, I need to be prepared to pay out of pocket for a private tutor (a scenario taken for granted by much of the commentariat). At the same time, I learned that our local school district is struggling to keep up with the costs of all the hardware and software it committed to over the years, ostensibly for educational continuity, equity and access. Do we need the tech or not? Who decides what it means and how it’s applied? Chicken, egg.
I think it would be foolish to throw up our hands and say the kids need paper and pencil and nothing else, and yet that’s where the discourse is going. I have low confidence that our current landscape will produce a sane and reasonable solution to this tangle – even Haidt is selling you a product here. Until then, we need to consider what it means to offload the costs, accountability, and responsibility for this technology onto school districts, parents, and children, many of whom do not have the time, resources, or know-how to curate an ideal tech experience on nights and weekends.
From 2024: Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor of Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia, on the durable limits of Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation.”
Looking at early feminist blogs and how they previewed the social critiques and economic problems present within today’s attention and publishing economies. What is old is new again.
This post is mostly an excuse to talk about my latest playlist: Digital Animal. This one consists of about 200 songs across genres, all reflecting on our human relationship to science and technology, futurism, digital culture and the internet.
When I’m chewing over a big idea, I like to compile resources in and around that idea to help support my thinking. Embracing my angst about artificial intelligence, I started compiling songs that reach back to the early 20th century, tapping into prior generations’ anxieties about telephones, television and early networking technology, adding more contemporary concerns as I went. The playlist runs from David Bowie and Blue Öyster Cult and Kraftwerk to Zapp and Radiohead, then forward into modern takes on social media, cell phones, and the internet from Missy Elliott, Gillian Welch and Charli XCX.
I like a playlist because it’s convenient, and because songs are one place where meaning and feeling are created simultaneously, and because it’s easy to spot salient patterns across disparate sources. Scholars in interdisciplinary studies have long argued that you cannot fully understand a thing without understanding what it feels like to live with it, and that cultural analysis may get you there faster than surveys will anyway. Meanwhile most writing about technology separates feelings from form and function. Art and music compress all three, and have the potential to surface ideas that professional and institutional language can’t. Art and culture frequently peg an issue down before emerging best practices are formalized in business and academia.
For anyone working in technology communications, that lag between culture and practice has practical consequences. The language we use to describe technical systems shapes what people can think and do about those systems. An institutional frame — efficiency, access, innovation, value — consistently misses important dynamics that people living inside those systems are experiencing as users and as people. Art keeps the human subject inside the frame, functioning as both anecdote and data.
Plus, it’s fun and we should collectively think about art as much as possible. So, treat every song like a portal.
What does it mean to be both digital and animal? Some observations:
- Grief and sadness sit next to fun and ecstasy. Many of the older songs see computers as friend and companion, treating tech with a kind of tender curiosity, a toy that makes you happy as much as a medium for expressing longing and desire. These nevertheless tend to be layered with a sense of loneliness, a minor key, a dynamic that bears out through user research.
- Between the era of telephones and the digital web, there are a charming number of songs about beepers, beeping and pagers. I’m hopelessly devoted to Missy’s “Beep Me 911” right now.
- Recent songs are concerned about understanding identity and the self under the pressure of social media. Songs talking about social media persistently trawl the gap between your real identity and your public identity and personal brand, and how this dynamic can hollow out your relationships and quality of life. Songwriters like Jazmine Sullivan consistently refer to tech as a place of escapism, like retreating into the creation of a new Tinder profile while avoiding reflection on your last relationship. Comparison is the product, and sometimes it stinks.
- Lots of songs from peak elder Millennial/Gen X songwriters are about watching the old analog world being swallowed by the new. The older the songs, the more aware they are of the machine across the room, and the more they lean into allegory. The contemporary songs don’t worry about the boundary between human and machine much at all, likely reflecting the high level of technical integration (and acceptance) we live with right now.
Is fretting about our relationship to tech and industry part of the human condition? Or is there something specific to tech that accelerates these anxieties and impulses?
A few favs:
- I’m enjoying almost everything from the band Automatic. One of the band members is the daughter of the drummer from Bauhaus, and their work is heavily influenced by 80s era synth pop and new wave. I have several of their songs represented on the list, and particularly like “Black Box” off their 2025 album.
- Erykah Badu’s “Cel U Lar Device,” which positions the phone as an instrument of interpersonal surveillance, has been on rotation in my house for (cough) years. It is also a reinterpretation of Drake’s hit “Hotline Bling,” itself forever memorialized as a popular meme format.
- The Talking Heads’ 1988 “(Nothing but) Flowers” imagines a sunny life after the fall of industrial civilization. For the doomer take on this theme, check out Nina Simone’s cover of “22nd Century.”
- Sophie’s “Faceshopping” is about the negative pressures of cultivating a public persona and brand, and tips a hat to our relatively new ability to use science and technology to curate a physical appearance that matches your internal (and digital) one.
- Nobody talks about Ladytron anymore.
In which the author summarizes artificial intelligence functions that might be reasonably regulated.
A write up on sycophancy in popular chatbots.
Regarding dinergoth, a rebrand of an old trope: “Alt kids are the social fabric of the most economically depressed, culturally conservative corners of America and have been for a very long time.”
That was fast: Afroman cleared of charges. Also noticed that in an amicus brief, the ACLU argued that the deputies’ lawsuit was a classic SLAPP approach, referring to a type of lawsuit that seeks to discourage criticism of public officials by burdening individuals with lawsuits in retaliation for talking about state wrongdoing.
On AI and the value of “taste” in Silicon Valley. As a pretentious hipster reformed, I welcome the return of bad taste as a social dealbreaker. Except for when bad taste is good.
Rapper Afroman is going ultra viral this week as his “Lemon Pound Cake” trial plays out in the news. He captured the raid on security cameras in his home and used the footage in a series of songs, videos and merch. He ultimately did not face charges after the search, and argues (with evidence) that the police broke his door and stole $400, which provides the platform and substance for everything that followed. He argues the police shouldn’t have been there at all, and didn’t follow protocol when they were, and that as a citizen and artist he’s expressing his feelings about it in his preferred medium. Is this a winning legal strategy? Time will tell.
In the meantime he’s winning at public opinion. The trial is shaping up in the public view as a defamation vs. free speech trial, with the artist’s prolific work about this no-knock raid performed at his house, itself arguably unethical, held up as harassment by the officers who did the job. True crime, legal experts and court watcher accounts are going gangbusters providing cultural and legal analysis alongside video of court testimony. It helps that the court footage is a rich text — both hilarious and revealing.
Meanwhile: another first amendment case in and around rap lyrics is playing out now. A brief history of rap and the First Amendment.
More discussion on how “last mile” problems suggest that stories about massive AI disruption of jobs are hyperbole.
This writer suggests that LLMs used to be pretty cool and creative — read: exceedingly weird — and that corporate tinkering to prepare the tech for a broader market took away some of the magic.
The “stochastic parrot” argument against LLMs has some rhetorical limits.
I misused PESOS below, c’est la vie, I’m doing a POSSE model. Here’s someone smarter than me on POSSE v PESOS.
Anne Helen Peterson on the erosion of good, stable, sustainable jobs.
Big internet controversy over dress codes in chain restaurants.
Author Margaret Atwood plays with Claude and reports back on her experience.
On the many failures of social media companies to act with pro-social ethics.
A gift link from The Atlantic, a reporter is given $10k to spend on emerging betting markets and reports on what he found. Spoiler: it’s dark!
Interesting read: NYT is using a custom LLM tool to track trends within the “manosphere,” as reported by the Nieman Journalism Lab.