Tech
Monday, February 2, 2026 • 1
There is something about the AI moment that reminds me a lot of when the internet was new. A lot of what was imagined and promised about the internet was never realized. But much was.
I’ve been reading Ellen Ullman’s memoirs - “Life in Code” and “Close to the Machine” - and her observations about proximity to technology feel relevant here. Being close to the machine means understanding its actual capabilities and limitations apart from the prevailing sales narratives.
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Friday, January 30, 2026 • 2
In 1999, academic and theorist Judith Butler famously won an award for the worst academic sentence, raising good questions about how we read difficult texts, who gets to access academic ideas, and the role of academic and plain language in and around the academy:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
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Friday, January 23, 2026 • 1
Tiktok is not much better or worse than other major social platforms, I say. The primary arguments against TikTok, including data collection, algorithmic manipulation, potential foreign government access, addiction and influence on public opinion, apply with equal or greater force to American platforms. Meta has faced billions in fines for allowing privacy violations, enabled documented election interference, and its algorithms have been linked to mental health harms and the amplification of extremist content globally, including perpetuating a genocide in Myanmar.
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Friday, January 16, 2026 • 2
Reading this blog post by a political scientist explaining the problem with our fractured information landscape, and how calls for more information and media literacy are not likely solutions:
“In short, decades of research have demonstrated that our political beliefs and behavior are thoroughly motivated and mediated by our social identities: i.e., the many cross-cutting social groupings we feel affinity with. And as long as we do not account for this profound and pervasive dependence, our attempts to address the epistemic failures threatening contemporary democracies will inevitably fall short.
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Friday, January 9, 2026 • 1
I suspect these three trends are connected: Women reportedly use AI at significantly lower rates than men—25 percent lower on average—in part because they’re more concerned about ethics, including privacy, consent and intellectual property. At the same time, countries with more positive social media experiences tend to be more open to AI, while Americans’ distrust is shaped by years of watching tech platforms erode trust. Meanwhile, one of the largest social platforms has turned its AI chatbot into a harassment tool—generating roughly one nonconsensual sexualized deepfake image per minute, disproportionately targeting women and girls.
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Sunday, December 7, 2025 • 3
I just completed my first attempt at coding using AI, in this case having Claude assist me with putting together a simple client-side OPML parser using Dave Winer’s Feedland service.
Winer’s original script is pretty slick, and includes a list of all my feeds with titles, URLs, and categories; click-to-expand functionality to see the 5 most recent posts from each feed; clickable post titles that open articles in new tabs; sort options (by title or by update); and automatic updates when I change my FeedLand subscriptions.
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Thursday, November 13, 2025 →
When AI is wrong, who pays?
Sunday, November 9, 2025 • 1
“… every text is connected to other texts by citations, quotations, allusions, borrowings, adaptations, appropriations, parody, pastiche, imitation, and the like. Every text is in a dialogical relationship with other texts. In sum, intertextuality describes the relationships that exist between and among texts. What follows is a discussion of the strategies of intertextuality.”
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Sunday, November 9, 2025 • 2
In recent history I stopped posting on most social media and moved to the fediverse. I still browse the social platforms to keep up with trends and friends, but I only post on my private IG and here.
What I share here is separate from but related to my professional life — I’m thinking out loud and making room for rough, unfinished ideas. I write mainly for myself, but if others find it useful, that’s great.
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Sunday, August 17, 2025 • 5
Thinking out loud about tech in the public sector, and the classic technical problem of covering the “last mile.”
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Friday, August 15, 2025 • 7
As communications professionals in higher education, we work for institutions built on the pursuit of knowledge and innovation, yet many of us feel uncertain about how to thoughtfully integrate one of the most significant technological advances of our time: artificial intelligence. I offer some thoughts here.
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Tuesday, July 8, 2025 →
“In 2024, there were a total of 454 words used excessively by chatbots, the researchers report.” When does use of AI tip over into something fraudulent? Experts disagree.
Tuesday, July 8, 2025 →
The education sector is a big target for cyber attacks, with higher ed being one of the largest and most sensitive targets for bad actors. A recent study shows that education is unprepared as a sector and many institutions lack resources to support a thoughtful and robust cybersecurity program.
Thursday, May 1, 2025 →
Private group chats are as maddening as public social media - and much harder to track. https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america