Shannon Mattern

So many poignant recent stories of TREES as potently symbolic victims of this techno-fascist regime www.hcn.org/articles/the... www.theguardian.com/environment/... www.newsweek.com/trumps-potom... www.404media.co/west-virgini...

The Chestnut Grove Caught in the Middle of A Years-Long Data Center Fight 404media.co

“Anthropic said it could not determine whether the research served a legitimate or nefarious purpose because valid biological inquiry… can also help engineer dangerous pathogens.” Reminiscing on the days when we had peer review panels with enough subject expertise to make thes…

nytimes.com

Our classes are creating publications that we'll share publicly, and we're exploring layers of GenAI protection: hosting everything behind a web AI firewall, using CAPTCHA + Glaze, managing email requests (rather than posting openly). I RESENT the Labor of Avoidance these assholes have necessitated.

The “Bye, Bye AI” program was held in the North Chatham Library annex, a restored trolley station, and drew 16 participants who wanted to remove AI from their phones. “The materials were all prepared by the Library Freedom Prjct (@flexlibris 🎉). “Winnie, the Library Dog, acted as greeter.”

Rdg lots of stuff acknowledging mounting public *fear* of AI. Yes, I’m glad there’s more attention to the aversion — but it’s more than fear: it’s distrust, resentment, disgust, the Spectrum of Justified Bad Affect. “Fear” implies a phobia one can conquer with exposure, understanding, etc.

Everything is risograph and cyanotype and fermentation. It's clear that AI slop and accelerationist destruction are prompting the seemingly ubiquitous resurgence of interest in these slow, organic, manual processes.

I just stopped by Printed Matter, where they were hosting a Parsons class. Craig, their bookshop director, told me that last year, class instructors commonly asked shop staff to pull artists’ books that exemplify 🎨 use of AI; now, students are asking to see material that offers an *antidote* to AI ✊

On this seven-hour flight back home, I’m catching up on journals + magazines: Orion, New York Review of Architecture, Aperture, Paris Review — all in print. And I’m reminded that there are innumerable things to ponder that are infinitely more fascinating, profound, and life-affirming than dumb AI.

Yes. This response to Rebecca Colesworthy’s thoughtful thread abt AI use in publishing — and how it upends codes of academic integrity + destroys trust — exemplifies my frustration that some ppl simply don’t see how the academy’s system of incentives + publishing economy need to change 

I’ve been reading lots of academics’ AI critiques that focus on the insufficiency of mass digitization and the provision of access, and on the dangers of stripping away context — and I’m hoping folks acknowledge that librarians + archivists have been issuing these warnings for 10 or 15 years.

I appreciate all these book centric reading lists abt public AI literacy + tech politics — but I also want to acknwldg the public scholars who’ve made principled choices to share timely, thoughtful, deeply researched, edited long-form work on these topics in *free, accessible* venues *for decades*…

I think there’s a lot for Critical AI to learn from the mass society / propaganda roots of comm studies — and radical publishing + radio — of the early 20th c; the TV critics + radical media collectives / community media centers of the 60s + 70s…