Shannon Mattern

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.

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 ✊

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…

I hate-read some Internet Theorist Guys’ newsletters. I appreciate this hot take from one thinker’s recent missive: “This [phenomenon] also tracks my theory that the AI era is an extension of the algorithm era, not a total sea change.” Whoa 🤯 A Brand-New Theory™️ of Historiography.

So many subway ads for genAI agents promising to make “killer pitch decks” – for more stupid AI agents, no doubt

Love the framing of this Times article: AI has *created* 13 new kinds of jobs at Box! Sure, you’ve invested so much in this crap, you now have to hire techs to shoehorn it into places it’s not needed, barkers + evangelists to talk up its use, folks to fix its errors and security vulnerabilities,,,

After Leo's AI encyclical, I saw several folks praise his (novel) framing of communication as *ecological*. The recent Atlantic article on reading has also incited calls for ecological views of technological / media change. McLuhan referenced "media ecology" in '64; Postman built a field around it.