Rachel Auslander

ai is a rhetorical technology.

when it produces a list of permissible targets, its value is not producing targets but producing permission

They also decided to “speak” to Steven Pinker of all people over email rather than talk to an actual disability or disability rights law expert

No one has seriously said LLMs aren’t important or that AI is categorically junk.

Some of us have said that there is something bigger than tech. It’s called power — governance, civic norms, etc — & refusal is absolutely part of how we think soberly about that power. Who has it & how they use it.

it is an active choice by the press to frame this overt white supremacist (who literally just bought an autocratic government and killed hundreds of thousands of people) as a serious and credible person making serious and credible promises

The rise of AI tools that write about you when you die Families and funeral directors are using AI obituary generators to more efficiently memorialize the dead. What happens when they get it wrong?

New: A few weeks ago, when my father-in-law died, the funeral home asked if we wanted to use AI to write his obituary. So I dug into it and found that it's the biggest new trend in "death care." Tens of thousands of AI obits have been made already. Often the families don't even know wapo.st/4okuxIg

National media should really be covering the fact thay every major school, museum, and arts institution in the Twin Cities, and hundreds of local businesses are closed tomorrow to protest federal occupation.

Nothing like this at this scale has happened anywhere in America anytime in living memory.

ICE’s Facial Recognition App Misidentified a Woman. Twice In testimony from a CBP official obtained by 404 Media, the official described how Mobile Fortify returned two different names after scanning a woman's face during an immigration raid. ICE has said th...

One of the first things anyone learns about facial recognition is that it is often wrong and that it is biased. And yet ICE is using it all day every day to determine legal status & who to detain. And now we have a high-profile example of it being flat out wrong:

www.404media.co/ices-facial-...

recommended virtual options: courses.osd.k12.ok.us/courses/ASL-... (free, asynchronous) or www.signlanguagecenter.com/zoom-classes (not free, group classes with opportunities for conversation) - it’s best to learn from Deaf teachers!

just so it's clear: this is the exact core function of genAI

Fascist government and climate deniers love it because it can produce the aesthetics of knowledge without any actual tendency towards truth. It is automated denialism.

Shame on every climate scientist promoting its use (there are lots)

an image quilt of epstein documents

Here's a quilt of Volume 4 of the Epstein document dump. Gives you a 10,000 foot view of the redactions. that's 2,704 docs.

this is so fucking grim

Fair Contract Now for ProPublica Guild We, the workers of ProPublica, provide our readers with deeply researched, unbiased news that holds power to account. This work is more important now than ever, but our staff can’t properly contribute...

2/ Our readers deserve clear labeling on AI content, and we deserve job security. Sign our petition for a fair contract and we’ll keep you updated on our campaign: actionnetwork.org/petitions/te...

Important piece thinking through what eugenics actually is and how this qualifies.

It's not lost on me that these companies are primarily men telling women how to responsibly reproduce. The marketing/examples are telling. It's part of a larger movement around control & should be treated seriously.

ICE is using smartwatches to track pregnant women, even during labor: ‘She was so afraid they would take her baby’ Pregnant immigrants in ICE monitoring programs are avoiding care, fearing detention during labour and delivery

A woman facing preeclampsia was afraid to take off her tracking device, even after medical staff warned her it could cut off her circulation. Another woman panicked bc staff had to cut off her device to prevent electrocution during her c-section. From @jmbooyah.bsky.social

NYT headline saying "F.D.A. Attributes 10 Children’s Deaths to Covid Vaccines: The agency’s top vaccine regulator said that a review had found that the children were likely to have died “because of” the shots. But public health experts want to examine the data." With a photo of a light-skinned baby receiving a shot from a healthcare provider with darker skin.

Headlines like this are extremely dangerous. Because moms of young kids are the people who make the bulk of the vaccine decisions for famillies. And for a lot of them, "reading the news" looks like scrolling past headlines on social media in the spare moments of the chaos of caring for kids.

RFK Jr had committed to Bill Cassidy, as a condition to win his vote, that he would keep website language.

Cassidy in February: “If confirmed… CDC will not remove statements on their website pointing out that vaccines do not cause autism.”

Note the language in second photo.

AI Is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge "Fascism and AI, whether or not they have the same goals, they sure are working to accelerate one another."

Librarians told 404 Media they're being inundated with new pitches for AI library tech and catalogs are being flooded with AI slop books.

But more broadly, AI maximalism across society is supercharging the ideological war on libraries, schools, government workers, and academics.

ICE and CBP Agents Are Scanning Peoples’ Faces on the Street To Verify Citizenship Videos on social media show officers from ICE and CBP using facial recognition technology on people in the field. One expert described the practice as “pure dystopian creep.”

New: Videos show ICE/CBP agents are scanning peoples' faces on the street to verify citizenship. ICE has tool to instantly look up unprecedented number of databases with just a photo

“I’m an American citizen so leave me alone”

“Alright, we just got to verify that”

www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...

Anti-science bills hit statehouses, stripping away public health protections built over a century More than 420 anti-science bills attacking longstanding public health protections – vaccines, milk safety and fluoride – have been introduced in statehouses across the U.S. this year.

NEW: AP investigation finds over 420 anti-science bills attacking longstanding public health protections have been introduced in statehouses across the US this year, part of an organized, politically savvy campaign to enshrine a conspiracy theory-driven agenda into law. w/ @lauraungar.bsky.social

The temporal drag of techno-bubbles: speedy hype, slow harm

Whether intentional or ignorant, seems ominous: CDC cuts the unit that assessed whether its proposed research studies are ethical.

The MMR shot is safe and effective, and there is no credible evidence otherwise.

Breaking MMR into three shots means 3x more copays at the doctor’s office, 3x more hours of missed work, 3x more bummed out kiddos, and probably more than 3x as many kids who aren’t fully vaccinated.

We should all be Luddites | Brookings Courtney Radsch discusses rehabilitating the idea of Luddites as people concerned with the control and impact of technology.

“Every time a news story frames AI competition as a race between companies or countries, it obscures the fact that ordinary people have been drafted into that race without their consent.”

BREAKING: Our client Mario Guevara, an Emmy-winning journalist detained by ICE in retaliation for livestreaming law enforcement activity, will be deported tomorrow to El Salvador.

Mario and his family are being punished for his reporting. This cruelty is meant to stifle our free press.

The WSJ carelessly spread anti-trans misinformation The Wall Street Journal’s fuckup while covering Charlie Kirk’s killing needs more than an editor’s note.

The WSJ carelessly spread anti-trans misinformation www.theverge.com/politics/777...

internet culture desks aren't just for cute meme trend stories. ever since gamergate, understanding how and why info moves online is critical to seeing how we got *here*

"The Printing Press Democratized Knowledge": When Slogans Masquerade as History — Sonja Drimmer The phrase is said so frequently it seems, like the mechanism it celebrates, to mechanically replicate itself.  It's become a favorite catchphrase among tech boosters of any sort (see my post on...

What, exactly, does this string of words mean? Why does everyone who stands to profit from selling "AI" love to repeat it? And what's the value of slogans that masquerade as history?

sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...

Thank you!

Fantastic — and actually quite heartening — interview with @histoftech.bsky.social.

And this is a great cross-cutting reminder to always keep in mind:
“It’s not inevitable…There’s always time to change things.”