@igraywill
Personal account. #socialwork, PhD student @thegraduatecenter.bsky.social @gcsocialwelfare.bsky.social. Read & think about tech ethics, digital literacy, innovation, inequality, & social change. Find refuge & inspiration in #humanities & #openscience.
nyt website currently resembles one of those mock covers people made before 2016 election: economy floundering, war in the middle east, scandal-plagued cabinet sec, brazen corruption....
This ⏬
"We further argue that AI resignation fulfils a strategic affective function within digital capitalism: by naturalizing dependence on predictive AI infrastructures and normalizing diminished expectations of the power to act, it stabilizes the very sociotechnical structures that produce it."
Oh,ok
Well, this doesn't look good... www.theguardian.com/environment/...
NYC Open Data Week 2026 schedule is up. Excited to have a panel in the lineup on public scholarship & open data with colleagues at @thegraduatecenter.bsky.social and @ccnysustainability.bsky.social, and to attend many other events, including @schoolofdata.nyc.
opendataweek.nyc
#OpenData
This is a fantastic reflection. Really interesting ideas about possibilities for organizing data leverage, strikes, and withdrawal.
Screenshot of a 3hr old post from the GW Hatchet: “BREAKING: GW sold its Virginia campus to Amazon Data Services, an Amazon subsidiary that manages the company's data centers, for $427 million on Friday. The deed, obtained by The Hatchet, authorizes ADS to develop the campus into a data or information technology center. STORY TK”
GW‘s student newspaper appears to have broken the story that the institution has sold a satellite campus to Amazon to be turned into a data center, which is just about chef’s kiss for the state of American higher education rn
SAVE THE DATE for next Thur, Mar 12 - the NYC city council libraries subcommittee is meeting to talk about the prelim budget.
Register to testify and say "booo, where is the promised 0.5%?" at: council.nyc.gov/testify/
A 3x3 grid titled "Is it a library? Alignment chart". Horizontal axis categories: Contents purist: Must contain books Contents neutral: Must contain information Contents rebel: Can contain anything Vertical axis categories: Curation purist: Must be managed by a professional librarian Curation neutral: Must be curated by someone Curation rebel: Can be managed by nobody Examples represented on the grid: Curation purist, contents purist: New York Public Library is a library Curation purist, contents neutral: A newspaper archive is a library Curation purist, contents rebel: A school information commons is a library Curation neutral, contents purist: A home bookshelf is a library Curation neutral, contents neutral: A Spotify playlist is a library Curation neutral, contents rebel: A zoo is a library Curation rebel, contents purist: A street library is a library Curation rebel, contents neutral: A PC downloads folder is a library Curation rebel, contents rebel: A junk drawer is a library
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White text on black background that says NO WAR ON IRAN with the logo of the American Friends Service Committee appearing below
Today the US & Israel launched an unprovoked war on #Iran, dropping bombs on Iranian cities and calling for regime change. At least 80 children were killed after a strike on a girls’ school. Iran responded by firing missiles at Israel and US military bases in the region. afsc.org/newsroom/war...
Another war, more of the same. I tire of waking up to bad news, to more conflict, crisis, and despair in the world. To greedy old men driving the world into ruin for their own selfish gain, and other old men, stubbornly clinging to power when they cannot muster the strength to mount an opposition.
Take note Senator.
bsky.app/profile/ocas...
“The war continues working, day and night.
It inspires tyrants
to deliver long speeches
awards medals to generals
and themes to poets
it contributes to the industry
of artificial limbs
provides food for flies
adds pages to the history books
achieves equality
between killer and killed”
Read it all:
A screaming cat
You know, I kinda preferred US gov't AI policy when it wasn't a soap opera.
In a long tweet about Anthropic, Pete Hegseth, through the offical "SecWar" Twitter account says "the Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic’s models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic."
Hegseth is wholeheartedly endorsing the core premise of fascism: industry, as part of the private sphere, must be subordinated to the military objectives of the state.
What this does to military A.I. capabilities is beyond the brief of this newsletter, except to say that I think it’s “bad” for Grok, the pedophile mechahitler A.I., to be involved with weapons in really any way. What I am interested in, here, is what this reveals about the state of politics in Silicon Valley. In a sentence, I think what’s happening is (1) basic (i.e. normal) cutthroat competition between rival firms for government contracts, which is both driving and being driven by (2) an open and ongoing political-ideological dispute between two factions of Silicon Valley capital, which is in turn informing and being informed by (3) an almost religious disagreement about the nature of the god being built on the computer.
To start, it seems quite obvious that the Tech Right--a bloc of right-wing, Trump-aligned executives, investors, podcasters, Twitter personalities, firms, and companies, among them Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale and Alex Karp, Anduril’s Palmer Luckey, and, of course, xAI’s Elon Musk--with its extensive links to the administration, has been exerting behind-the-scenes pressure on Hegseth and the Pentagon to sever ties with or otherwise punish Anthropic. It was a Palantir executive, after all, who snitched on Anthropic to the D.o.D., and Hegseth’s speech in January about “objectively truthful AI capabilities” was a close echo of Musk’s ramblings about his “maximally truth-seeking” model Grok. The Tech Right’s contempt for Anthropic is first and foremost financial in nature. Musk, obviously, would like xAI to be first in line for any government contracts. (Indeed, Hegseth announced a deal with xAI this week to use Grok under the Pentagon’s preferred “all lawful use” terms.) And I suspect Palantir, Anthropic client though it may be, has the same existential fear of Claude as McKinsey or Salesforce or any other consultancy or software-as-a-service provider. If Anthropic is aggressively courting the D.o.D. to contract directly, and if Claude is as good as every thinks, what does Palantir’s future as a data-analytics-in-camo platform actually look like?
This doesn’t necessarily separate him from any other Silicon Valley liberal. But I think it’s good to attend to the valence of his liberalism. Amodei, like most of the Anthropic executives and many people in the A.I. in general, has long been associated with the worlds of Bay Area Rationalism and Effective Altruism--wonkily utilitarian philosophical and philanthropic practices focused on self-described rationalist inquiry and self-improvement. Bay Area Rationalism is a loose and diverse movement, containing a host of political perspectives, but it’s always had a particular concern with moral philosophy as it relates to the expected development of artificial superintelligence. To be a Rationalist liberal democrat (small-L small-D), e.g., might mean orienting your liberal democrat-ness toward its practical applications around the eschatological scenario of hard-takeoff A.G.I.
I don’t mean to suggest that Amodei’s commitments to liberal democracy are inauthentic. More that, as far he is concerned the stakes of this commitment go well beyond his own moral or ethical culpability. The decisions he makes now, and his consistent practice to his espoused beliefs, could mean the difference between a benevolent computer god and a wrathful one. X avatar for @hlntnr Helen Toner @hlntnr One thing the Pentagon is very likely underestimating: how much Anthropic cares about what *future Claudes* will make of this situation. Because of how Claude is trained, what principles/values/priorities the company demonstrate here could shape its "character" for a long time. Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_ Update on the meeting; according to Axios Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Dario Amodei until Friday night to give the military unfettered access to Claude or face the consequences, which may even include invoking the Defense Production Act to force the training of a WarClaude 4:26 PM · Feb 25, 2026 · 227K Views 41 Replies · 122 Reposts · 1.96K Likes And this has placed him, and Anthropic, on a collision course with the Tech Right. Musk, too, believes he is bringing superintelligence into existence at xAI. But for him the urgenct imp
one way of seeing anthropic vs. the pentagon is as a fissure between the two silicon valley tribes most enthusiastic about ai: "rationalists" and "accelerationists"
maxread.substack.com/p/what-anthr...
More than a decade after a federal judge ruled that the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk practices violated the Constitution, the agency is still not following the law according to a new report by a court-appointed monitor.
www.thecity.nyc/2026/02/26/n...
Oligarchic media conglomeration.
Some good findings in here about doctoral education. Thanks @katinalynn.bsky.social for convening these listening sessions.
medium.com/doctoral-fut...
This feud is a very interesting clash of ideologies, actors, and institutions...
www.axios.com/2026/02/25/a...
@metagov.bsky.social had a great seminar today with Ivan Pardo of solidarity.tech, tracing the CMS's origins in digitgal platform (rideshare) driver organizing & growth to critical organizing infrastructure for Zohran Mamdani's NYC mayoral campaign + more. Watch it here: archive.org/details/sola...
I watched some of the testimonies today. Likely the most impassioned (pro & against) public hearings since the City of Yes vote last year. Passing this package of bills would not be good thing. The NYPD already has plenty of tools to suppress free speech & protests.
hellgatenyc.com/nypd-approve...
"As “Resist and Unsubscribe” gathers momentum as a form of a modern-day strikes, it is notable that AI opposition spans the political spectrum."
Paliwal is right, just not in the way he thinks: One thing AI has in common with cars it that both have been advanced by powerful interests in the name of progress for progress's sake without any thought as to how and where they are deployed nor the societal or environmental harms they produce.
While PSC members rally in the Armory, we're also out with hundreds of students in the Capitol itself calling for increased funding for CUNY, broader access to free tuition, more financial aid, and higher taxes on corporations and the rich.
"[G]overnment watchdogs voiced concerns when informed by POLITICO that the costs of the pod would be picked up by three companies — Waymo, Greenberg Traurig and Charney Companies — that have extensive business before the City Council."
From NY Times mobile app: Snowball Fight in New York Turns Chaotic After Police Arrive Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said officers had been attacked at Washington Square Park. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said the episode looked like a snowball fight, not a crime.
so there’s this Scottish guy who had a theory of causation
@katinalynn.bsky.social - is this a question you might have answers for?
@hastac.bsky.social used its earlier instance (which later became Knowledge Commons) when I was in @hastacscholars.bsky.social. Seemed pretty easy to use then for sharing, storing, & publishing information from a user perspective, but I wasn't coordinating group activities or communications.
