Sun-ha Hong

Happening now! I'll be talking company towns, tech futurists and stripped modernism.

Join us for BD&S 2026 Colloquium, Panel 2: Infrastructures in Time: Genealogies of Big Data (Feb 18 | 16:00–18:00 GMT / 11:00 AM–1:00 PM EST) uky.zoom.us/j/86848639105
#CriticalDataStudies #STS #BigData

A striking thing about articles I’ve read claiming to “study the effects” of generative AI on student writing skills and consumption of information is that (1) they nearly always find the effects are negative and (2) most “conclusions” are still written assuming that we must use AI, for some reason.

Please join us for our last Digital Aesthetics event of the AY 24-25: an AI & Media Roundtable, with Sun-ha Hong, Johan Fredrikzon, Julia Irwin, and Hank Gerba on May 20, 5-7pm PT. Abstracts and bios can be found here: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Zoom for the day of: tinyurl.com/5n8mdpbb

While many critics of AI might hope that familiarity with the tools – with their frequent hallucinations and often outdated knowledge bases – would breed contempt, the opposite appears to be the case. Those Britons who use AI chatbots more frequently are the most likely to think they are good at pretty much all of the tasks listed.

This Yougov survey contains an important finding: people who rely heavily on ChatGPT rate it as being "good" at tasks that we ABSOLUTELY know for sure it is very bad at

imo, this is a strong piece of evidence these heavy users simply do not ever check outputs

yougov.co.uk/technology/a...

Stanford Professor Allegedly Includes Fake AI Citations in Filing on Deepfake Bill Professor Jeff Hancock from the Stanford Social Media Lab submitted a legal argument in support of a Minnesota deepfake bill, but it reportedly includes citations made up by AI.

I think we can split @hankgreen.bsky.social's question out into two categories:

1) Uses with an obvious failure mode
2) Uses with a subtle failure mode

My theory is type (2) failures are becoming EXTREMELY widespread - the ones we catch are the iceberg tip, and suggest 1,000 un-caught errors

The Network State and Topological Fetishism in Greenland In his essay for our series “The Cloud is Dead,” D&S affiliate Zane Griffin Talley Cooper examines resource extraction in the Arctic and how fantasies of the Network State run counter to the reality o...

I love how @zgtcooper.bsky.social uses his ethnographic work in Greenland to take down the vacuous concept of the Network State, which is so detached from land and the people who live in a place, with tech bros grafting AI generated crypto fascist nightmares onto topographies they don’t understand

Exclusive: Anthropic warns fully AI employees are a year away Managing those AI identities will require companies to completely reassess their cybersecurity strategies.

I do wish it was better understood by now—especially by folks in the media—that these "warnings" from large AI corporations in fact function as "advertisements"

www.axios.com/2025/04/22/a...

One thing I distinctly remember from this book is FFM.

20th century SV grew on electronics manufacturing, and employers systematically looked for female migrant labour - they called it FFM (fast fingered Malaysians). Small, cheap, and you can ignore/suppress all their health & safety complaints

'From a legal perspective, the best analogy to robot rights is not human rights but corporate rights...' papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... @abeba.bsky.social

Sam Altman isn't keen on you reading my book. EMPIRE OF AI is based on 300+ interviews, 7 yrs covering AI, and my time as the first reporter who got extensive access to OpenAI. I sought OpenAI's perspective throughout. For months they said it was coming. It never did. Pre-order here: empireofai.com.

Folks, this is going to be big: “Hype Studies is an emergent, transdisciplinary research arena aimed at inquiring hype as a powerful and pervasive phenomenon that influences economic trends, political agendas, media narratives, and technological developments.” hypestudies.org

On the Miraculous Tradition in Silicon Valley Thought "And then a miracle happens" is not a plan.

I was gonna grade papers today, but ended up yelling about VC bullshit instead.

It is an article of faith in Silicon Valley that technology is miraculous, and will always save us.

We are stuck dealing with the consequences of that faith and its failures.

open.substack.com/pub/davekarp...

Peter Thiel’s Network Is Quietly Shaping Trump’s Government The tech magnate has many links to the new Trump administration and the cost-slashing effort led by Elon Musk.

This is a gift link, we will continue to update this article as more Thiel names emerge:

🤯! I just learned that both Sarah and I are the "senior scholars and broken machine facilitators" at this summer's Digital Ideas Institute at the University of Michigan, June 23-7. Advanced grad students + early career scholars are encouraged to apply!

Bio – Sarah Sharma Sarah Sharma is Professor of Media Theory at the ICCIT/Faculty of Information and Director of the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto. Her rese...

I wanted to see what Sarah Sharma's been up to, and I discovered that she's soon publishing a book titled Insufferable Tools, which sounds amazing. I love her 🥰

Remember Babylon Health: a Goldman Sachs banker sees the NHS gutted by austerity => promises magic AI doctors => 4.2bn valuation => IPO bust => bankruptcy.

The funding system requires exponential hype - until, eventually, the massive costs & lack of actual product catches up with you.

"The more ideas have become automatic, instrumentalised, the less does anybody see in them thoughts with a meaning of their own. They are considered things, machines. Language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society." - Max Horkheimer, 1944

(PDF) The Network State, Venture Capital and the Political Economy of Exit PDF | This paper considers the emerging network state movement as evidence of the interplay between exit ideologies and exit strategies in the political... | Find, read and cite all the research you n...

'The Network State, Venture Capital and the Political Economy of Exit' my latest manuscript (preprint) on Crypto-colonialists and NRx VCs
www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Screenshot of a Washington Post article headline stating, 'Whole Foods says Trump’s actions make union win moot"

Trump already empowering the worst bosses to just.. ignore labor law.

Whole Foods workers won their union vote, and now Whole Foods (owned by Jeff Bezos) is saying they simply won't recognize the vote because nobody is going to make them.

It occurs to me, for no reason in particular, that I should put this starter pack back in circulation

go.bsky.app/3h6n3YC

Straight up corporate welfare. Incredible stuff. Unimaginably stupid and wasteful and invariably will help SoftBank burn even more billions

One of the things to know about edtech is that many, many people involved in it have no experience teaching, and particularly not at the grade level the intervention is designed to target. They’re tech guys who think tech is Very Hard and teaching is a skill-free avocation for ladies.

This is especially relevant now that OpenAI is now touting its "$500 billion" data center project with Softbank, and celebrated by Trump—it shows that OpenAI still doesn't have a viable business model, that their costs are too high, and that they need more state buy-in and outside capital to survive

The key ambition for the tech ideologues is the systematic destruction of all things 'public' - public oversight, democratic institutions, public space. City councils, local media, community orgs, public health experts - everything 'independent' must be eliminated in this vision of tech as religion.

publicera.kb.se/jdsr/article... New piece in very cool JDSR special issue '(Un)stable diffusions', *open access*, ft.@thaophan.bsky.social @lukestark.bsky.social @abpowell.bsky.social @melhogan.bsky.social & more - I show how genAI is being legitimised through dramas & rituals of 'realness'. Thread:

“I’m different, I’m a rebel. I’m an outsider,” I say to the credulous journalist before repeating verbatim the beliefs and worldview of the president of the United States and every person with money and power in the world right now.

Excited to share that @ftripodi.bsky.social will join us to discuss her incredible book, The Propagandists’ Playbook, for our next @civicsoftech.bsky.social book club, hosted by me and @philnichols.bsky.social!

Grab a copy and register at www.civicsoftechnology.org/events to join us on February 18