Brooders' Roundup #5
AI Vampirism, podcasting politics, affirmative action for conservative professors, and the maldistribution of social friction. Here's some of what I've been brooding on lately.
Hey there Brooders,
It’s been awhile! We are deep into the summer semester here in Germany, so I’ve been busy with teaching, research, and all kinds of super exciting, totally necessary, and not at all futile administrative busywork!
That said, I’ve managed to do a bit of writing on ye ol’ Substack. Here’s what I’ve got for you this time around:
The Trumpian right has been attacking US universities for a lot of things, amongst them a supposed lack of “viewpoint diversity.” But is this just a power play to dismantle DEI while insisting on affirmative action for conservative flunkies?
"Viewpoint Diversity": Affirmative Action for Right-Wing Conservatives?
·Career self-selection, not conservative “self-censorship,” explains the political leanings of the professoriate. Students don’t experience “indoctrination,” but rather moderate their views over time. In this light, there’s only one way to describe MAGA’s “viewpoint diversity” demands: as a power play.
Generative AI functions only because big companies have sucked up the fruits of the unpaid digital labor we all perform any time we do anything online - only to sell it back to us as chatbots and image generators. But what does that have to do with vampires, Karl Marx, and a 1990s Canadian Alt-Rock song?
Dead Labor in the Smart Machine
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AI technologies rely upon data sets harvested from the unpaid work we perform anytime we do anything online. This “dead labor” takes the form of technology that gets turned back on us to manipulate our perceptions and behavoir. Thus, our digital labor is appropriated for nefarious commercial and political ends, while any benefits accrued are captured by…
I’ve been teaching about podcasting and politics this semester. Here’s what my students have to say about the so-called “Podcast Election.”
Lessons from the "Podcast Election."
·While I’m focused on explaining theories and elaborating concepts, they are hyper-fixated on what works. And that’s valuable. Here are some quick-and-dirty lessons we’ve learned together.
And now for some recommendations:
Surreal AI Screening
Technology podcaster Dwarkesh Patel recently released this very haunting video essay about a speculative future in which AI takes over all of our work - made with often surreal AI-generated visuals. Check out his idea of what the world of The Last Human CEO might be like.
Recommended Co-’stacker
I really like economics blogger and instagram “influencer” (a word I usually detest) Kyla Scanlon. She recently wrote this great piece about the value and maldistribution of frictional experiences in our (only supposedly) “frictionless” modern world. You can also find her instagram here.
Uneasy Bedtime Reading
I’ve recently finished Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. It’s a near-future dystopia framed as a memoir and set at a seemingly idyllic English boarding school. As such, it deals with questions of memory and the long arc of childhood-to-adult relationships, but also the dangers of scientific progress in a world in which certain people are routinely deemed less human than others by virtue of nothing other than the situation of their birth, and in which their value is only measured in terms of the degree to which they are seen as useful so the socially privileged. If that all sounds vague, it’s on purpose; there’s a dark secret at the center of this novel, one intimated at early on, but which only unravels gradually as the plot develops. A contemporary classic, and an important work by an important aurhor, set in a fictional dystopian world which is all too similar to our own. 10/10.
That’s all for now! Brood on, brooders.