“The greatest danger that fear poses [is] not panic amid disorder, but cooperation with an order that we ought to find unspeakable.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/obligation-to-possibility
“What you have is, in essence, a very grassroots and cheap approach to launder misinformation to the public.” https://www.404media.co/googles-ai-is-destroying-search-the-internet-and-your-brain/
The “culture of fear” noted here is something that I’m seeing across all big tech, and it’s suicidal: frightened workers either quit or comply. They don’t take risks, they don’t create anything new, and they don’t ship. Nothing good will come of this. https://www.theverge.com/notepad-microsoft-newsletter/709144/microsoft-layoffs-2025-ai-notepad
Coming at Nicola Griffith’s Aud Torvingen books after reading Hild and Menewood is like meeting one of Hild’s descendants: https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/blue-place
“I’m good at this job. Rather, I was good at this job—and I’ll become so again in an environment whose values align with those that animate my work: the small, the weird, the local, the public, the principled.” https://wordsinspace.net/2025/06/30/i-prefer-weeds-to-ivy/
I’m certain the accumulating small bugs and instabilities that I’m noticing almost every day in previously reliable, decades-old software has nothing at all to do with the fact that the retention teams have been dissolved or else coerced into working on AI features no one wants.
The most important thing to understand about the huge federal layoffs—which the Supreme Court just cleared the way to continue—is that they are a strategic attack on equality in all workplaces: https://unbreaking.org/issues/equality-at-work-decimating-the-federal-workforce/
Solidarity with DC33 as their strike extends into a second week. Sanitation workers are the most critical workers in the city and they deserve not only a living wage but a thriving one. https://www.inquirer.com/politics/philadelphia/dc33-strike-health-benefits-residency-20250707.html
Lessons from another healthcare system gutted by austerity measures: https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/autonomy
“The truth is quite simple: we don’t know what to do because there’s not just one thing to do.” https://prisonculture.substack.com/p/the-struggle-is-permanent-keep-fighting
“Technological change is not an external force to which societies must simply adapt; it is a socially and politically mediated process.” https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/is-the-ai-bubble-about-to-burst
You should read every “here’s how AI will change your job” in the context of who has the power to change the conditions of work, and how that power is exercised. And remember that major changes to working conditions come about in one of two ways: as negotiation, and as coercion.
“Giving up on the idea that truth matters is not just cynicism, it’s surrender.” https://www.citationneeded.news/it-matters-i-care/
“Artificial intelligence is currently busy completely de-caring human existence by optimizing life and doing away with the future as a source of care.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/de-caring
“They have turned these indifferent and extractive technologies into instruments of protest. They are weaponizing the accountability sink.” https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-weaponization-of-waymo
The thing that keeps coming up as I talk to people about AI in their workplaces is how dehumanizing it is. It’s dehumanizing to ask a machine to do something, and then have to correct it over and over; it’s dehumanizing to be told to read something that involved little to no human effort to make.
“While the upsides of adopting LLM technology to you as a worker might seem marginally useful now, that adoption directly contributes to that extraction, ultimately devaluing labor.” https://henry.codes/writing/economics-and-labor-rights-in-ai-skepticism/
“It is very very disturbing that your response is always to lie.” https://amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-ex-machina
One way to know that “AI is coming for your jobs” is a bluff is to see it paired with “and cancer will be cured.” The same Ferengis pushing AI are also working to cut funding for medical research! No cure for cancer is forthcoming without working scientists. https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-ai-jobs-apocalypse-is-for-the
Again: work (both students’ and teachers’) that has been deskilled, de-spirited, and stripped of all creativity and joy. Appalled on behalf of the teachers, and so so sad for the students. https://www.404media.co/teachers-are-not-ok-ai-chatgpt/