AI

I’m following a guy in TX who is using AI to write and illustrate children’s books whole cloth, then self-publishes using Amazon, and getting recognition in his region as a laudable children’s author. The books are categorically not good. It’s like people are rewarding his content strategy.

I once worked in a role where I keyed million dollar manufacturing orders into SAP, information that directly fed into factory specs for a manufacturing facility based in another country. Our regional office fed into a massive, global electrical engineering firm that ran on small margins (electricity delivery is a well-trod market), so our ability to deliver accurate orders on time was a differentiator in a field that is otherwise easily interrupted by chip shortages and logistics chains.

It was a big job. I learned a ton about electrical engineering, manufacturing and global logistics from a particular vantage point in North America. Our headquarters were based in Sweden, with locations around the world to support the electrical grid(s), covering both hardware and software solutions. My colleagues and I worked in positions that sat somewhere between B2B customer service, inside sales and data entry, and were expected to maintain a 99.8% accuracy rate because a single fat finger error would cascade across myriad systems, impacting real-world operations to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per error.

Once (and only once), I fat-fingered a serial number during data entry which ruined an entire shipment of widgets. In response, the factory in Mexico sent the incorrect order of widgets, about five pallets, to my location in the United States so I could correct the order by hand. One by one, I had to physically remove each widget from a pallet, then from its individual shipping container, make a correction on the widget itself, and repackage each one, signing my name on each unit to ensure it was corrected by an accountable employee. I can’t recall why the issue couldn’t have been corrected on the factory floor, but it wasn’t on the menu. It was going to stay my problem.

This was the one and only factory error I made in about five years of tenure, precisely because it was so painful to correct it. The process was a little embarrassing but nobody made it especially so. Instead my coworkers up and down the org chart relayed a simple expectation: the desk workers need to pay attention to the details because the alternative is too costly. A few old-timers made sure to razz me about it in good humor, but ultimately the error was mine and the fix was mine, and the experience stuck because the whole chain of responsibility understood the stakes and reinforced the consequences. They also trusted me to stick around and continue to do my best.

During my annual review that year, I was dinged for only having a 98% accuracy rate, and I knew why that was a fair assessment.

I thought about this when I read today’s NYT piece on whether 90% accuracy is good enough for LLMs.

Related-ish: The important legacy of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Pulling from some old communication theory while I am thinking about blogging and the indie web, and especially thinking about Dallas Smythe, who argues that mass media doesn’t produce content but audiences, packaged and sold to advertisers. On social media, users aren’t just the audience being sold, they’re also a labor force co-producing the content that attracts more audience.

Looking back at the feminist blogging era with the benefit of my current experience, I’d argue that what made Feministe different from our peer blogs was the commitment to convening the audience and sharing the platform without packaging it up for or selling to advertisers. That was largely my boundary – with as much market space as it commanded for the time, it was never monetized at scale, though individual contributors were free to use it as they wanted to build their audiences. We eventually committed to a small advertising carousel to cover hosting costs.

I recall someone balking at me for refusing to broadly monetize when I spoke at Blogher in 2005, but it was a hard line, for better or worse.

Testing a new feature I created using a mix of open source code and Claude, hoping I didn’t break my own site. I pulled together a dynamic link library using a Hugo partial and some shortcode that automatically catalogs all of my outbound links into sortable lists.

A screenshot of a Link library webpage displays a list of four links along with their titles and dates, sorted by Newest first under the category Higher Ed.A webpage lists blog-related links in a library format, sorted by newest first with dates.A webpage titled Link library displays a sorted list of links related to arxiv with titles and dates.A webpage displays a link library interface with a search result for hacker, showing one link titled Searching for Suzy Thunder from theverge.com dated 2020-01-22.

An observation on feminist writing and Jezebel: Throughout history, a lot of time and energy has been spent mediating how and whether certain kinds of people talk to one another. The feminist blogosphere, for all its faults, was the first time lateral, public, unmediated conversation happened among women at scale. Many kinds of women were there that had no space at other tables. And it was very messy, and very revealing, because it was the first time that happened at scale for all to see.

Some thoughts:

  • When I started in 2001, the most viewed website about feminism on the internet was a solo blog by a man in Portland.
  • I just pulled Mindy Seu’s “Cyberfeminism Index” off my shelf, a veritable tome, and the feminist sites don’t even make the table of contents. Which is not an indictment of the book, but an example of how ephemeral all this is online.
  • You can see this on Twitter in the live debate about what Jezebel was and wasn’t, a conversation happening mostly through collective remembering. Jezebel joined the pack of blogs at some point, and they were big dogs, but they weren’t responsible for the creation or steering of the digital movement. They were a glossy, spendy repackaging of the organic thing, backed by real investors. It’s wild to see the entirety of the movement attributed to Jezebel by young Twitter, given that most of the indies kept Jezebel at arms’ length until much later. They were pretty widely considered a corporate interloper in a grassroots arena, though in hindsight that wasn’t right either.
  • The first time the indie bloggers gave Jezebel their day was when they published the untouched photographs of Faith Hill on the cover of Redbook, a women’s magazine. The Redbook post tore the veil off the beauty industry in real time. Until then, the idea that “celebrities are photoshopped” and “photos are retouched” was almost an urban myth, which is easy to forget given the ubiquity of filters and AI now. Then, you heard about it but couldn’t confirm it for yourself unless you had firsthand experience. Retouching was a discrete industry practice, digital tools were still expensive and clunky, and all of it was surrounded by a lot of tradecraft and secrecy. The mystery of celebrity image management exploded with an animated gif on a public-facing post, and it was rad.

Another AI writing tell that annoys me is the preoccupation with describing what “exists,” and what is “structural” or “architectural” to an ephemeral idea. LLMs seem tuned to describing physical presence and connections even where they aren’t appropriate and don’t make sense.

A couple of weeks ago I had an interesting convo with Jessica Grose on Threads about the rise of the “Luddite teen” trend. I largely suspect neo-Luddism is a class-related trend and will not be durable. In short, I remain unconvinced that the concern of white collar professionals and parents about the attention economy can be universalized to everyone in the actual economy. This weekend, the NYT reports that the “one laptop per child” goal we’ve been living with in public education may be on the way out, like I hinted in that thread. As the anti-AI backlash develops in real time, it will implicate other tech trends like so.

I’ve been dismayed to find out how much schoolwork happens in Google Classroom in 2026, especially since the COVID shutdown accelerated the shift. My kiddo has received a good deal of math instruction through digital modules, and I’ve learned that if I want her experience to be different, I need to be prepared to pay out of pocket for a private tutor (a scenario taken for granted by much of the commentariat). At the same time, I learned that our local school district is struggling to keep up with the costs of all the hardware and software it committed to over the years, ostensibly for educational continuity, equity and access. Do we need the tech or not? Who decides what it means and how it’s applied? Chicken, egg.

I think it would be foolish to throw up our hands and say the kids need paper and pencil and nothing else, and yet that’s where the discourse is going. I have low confidence that our current landscape will produce a sane and reasonable solution to this tangle – even Haidt is selling you a product here. Until then, we need to consider what it means to offload the costs, accountability, and responsibility for this technology onto school districts, parents, and children, many of whom do not have the time, resources, or know-how to curate an ideal tech experience on nights and weekends.

This post is mostly an excuse to talk about my latest playlist: Digital Animal. This one consists of about 200 songs across genres, all reflecting on our human relationship to science and technology, futurism, digital culture and the internet.

When I’m chewing over a big idea, I like to compile resources in and around that idea to help support my thinking. Embracing my angst about artificial intelligence, I started compiling songs that reach back to the early 20th century, tapping into prior generations’ anxieties about telephones, television and early networking technology, adding more contemporary concerns as I went. The playlist runs from David Bowie and Blue Öyster Cult and Kraftwerk to Zapp and Radiohead, then forward into modern takes on social media, cell phones, and the internet from Missy Elliott, Gillian Welch and Charli XCX.

I like a playlist because it’s convenient, and because songs are one place where meaning and feeling are created simultaneously, and because it’s easy to spot salient patterns across disparate sources. Scholars in interdisciplinary studies have long argued that you cannot fully understand a thing without understanding what it feels like to live with it, and that cultural analysis may get you there faster than surveys will anyway. Meanwhile most writing about technology separates feelings from form and function. Art and music compress all three, and have the potential to surface ideas that professional and institutional language can’t. Art and culture frequently peg an issue down before emerging best practices are formalized in business and academia.

For anyone working in technology communications, that lag between culture and practice has practical consequences. The language we use to describe technical systems shapes what people can think and do about those systems. An institutional frame — efficiency, access, innovation, value — consistently misses important dynamics that people living inside those systems are experiencing as users and as people. Art keeps the human subject inside the frame, functioning as both anecdote and data.

Plus, it’s fun and we should collectively think about art as much as possible. So, treat every song like a portal.

What does it mean to be both digital and animal? Some observations:

Is fretting about our relationship to tech and industry part of the human condition? Or is there something specific to tech that accelerates these anxieties and impulses?

A few favs:

  • I’m enjoying almost everything from the band Automatic. One of the band members is the daughter of the drummer from Bauhaus, and their work is heavily influenced by 80s era synth pop and new wave. I have several of their songs represented on the list, and particularly like “Black Box” off their 2025 album.
  • Erykah Badu’s “Cel U Lar Device,” which positions the phone as an instrument of interpersonal surveillance, has been on rotation in my house for (cough) years. It is also a reinterpretation of Drake’s hit “Hotline Bling,” itself forever memorialized as a popular meme format.
  • The Talking Heads’ 1988 “(Nothing but) Flowers” imagines a sunny life after the fall of industrial civilization. For the doomer, afropessimist take on this theme, check out Nina Simone’s cover of “22nd Century.”
  • Sophie’s “Faceshopping” is about the negative pressures of cultivating a public persona and brand, and tips a hat to our relatively new ability to use science and technology to curate a physical appearance that matches your internal (and digital) one.
  • Nobody talks about Ladytron anymore.