Charles Pidgeon

I always think C Thi Nguyen's epistemic bubbles and echo chambers article is accessible, compellingly written, and useful for starting conversations

I'm sure you've come across it, but Olivia Guest et al, "Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' technologies in Academia" (2025) provides a very useful overview and readable overview of critiques against AI
Maybe too citation heavy for week 1, but I've had success using it to start discussions!

Send it to one friend whose opinion you respect greatly, who will give you a tiny crumb of praise (not too much!) and then ask you heaps of provocative questions about what happens next

Did you know that the PR agency for #COP30 also works for fossil fuel companies like Shell?

We made a meditation app to help them sleep at night.

Try it for yourself here
oilwell.app

"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future."

- @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit.

Incredible words.
Listen to all of it!

I've been reading the Cultural Logic of Computation (2009) and it's so lucid, insightful, and prescient. Very sad that he's no longer with us, but very grateful to have his books

📌

re: LLM answers at the top of search results — it's so funny that they put a little imp who lies to you at the gate to All Human Knowledge. Does Google think it's protecting the city of Thebes??

Will continue to bang this drum: this is the system university admins are cramming into every aspect of education. This is the system we are told “isn’t going anywhere” so we all have to adjust to it.

Magic Bean Adoption Flatlines as Magic Fails to Ensue

“Researching and reflecting on the harms of AI is not itself harm reduction. It may even contribute to rationalizing, normalizing, and enabling harm. Critical reflection without appropriate action is thus quintessentially critical washing."

-- @marentierra.bsky.social et al, (2025).

i said what i said

Microsoft is refunding its scummy AI plans so that the ACCC doesn’t go so hard on them Microsoft is offering refunds to 3 (!) million Australian customers and apologised about its dodgy AI plan pushing (SmartCompany). In an email sent to customers today, Microsoft says it will refund all the additional cost of its Copilot AI plans if people revert to its non-AI plan by the end of the year. “In hindsight, we could have been clearer about the availability of a non-AI-enabled offering with subscribers, not just to those who opted to cancel their subscription,” the statement said. grovelling email by Microsoft The Sizzle: None of this happens if the ACCC hadn’t launched legal proceedings against Microsoft. Notably, this is just for Australian customers. Everywhere else just remains ripped off. If our consumer protections make us a nanny state, then stick a dummy in my mouth and give me a diaper!!! Greatest country in the world!!!!

This is huge news in @cameronwilson.bsky.social's @thesizzle.com.au- Microsoft is being forced by the Aus regulator refund all the ultra-dodgy AI plan pushing it was doing for Office 365

Wild that other regions aren't also using regulatory power to punish Microsoft

thesizzle.com.au/p/google-sur...

Staggering to imagine trying to explain this to 2015 me, who was happily listening to Art Angels without a care in the world...

They’re doing this because it’s so successful

Ahahah and Riskin's book is a HEFTY tome. Maybe you need a taller house? :))

Love this! I think that Jessica Riskin's Restless Clock (2016) is a version of this book. But her book is marketed/formatted as scholarly, even though it is very engagingly written

Devastatingly accurate, isn't it?

I do! Also anecdotes about this had an afterlife in quote a few essays and critiques of the tech industry (I'm thinking Roisin Kiberd's essay on normcore / Zuckerberg / the hoody as coding uniform)

The Review of Beauty by Jessica DeFino | Substack A critical review of the beauty industry prioritizing people, not products. Click to read The Review of Beauty by Jessica DeFino, a Substack publication with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Jessica DeFino's review of beauty is really good at staying up to date (but also very smartly critiquing) the beauty/fashion culture industry
open.substack.com/pub/jessicad...

I think the conclusion of this study is likely to be valid however it is worth noting that any attempts to localise cognitive tasks such as writing to a specific brain activation/connectivity is problematic because that's not how the brain works.

1/

One of your best!

This is a truly incredible series, cannot recommend enough!

The actual centre of literary studies? What unites it as a form of enquiry?

One of the main answers: the method of close reading.

But that has led to some really interesting historicising of how close reading developed (see Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant forthcoming book on close reading).

Most obvious focal point for this discussion is John Guillory's 2022 book "Professing Criticism", and reactions to that book.

He basically asks: with the capacious breadth of 21st c literary studies (ecocriticism, queer studies, diaspora literatures etc are all very different subfields), where is

The defining conversation of the recent 5 years of literary studies centres on: is/why literary studies is dying/being defunded? How/should it be saved? What part(s) are worth saving?

Not so much "can literary studies save the world", more like "is it worth/possible to save literary studies".

"The idea of granting rights to a future sentient robot legitimizes a kind of techno-optimist thinking which, much like the current fad of commercial space travel, actually undermines rather than promotes sustainability" firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

📌

Screenshot of Jathan Sadowski’s article Machine’s Eye View: Postmodern Data Science and the Politics of Ground Truth (2025). The following quote is highlighted: 'Through a vast, and still growing, variety of socio-technical systems, insurers and actuaries have created their own complex models to assess the risk and value of all phenomena, legitimated them as objective sources of economic and epistemic authority, and enforced them as a techno-political regime that governs the present, through the past, by predicting and pricing the future'

Only on page 1 and we’re already off to the races! This is excellent.

My bf and I have a spare room in Oxford? Pretty easy to do day trips to London