Shreeharsh Kelkar

@STS_News Agree much of the current SV rightward shift about CEO opportunists; but lefty intellectuals had started to characterize SV as racist/misogynist/colonial for structural reasons *well before* this shift e.g., see the reinterpretation of computer hobbyists of the 80s.

My bet is that this whole right-wing Silicon Valley thing is *WAY* more about opportunists trying to get ahead in a specific moment than it is anything deeper than that, and that all the effort lefty intellectuals are putting into exegesis of this stuff will be turn out to have been a huge waste of time that would be better spent doing materialist analysis of geopolitics and how industries work.

@TheStalwart Or to put it differently, this depends on how much your identity is tied to the tokens you produce when you write text or code.

@TheStalwart Seems simple to me. Computer code is not evaluated for its own sake; the software has to work around objective standards. Writers are judged on *writing*; criteria far more subjective. For crafting manuals or help files or exam questions, writers ask AI for help all the time.

I’ve seen this exact question asked a thousand times, and yet I’ve never seen anyone establish that the underlying premise is actually true. Has there been some poll?

@binarybits There was a grain of truth to the op-ed but so many different companies were called "software" companies for very different reasons! Amazon for its lack of stores and also Walmart for its inventory management software; Netflix for A/b testing and Pixar for their animation!

Marc Andreessen was wrong about software eating the world, and I see people making the same mistake about AI today. I wrote this almost three years ago and I wouldn't change a word if I were publishing it today.

@AlanLevinovitz It is demoralizing indeed which is why I don't have take-home papers anymore and do exams instead. There are some solutions; but they do present collective action problems for us. The most promising is watermarking: computingandsociety.substack.com/p/the-solution…

it's INCREDIBLY demoralizing to go through student assignments having to police them for AI, to know AI is being used to summarize readings, and have essentially no institutional recourse for punishments, no unity around stopping this from happening fundamentally changed my job

A BIG FUCK YOU TO THE AI COMPANIES THAT RELEASED THEIR PRODUCTS INTO THE WORLD WITHOUT EVER CONSIDERING THE CHEATING CRISIS THEY WOULD CREATE AND TO THE INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER ED FOR NOT CRACKING DOWN HARD BECAUSE THEY ARE AFRAID OF STUDENTS

@AndyMasley @algikarpooja I want to second that. I had to read "Reason in History" in grad school (a slim text) and could not make head or tails of it. Then I read Charles Taylor's book (a much bigger book) and I thought he explained Hegel better than Hegel explained himself!

@algikarpooja I’m a huge fan of Charles Taylor’s book on Hegel and think it’s preferable to the primary source. Would otherwise start with The Philosophy of History

can anyone suggest the order to read Hegel?

@Tyler_A_Harper Surely, this is less about the MF's power than the fact that this person's friends yelled at him, which suggests that the kind of projects the Foundation funds have deep support within the academy itself. True, not every humanist agrees, but a very significant number do.

This is a hilarious illustration of Mellon's power: guy has criticisms of my article (fair!) but admits donors having monopoly power is concerning. Then his friends yell at him, he apologizes for his white privilege, says I'm an enemy of racial justice, and deletes the article.

@STS_News Deleted my post because I am starting to read your link! "Bubble environments are shitty information environments" is a great sentence.

On LinkedIn, Rajesh Veeraraghavan tagged me in a post bemoaning our current info environment around GenAI, including both positive and negative takes. So I wrote up some thoughts, "Bubbles Are Shitty Information Environments, and All We Can Do Is Wait" peoples-things.ghost.io/bubbles-are-sh…

@STS_News "Bubbles are s*itty information environments" is a great sentence!

@KelseyTuoc Glad the gates worked out but will they keep on working? 🤞 It's easy to dodge them even now. Ultimately, this is about enforcement and being willing to fine people who travel without paying. In Vienna and Berlin, I saw random spot checks, almost military-style, but no gates.

There is a really good way to do this - fare gates which can't easily be bypassed. When BART added them they saw a massive decline in vandalism, damage, major cleanups, etc. If you want safe orderly transit, you just need good fare gates.

@jackbutler4815 This was fun and very well-done. You're clearly learning -- and very good! -- at the art of short-form videos.

I say it with love: Enough with the Tolkien and Lewis adaptations for now.

At this point, it's hard to say anything too new about the "institutional neutrality" debates, but I think @JeffreyASachs does, here: it's about public relations, and that's just fine: chronicle.com/article/neutra…

@NateWitkin I read the abstract and, while I have quibbles, absolutely believe that social media has reshaped politics, but I'm puzzled about what specific policy solution you think exists in terms of what this specific paper is saying. Ban content recommendation algorithms?

Would think folks who continue to deny social media's ability to reshape our politics, health, and society for the worse would throw in the towel by this point, but I'm not holding my breath.

Is the Mellon Foundation to blame for "woke"? open.substack.com/pub/computinga…

I wrote about @Tyler_A_Harper's latest piece on the Mellon Foundation which I liked a lot but which seemed to be focusing too much on "supply" rather than "demand."

@STS_News @luke_fernandez Forgot to mention that this piece (andymasley.substack.com/p/empire-of-ai…), if you haven't read it, is very good and also makes the book's worldview somewhat salient

@luke_fernandez @scritic Yes. That's an interesting point. Actually, what I had in mind was a little different: That we are already seeing lots of smaller AI firms popping up, especially in specific business niches. So the "empire" metaphor might break down in that way, too.

Maybe the answer is that there isn't one yet?

@michel_estefan Just to be clear, I think both are fine.

@michel_estefan The difference is in their methods: sociologists want to use "praxis" (whatever that is) and the SV engineers like to build products. And of course, the goals: SV engineers are perfectly fine with markets and corporations while sociologists don't.

One common phrase you’ll hear in Silicon Valley is, “I want to change the world.” In contrast, I’ve never heard my sociology students say that. What I have heard them say (often, and without irony) is, “I want to help people.”

@STS_News @luke_fernandez I do think Empire of AI is a well-reported book with lots of information about the workings of the AI industry; though it comes from a perspective that I don't quite agree with.

@STS_News @luke_fernandez I see! Got it! Look forward to reading your essay when it comes out! My point was that academics often consider every actual industry to be bad, which I find odd, but then if you want to call an industry *extra bad*, then I guess you'd have to use words like authoritarian!