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atillahallsby.bsky.social
Atilla Hallsby
@atillahallsby.bsky.social
670 followers 770 following 100 posts
Rhetoric/Secrecy
a.i. refuser/OA advocate
he/him
🇹🇷/🇸🇪
www.atillahallsby.com

“Reading Rhetorical Theory” (UMN Libraries, 2022) https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/

“Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie” (OSU Press, 2026). https://tinyurl.com/yfh4pvfd
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atillahallsby.bsky.social
Atilla Hallsby @atillahallsby.bsky.social · Oct 11
Forthcoming February 2026 from The Ohio State University Press: “Sovereign, Settler, Leaker Lie: Forms of the Secret in U.S. Political Rhetoric”!

ohiostatepress.org/books/titles...

Pre-orders available at link; the book will be released as an open access title. Book jacket description follows.
Cover image for sovereign settler leaker lie: forms of the secret in US political rhetoric. The image depicts a large empty office space with fluorescent lighting and telephones placed at regular intervals on the ground, next to poles where they are plugged in. The image is shot in black-and-white. the image is of the Philip Morris call center and was taken by Ezra Stoler. A book jacket blurb for sovereign, settler, leaker, lie: “much work on the secret skirts over it’s rhetorical form and associated tropes, but Hallsby has written a rigorous, capacious, and highly that situates the secret historically essential reading for those interest in the politics and aesthetics of secrecy.” by Clare Birchall, author of radical secrecy: the ends of transparency in datafied America A book jacket blurb for sovereign, settler, leaker, lie: “ sovereign, settler, leaker, lie, generatively brings rhetorical studies into conversation with surveillance studies to offer important expansions and correctives to the study of secrecy. drawing on a rich historical archive that includes figures like Allan Turing, Saul D. Alinsky, Valerie Plame Wilson, and Chelsea Manning, Hallsby powerfully illustrates how secrets are not just in but of discourse. And so doing he importantly, foregrounds the secret’s material impacts and entanglement with racial, colonial, and gendered violences.” Blurb by Mia Fischer, author of terrorizing gender: transgender visibility and the national security state. A book jacket blurb for sovereign, settler, leaker, lie: “ presented from a psychoanalytic perspective that ref binary of suspicion and faith, sovereign, settler, leaker, lie is both reassuring for its ability to name contemporary rhetorical dynamics, and sobering because, as Freud once put it, we are not masters of our own house.” Blurb by Joshua Gunn, author of political perversion: rhetorical aberration in the time of trumpeteering.
atillahallsby.bsky.social
EdTech LLMs reinforce racism and forecast the death of education.
irisvanrooij.bsky.social Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 8d
You think LLM-based chatbots can help students learn? Think again.

Take a few minutes to listen to Dr. @drtanksley.bsky.social clear explanation why this is very bad, harmful idea, especially for Black students.

#Critical_AI_Literacy

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mtc...
Howard University AI Panel
YouTube video by Tiera Tanksley
www.youtube.com
November 23, 2025 at 12:17 PM
atillahallsby.bsky.social
So very proud of Emily Winderman, whose book is out in the world as of this October!! The cover is AMAZING and the book is INCREDIBLE. Pick up a copy for yourself or your library!!

tinyurl.com/Back-Alley-A...
Back-Alley Abortion
A Rhetorical History
tinyurl.com
November 20, 2025 at 3:00 AM
Reposted by Atilla Hallsby
lecagle.bsky.social
I have a book chapter I wrote about this!!

More specifically, it's about how tools like web templates help conspiracists move away from traditional visual markers such as wild color templates and mismatched fonts.

Of course LLMs are making it worse.

www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781...
Scan of a flyer covered in small, cramped, black, red, blue, and green text, much of it. Underlined. The bottom half of a flyer has distorted images that vaguely refer to technology, weather, buildings, and cars. The text reads Did You Know that Lexington, Kentucky City Council has signed us up as Members of ICLEI, Agenda 21, Agenda 2030, and the United Nations? Did you know that our Planning Commission, Utility Companies, University of Kentucky, and many others have taken money to install LED Lights (with Cameras and Recorders inside), Wireless Utility Meters, and other smart technology to use as Mass Survelliance Devices in order to have complete control over all of us? Did you know their plans include Controlling our access to land, water, and food? Did you know they plan to stack and pack all of us into tiny spaces and force us to use their transportation of choice by taxing the use of our cars by the mile and increasing gas prices? Don't believe it? Just take a look at the Cases filed with Kentucky PSC. Look at the Imagine Lexington Comprehensive Plan 2018 and READ BETWEEN THE LINES! China and India are already under complete surveilliance! Californians are fighting for their lives as their property is burned up using DEW Lasers, their land and water is being controlled by the utilities using wireless meters. The RADIATION from the meters and now 5G is cansing illness and disease as well as death! They are Policed, their property has been destroyed and taken away, their lives are controlled through "REAL ID" and Biometrics, and they're loosing their freedom to travel where they want, when they want. EVERYTHING citizens do is SURVEILLED and SENSORED! All Amendment Rights are Gone! Look it Up! There is no place to run because they ignored the warnings and waited too long to take action against their City Council!
November 19, 2025 at 2:46 PM
Reposted by Atilla Hallsby
annakornbluh.bsky.social
"A circular economy of loans and debts and froth and hype…all entirely dependent upon one another. This emperor has $1 trillion and not a stitch to wear.

Wiley Coyote at the edge of a cliff doesn’t fall until he looks down. When are people going to look down? The finances don’t make any sense."
carolecadwalla.bsky.social Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla.bsky.social · 14d
NEW: Welcome to the Great AI Bubble. Yes, it’s here. And yes, it’s going to burst.

It’s also got way more in common with the Epstein scandal than you really want to know.

open.substack.com/pub/broligar...
The Great AI Bubble
Yes, it's a bubble. And yes, it's going to burst.
open.substack.com
November 16, 2025 at 12:49 PM
atillahallsby.bsky.social
One of those “I spent x year writing a book and they just … tweeted it” moments, only, my entire feed, everyone, forever moments.

Feels validating, honestly.
adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com Adam Gurri @adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com · 18d
TV conspiracies: we’ve hacked their computers but they’ve perfectly cleaned up the evidence!

Real conspiracies:
To: conspirator
From: famous person
Attachment: evidence.png
November 13, 2025 at 8:33 AM
atillahallsby.bsky.social
This is literal iconoclasm, no?
angrystaffer.bsky.social Angry @angrystaffer.bsky.social · Oct 21
The White House is asking people not to share pictures of the East Wing because it’s even worse today.
October 22, 2025 at 4:00 AM
Reposted by Atilla Hallsby
tressiemcphd.bsky.social
In about three years the entire university pivot to AI curricula and schools and programs is going to be so deeply embarrassing. We will all pretend it never happened and I will be standing there, looking at people with a mirror in my eyes. This is all so embarrassing.
October 17, 2025 at 12:16 PM
atillahallsby.bsky.social
Some fun* facts:

1. Woodlawn, one of the neighborhoods that became the UC South Campus, was built as temp housing for the Columbian Exposition in 1893: a “white city” w/ the original Ferris Wheel, a “military encampment,” & German/Turkish “villages”

Beck, Unfair Labor?, Burg, Chicago’s White City
October 16, 2025 at 10:05 PM
atillahallsby.bsky.social
October 14, 2025 at 1:42 AM
Reposted by Atilla Hallsby
hypervisible.blacksky.app
ai is a fascist tool. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
Ilyasah Shabazz didn’t want to look at the AI-generated videos of her father, Malcolm X. The seemingly realistic clips — made by OpenAI’s new video-maker Sora 2 — show the legendary civil rights activist making crude jokes, wrestling with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and talking about defecating on himself. “It is deeply disrespectful and hurtful to see my father’s image used in such a cavalier and insensitive manner when he dedicated his life to truth,” Shabazz, whose father was assassinated in front of her in 1965 when she was 2, told The Washington Post. She questioned why the developers were not acting “with the same morality, conscience, and care … that they’d want for their own families.”
October 12, 2025 at 11:03 PM
atillahallsby.bsky.social
Forthcoming February 2026 from The Ohio State University Press: “Sovereign, Settler, Leaker Lie: Forms of the Secret in U.S. Political Rhetoric”!

ohiostatepress.org/books/titles...

Pre-orders available at link; the book will be released as an open access title. Book jacket description follows.
Cover image for sovereign settler leaker lie: forms of the secret in US political rhetoric. The image depicts a large empty office space with fluorescent lighting and telephones placed at regular intervals on the ground, next to poles where they are plugged in. The image is shot in black-and-white. the image is of the Philip Morris call center and was taken by Ezra Stoler. A book jacket blurb for sovereign, settler, leaker, lie: “much work on the secret skirts over it’s rhetorical form and associated tropes, but Hallsby has written a rigorous, capacious, and highly that situates the secret historically essential reading for those interest in the politics and aesthetics of secrecy.” by Clare Birchall, author of radical secrecy: the ends of transparency in datafied America A book jacket blurb for sovereign, settler, leaker, lie: “ sovereign, settler, leaker, lie, generatively brings rhetorical studies into conversation with surveillance studies to offer important expansions and correctives to the study of secrecy. drawing on a rich historical archive that includes figures like Allan Turing, Saul D. Alinsky, Valerie Plame Wilson, and Chelsea Manning, Hallsby powerfully illustrates how secrets are not just in but of discourse. And so doing he importantly, foregrounds the secret’s material impacts and entanglement with racial, colonial, and gendered violences.” Blurb by Mia Fischer, author of terrorizing gender: transgender visibility and the national security state. A book jacket blurb for sovereign, settler, leaker, lie: “ presented from a psychoanalytic perspective that ref binary of suspicion and faith, sovereign, settler, leaker, lie is both reassuring for its ability to name contemporary rhetorical dynamics, and sobering because, as Freud once put it, we are not masters of our own house.” Blurb by Joshua Gunn, author of political perversion: rhetorical aberration in the time of trumpeteering.
October 11, 2025 at 5:11 PM
atillahallsby.bsky.social
“Several of the skits show clankers being treated as second-class citizens. ‘For me, [said Moya Bailey, a professor at Northwestern University] the racism very much shows just how embedded and how tied anti-Blackness is with our ideas of work and labor and service and servitude.’”
The AI Slur ‘Clanker’ Has Become a Cover for Racist TikTok Skits
The online trend takes a comedic approach to spreading anti-AI messaging, but some creators are using racist references to make their point.
www.wired.com
October 10, 2025 at 5:08 AM
atillahallsby.bsky.social
Artists are not killing the a.i. industry; the a.i. industry is making it impossible for artists to make a living.
October 8, 2025 at 2:35 PM
Reposted by Atilla Hallsby
vicmsong.bsky.social
I think about this constantly as I test AI hardware and smart glasses. As someone who grew up being told my family was constantly surveilled because of my dad’s ties to North Korea, I don’t think people really understand what it means to always live like you’re being watched.
September 10, 2025 at 4:22 PM
Reposted by Atilla Hallsby
hypervisible.blacksky.app
There it is.
spavel.bsky.social Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · Sep 9
Remember: there's no audience for AI-produced content. Nobody in the AI ecosystem is there to read or listen - only to publish their own slop.
spavel.bsky.social Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · Apr 15
The real pitch, of course, isn't to consume the slop, but to join the exalted ranks of slop producers. The typical slop middleman makes an "AI company" - they run the gamut from Grammarly to Synthetic Users - and resells the processed slop with the same pitch: you too can now make slop.
September 9, 2025 at 10:50 PM
Reposted by Atilla Hallsby
aaronradney.bsky.social
I will remind folks those images of Nazi book burnings aren't burning just any books. They're burning the library of Magnus Hirschfeld; a gay, Jewish doctor who created an institute dedicated to LGBTQ sex education and healthcare. And a man who pioneered gender affirming care surgeries.
August 29, 2025 at 1:23 AM
Reposted by Atilla Hallsby
jamellebouie.net
there is no question in my mind that rfk jr is the most dangerous person in this administration and that his eugenicist ideology threatens the lives of millions of people www.advocate.com/politics/dem...
RFK Jr.’s damage to the CDC is ‘past the point of no return,’ Dr. Demetre Daskalakis warns
“The CDC you knew is over,” the infectious diseases doctor told The Advocate. “Unless someone takes radical action, there is nothing there that can be salvaged.”
www.advocate.com
August 29, 2025 at 8:53 PM
Reposted by Atilla Hallsby
jenraso.bsky.social
One challenge here is that public officials use this tech as a pretext for acting like *preexisting* laws, policies and norms simply no longer apply when communicating with the public. As if LLMs open a magic portal to a law-free world. This spells trouble for administrative justice.
emilymbender.bsky.social Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · Aug 28
Reading more of the PBS/KNKX excellent reporting on LLM use by municipal governments in WA and it's infuriating.

www.knkx.org/government/2...

A short thread:
Screencap from linked article: “Technology moves very fast, law and regulation tends to move slowly,” Ishizuka said. “And it’s often not until after a lot of technology and the impacts are felt that often regulators respond.” Screencap from linked article: Responding to constituent emails appears to be a “high-use case for how city employees are using AI tools,” said Bellingham Mayor Kim Lund. “We consider that a permissive use of AI for efficiency reasons, but it’s a springboard to finalize the communication with the constituent,” she said. “There’s still that discernment that happens and that critical thinking.” Screencap from linked article: Bellingham is still developing a formal AI policy; asked if the public should have the right to know a message is AI-generated, Lund wasn’t sure. It’s a question the city is grappling with. That lack of clarity isn’t unusual: As generative AI tools like ChatGPT are used more and more by local governments, adoption is often outpacing potential safeguards and ethical guardrails. Screencap from linked article: This spring, Bellingham officials emailed a copy of the city’s draft AI policy to city employee union leaders. Records show that the policy was drafted with assistance from ChatGPT. Over the course of more than a year, an IT staffer in Burdick’s department asked the chatbot numerous AI policy questions. “[C]reate an example ai policy for a city government,” the staffer wrote in one prompt. Seven of the 10 guiding principles in the policy procedure document appear partially copied from ChatGPT’s output. The main difference is that the city version replaces the phrase “AI system” with “solution.”
August 28, 2025 at 9:20 AM
atillahallsby.bsky.social
Oh, good.

Classic correlation/causation dodge and weave with a sprinkle of surveillance, as a treat.

The mental health uses/applications are honestly terrifying given how ai is refurbishing the ol’ psychopathology-to-carcerality pipeline.

Your words live in public. You don’t own your prompts.
August 28, 2025 at 5:29 AM
Reposted by Atilla Hallsby
maxkennerly.bsky.social
Anyone who looks at America in 2025 and thinks, "maybe we can fix this by throwing trans people under the bus"

1) doesn't have the brains to understand what's going on or how we got here

2) doesn't have the stomach for any of the fights ahead

and

3) is vice signaling to their MAGA friends.
parkermolloy.com Parker Molloy @parkermolloy.com · Aug 27
The Pod Save America bros are setting up a "debate" about trans rights featuring anti-trans ghoul Matt Yglesias, apparently! No clue who the "pro-trans" side will be repped by, but I'm really worried that they're going to just find someone to get steamrolled.
jael.bsky.social jael holzman @jael.bsky.social · Aug 27
so there’s gonna potentially be a pod save america “debate” on democrats future support for trans rights in the near future

i had to back out because of scheduling conflicts, and for some reason they didn’t want my help finding a replacement

on the other side of the “debate” is…

matt yglesias
August 28, 2025 at 2:21 AM
Reposted by Atilla Hallsby
alexbpart.bsky.social
It's getting harder and harder to deny that AGI is a near certainty. This kind of rapid expansion, this level of investment and infrastructural shift, this amount of *risk* - it doesn't happen without astronomical reward. The other day I saw a big barn, which can only mean one thing: giant horses
August 27, 2025 at 9:14 AM
Reposted by Atilla Hallsby
tressiemcphd.bsky.social
August 21, 2025 at 12:15 AM
Reposted by Atilla Hallsby
lisabahr.bsky.social
“They’re using the trade secrets exemption — that it would materially harm the companies and their competitiveness,” Cuillier said. “That’s not what they’re doing. They’re deleting everything and having a vague cover page. That’s not complying with the law.”👇

talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/th...
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/there-is-an-information-blackout-at-floridas-alligator-alcatraz-migrant-detention-camp“They’re
August 6, 2025 at 9:35 AM
atillahallsby.bsky.social
"Although Trump has used his request to release them as evidence of his supposed transparency, now it is clear his DOJ knows they would be of limited revelatory value."
Trump and Allies Flounder on Epstein Files While Senate Dems Forge Ahead
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This...
talkingpointsmemo.com
July 31, 2025 at 4:27 PM
Reposted by Atilla Hallsby
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Nearly two decades after my principal said we couldn't do anything about kids' phones, so we had to figure out how to use them in our lessons, and after two decades of schools failing to "teach kids how to use them responsibly," phones are being banned and we're getting the same message about AI.
Headline from NY Post: NYC kids banned from using phones, smartwatches, tablets in public schools starting this fall
July 25, 2025 at 10:30 AM