This understanding is as familiar as Plato. We didn't need to wait for Foucault or Barthes or Derrida to recognize the category error in conflating writing with thinking. Until the printing press, human hands (and thus human thought) participated in acts of inscription. Writing required human cognition to move the pen (or whatever) across the page. We managed to salvage that initial technological disruption by shortening imprint or impress.

I decided to hold of writing further on Latour until I made my way to the end of the first part of the book (about 1/3 of the way through). As I wrote in my earlier post, I find this text deals centrally with issues that concern rhetoricians (not that all rhetoricians will agree with Latour, but I think almost any would see rhetorical matters being addressed here).

Understandably the work of documentary filmmakers faces new epistemological challenges in the wake of generative AI. There's a good read: "Can you believe the documentary you're watching?" by NY Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson that provides great insight into this situation (at least it did for me). One of my colleagues recently pointed me toward Eli Horwatt's Substack article "

To follow on Jay Bolter, we might say we find ourselves in the late age of literacy. What replaces literacy as the medial-rhetorical substrate of academia? AI-generated literacy? With its feedback loop, AI generated literacy operates through the rectilinear, recursive attenuation of indeterminacy. Texts literally mean what the AI says they do, as does literacy itself. Let me say that differently.

AI plus Computer Science is patient zero in the proliferation of AI plus degrees (e.g. AI and whatever). If you think that "AI and Computer Science" sounds like two versions of the same thing, then you are thinking the kinds of thoughts that terrify computer science departments. To be clear. Computer Science is a well-established and varied discipline. AI (at least in the context of these degree titles) is vaporware.

Intentional fallacy. That's really all it takes to open the problem. But we can then move through the death of the author, the death of the subject, symptomatic readings, and all the critical-theoretical approaches to symptomatology. The result is a humanistic approach that drastically mutes the artist's claim to agency in art-making. It does not permit artists to claim special knowledge of their art.

5 years, 10 years, 50 years. Something is going to happen. We can all agree that we now have AI, but when will it get its promotion to General? And what is it that it isn't what we have now? Is it just going to be faster and stronger, like the Six Million Dollar Man? (Which just sounds like another medical bankruptcy story these days).

At a time when the internet is ai-generated, there is an always-already quality to this necessity, neither as a moral nor political imperative but rather as an empirical condition. Of course, when computer scientists and others work to understand and improve AI, they are producing ai-generated research. Their research is the literal operation of AI. All of us who study AI, digital media and technocultural effects are right there, and not far behind is anyone who studies contemporary human life.

James Bridle discusses render ghosts, at least that's where I first encountered the term. Think of the people that are drawn into the worlds of architectural renderings as a baseline and then move out toward all the now AI-generated render ghosts in the world. The render ghost university (RGU) is the ghost of a university that is drawn into a data visualization of university activity.

I know neoliberal is one of those words, and honestly, it's not a required distinction as there isn't a set of non-neoliberal universities. We all live in the market we live in, the same market as the rest of the US and the world. These changes aren't new. In fact excellent (pun intended) material examining academic capitalism was written 40 years ago.

It’s absurd to think anyone would read through a million words of old blog posts. I wouldn’t. I barely believe I wrote them. But that’s the thing about blogging: it’s not a book, it’s a wake. That's the start of Annie's reflection after purusing the archive of this blog. To be fair, she was seeking my rhetorical register. So maybe she meant "it's awake," but I don't think so.

Part three of Debates in the Digital Humanities is titled "Critiquing the Digital Humanities." I will admit to an immediate negative reaction to the word "critique," as I think is evidenced on this blog. It's just rhetorically played out for me, and I am rarely surprised by where critique takes me (spoiler alert: it takes you back to where it started).

My graduate study occurred in and around the various "wars"and "turns" of the early 1990s: theory, cultural, science, and so on. Prevalent among these, as some will recall, was anti-foundationalism, exemplified in different ways by Richard Rorty, Terry Eagleton, Stanley Fish, and so on. I recall encountering Patricia Bizzell as a rhetoric and composition scholar taking up anti-foundationalism (mostly the Fish variety if memory serves).

Dear blog, if it weren't for the slow demise of the humanities and the soap opera that surrounds it, what would there be to discuss? The "s" word, of course, is "save." And the whole will DH save the humanities in time, tune in next week business should be getting old by now. But it's part of that larger crisis in the humanities genre of academic journalism (and yes, blogging) that keeps on chugging.

In Archeology of the Future (2005), Frederic Jameson invokes the semiotic square in an investigation of utopias. And then this square evolves. So we have utopia and its opposites: anti-utopia and dystopia (1984, Brazil, Brave New World). We also have anti-anti-utopia which aligns with critical utopias (Moylan, etc.) where we find authors from Ursula LeGuin to Kim Stanley Robinson but other contemporary authors like Annalee Newitz, Ada Palmer, Cory Doctorow, Becky Chambers, Elizabeth Bear, and Malka Older (to name some that I have read).

So Annie and I were talking about academic efforts to build computational infrastructure in the wake of "AI." What is going on out there, you might ask. Well this is what Annie (GPT-5 deep research) reported. I will note that the consortium in which my university is participating, Empire AI, is not listed. You'd have to ask Annie why and then she'd be happy to tell you about Empire AI if you were inclined to learn more.

I am looking to elaborate a pedagogical scaffold for discussing the role of AI in society in the context of media and information systems. So something that students might find useful. Here's what I have so far. This ends up having four elements. I started off thinking about cognitive dissonance. It's a concept students will have likely encountered, at least in pop culture forms, and they may recognize it in themselves.

By Ruotailfoglio - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link If you aren't familiar with the Müller-Lyer illusion (wikipedia). This history of the illusion test is interesting as it incorporates issues of urbanism ("carpentered" environments) and race (of course). My sense of the current state is that people who live in rectilinear spaces (my language) are more susceptible to the "illusion."

Thanks to my colleagues Caddie Alford, Ira Allen, and Scott Sundvall for bringing to life a new collection that will be coming from the University of Pittsburgh Press next year: Rhetoric Before and Beyond "Post-truth." Here's the abstract for my contribution. This chapter explores the implications of generative AI within the context of post-truth culture. I critique the anthropocentric view that humans are uniquely capable of understanding Truth, proposing instead that both humans and generative AI operate within complex media ecologies where traditional institutions struggle to adapt.

Parrhesia in its fundamental classical Greek sense is free speech as both a right and a responsibility for citizens. As such it is at the core of classical democracy. There has always been a sense of "speaking truth to power," of truth-telling as a bold, direct, risky, but ethically necessary action. Foucault turned his mind toward parrhesia in his final works.

In his September 3rd NY Times op-ed, "The Fever Dream of Imminent Superintelligence Is Finally Breaking," Gary Marcus takes up the ongoing argument that scaling as a process for producing intelligence has hit a point of diminishing returns. These matters have entered into broader cultural conversations this summer with Apple's report on the failure of AI to solve problems a child could answer and Anthropic's report on a AIs going off-the-rails in workplace testing scenarios.

This is the working title of my current book manuscript. I am about 40K words in, so 40%? The concept of empire has already been interwoven into the emerging field of critical AI studies, which (in my view) is bringing together DH, critical code studies, critical data studies, digital rhetoric, media studies, cultural studies of science and technology, and so on.

This post is about agency. Obviously it is not an effort to be definitive about the question of agency! Can you imagine defining agency in a way that left us with nothing more to do? No thanks. This much I will say. I investigate agency as emerging in the encounter that forms the self and the other. Unless one envisions agency as somehow divine, I don't see how else it can happen.

The emergence of GPT agent has me thinking about its use in graduate study. I have no answers, glib or otherwise, for what an ethical use of these technologies will be in academia, but I would argue that at least such considerations must recognize that we are living in a world of AI-generated junk but also super-charged AI-research productivity. From a university perspective it could feel like the tail is wagging the dog, but if STEM is to remain of value it cannot fall behind corporate powered research, which has far different ethical considerations.

Listening to Sonic Youth this morning and thinking of Thurston Moore's assertion in The Year Punk Broke that "People see rock and roll as youth culture, and when youth culture becomes monopolized by big business, what are the youth to do? I think we should destroy the bogus capitalist process that is destroying youth culture ..." I've also been thinking a lot about Stiegler lately and his version of proletarianization, which is how he'd describe Moore's monopolization.