Anne Pasek
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apasek.bsky.social
Anne Pasek
@apasek.bsky.social
580 followers 450 following 280 posts
STS, cultural studies, media, environment, climate, energy

Bikes, cats, synths, barbells, good recipes
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apasek.bsky.social
Guess who just got access to a primary care physician for the first time in 8 years and so will be doing preventative medicine again! :)
Cordelia Flyte writes: my deepest darkest fantasy is that I collapse on the street and I am rushed to the hospital. They perform a bunch of tests and find out I am severely deficient in some kind of vitamin. Then I start taking the vitamin and I become the happiest, cleverest person alive because all my problems were caused by this one deficiency. Cara Calliope adds: Moreover, everyone gathers around to be tremendously compassionate and discreetly admiring: all this time, you lacked the Vitamin? And yet you persevered?
November 6, 2025 at 6:33 PM
apasek.bsky.social
Sneaky bastards
unfuck google drive by shooting gemini Hey folks! Google is fucking you via sneaky enshittification again! Want the shit in your google drive to load instantly again, instead of taking for-fucking-ever? Open yourgrive settings, manage apps. Gemini was checked as use as default. Nuke that, and suddenly folders that took up to a minute to populate and sort do so in a fraction of a second.
October 31, 2025 at 12:46 PM
apasek.bsky.social
Yesterday my students did 'dead media autopsies' in class. It was pretty neat to look at electronics across a range of decades, and parsing when things stopped being soldered, and then largely assembled, by hand
A VCR disassembled. There's a lot of plastic gears, two belts, a motor, a 'magic' tape head, and a big old sheet a plastic with instructions for where all the caps and resistors go Computer speakers disassembled, featuring 2 cones with big magnets, a single phase transducer, screws, caps, and a lone LED The remains of an automated cat feeder. The plastic chassis got busted right apart to reveal a motor, a power port, and a board with spec-sized LEDs and caps/resistors, glued in with soldering paste
October 17, 2025 at 11:01 PM
apasek.bsky.social
I am going to talk to a bunch of lawyers at Yale about AI Trash. Yes, I will be showing them the bad AI slop picture of a scientific illustration of rat testicles (?).
AI slop of a scientific diagram. It features a cute white rat, with a cross-section of its abdomin, in which a huge phallic (or is it umbilical?) structure protrudes up and extends far past the height of the rat itself. Helpful labels on the image read "rat" "dissiced" "retat" "testtomcels" "dck" and "spermatocial stem cells"
October 2, 2025 at 2:30 PM
apasek.bsky.social
I'm making my environmental media class vote in Fat Bear week today with me.

Also: Look at this unit. Justice for 901! explore.org/fat-bear-week
A before and after photo of a bear called 901. She's bulked out! Elsewhere on the site "Her early adult life is marked by growth and loss. She readily achieves a level of fatness above that of many other bears... It is not uncommon for mother bears in Katmai to lose their entire litter given the risks faced by cubs. Yet past maternal experience is immensely valuable, which is why 901’s growing maturity and body size have her poised for success."
September 25, 2025 at 6:20 PM
apasek.bsky.social
September 21, 2025 at 2:02 PM
apasek.bsky.social
Wrestling is good
September 21, 2025 at 1:59 PM
apasek.bsky.social
Finally got my shortwave collective radio receiver to work!!!
A photo of a zoom recorder hooked into a really crude circuit built on a piece of cardboard. On/next to it as a lot of wires, alligator clips, a cookie sheet and piece of aluminum foil, a chunk of Galena, some blue razor blades, a safety pin, and a pencil stub. Copper wire is coiled around a toilet paper tubes in the corner
September 13, 2025 at 10:21 PM
apasek.bsky.social
My noise band is playing with some very talented folks next week. Come for good times! Come for loud times!
A hand-printed poster featuring three superpositioned dogs. The text reads Horseman, Passby & Connor Bennett / Normal Human Amount. Fri Sep 19 at Sadlier House 8 pm $20
September 9, 2025 at 1:14 PM
apasek.bsky.social
August 30, 2025 at 11:41 AM
apasek.bsky.social
In some personal news I can now lift exactly 300 lbs up a few feet and then drop it
A barbell on the ground with a bunch of rubber plates loaded. A red lifting belt is strewn on the floor nearby
August 29, 2025 at 10:12 PM
apasek.bsky.social
Looking forward to thinking about the geographical imaginaries of tech billionaires (+ their networks) with some very good company in September! us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regi...
A poster for A Roundtable on Mapping the Geographical Imaginations of the Tech Right, featuring Josh Lepawsky, Angela Carter, Keif Godbout-Kinney, Mel Hogan, and Anne Pasek. There's a pointillist, pastel background and a goofy 70s looking flower graphic.
August 19, 2025 at 7:59 PM
apasek.bsky.social
Joyful sights greet me walking home at 2 am
A brick house with chalk written a meter tall: "WE ♥️ cats". "MEOW" is also written vertically on the wall's edge
August 12, 2025 at 5:25 PM
apasek.bsky.social
And in the draft EPA proposal to roll back the 2009 CO2 endangerment finding (which, before the IRA, was sort of the singular meager thing the US federal government managed to do re: climate regulations, and only on the basis of a lawsuit)
recent scientific analyses propose that this divergence may be explained by greater capacity for the climate to reuptake GHGs in the atmosphere through natural processes. Terrestrial ecosystems have demonstrated a greater than anticipated sensitivity to elevated CO2 concentrations in the form of enhanced plant growth, which results in greater removal of CO2 from the atmosphere as plants take up CO2 and return it to the soil through natural life cycles. Similarly, the oceans have demonstrated a greater capacity to take up and process CO2 (including through aquatic plant life) without resulting in the anticipated negative impacts on pH and ocean ecosystems, including coral reefs (2025 CWG Draft Report at 6-9, 18-20)
July 31, 2025 at 11:47 AM
apasek.bsky.social
We're so back
A screenshot of the report, featuring a set of different plant seedlings and their root structures, arranged from smallest to largest. This correlates to different levels of CO2 concentrations they were grown under, and the historic dates those concentrations reflect atmospheric levels of CO2. The 700 ppm plant looks especially robust
July 31, 2025 at 11:41 AM
apasek.bsky.social
Power Shift is out!
This keywords project brings together many long-admired energy humanities thinkers in 1 book of v. assignable essays. In my entry I don't talk much about screen time & instead muse about infrastructure, data sovereignty, and (eventually, a little bit,) bikes.
powershiftbook.com
A photo of a book chapter. It starts: Online: When we are online, what lines are we on? The meanings of the word online are less narrow that we usually imagine. Though its use skyrocketed with the advent of the internet, 'online' messages and practices can be found in early twentieth-century discussions of the telegraph's electric signals as well as the linear paths of the railway... The word speaks not to a technology but to an infrastructural condition. The chapter continues: What will lines mean in such a future? This is an undecided question, and so also a promissory one. In visions of the Green New Deal, in experimental networks, and in Indigenous land and water protection movements, we find the unfolding of spaces and times that lines have long compressed. They prompt us in part to ask: what if lines were built not only for transmission, but also for living and leisure, featuring linear parks that bridge urban and rural landscapes? How might community-controlled networks get more people on screens, but also outside, locating the lines of sight and solar panel placements needed to make different kinds of connectivity? Could we learn to stream video while the wind blows, and pursue less energy- and data-intensive pleasures when the turbines are still? And what if Indigenous data sovereignty and land sovereignty were thought and practiced together, such that consent was meaningfully negotiated for the transit of such lines, so that they in turn served to connect and benefit the nations they crossed? Lines, in this future, might invite new modes of dwelling within the spaces of interconnection...
July 8, 2025 at 2:07 PM
apasek.bsky.social
Great thinking on the power of friendship (non-ironically!!!) laid out by @melhogan.bsky.social today at UT Austin's Digital Field Methods Institute.
Closing thoughts: the way we are sold friendship by tech CEOs tells us the state of politics of a nation, for which collective consequences are increasingly driven (and normalized) by corporations and invisible forms of private equity. That means - ultimately - rising authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and (eco)facism where your ideas and ideals - your politics - are shaped by companies, but feel like your own
July 2, 2025 at 7:11 PM
apasek.bsky.social
The fine folks of UT Austin's Digital Field Methods Institute are hosting me as a keynote this year. This means that I get the coolest mail! Y'all are setting quite the feast.
Three sheets of mylar paper with the headings Readings, Energy, and Welcome are fanned out on a table. There's also a bunch of little envelopes that say 'Open me on June 30' (+other dates). My hand is in the shot holding up a magnifying glass, expanding text on another envelope that says See Different. There is also a Sunpoint Kit, with a pretty illustration of a white fern silhouette over a blue background
June 27, 2025 at 11:07 PM
apasek.bsky.social
Me alegro mucho de que haya una traducción al español de mi fanzine sobre las luchas en los centros de datos. Más recursos para la gente que se está metiendo en buenas peleas con infraestructuras no deseadas y extractivas.
La portada de un fanzine con el texto: Enzarzarse en peleas con los centros de datos, o una humilde propuesta para reformar la política climática de las tecnologías digitales. También: cómo usar ping y traceroute para encontrar ubicación de los centros de datos y cómo buscar drama, conflictos y oportunidades de organización dondequiera que se encuentren
June 12, 2025 at 8:42 PM
apasek.bsky.social
Goal for CCA/Congress 2025: Don't get COVID again
A woman in a beige bomber jacket on a train wearing a snapback hat with a radish pattern and an N95 mask
June 1, 2025 at 10:52 PM
apasek.bsky.social
I'm playing a set tonight with a telephone pick up, and so I've made a sonic heat map of the different sounds it makes with the rest of my kit. (Not included here is an Xbox controller, whose Bluetooth sync makes a pleasing 'forklift backing up sort of beep'...)
A drawing of a mixing board, tape deck and speaker with pink highlighter marking a few areas on each where interesting hums and shrieks can be found with the pick up coil
May 24, 2025 at 9:33 AM
apasek.bsky.social
An etching of a very handsome amphibian with the text: Beautiful Mr Toad: the naturalist finds many points in him to admire
May 18, 2025 at 11:00 AM
apasek.bsky.social
Sometimes they just come out and say M-C-M' baybee
A screenshot of the article: "[Nadella] acknowledges that AI will cause “hard displacement and changes in labor pools,” including for Microsoft. (Althoff, the sales chief, says Nadella is pressuring his team to find ways to use AI to increase revenue from its operation instead of boosting head count. Meanwhile, Microsoft said on May 13 that it’s cutting 6,000 employees, about 3% of its workforce.) But Nadella contends that AI could end up delivering more societal benefits than the industrial revolution did. “When you create abundance,” he says, “then the question is what one does with that abundance to create more surplus.”
May 17, 2025 at 11:18 AM
apasek.bsky.social
We've come a long way, admittedly.

I'm psyched for your article!
A post: kids these days will never know the hardships of each week having to overcook a fresh hardboiled egg hold for the computer mouse (then there's photos and dang those 2 spheres are a similar colour!)
May 16, 2025 at 2:37 PM
apasek.bsky.social
I'm in this very neat CC collection of mini essays on AI, bringing grumpy materialist analyses of the 'new.' If you need a snappy bit of environmental skepticism, here's 2 pages you can use!
Policy makers should be very cautious about the limits of energy efficiency as an environmental strategy, just as they should maintain a disciplined skepticism about the novelty or exceptionalism of these technologies. Ultimately, it’s all just data centers (and we perhaps have too many of them as it is). Grounding assessments in the churn of chips, concrete, and transmission lines that accrue around these structures will make for sounder, more accountable assessments of AI than any speculative account of the promises and perils of a wholly new technical frontier. That future is already here, and it’s made of sprawling server racks in air-conditioned boxes. The title, in teal text, which reads AI IS JUST A BUNCH OF DATA CENTERS
May 15, 2025 at 9:09 PM