Matthew Kirschenbaum
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mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
Matthew Kirschenbaum
@mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
12K followers 810 following 4.9K posts
Critical tech and AI. Cats, letterpress printing, tabletop gaming.

Distinguished University Professor at UMD; come January, Commonwealth Professor at UVA.

I am speaking only for myself and as a private citizen here. Being a dick will get you blocked.
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mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
The “Northeast Indiana Defense Summit”? Is that like a graduate student conference?
Screenshot of Pete Hegseth speaking at, per chyron, “SEC. HEGSETH SPEAKS AT NORTHEAST INDIANA DEFENSE SUMMIT”
November 12, 2025 at 3:43 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
This is the headline the normies are waking up to this morning.
Screenshot of CNN headline: “Enough Democrats caved, paving the way for shutdown to end”
November 10, 2025 at 1:38 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
Hai
Schumer has got to go.
November 9, 2025 at 9:43 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
Money quote from Gov-Elect Spanberger (now please just do it).
“As governor, I will be clear-eyed about ensuring that we have structures in place, including boards of visitors across our universities, that want to defend academic freedom and, frankly, the viability and vitality of extraordinary institutions like the University of Virginia."
November 9, 2025 at 7:53 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
Good morning.
A cat stop a cat tree in the Superman pose, sunlight coming in through a glass door opening onto a leaf-scattered suburban lawn.
November 8, 2025 at 5:24 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
Just sit with this subhead for a moment.
“The president seeks to block a ruling that required food stamp benefits to be fully covered for tens of millions of Americans”
November 8, 2025 at 1:15 AM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
Friends and neighbors, I gift you . . . the internet.

Referent:
bsky.app/profile/crit...
Screenshot of skeet: Agü Nägü @naguagu.b... •7d Cyborgs look like humans and could be made of biological material. Robots are brushed-metal. Not a good blurb showing authors don't know their sci-fi 101.
November 7, 2025 at 7:42 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
No one reads D. A. Miller’s
The Novel and the Police
anymore but they should, and it’s very beautiful.
Image of a paragraph of prose on a printed page: “A note on the author's body: shortly after I began writing this essay, the muscles on my shoulders and back went into spasm. Referring this pain to other matters (excessive working out, an affair of the heart) than the work on which it continually interrupted my progress, I consulted physical and psychological therapists. Only when the former at last pronounced that a rib was out of place (which may have been what the latter was getting at when he diagnosed, on the insurance form, a personality disorder), was I willing to entertain the possibility that I had become, in relation to my own writing, an improbably pat case of hysteria. Now that a practiced hand has put the fugitive rib back into its cage, my spine tingles to have borne out my assumption of that "nonrecognition" which evidently also obtains between the somatics of writing and what is written about. I am less pleased (though still thrilled) to understand that, on the same assumption, what dumbfounds me also lays the foundation for my dumbness: too stupid to utter what has already been said in the interaction between body and text, and in the traces of that interaction within body or text; and too mute to do more than designate the crucial task of identifying in this writing the equivocal places where "sensation" has gone, not to say love.”
November 7, 2025 at 4:07 AM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
We Haven't Been Here Before BY MATTHEW KIRSCHENBAUM $ 2025 draws to a close, we know that generative artificial-intelligence models can furnish good-enough which is expected or compelled of us either by way of a salary or a grade. To acknowledge this is not boosterism or credulous absorption of industry "hype": It is the baseline for how much the conditions of writing have changed in the three years since the public launch of ChatGPT. For higher education this means that, where the classroom deliverable is a piece of student prose, the expectation has to be that Al is adequate to the task of creating a passable imitation; and that it can do so in ways that are all but impossible to prove to the standards of an academic-integrity violation. Now, with the emergence of so-called agentic-Al browsers, capable of autonomously fulfilling tasks on the user's behalf, we are on the verge of a fully automated loop in which assignments are Al-generated with the help of a learning-management system; Al-generated content is submitted by an agentic browser on behalf of the student; and Al-driven metrics then evaluate the work on behalf of the instructor. Moments of real rupture can be hard to reckon with, especially for those of us in the humanities where our training is more given to prodiemanzine, contextualzne, and historicing, all utmately demadonary — and in that sense conservative — critical postures. We have been here before, we like to say, nodding knowingly all the while. Similarly, there is much hope in some circles that Al will prove a mere "bubble," destined to burst like other ed-tech fads. At the very least | this betrays a curiously robust faith in markets to self-correct in the interest of collective salvation. It is also, I would venture, a dangerous misreading of the current political landscape, where the very corporations at the forefront of Al have aligned themselves with the present administration's authoritarian excesses, including a fistful of executive orde…
November 6, 2025 at 2:53 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
Who remembers?
A copy of the Apple IIe PRINT SHOP software by Brøderbund on floppy disk.
November 5, 2025 at 11:17 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
I don’t know how we fix this
Screenshot of a tweet from Regina Hayes on X showing footage of the Louisville plane crash with text “ Happening now in Louisville Kentucky! This I bet has to do with the democrats and their shutdown! Plane crash”
November 5, 2025 at 1:04 AM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
Very proud to have worked on this statement of the Modern Language Association with @annamillsoer.bsky.social and other colleagues on the MLA’s task force on AI in Research and Teaching. It is a direct call for faculty input into Ed Tech decision-making, especially AI: www.mla.org/Resources/Ad... 🧵
Screenshots of the following text: Statement on Educational Technologies and AI Agents The following statement of endorsement was drafted by the MLA Task Force on AI in Research and Teaching. The Executive Council approved it as an MLA statement in October 2025. Software, specifically learning management systems (LMSs), is as important to teaching and learning as physical classrooms and facilities. The recent and hasty integration of generative AI features into those systems is already redefining student and instructor relationships, evaluative standards, and instructional outcomes—with no compelling evidence that any of it is for the better. At the same time, so-called agentic browsers are becoming widely available to the public. These offer AI “agents” that can navigate LMSs and complete assignments without any student involvement. All of this is unfolding at a time when contractual arrangements between institutions and commercial vendors often lack transparency, with worrisome implications for data collection and student privacy. Screenshots of the following text: The Modern Language Association therefore unequivocally 1. Advocates for full faculty and instructional involvement, including faculty of languages, literatures, and the humanities, at all levels of decision-making in the selection, procurement, and responsible implementation of instructional technology systems and software, including those incorporating AI.

The instructional mission cannot be fulfilled in the absence of faculty expertise, and this expertise extends not only to the “content” of the curriculum but also to the infrastructures and environments—virtual and otherwise—in which learning happens.
  2. Calls upon law- and policymakers, LMS vendors, and companies offering agent-based AI browsers to cooperate in order to prevent misuse and to ensure that academic institutions have the ability and option to block agentic AI when needed.

Without dedicated outside cooperation from lawmakers and technology providers, academic institutions may not have the technical capacity to do so on their own. If we do not act, we risk seeing the development of a fully automated loop in which assignments are generated by AI with the support of a learning management system, AI-generated content is submitted by an agentic AI on behalf of the student, and AI-driven metrics evaluate the work on behalf of the instructor.
November 4, 2025 at 1:09 AM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
Just wrote this for an abstract and, well, I rather like it. (I mean, I don’t like it at all, but it seems like something I should write.)
Screenshot of text: “The chapter will address impacts for textural studies, but not in the narrow sense of the implications for one single academic specialization. Rather, the chapter will consider a future in which text itself has become inimical to traditional humanistic values such as truth, memory, and understanding.”
October 31, 2025 at 11:50 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
Fascinating long read on possible socio-political models for the institution of the American military after a collapse of liberal order and the current governing orthodoxy of the soldier as a servant of the state: warontherocks.com/2025/10/the-...
“This is the present challenge: an officer corps that claims neutrality by retreating into process yet must promote through performatively reproducing prevailing orthodoxies. The result is a military that is simultaneously insulated from society by impenetrable techno-jargon and deeply politically enmeshed through ideological policing. It is professionalism void of substance, shiny and nacreous as the inside of an oyster shell and just as empty. It foreshadows what the military may look like if liberalism gives way.”
October 31, 2025 at 1:39 AM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
Look, I made a thing with AI
Digitally altered image of a NYT photograph showing Donald Trump and President Lee Jae Myung of South Korea admiring a replica of a gold crown gifted to Trump. This image replaces the actual crown with a rendering of a paper Burger King crown. From the original article: “The crown symbolized the ‘divine connection between the authority of the heavens and sovereignty on earth,’ the spokesman said, as Mr. Trump stared at the crown.”
October 29, 2025 at 8:29 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
It was pretty much one year ago that @ritaraley.bsky.social and I published “AI and the University as a Service,” a first draft, if you will, of the everyday history we’re seeing playing out all around us. www.cambridge.org/core/service... Here’s just a bit—we think we got a few things right.
In this, our own sector of the economy, we can now begin to apprehend the true and actual foundation model subsuming the disciplinary ones we were at such pains to enumerate above: the university not in ruins but as a service. The idea of the University as a Service (UaaS) extends the model of Software as a Service (SaaS) to education: physical institutions (for now) provide the lecturers, content, and degrees; in turn, the technological infrastructure, instructional delivery, and support services are all outsourced to third-party vendors and digital platforms.® Licensing and subscription agreements favor short-term budget planning; so too do they enable an administrative vision of universities as customizable, scalable, cost effective, and available on demand. And thus the decision-making is too often exclusively in the hands of CIOs, IT staff members, and instructional development, with academic affairs relegated to the position of managing the implementation of commercial ed-tech applications that promise continuous pedagogic improvement, which is now to be accelerated by new Al features, all of them generating revenue through the generation of data.
October 25, 2025 at 8:34 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
Tiny building I painted up. A medieval countryside church.
October 25, 2025 at 1:53 AM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
Don’t know if this spam is swim-related or misdirected medical advice
Email subject line reading “Let's talk about your stroke”
October 24, 2025 at 7:33 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
The closing sentence of this opinion from the illustrious Washington Post editorial board is directly at odds with everything they just finished arguing about the commendable nature of the deal . . . and they don’t seem to realize it. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...
Screenshot of closing sentences of the op-ed with this sentence highlighted by me: “Other universities should take note as they navigate these choppy waters: If you trade freedom for some temporary security, you are likely to end up with neither.”
October 23, 2025 at 11:45 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
Doctored Washington Post headline changed to read: “Many HOLLYWOOD MOVIES have BLOWN UP the White House. Here's how Trump's ballroom compares.
October 23, 2025 at 11:33 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
The word WHELP against an orange and blue UVA gradient
October 23, 2025 at 5:37 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
More: www.virginia.edu/uva-presiden...
Speech on Rotunda Steps On May 10, 1970, President Shannon addressed students from the Rotunda steps. He noted that the University was the only one on the East Coast to remain open, and that he intended it to stay open. He told students that he was proud of them: "All of our students are deeply concerned about the war, some to the point where in an agony of conscience they want to act, not to study." He condemned the "anti- intellectualism and growing militarism in the national government." He condemned the Nixon administration's decision to invade Cambodia. And then he urged Virginia U.S. Senators William Spong and Harry F. Byrd to act with fellow members of the Senate "in reasserting the authority of the Senate over the foreign policy of the United States and the use of armed forces in its support." Soon after this speech, at graduation, Shannon received a standing ovation from students, faculty, parents and alumni.
October 23, 2025 at 4:02 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
With thanks to @rcjacks.bsky.social for bringing it to my attention, note the discrepancy between the public FAQ assigning agency to the interim President alone and the text of the actual agreement stipulating the BoV as the responsible party. Maybe tip the Cavalier Daily?
Who approved this deal? Updated: 10/22/2025 - 03:23 p.m. Interim President Paul Mahoney signed on behalf of the University on October 22, 2025. Because the agreement involves no financial penalty or expenditure, it did not require a formal vote by the Board of Visitors. However, the Board was kept apprised of the negotiations and briefed on the final terms before signature. 10. UVA's president shall certify under penalty of perjury cach quarterly report as to the report's accuracy and UVA's full compliance with all the provisions in this Agreement. Such certification will state: I, _ [nterim President or President] of the University of Virginia, hereby certify, to the best of my knowledge, and after reasonable review and investigation, that the accompanying quarterly report is accurate, and that the University of Virginia has maintained and implemented policies and procedures as well as training programs to ensure material compliance with the Agreement between the United States and the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia dated [Effective Date].
October 23, 2025 at 3:13 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
Notable that per them official FAQ, the agreement was signed off on by the interim President alone; the BoV was merely “apprised.”
Entry from UVA FAQ on DOJ settlement: Who approved this deal? Updated: 10/22/2025 - 03:23 p.m. Interim President Paul Mahoney signed on behalf of the University on October 22, 2025. Because the agreement involves no financial penalty or expenditure, it did not require a formal vote by the Board of Visitors. However, the Board was kept apprised of the negotiations and briefed on the final terms before signature.
October 23, 2025 at 3:03 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
Not sure nos. 5 and 6 are compatible.
October 21, 2025 at 12:16 AM