Discover more from Never Met a Science
Last year around this time, I was (justly) accused of hypocrisy—one can only write so many screeds about Twitter while continuing to use it. I deleted my account January 1, with the option open for one year to reactivate. I will not be doing so.
I feel so much better. People sometimes tell me about Twitter kerfuffles which would once have dominated my attention for days, and I smile bemusedly like I would at a child describing the plot of a video game.
The Twitter that we made—the norms and communities developed by the platform’s users—provided many benefits for many people. It’s difficult to repudiate the thing entirely; I have many friends I would not otherwise, and my specific interest (social science reform) made rapid progress there.
But a Twitter developed that way, through trial and error, with enthusiasm and wit, could only ever be a local maximum of how to use the internet. The benefits were real, but there were terrible costs inflicted, both on our individual psyches and on the institutions we took for granted. The myth that we can wield powerful technology without consequence, that we can have something for nothing, is literally diabolical.
So the question I’ve been trying to answer is: what, exactly, happened to us? This leads to my second hypocrisy. I’ve spent the past few years wringing my hands over the decline of the written word, while producing almost nothing but.
Just like I couldn’t give up whining about Twitter, I also can’t stop believing in the decline of the Word. So I’m jumping headfirst into the universe of technical images: three video lectures, with more to come.
NM TV | on Vilém Flusser's “Communicology"
This video is remarkable, and I’m proud to have been involved. Hosted by my friends at New Models and produced & edited by Lil Internet, the video reprises a lecture I gave at the New Models 5th year anniversary party at Trauma Bar und Kino in Berlin, last July 28. Thanks also to Joshua Citarella & Do Not Research for supporting this project.
I’ve been writing about Flusser enough on this blog, and I can’t really blame you if don’t get it: writing isn’t the right medium. But if you want to know why things are so weird today, this video is where to start.
Chatbots for Good and Evil
I gave a keynote lecture at the European Association for Computational Linguistics in Dubrovnik last May. Based on my research that experimentally reduced racist harassment on Twitter, I was asked to give a lecture on “Chatbots for Good.” In light of the recent explosion of LLMs, I felt that Evil should be considered as well.
The talk combines perspectives from information theory, media theory and moral philosophy to reframe and expand how we evaluate chatbots—and by extension, other digital media. It was an interesting time to be at a computational linguistics conference, as the LLM explosion had effectively ended entire subfields and kickstarted other ones. These periods of crisis can set the terms for decades of research to come, and I hope I was able to
Thanks to the conference organizers for taking the lecture out from behind the paywall:
https://underline.io/lecture/72154-chatbots-for-good-and-evil
and if you prefer to watch on YouTube, here is a reprisal of the talk I gave here at Princeton CITP this fall:
American Gerontocracy, Explained
Like many academics, I’ve spent a lot of time and effort preparing talks that are delivered only once or twice and which otherwise never see the light of day—the knowledge we produce has to be stored in a .pdf for it to advance our careers.
But it doesn’t have to be this way! One of my goals this year is to go back and re-record these talks…starting today with the book talk from last year’s Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture.
If you’re only here for the written Word, well, don’t worry—I’ll be back with a doozy next week.