I’ve been promoting @cjsprigman.bsky.social’s proposal to limit jurisdiction by creating exceptions, because it is something that legislators could start trying to put into every bill today.

But I’m also running for Congress because I don’t trust the Democratic Rep I’ve got to even try.

The introduction of machines actually did hurt workers, though, and the recent moves to automate manufacturing have decimated the American middle class.

Yeah, we don’t have a responsibility to robots the way we do to our neighbors. Doing things for robots doesn’t make their life better, because they don’t have one.

That makes taxing automation more useful, tho. Otherwise it is just using public services to take our money & hand it to billionaires.

They most certainly do: andthewest.stanford.edu/2025/thirsty...

(If you would like to dream along with me today: secure.actblue.com/donate/bab-b...)

“The Aggregate Demand Curve Is Currently Upward-Sloping” remains the most-accurate protests sign I’ve ever marched with

Measurement is hard!

Companies either do their work in ways that make it less effective but easier to measure, or they have to practice “delegated management” without that visibility.

Robert Austin: Measuring And Managing Performance In Organizations www.dorsethouse.com/books/mmpo.h...

People hate inauthenticity more than they hate almost anything else.

I will say “pregnant people”, like a normal American. I’ve never had anyone in real life so much as notice.

I suspect what is actually radical about “pregnant people” is the idea that women don’t stop being people just because they are pregnant. Which just isn’t controversial in Massachusetts.

Eh, our guesses about what will happen next are more accurate when we believe in consciousness than when we don’t.

I do think there are similar properties at scales bigger than the individual. Like the internet talking about itself, or wanting cat pictures.

But we have more agency than we imagine.

It is the process of a somatic system self-constructing, not mere pattern matching.

The AI theorists like the idea that all we do is pattern-match because it makes the math easier. But motivation, relationships and emotions are what lead to the emergence of self-awareness and personal growth.

Personally I see self-consciousness and independent motivation as the two most important aspects.

One must recognize one’s self as distinct from others, and one must change one’s self-concept over time without any external input, or lack thereof, with those changes sparked by intrinsic motivation.

I’d put money on neurons alone being unable to achieve consciousness. In us it takes at least the nervous, endocrine and lymphatic systems, all working in concert.

She points to Discourse 9 (Spring/Summer 1987) www.jstor.org/stable/i4006... One piece in there (Text Out of Context: Situating Postmodernism Within an Information Society) cites Claude Shannon, from Bell Labs. Might be an interesting place to start.

Someone else pointed to French structuralists/feminist philosophers. Haraway accepts their ideas and then theorizes about resistance: “Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly”

The Cyborg Manifesto explores the idea pretty thoroughly but isn’t especially quotable.

It includes the ability of dialect to subvert the algorithms, anticipating algo-speak nineteen years before MySpace came into being.

I am running in the MA-06 because I think the voters are there, whether or not the party is