Vee Lawson
LightNews LightNews
banner
lawsonvee.bsky.social
Vee Lawson
@lawsonvee.bsky.social
920 followers 1.1K following 130 posts
they/them | assistant prof in professional writing | feminist, queer, and trans digital rhetorics + storytelling online | 🐈🧶⛺👟

For better or worse, these are all my opinions.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Vee Lawson
calmatters.org
California State University’s trustees will vote tomorrow on whether to increase how much the system’s 22 campus presidents and other senior executives earn. bit.ly/4oHbzv6

📝 @mzinshteyn.bsky.social
📸 Jules Hotz
The Cal State Long Beach campus in Long Beach on April 24, 2024. Photo by Jules Hotz for CalMatters. Hed:
November 19, 2025 at 12:45 AM
lawsonvee.bsky.social
This thread, and to be frank, it's interesting to see that posting figurative death threats is the hill so many leftist men are willing to [redacted] upon. See you all on fedsky, I guess
faineg.bsky.social Faine Greenwood @faineg.bsky.social · 4d
especially in these incredibly high tension times, you should simply not make even super obvious jokes about killing people on social media websites imo

and I get why websites like Bluesky are taking this stuff rather seriously at this particular point in time, personally
November 14, 2025 at 3:46 PM
Reposted by Vee Lawson
sbworkersunited.org
Want to support workers on strike?

✅ Follow us + share our posts about NOT BUYING STARBUCKS!
✅ Sign our No Contract No Coffee pledge, & we'll send you local calls to action throughout the strike: nocontractnocoffee.org
✅ Donate to our strike fund: sbworkersunited.org
November 13, 2025 at 11:34 AM
lawsonvee.bsky.social
When I worked for Starbucks full-time, I'd routinely get scheduled to close the store at 10pm then come back and open it at 5am. For a fun bonus, management would schedule full daytime shifts, then send us home halfway through to cut labor costs.

Starbucks workers deserve a fair contract.
sbworkersunited.org Starbucks Workers United @sbworkersunited.org · 5d
As of this morning, Starbucks workers across the country are officially ON STRIKE. And we're prepared for this to become the biggest and longest ULP strike in Starbucks history.

Say #NoContractNoCoffee with us: DON'T BUY STARBUCKS for the duration of our open-ended ULP strike! $SBUX
Don't Buy Starbucks! At any location, today and beyond, while workers are on ULP strike!
November 13, 2025 at 4:12 PM
Reposted by Vee Lawson
josephcox.bsky.social
Behold: you can now see all 23 years of BYTE magazine in all its glory, all at once. Every issue on a single zoomable interface

www.404media.co/byte-magazin...
Visualize All 23 Years of BYTE Magazine in All Its Glory, All at Once
Software engineer Hector Dearman built a zoomable map of every issue of BYTE magazine.
www.404media.co
November 11, 2025 at 5:10 PM
lawsonvee.bsky.social
"At the heart of our work together was the question: How can the online communities that we participate in use tools that truly reflect our values?"

This looks so useful for #TeamRhetoric folks seeking to reframe our social media pedagogy!
ntnsndr.in Nathan Schneider @ntnsndr.in · 15d
Over the past year, my lab has hosted a cohort of people from around the world who are trying to move their communities to online tools under their control. OUT TODAY: Learn about their thinking and doing in our collectively authored Open Social Network Cookbook. https://www.colorado.edu/lab/medlab/
November 3, 2025 at 5:41 PM
Reposted by Vee Lawson
femma.bsky.social
so Grokipedia is really bad, in case anybody was wondering, but I'm going to just kind of quickly write a short thread about why. I'm going to focus on the article of neo-fascist William Luther Pierce, because I just published my MA thesis on him a few months ago.
Which Grokipedia cites.
October 28, 2025 at 11:13 PM
lawsonvee.bsky.social
Me adding all the Grokipedia pages to the @waybackmachine.bsky.social archive for future research use
a laptop with a picture of a kitten on it
Alt: A cat is frantically "typing" on a laptop. An image of a kitten yelling is superimposed over the typing cat's face.
media.tenor.com
October 28, 2025 at 10:58 PM
Reposted by Vee Lawson
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
This is so bleak:

www.404media.co/a16z-is-fund...
Last week, I wrote about Doublespeed, essentially a click farm that sells “synthetic influencers” to astroturf whatever product or service you want across social media, despite it being a clear violation of every social media platform's policy on inauthentic behavior. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. a16z’s Speedrun is also backing: Creed: An AI company “rooted in Christian Values” which produces Lenny, a “Bible-based AI buddy who's always got your back with wise words, scripture-inspired guidance, and a listening ear whenever you need it.” Zingroll: The “world’s largest Netflix-quality AI streaming platform,” which is another way of saying it’s a Netflix populated exclusively with AI Slop. Vega: which is building “AI-powered social orbits.” What does that mean? Not entirely clear, but the company has produced one of the most beautiful Mad Libs paragraphs I’ve ever seen: “We’re building the largest textual data moat on human relationships by gamifying the way people leave notes for each other. For the first time, LLMs can analyze millions of raw, human-written notes at scale and turn them into structured meaning, powering the most annotated social graph ever created.” Moona Health: an AI-powered Sleep care app the company says is covered by insurance. “Our AI-powered platform automates insurance claims and scheduling and analyzes sleep data – providing personalized session guidelines to therapists,” Moona says. Jooba: “The world’s first autonomous recruiting firm.” Margin: “The World’s first AI powered credit card.” Margin says “Customers earn points, with dynamic rewards that adapt to their preferences in real time.” First Voyage: A wellness app that gives you AI “mythological pets that turn wellness into play.” Axon Capital: billed as “DeepMind for Finance,” Axon says it has “pioneered brain-inspired, low-latency AI for financial markets.”
October 28, 2025 at 6:26 PM
lawsonvee.bsky.social
If you see this, post a vampire that isn't Dracula
October 27, 2025 at 5:28 PM
Reposted by Vee Lawson
wolvendamien.bsky.social
Remember those times i said we were headed for an epistemic crisis because bad people were gonna use deepfakes to make propaganda & conspiracy theories & destabilize consensus reality-making & how the central paradigm of "generative AI" enables, encourages, & was indeed built on this premise?

Yeah.
histoftech.bsky.social Mar @histoftech.bsky.social · 27d
This person is one hundred percent correct and it’s scary af. We will never “media literacy” our way out of this as a society. We are about to reap the whirlwind when it comes to misinformation, disinformation, and informational warfare.
October 23, 2025 at 2:13 PM
lawsonvee.bsky.social
Attn: Everybody with good music taste:

Following a fit of delusion during race signups back in January, I'm attempting a trail race in which I will be #running (read: speed hiking) overnight, and I'm putting together a playlist to get me through.

What are your best bangers, any genre/any language?
October 2, 2025 at 6:12 PM
Reposted by Vee Lawson
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
For my buds still sad about the end of Real Life mag, and anyone else bored of the current state of writing-about-tech, it's time to get excited — a very exciting new left tech-etc magazine is dropping later this month. Empty Set! No website yet but follow on insta www.instagram.com/emptysetmaga...
Empty Set is founded on the idea that technology writing is at an impasse. Despite growing interest in "tech criticism," the genre has found itself flattened and constrained in recent years. As publications dedicated to grappling with the many contradictory shades of our techno-culture have shuttered-Real Life, WIRED Ideas- -the industry has shifted towards hype cycle-based business reporting, at best, and thinly veiled advertorials at worst. Though there remain a few bastions of critical thought, these have mostly survived as watchdogs, too tired from keeping up with a neverending cycle of abuses to speculate more broadly on what our evolving relationship to technology is doing to us. We believe that technology writing can be so much more. After all, despite what we so often assume, technology isn't synonymous with the latest gadget, or digital this-and-that. It is ancient-as old as our bodies and words. If language was one of our first technologies, then shouldn't technology writing give rise to poetry? If our bodies were the basis upon which all technical prostheses emerged, then shouldn't technology writing know how to move? The tech writing remaining today is too sober, too timid in style and subject matter to capture what it feels like to inhabit our world: the millenarian fervor of the techno- evangelists, the riptides of rage and desire we traverse daily on our devices, the anxieties and distant hopes that shimmer on the horizon. We need writing that not only thinks about technology, but with it. The stakes are clear. Having failed to address this latent world- where technology becomes religion, flesh and code intermingle, and ghosts haunt the machine--we've let the worst among us steer the conversation. Peter Thiel sells out lectures on the Anti-Christ while pseudo-intellectual bloggers peddle dollar-store fascism by misreading Hegel. In our failure to experiment boldly, to speculate and myth-make and take all the strange corners of our techno-culture seriously, leftist technology criticism has handed over the reins of sensemaking to feudalist wannabes and reactionary trolls. Donna Haraway once wrote that "it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with…. what thoughts think thoughts." Empty Set is dedicated to finding the concepts and thoughts that we'll need in order to tell a new story about our technologized lives. Writing in the dust of this critical landscape, it's only fitting that our first issue takes on decay. Though the promise of technology is one of eternity (living forever, endless access to information) it's rot that undergirds our world today: brainrot, entropy, planned obsolescence, 404 errors, poor images, lossy compression, nutrient-rich humus, carbon- rich biomatter turned oil and coal. Rot is a process that encapsulates the short-sighted excesses of our techno-culture, as well as a potential force we might channel into new hopes. After all, without decomposition there could be no regrowth, nothing underfoot for life to arise in. By sitting with this decay, we hope something new might take root.
October 1, 2025 at 5:04 PM
Reposted by Vee Lawson
maargentino.com
It is Book Launch day for @amaramarasingam.bsky.social and My edited volume "Contemporary Far-Right Culture The Art, Music, and Everyday Practices of Violent Extremism"

www.routledge.com/Contemporary...
September 30, 2025 at 3:54 PM
Reposted by Vee Lawson
cfshrc.bsky.social
Celebrate #FeministFridays with us! ✨ Got an article published, written a book review, received a teaching award, or reached another milestone? We’d love to highlight your achievements!

Use this Google Form to share your wins! forms.gle/6JiytdhVS5oT...
Feminist Fridays graphic with text reading: "Tell us about your scholarship and accomplishments!"
September 19, 2025 at 4:02 PM
lawsonvee.bsky.social
Hey #TeamRhetoric, SJSU is hiring an Assistant WPA! We're a union campus (@cfaunited.bsky.social), and in my first year here, I've found the department to be welcoming + supportive. There's a strong community especially among the junior faculty.

jobs.sjsu.edu/en-us/job/55...
San José State University - Details - Assistant Professor - Assistant Writing Programs Administrator
jobs.sjsu.edu
September 17, 2025 at 4:27 PM
lawsonvee.bsky.social
This doomscrolling break is brought to you by #4C26 announcements: See you all in Cleveland for "Wresting Power Back: Tactical Technical Communication for Social Media Under Rising Authoritarianism"
Dear Professor Lawson, Congratulations! I am delighted to let you know that the following proposal(s) has been accepted for the 2026 CCCC Annual Convention, "Conference and Our Conversations," taking place in Cleveland, Ohio, March 4-7: Wresting Power Back: Tactical Technical Communication for Social Media Under Rising Authoritarianism
August 28, 2025 at 3:43 PM
lawsonvee.bsky.social
The fundie-snarking communities have been celebrating all day. There are no words for the harm Dobson caused so many children.

For the unfamiliar, D.L. & Krispin Mayfield's "Strongwilled" describes Dobson's child abuse advocacy & its role in Christian Nationalism (www.strongwilledproject.com)
roxanegay.bsky.social Roxane Gay @roxanegay.bsky.social · Aug 21
May James Dobson burn and rot below for all eternity. A cruel, venal man who caused grave harm with every breath he took.
August 21, 2025 at 6:38 PM
Reposted by Vee Lawson
cfshrc.bsky.social
🩵 Friendly reminder! 🩵

If you're still revising your ideas for Peitho's Summer 2026 special issue, Academia in Crisis: How Feminist Rhetorical Scholars Respond, be sure to send them by tomorrow, August 15.

CFP: tiny.cc/PeithoSummer...
Peitho Special Issue, Summer 2026 Call for Proposals Academia in Crisis: How Feminist Rhetorical Scholars Respond Editors: Patty Wilde, Erin Costello Wrecker, and Justine Trinh Submissions: 2026peithospecialissue@gmail.com Proposals Extended! due August 15
August 14, 2025 at 2:08 PM
lawsonvee.bsky.social
This is how Meep and Mushroom celebrate #InternationalCatDay
Two cats lay on a rug, recreationally kicking each other in the head.
August 8, 2025 at 8:29 PM
Reposted by Vee Lawson
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
*Academics in early August
Ralph Wiggem “I’m in danger” meme
August 6, 2025 at 4:31 PM
Reposted by Vee Lawson
drjenho.bsky.social
For any BlueSky friends engaged in Digital Humanities projects, here's a place to apply for seed money

www.acls.org/programs/acl...
ACLS Digital Justice Grants
The ACLS Digital Justice Grant program is designed to address the inequities in the access to support for digital work across various fields.
www.acls.org
August 5, 2025 at 4:49 PM
lawsonvee.bsky.social
I'm adding a blurb to my syllabi clarifying that I will never use AI to evaluate or respond to student work. If I can't be bothered to read it, why should students be bothered to write it? This ends up with bots responding to bots all the way down, imo.
shannonmattern.bsky.social Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · Jul 23
“…faculty members will be able to click an icon that connects them with various AI features…, like a grading tool, a discussion-post summarizer… Canvas’s parent company, Instructure, is also in partnership w/ OpenAI… so instructors can use generative-AI technology as part of their assignments.”
Instructors Will Now See AI Throughout a Widely Used Course Software
New features integrated into Canvas include a grading assistant, a discussion-post summarizer, and even a way to pair assignments with generative AI tools.
www.chronicle.com
July 24, 2025 at 3:56 PM
lawsonvee.bsky.social
Mushroom and I are catching up on #FemRhet2025 virtual presentations--I love that there's a space to leave comments or questions for presenters.

Here, we're listening to Dr. Julia Allen's talk on feminist rhetorical furtherance.

#FemRhetHappensHere
A grey and white cat sits on a soft blanket in front of a table and laptop. A presentation is blurred in the background.
July 23, 2025 at 7:19 PM