Matthew Kirschenbaum
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mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
Matthew Kirschenbaum
@mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
12K followers 820 following 5K 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 gets you blocked.
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mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
There could be an interesting debate here (we are both participants in the same @chronicle.com forum). We agree I think on the severity of the threat to education. We disagree perhaps on how materially manifest that threat already is and its ultimate socio-political framing (and consequent remedy).
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 … [text truncated do to length).
November 20, 2025 at 2:37 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
Enjoying @titachico.bsky.social and @zugenia.bsky.social in conversation here at @umdenglish.bsky.social about their new books, on wonder and wit.
Drs. Chico and Zurosky seated in conversation.
November 18, 2025 at 6:06 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
I guess there’s really only one way to interpret this sign.
Pictogram of a squatting individual with a pile of excrement beneath and a diagonal slash line enclosed in a circle across the whole image.
November 17, 2025 at 5:01 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
THE STEAM MAN OF THE PRARIE, an “Edisonade” (story about a boy wonder inventor) by Edward S. Ellis published as a literal dime novel in 1868. Not “AI” but a ten-foot steam-powered mechanical man used as transport and surrogate labor. Cover image here is from the Rosenbach Library, via Wikipedia.
Cover image of the novel showing an engraved line drawing of the rotund “man” pulling a carriage with riders.
November 17, 2025 at 1:41 AM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
Reading the opening of Ian McEwan’s WHAT WE CAN KNOW and can’t help wondering if he read a bit of the beginning of BITSTREAMS, which offers the hypothetical of a 21st-century poem on the order of The Waste Land and futuristic scholarly attempts to reconstruct its textual provenance.
“L et's begin with a new file: File → New. Let us say the person at the keyboard is a poet, in the early stage of what is eventually to become - a five-part work, referentially dense but comprised of lines and phrasings that are sharp, resonant, and memorable-so much so that in future years, much later in this century, the poem is widely seen as capturing the zeitgeist of this tumultuous moment, a text of indisputable literary and historical significance embraced by diverse constituencies as among the most important and influential of its age. Let us assume that this text becomes the subject of seemingly inexhaustible critical interest, the centerpiece of dissertations and monographs, of commentaries and interpretations. English majors (yes, there are still a few) can quote from it, and certain of its lines and phrases enter into popular circulation on refrigerator magnets and greeting cards and such. Of course textual interest in this work would be intense, with those scholars who are attentive to such things concerned to establish the relationship between the poem's various sections, extant drafts and versions of each, their sequencing, the identities of persons who may have first read and helped revise them, and so on. Exactly the sort of ques-tions, you may have recognized, that for many years animated inquiries into T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.” “But what would it take for someone sometime in the future whose motivations were like Rainey's to bring the scholar's art to bear on the twenty-first-century masterpiece I have conjured with my opening hypothetical? Rainey, after all, had access to actual papers in archives that he could evaluate as physical evidence; what will remain for an intrepid coterie of e-paleographers who find themselves working on my notional text two or three generations from now?”
November 16, 2025 at 5:01 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
A friend sends. 🤷‍♂️

(I hope everyone else enjoys.)
November 15, 2025 at 11:13 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
This is a 52-pound 9000+ page accordion-bound artist’s book of Donald Trump’s lies, conceived, printed, and bound by Jill and Ray Nichols of @leadgraffiti.bsky.social in Delaware. Each of the 9000 pages has the text (per the Washington Post) of one or more of Trump’s lies; none are repeated.
The 9000-page 52-pound book, entitled LIAR, LIAR, on display today at the University of Maryland. Sample interior page. Front of a postcard describing the project. Photo of postcard describing project: “9,296 pages document 3o,573 false or misleading claims by Donald Trump from his first day in office, 2017, to his final day on January 20, 2020, when Joe Biden was sworn in as the country's next president. All that verbiage is s3" thick, weighs 52 pounds, and it started like this. The disolution of the Delaware College of Art & Design, to whom Lead Graffti had donated 1oos of design books over the past decade, brought an invitation to redaim them. We found a few, which brought us another interesting find — a blank Coppic-stitched book with a spine about 36 inches wide bound by Ema Ishii Holdredge for her BEA show at the Corcoran School of Art in 2008. That book haunted us for several weeks, and we decided it was too audacious not to give ita Lead Graffiti shot. For a while, we pondered how to fill a several thousand-page book with content that made a serious point. The notion of the presidential untruths came to mind, so maybe there was some documentation we could "borrow?" Sure enough, in a few Safari minutes, we found a downloadable PDE from The Washington Post that we could massage into a typographic form we could use. We were off. Ray undertook the ink-jet printing of the pages, folding and inserting the red cover-weight sheets for structural support, and gathering and punching the folds for sewing. Jill did 99.8% of the sewing. At a 3o2 United gathering, we encouraged attendees to give the book a stroke. Shown at right is the head of the Delaware ACLU, who has excellent technique. LEAD GRAFFITI | NEWARK, DELAWARE| LEADGRAFFITI.COM|RAY@LEADGRAIETTI.COM”
November 15, 2025 at 7:09 PM
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
Former UVA President Jim Ryan has just released a 12-page memo of his own account of his forced resignation last summer. Here’s just a bit in which Paul Manning, a member of the Board, was told by DOJ that unless Ryan departed they would “bleed UVA white.”
“During the ten-day period before I resigned, I also reached out to a former Board member, who has extensive connections in DC, to see if there was some way to stop this from happening. We spent several days trying to understand if this was a bluff and/or if there were some way to forestall the looming threat to UVA and to me. In the meantime, Paul Manning reached out directly to the DOJ lawyers to make sure he was not missing anything, and he said that they told him that if I didn't resign. they would "bleed UVA white."”
November 14, 2025 at 2:07 PM
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