Notices by Mandy Brown (aworkinglibrary@mstdn.social)

The thing that keeps coming up as I talk to people about AI in their workplaces is how *dehumanizing* it is. It’s dehumanizing to ask a machine to do something, and then have to correct it over and over; it’s dehumanizing to be told to read something that involved little to no human effort to make.

If you were (wisely) offline over the weekend, I wrote about the ideology of AI and why we need to shift our stance in relation to it: https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/toolmen

I’ve spent the last year reading, thinking, and talking with workers about AI and I’ve concluded that AI is not a technology—it’s an *ideology*, and it must be engaged with as such. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/toolmen

“I want to be in dialogue with my website, my work & the people who find it. Not have it be just a space where I publish posts and art, but a *living work itself*. I want to engage with and collaborate with it. I want to inform it and for it to inform me.” https://fromemily.com/website-manifesto/

Some patterns I’ve observed in the moves and countermoves that workers are making in response to the direct, violent, and unconstitutional attacks on human rights, life-sustaining infrastructure, and work itself: https://everythingchanges.us/blog/keep-moving/

“Because federal law does not in fact prohibit DEI, Trump is presumably counting on his order having a chilling effect, hoping that institutions self-censor by abandoning the programs out of fear.” https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/03/10/profiles-in-self-censorship-dei/

Among other things, targeting 18F sends a clear message that tech workers are being coerced into serving the needs of capital. Even for those who never took it, civic tech work held the promise of escape, the dream of using tech for good. And dreams are dangerous.

Thinking with Le Guin about living with uncertainty: https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/make-life-possible

All of the nonsense about so-called artificial “intelligence” has the notion of intelligence backwards: becoming intelligent does not make you alive. To be alive is to be intelligent. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/our-words

“What we’re called to ask is why the murder of one man must be described as unspeakable violence, but the systemic denial of life to 100,000 people is an acceptable business practice.” https://www.jphilll.com/p/whats-a-life-worth

Le Guin’s advice—read when you cannot write, sleep when you cannot read—has been top of mind all week and I am intensely grateful.

God I love Le Guin so much and hope her blog has been backed up a hundred times over. “Who ‘we,’ white man?” https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/54-le-guins-hypothesis

In case anyone needs a reminder (I do, often!), spending time on your art is always the right choice: https://everythingchanges.us/blog/energy-makes-time/

The whole concept of knowledge workers rests on the assertion that there are other workers who do not truck with knowledge. But that assertion is bullshit. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/knowledge-workers

You cannot separate the ongoing fascination with creating femme AI servants from the ongoing efforts to restrict reproductive and trans rights. They are both part of a concerted effort to equate feminity with servitude, and to maintain caretaking as free and unwaged labor.

We really haven’t learned a goddamn thing about female-gendered bots have we. (I wrote this *eight* fucking years ago.) https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/bots

Something I often talk about with my clients is to question when we reflexively say we have “no choice” but to do something. We always, always have a choice. “No choice” usually really means “I don’t want to bear the consequences of not doing this thing.” Which then opens up space to ask: what are those consequences? Why are *those* the things we don’t want to bear? And what are the consequences of *making* this choice?

So much good stuff in this post from @kissane but I’m also caught up by the notion of “load-bearing personalities” and how they are just utterly, back-breakingly unsustainable. https://erinkissane.com/root-and-branch

This is not a fully formed thought, but I have a visceral reaction to seeing coverage of Altman’s firing treated as a top-left news headline. It feels part of the hagiography of these dudes, that we cover them like kings and we cover their companies like nations, but somehow we don’t cover what their tech is going to do to real people.

PSA to other folks who also frequently schedule meetings across the Atlantic: DST ends this Sunday in Europe but it doesn’t end until the following Sunday in the US—because if we’re going to fuck with the clocks let’s maximize the chaos and fuck with them at different times, sure, why not.