Rene Beekman
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renebeekman.bsky.social
Rene Beekman
@renebeekman.bsky.social
75 followers 410 following 5 posts
Artist, gallerist, product manager, former teacher, perpetual student
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Reposted by Rene Beekman
spavel.bsky.social
Users hate AI. So tech made it mandatory. Even if you don't use it, it pollutes what you read and how systems make decisions. The computer's hallucinated word is final.

And it needs all of your data to do it.

In the age of no consent, UX exists to normalized complete acquiescence to surveillance:
The AI age is the "age of no consent"
"Inevitability" means design decisions are no longer informed by user needs; now they are unilaterally imposed. The users are the ones being designed.
productpicnic.beehiiv.com
August 1, 2025 at 1:37 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
bruces.bsky.social
www.pangram.com
December 21, 2025 at 9:01 AM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
kjshepherd.bsky.social
It's your birthday, Duane.
Duane Kearns Puryear, holding his panel for the AIDS Memorial Quilt. It reads, in block letters: "My name is Duane Kearns Puryear. I was born on December 20, 1964. I was diagnosed with AIDS on September 7, 1987 at 4:45 PM. I was 22 old. Sometimes, it makes me very sad. I made this panel myself. If you are reading it, I am dead..." There are several great resources to learn about Duane, his advocacy, his family, his panel, and the politics of memory and re-creation, especially this one by The Dallas Way: http://www.thedallasway.org/stories/written/2021/9/19/duane-puryears-and-the-quilt-panel Duane Puryear died in 1991.
December 20, 2025 at 3:21 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
shaneanderson.bsky.social
"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future."

- @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit.

Incredible words.
Listen to all of it!
December 19, 2025 at 12:24 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
jennanewman.bsky.social
“When participants used ChatGPT to draft essays, brain scans revealed a 47% drop in neural connectivity across regions associated with memory, language, & critical reasoning.

Their brains worked less, but they felt just as engaged—a kind of metacognitive mirage.”🧪
“When participants used ChatGPT to draft essays, brain scans revealed a 47 percent drop in neural connectivity across regions associated with memory, language, and critical reasoning. Their brains worked less, but they felt just as engaged—a kind of metacognitive mirage. Eighty-three percent of heavy Al users couldn't recall key points from what they'd "written, compared to only 10 percent of those who composed unaided. Neutral reviewers described the Al-assisted writing as "soulless, empty, lacking individuality." Most alarmingly, after four months of reliance on Chat GPT, participants wrote worse once it was removed than those who had never used it at all. The study warns that when writing is delegated to Al, the way people learn fundamentally changes.”
December 4, 2025 at 2:13 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
hptsociety.bsky.social
OTD in 2002, Ivan Illich died. A radical social critic and philosopher, Illich offered one of the most distinctive and influential critiques of modern technology in the 20th century.
1/
December 2, 2025 at 4:56 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
spavel.bsky.social
Headline: "AI can replace 11.7% of workforce"

Actual study: Anthropic paid MIT to use a "labor simulation tool" that said 11.7% of TASKS could be done by AI
MIT study finds AI can already replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce
Artificial intelligence can already replace 11.7% of the U.S. labor market, across finance, health care and professional services, according to MIT's study.
www.cnbc.com
November 29, 2025 at 9:57 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
lindsaybussau.bsky.social
“Constant lying is not about making people believe a lie, but about ensuring that no one believes anything. A people who no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between good and evil: a people deprived of the power to think,”
Hannah Arendt.

Are we there yet?
November 25, 2025 at 2:06 AM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
wbm312.bsky.social
It's my favorite day! It's the 38th anniversary of the Max Headroom signal broadcast intrusion!

1st incident lasted 25s during the 9PM news on WGN-TV in Chicago; The 2nd, 2hrs later, lasted ~90s on PBS affiliate WTTW during Dr. Who.

You can watch it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqge...
Max Headroom 1987 Broadcast Signal Intrusion Incident
YouTube video by andrew867
www.youtube.com
November 22, 2025 at 6:37 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
us.theconversation.com
Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other.

Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq
November 21, 2025 at 11:48 AM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
bcmerchant.bsky.social
So these two trends—AI as smokescreen for management's ulterior motives/misplaced belief in its hype, and AI as an automation system for producing cheap knockoff art and writing (at the expense of artists and writers)—are what I think are the biggest impacts of AI on jobs so far.

More in the piece:
What’s really going on with AI and jobs?
Record-breaking layoff reports, Amazon's mass firings, and a slump in entry level employment. Is AI behind it all?
www.bloodinthemachine.com
November 13, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
hagenblix.bsky.social
I do, of course, have a paragraph from "Why We Fear AI" for this
An LLM is an abstraction over the status quo (or rather, the text of the status quo) that has, at its core, no other aim than producing more text that is just like the text already in existence. One result is that the dominant ideas, the dominant textual patterns of our time, are recast as “intelligence” per se. We might call the complex mass of concepts and ideas, the channels into which ideas flow often and easily, or the boundaries of what is reasonable to debate in so-called “polite society”—the dominant ideology of an age. An age’s dominant ideology tends to presuppose that the power of that age is natural; the hallmark of ideology, in this sense, is that it is easy to recognize only when it’s past its time. We may no longer think that an almighty god appointed a king to rule us, that women are naturally unfit to vote, or that sex outside of a heterosexual marriage is immoral. But at various times, to think otherwise (to think of replacing the monarchy with a republic, to affirm that women are people, or being in favor of sexual or gay liberation) was the far more difficult, even dangerous thought—if not to have, then at the very least to put in writing. Ideology, of course, is never complete, other thoughts are always possible. But ideology is easy to think, it’s what our thoughts are already marinated in. And hence, ideology will be dominant in the textual patterns of an age. Seen in this light, what is called “intelligence” in a language model, is really that—ideology as a thing that can pretend to be a person.
November 11, 2025 at 8:36 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
randomfactor.bsky.social
"6-7"?! Boy I say boy you gen alpha kids cant be doin' that! Your signifiers need signs boy! You've laid a rhetorical claim to an empty space son! You're creatin' a nihilistic dialectic! Your broccoli hairs obfuscatin' some much needed communication! Find some MEANIN', kid!
November 8, 2025 at 6:22 PM
renebeekman.bsky.social
It's rude to show AI output to people | Alex Martsinovich
Feeding slop is an act of war
distantprovince.by
November 2, 2025 at 10:26 AM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
slugnoodle.com
For anyone interested in Projeckt B00KM4RK: THE ROAMING LIBRARY and building their own, instructions and files can be found here:

github.com/TheSlugNoodl...
GitHub - TheSlugNoodle/ProjectBookmark
Contribute to TheSlugNoodle/ProjectBookmark development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
July 30, 2025 at 6:24 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
dosnostalgic.bsky.social
I'm definitely a Prompt Engineer.
January 14, 2025 at 11:51 PM
renebeekman.bsky.social
Gentle reminder…
The Day My Smart Vacuum Turned Against Me
Would you allow a stranger to drive a camera-equipped computer around your living room? You might have already done so without even realizing it. The Beginning: A Curious Experiment It all started ...
codetiger.github.io
October 26, 2025 at 3:14 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
info-activism.bsky.social
We face a climate+info crisis. What to do? Get “The RePlaybook: A Field Guide to the Climate & Information Crisis” by Tactical Tech. In this guide, 30+ experts share strategies to decode disinfo, challenge tech & counter division in climate info. Download: tacticaltech.org/replaybook/
October 20, 2025 at 8:04 AM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
anildash.com
Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!
The Majority AI View - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
anildash.com
October 17, 2025 at 7:29 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
olivia.science
really nice piece on this btw from @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...
"The Printing Press Democratized Knowledge": When Slogans Masquerade as History — Sonja Drimmer
The phrase is said so frequently it seems, like the mechanism it celebrates, to mechanically replicate itself.  It's become a favorite catchphrase among tech boosters of any sort (see my post on...
sonjadrimmer.com
October 10, 2025 at 1:19 PM
renebeekman.bsky.social
The comments to this make a great readinglist
loriemerson.net Lori Emerson @loriemerson.net · Oct 8
if you were to teach a class on the pre/history of AI in terms of key concepts ideas, what would they be? the mind/body problem? abstraction vs materialism? history of the database? automation?
October 8, 2025 at 11:26 AM
renebeekman.bsky.social
Meredith Whittaker’s brilliant takedown on how agentic AI is ultimately a backdoor.
How Signal’s Meredith Whittaker Remembers SignalGate: ‘No Fucking Way’
The Signal Foundation president recalls where she was when she heard Trump cabinet officials had added a journalist to a highly sensitive group chat.
www.wired.com
September 26, 2025 at 10:14 AM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
gilduran.com
1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it).

But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that
photo of paulina borsook
September 24, 2025 at 6:36 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
carlbergstrom.com
For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper
Joseph Fasano

Now I let it fall back
in the grasses.
I hear you. I know
this life is hard now...
For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper
Now I let it fall back in the grasses. I hear you. I know this life is hard now. I know your days are precious on this earth. But what are you trying to be free of? The living? The miraculous task of ...
poets.org
September 22, 2025 at 6:39 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
mikeyearworth.bsky.social
"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits."

www.computerworld.com/article/4059...
OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws
In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limi...
www.computerworld.com
September 21, 2025 at 12:50 PM