Holding the Line @ Backchannels
I’m joining 4S Backchannels—the Society for Social Studies of Science blog for shorter, timelier, media-rich STS scholarship—and my first piece is live: “Holding the Line: Values Drift, AI Anomia, and the Craft of Accountable Leadership.” 👇
Invisible work, long before AI
Invisible work has always been here. It is the creative contribution behind the great man’s invention, the editor who makes the Nobel prize possible, the unnamed colorists and inkers in pre‑digital comics and animation whose hands trained a generation’s visual imagination.
Bruises Beneath Brocade
What does it mean that some of the most exquisitely sensitive films about constraint and moral courage—films that taught many viewers to notice class cruelty, emotional repression, and the quiet heroism of small acts—were created inside a system that often asked others to keep quiet, endure, and carry on?
AI as a Period Movie set
Period films taught us to notice the fine grain of class and constraint. Who opens the doors, who carries the trays, whose feelings must be swallowed so that another character’s moral awakening can unfold in peace. The AI products that now saturate daily life are built on a similarly stratified stage, where some workers appear in the credits (engineers, founders) and others remain offscreen (moderators, annotators, ghostwriters, and translators) despite being essential to the performance.