McKane Andrus

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Harvey laments philanthropists who “conjure best practices, metrics, milestones, key performance indicators, reporting requirements, and more. Each item may make sense on its own, but in total it’s nonsense. And in any event, doing all of this is still no substitute for a real strategy.”
Left Organizing Is in Crisis. Philanthropy Is a Major Reason Why. | The Nation
Back when I was an issue campaigner, we often suffered from the fact that many of our organizations’ executive directors had “funder brain,” a phenomenon where an ED spends so much time packaging and spinning their work to funders that they could no longer be the disciplined, strategic leaders we needed them to be.
Left Organizing Is in Crisis. Philanthropy Is a Major Reason Why. | The Nation
And capitalism rewards these men. It rewards them again and again. Bezos is rewarded for forcing workers to pee in bottles, Zuck is rewarded for abusing our data, and Musk is rewarded for spreading hatred and busting unions. We live under a system that rewards black holes, rewards endless greed. There are many ways to judge capitalism, but one metric that makes sense is who gets elevated, who is able to accrue vast fortunes and power beyond measure. In these three men we see some of the worst of humanity, sickos who scapegoat others both to rake in more profits and to distract from how horribl…
We're ruled by Losers - by J. P. Hill - New Means
Are they not storing their meat in the bellies of their brothers and sisters—the Jays, the Thrashers, and the Robins?
The Serviceberry – Robin Wall Kimmerer
“Gifts cement the mystical realization of participation in something greater than oneself which, yet, is not separate from oneself. The axioms of rational self-interest change because the self has expanded to include something of the other.”
The Serviceberry – Robin Wall Kimmerer
A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is “we” rather than “I,” as all flourishing is mutual.
The Serviceberry – Robin Wall Kimmerer
In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away. The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity
The Serviceberry – Robin Wall Kimmerer
Anything and everything in a market is implicitly defined as scarce. With scarcity as the main principle, the mindset that follows is based on commodification of goods and services.
The Serviceberry – Robin Wall Kimmerer
Mistreating a gift has emotional and ethical gravity as well as ecological resonance.
The Serviceberry – Robin Wall Kimmerer
. A woolly knit hat that you purchase at the store will keep you warm regardless of its origin, but if it was hand knit by your favorite auntie, then you are in relationship to that “thing” in a very different way: you are responsible for it, and your gratitude has motive force in the world
The Serviceberry – Robin Wall Kimmerer
To name the world as gift is to feel one’s membership in the web of reciprocity. It makes you happy—and it makes you accountable.
The Serviceberry – Robin Wall Kimmerer
Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource.
The Serviceberry – Robin Wall Kimmerer
Gratitude creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you have what you need. In that climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver.
The Serviceberry – Robin Wall Kimmerer
the goal (conscious or unconscious) of a healthy challenge is to make all parties stronger, whereas the goal of an unhealthy attack is to take down, cancel, incarcerate, or destroy.
We Will Dance With Mountains
none of these things (nor the things that Bayo says) are to be understood as “Truth”; that would be a demotion!
We Will Dance With Mountains
We also want to question the centrality of some of these narratives, including those that seek comfort in humanity’s oneness or that hold our different social identities as fixed, rigid objects.
We Will Dance With Mountains
How do we consider and care for those most historically exploited in our cohort without calcifying our encounters through fixed-solutions, reifying colonial sense-making?
We Will Dance With Mountains
While we are deeply committed to prioritizing the well-being of those who’ve been most extracted from, we are also wary of reproducing hegemonic structures of compliance that override one’s ability to practice discernment, to be accountable to other compelling forces, and to think differently.
We Will Dance With Mountains
Instead, I envision an alternative non-AI project that would deploy some of the technologies currently used in AI—together with other social and cultural resources—to foster ecological reason. The goal would be to make more things meaningful to more people by enabling us to cultivate the interests and skills that transform noise or boredom into meaning and care.
Cultivating Meaning - Boston Review
But thanks to its agenda-setting power and widely adopted benchmarks, the tech industry now defines what counts as an advance in basic research.
AI’s Missing Others - Boston Review
The vast distance between a seat at the table and a meaningful voice in shaping whether and how AI is used is especially stark in regulatory debates on AI.
AI’s Missing Others - Boston Review
A still-underappreciated truism of our technological moment is that there is great solidarity to be found in refusing a technology—AI, mostly—that is used to exploit or replace a worker.
Learning from the Luddites - Boston Review
“If, if, if!” Mellor interrupted. “What’s the use of such sermons as thine to starving men? . . . If men would only do as thou says, it would be better, we all know. But they won’t. It’s all for themselves with the masters.”
Learning from the Luddites - Boston Review
The problem isn’t how to engender AI systems that are more playful and less boring but to lay out what it would mean to create and deploy systems that are supportive of human concern and care. I agree these would be systems designed to enhance the interaction of humans, not to replace it. As outlined in Douglas Engelbart’s early vision, the goal should be intelligence augmentation rather than artificial intelligence.
Machines of Caring Grace - Boston Review
That is, care for the lifeworld of the person being told what to do cannot be a consideration. To return to Haugeland’s insight, the bureaucratic system doesn’t give a damn. It’s designed that way on purpose, to remove human subjectivity and judgment from matters even when they are of crucial, life-determining importance.
Machines of Caring Grace - Boston Review
The theme of this and Flores’s subsequent work is of “instilling a culture of commitment” in our working relationships, allowing us to focus on what we are creating of value together.
Machines of Caring Grace - Boston Review
We don’t want to fill the world with uncaring playful machines any more than with uncaring efficiency generators.
Machines of Caring Grace - Boston Review
Rather than a kind of intelligence, care is an underlying foundation of human meaning.
Machines of Caring Grace - Boston Review
But care is not a form of intelligence. The philosopher John Haugeland famously said “the trouble with artificial intelligence is that computers don’t give a damn.”
Machines of Caring Grace - Boston Review
What Morozov leaves out in his efficient-versus-playful dichotomy is the role of human care and concern
Machines of Caring Grace - Boston Review
The surprise is primarily the speed and the volume, not the content.
AI’s Walking Dog - Boston Review
For me, using AI all too often feels like I’m engaging in a socially useless process, in which I learn almost nothing and then pass on my non-learning to others. It’s like getting the postcard instead of the holiday.
AI’s Walking Dog - Boston Review
I’m intrigued and bored at the same time: I find it quickly becomes quite tedious. I have a sort of inner dissatisfaction when I play with it, a little like the feeling I get from eating a lot of confectionery when I’m hungry.
AI’s Walking Dog - Boston Review
Where something came from, and how and why it came into existence, are major parts of our feelings about it. We feel differently about a piece of music played by an orchestra in a concert hall than we do about exactly the same piece of music made by a kid in a bedroom with a good sample bank. The backstory matters! The event matters! The intentions matter!
AI’s Walking Dog - Boston Review
We need to sense the humble beginnings before we can be awed by what they turn into—the greatest achievement of creative imagination is the self-discovery that begins in the ordinary and can connect us to the other, and to others.
AI’s Walking Dog - Boston Review
During an asset bubble, it is only a matter of time until moonshot projects and zombie firms and business models sustained by misallocated capital finally see their demise. Can we afford to wait around? Given the success of firms like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb in leveraging misallocated capital into political power that then reshapes markets and urban governance into forms that will sustain them once the capital gluts retreat, I would say no.
The Plot Against Finance - Boston Review
We should turn ecological reason into a full-fledged research paradigm, asking what technology can do for humans—once we stop seeing them as little more than fleshy thermostats or missiles.
The AI We Deserve - Boston Review
The result, however, is the same: a prohibition on imagining alternative institutional homes for these technologies.
The AI We Deserve - Boston Review
Stripped of politics, it’s very easy for eolithism to morph into solutionism.
The AI We Deserve - Boston Review
In both cases, the process is as much about improving what Paulo Freire called “problem posing”—allowing contesting definitions of problems to emerge by exposing it to public scrutiny and deliberation—as it is about problem solving.
The AI We Deserve - Boston Review
In this sense, information technology resembled the workshop of our eolithic flâneur: a space not for mere management or efficiency seeking, but for imagination, simulation, and experimentation.
The AI We Deserve - Boston Review
They cannot easily harness the vast reserves of both tacit and formal knowledge possessed by citizens, or at least that type of knowledge that isn’t reducible to entrepreneurial thinking: markets can only mobilize it by, well, colonizing vast areas of existence.
The AI We Deserve - Boston Review
When we use these tools to solve problems, we’re not like Storm’s carefree flâneur, open to anything; we’re more like entrepreneurs seeking arbitrage opportunities within a predefined, profit-oriented grid.
The AI We Deserve - Boston Review
This takes us to the core problem with today’s generative AI. It doesn’t just mirror the market’s operating principles; it embodies its ethos. This isn’t surprising, given that these services are dominated by tech giants that treat users as consumers above all. Why would OpenAI, or any other AI service, encourage me to send fewer queries to their servers or reuse the responses others have already received when building my app? Doing so would undermine their business model, even if it might be better from a social or political (never mind ecological) perspective.
The AI We Deserve - Boston Review
its generality and lack of a built-in telos make it conducive to experimentation.
The AI We Deserve - Boston Review
the machine hasn’t been socialized in a way that would make the process of having it interpret the Rorschach image meaningful.
The AI We Deserve - Boston Review
There can be no question of formalizing the entire, ever-shifting universe of meanings from which it arises.
The AI We Deserve - Boston Review
In fact, this striving might inform the very spirit—playful, idiosyncratic, vernacular, beyond the rigid plans and one-size-fits-all solutions—that some associate with postmodernity.
The AI We Deserve - Boston Review
This longing for the heterogeneous over the rigid is not something people or societies are expected to outgrow as they develop. Instead, it’s a fundamental part of human experience that endures even in modernity.
The AI We Deserve - Boston Review
The absence of predetermined goals broadens the flâneur’s capacity to see the world more richly, as the multiplicity of potential ends expands what counts as a means to achieve them.
The AI We Deserve - Boston Review