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7 min read 32

UofWinds 443, Week 32, 2026: Just Trying To Figure Out My Job, Neuroplasticity As A Praxis, Tired of Dystopian Sci-Fi? You Might Like Solarpunk


Good morning. My husband is volunteering his time at the soccer fields. My children are up, having breakfast in the kitchen and talking about the latest Spiderman movie. My cat is insisting that she has not had enough scritches. I have booked a noon-hour pilates class in order to force me to move after my three hours of sitting to write this newsletter.

Inspired by Ethan Marcotte's collection of statements and compelled by recent events (see below), I would like to include a brief, imperfect statement on the use of Ai in and for my work: I have never used LLMs for research or writing and I have no intention of starting the practice. If I choose to do so in the future, such use will be disclosed.

Just Trying To Figure Out My Job


If you would indulge me in chiming in on something that you have possibly already heard too many opinions on already (which is a good of a definition of The Discourse as any other), I can't stop thinking about Hank Green's apology video for admitting his use of large language models in his work as a content creator. As someone who is well versed in the genre of YouTube, Hank's response is a textbook response to a fandom that is disappointed in its creator.

What was surprising is that Hank identifies the fault in that he did not disclose the scope of his use of LLMs in a policy document, not in the use itself. His policy (which is found in the video's description section) states that he will continue to use LLMs for "research" but not for writing. The subsequent comments on his video from his audience compelled him to make two additions to his policy several hours later:

  1. LLM outputs will never be trusted as a source.
  2. Informational / educational videos will contain links to primary sources in the description.

Do I think Hank Green is suffering from some form of Ai psychosis? Well, I have to admit that to me, his apology video has all the hallmarks of an addict responding to an intervention. However, I am inclined to agree with Ryan Broderick: if there's an addiction at play, it is an addiction to social media.

I’d go so far as to say that without social media — or, rather, the need to compulsively post on social media, to be digitally productive — there’d be almost no reason for generative AI to exist at all. Whether it’s because of all the social media content these tools were trained on or because they were built by many of the same companies that created social platforms, chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude really want you to make stuff. And the unspoken anxiety driving the feeling that you must always be making stuff is a fear that you are simply not doing enough. And if you dig deep into why so many people feel that way, you will find the answer is social media every time. You must always be posting. To stay in people’s minds, to stay in good standing with the platforms, to take another whack at the slot machine that is the attention economy. I watch Green’s videos and I’ve definitely noticed the same mania I, myself, have felt so many times begin to crop up. A new project, a new initiative, a new video, a new post, a new company, new, new, more, more.
A human collaborator would tell you to slow down — Green admits his brother, author John Green, was worried about him — but an AI has no incentive to do the same. It will mindlessly keep pushing you to keep engaging with it as every human around you thinks you’re losing your mind.

I think Hank Green, social media content creator, knows about and understands this charge levelled against him because the title of his apology video is "Just Trying To Figure Out My Job".

Neuroplasticity As A Praxis


Hank Green should read some books.

I would suggest that a good place for him to start is anywhere from Tressie McMillan Cottom's list of works 🎁 that she is calling, The Reading Ahead Series. It is preparation for the work that needs to be done for this age of data politics.

The challenge this presents to a functioning democracy is immense. Democrats cannot just “win the midterms” and go back to life before Donald Trump and his army of tech bros upended our way of life. We can talk about reforming the Supreme Court, ending the filibuster, enshrining women’s autonomy in the Constitution and getting money out of elections. But those things won’t matter if we don’t change our laws and norms about what I am calling data politics.
All of the speculation and hype around A.I. is hiding the fact that the technology isn’t just large language models or agents or data centers. It is the backbone of a superstructure that merges regressive politics with unchecked economic power in the guise of technological innovation. Put simply, there is too much money, some of it too untraceable, giving a small group of unelected people too much power over the people. That’s data politics.

Throughout modern history, reading groups have been part of both political and social movements. From a short essay entitled, Only Connect:

Shared reading amplifies the conditions for those involved to experience resonance, to feel that crackle of energy when deeply moved, when deeply connected to ourselves and some ‘other.’ The text — a short story or poem — serves as a collective resource around which relations form as group members spontaneously share their individual responses and also form collective ones. Group members are often left with the sense that they have been moved (by the story, by one another) but also that they have moved another. Through the collective experience of participating in shared reading, our wire to the world can vibrate intensely.

But it was only after reading Matt Seybold's recent essay Neuroplasticity As A Praxis, that I considered that the act of reading is —unto itself — a form of resistance to not just social media, but data politics:

What I love most about Cottom’s invitation, however, is that if we take it up, it is not a prequel to action, it is direct action of itself. This is not a case of go do the reading and then you can start making a plan. Reading, listening, and having conversations is the plan, and it could be, I believe, a highly effective one, even before it converts into boycotts or protests or electoral campaigns. And if people take up Cottom’s invitation en masse, it will convert into those things.
It is a type of direct action because one of the things which will become apparent as you read the books Cottom is recommending is that powerful forces are aligned against the practices of reading books, listening to researchers, and discussing why this period in our history is the way it is (and why maybe the next one doesn’t have to be). Deep reading, careful listening, and constructive conversing are harder to do than they used to be. And that is not because of some individual, professional, or generational failure. These things have been made harder to do by structural adjustments to our systems of media, politics, and economy on behalf of consolidated power. These adjustments are being defended and reinforced, but are not inevitable or permanent.

As a fan of the writing of both Naomi Klein (Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World is the best book I've read about the COVID years) and of Astra Taylor (her book The Age of Insecurity is one of the best Massey Lectures I have read and I have read most of them), I am planning to read their forthcoming collaborative work: End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World. Perhaps we can (and should) read it together.

Tired of Dystopian Sci-Fi? You Might Like Solarpunk


Longtime readers know that I've linked to works related to solarpunk before in previous issues (077, 197, 288, 420, 424), so what I am going to share isn't likely going to be exactly new to most of you. But I want to be insistent about how I am working towards a solarpunk future, just as the media insists on reporting every utterance of a billionaire that suggests that our future is somewhere off this planet.

Tired of Dystopian Sci-Fi? You Might Like Solarpunk: A recent literary genre imagines what happens when our climate changes—and so do we was published in the March/April issue of Mother Jones and was written by Clive Thomson.

This anti-capitalist turn is probably the most speculative aspect of solarpunk. A popular adage is that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Solarpunk flips that on its head: If you’re going to imagine the world not ending, maybe you need to imagine a new economic system.
At its weakest, solarpunk can get treacly, with societies too well adjusted to seem believable and denizens as amiable as Winnie-the-Pooh. The most interesting stories, to me, are ones in which we tackle climate change but are still terrible to one another. In 2022’s The Peacekeeper, Chippewa novelist B.L. Blanchard imagines a contemporary North America that was never colonized. Native populations have all the mod cons—smartphones, etc.—but are still so nature-oriented that they lean hard into clean tech. Emissionless public transit abounds and huge mirrors along the Great Lakes reflect sunlight onto massive solar panels. But their world isn’t free of misdeed; The Peacekeeper is a murder mystery, complete with a tormented detective.
As novelist Roberson puts it, we can save the world and still lose ourselves. In his forthcoming novel, a noir tale, the tech is clean and the souls are dirty. “Government is still government, people are still people, criminals are still criminals,” he told me. “As a society, we have not become suddenly worthy of utopia.”

I want to mention solarpunk again because my own attempts to bring about this future is a very large part of my own personal why I write on the internet in public.

One of the reasons why I have been probably more shaken by Hank Green's current state than probably most of you, is because I had followed Hank Green's work since his early days when he was an ardent environmentalist. I don't know whether Hank Green has lost his why or whether he has simply replaced it with trying to be one of the most successful content creator on all the platforms, but I am no longer following where is going now. My work is here, following the sun.

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