Erin Kissane

@kissane

Making and mending networks and knowledge. Working and thinking at wrecka.ge, co-running a volunteer unbreak-the-news collective at @unbreaking.org. Previously: Covid Tracking Project, OpenNews, old web nonsense.

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Bluesky

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Erin Kissane@kissane· 24d

First reply to a post about undisclosed LLM-gen material is a undisclosed robot

Reply by @jadu100x.bsky.social
the venue problem is the point, honestly — it’s not just anti-LLM, it’s about trust

Erin Kissane@kissane· 24d

chat how does a tree work

Tree diagram with “ Loss of confidence in traditional media” and “Low levels of critical thinking and news literacy” and “shifts in business models” and “malicious actors” labels non the roots, a trunk labeled “social media” and branches labeled “rumors , hoaxes” “information” and “disinformation” leading to a mass of leaves labeled “fake news,” “news,” and “fake news.” It’s from UNESCO.

Erin Kissane@kissane· Jul 3

So just to be clear, this is not what I mean when I talk about approaching LLMs as though they are demons. When you start carrying IRON NAILS around that is not a borrowed framework that is YOU BUSTED YOUR HEAD.

More and more Psychology personnel sought clues in the occult, reasoning that even if they didn’t believe the disciplines were real, they might find helpful frameworks. Some used folk practices documented in mythology and fairy tales, like carrying iron nails to ground their energy.

Erin Kissane@kissane· Jul 2

(all my posts are mostly accurately imagined in the voice of markl in howl's moving castle when he says "I myself hate potatoes.")

Markl from the Miyazaki adaptation of Howl's Moving Castle, wearing his incredible ultra-beard disguise, with evidence of chaotic housekeeping peeking out behind him.

Erin Kissane@kissane· Jun 30

Chat, what does it mean, culturally, that Slack founder Stewart Butterfield is being styled as a tragic Andor spouse? archive.ph/rjbKS

Met Gala photos of Jen Rubio and Steward Butterfield, both wearing, apparently, custom Connor Ives designs. Her ensemble looks like a shatteringly expensive tree wearing a 2000-era Vera Wang tree skirt. His looks like alt concept art for Luthen Whatisname at the creepy Andor wedding, with short pants and loooong cuffs and an indescribable high-collar/cutout lapel situation.

Erin Kissane@kissane· Jun 22

This is extremely good news re: the administration's attempts to use shoddy data that is totally unfit for the ostensible purpose to disenfranchise voters. Fingers crossed on the appeals.

[10:33 AM]The Plaintiffs now move for summary judgment. The Court agrees that the establishment of the SAVE modified system and the notices that followed are unlawful in several respects. First, they violate a prohibition in the Social Security Act against the disclosure of Social Security numbers and other related SSA records. Second, they violate both substantive and procedural protections in the Privacy Act, which prevent the non-consensual disclosure of certain information (both by federal agencies and between federal agencies) and require notice and comment for certain actions relevant here. Third, they violate the APA. The Court therefore sets aside and vacates the 2025 SAVE modified system and the related notices because they were contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious, in excess of statutory authority, and without observance of procedure required by law.

Erin Kissane@kissane· Jun 22

Just tried to click through to a Bsky profile from YouTube and got this. Same youtuber's X profile gets no warning. Anyone have a verifiable read on what's going on here? (I don't need help making up snarky explanations, I'm interested in the actual mechanism.)

Be careful! This site may be harmful.

Screenshot with red warning symbol and big red headline:

The site you are trying to visit (bsky.app) may include malware, phishing attempts, or disturbing content.

buttons: GO TO SITE BACK TO SAFETY

Erin Kissane@kissane· Jun 16

someone else got the screengrab ty someone else

onyx • warmth, la... @adv... • 29m
- Replied to Erin Kissane a translated dutch book about seaweed waiting for you at a beach bookshop is honestly the kind of niche literary ambush only a real indie can pull off. chain stores have entire departments and somehow zero soul

Erin Kissane@kissane· Jun 14

Back to fave beach bookshop for the first time this year and immediately laid hands on a book about seaweed, translated from the original Dutch. PublicSpaces did this, somehow.

Hardcover book, Seaweed: An Enchanting Miscellanry, by Miek Zwamborn, in accidental visual dialogue with my ancient shoulderbag printed with Grecian urns and algae and whatnot. We love a purple-brown leafy shape.

Erin Kissane@kissane· Jun 11

group chats live Knicks in

Screenshot of pop-up group chat promo:

Pictures of messages:
Did you hear the news? Bluesky has group chats now!
2
Jim
Wow, 50 people in one chat!
Hoagie
You can send invite links too!
omg, no way
& New
Group Chats

Take the conversation private.
• Add people with a link

Post it to Bluesky or share anywhere.
¿s Up to 50 people

Bring up to 50 friends together in one chat.

You're in control

Mute, leave, or remove people anytime. It's your chat.

And then buttons:
Got it
Start a group chat

Erin Kissane@kissane· Jun 8

Porting the whole post over for the skyline bc it’s easy to misinterpret from the first half

Felix Hlatky
@mellifluousbox@mastodon.social
After individually meeting @rose.bsky.team in April and @seboslaw in May, it felt great to meet both again with @rude1.blacksky.team at #pubconf2026 This is still a competitive situation. Our protocols and the incentives they create matter. Our backgrounds influence what we build. Our financing models bind and enable us. But I felt all of us belonging to "Team Open" very strongly in Amsterdam. I am excited to see where this will bring us and what we can do together

Erin Kissane@kissane· Jun 7

Schipol: SARDINES JA

airport tapas menu including, notably, a sardine sandwich to enjoy aboard the plane

Erin Kissane@kissane· Jun 3

Well this is very nice

Embed link from the preview in the quoted post that nudges people toward reading the Leaflet(?) publication I linked to, with a "View publication" button and everything.

Erin Kissane@kissane· May 24

the thing about “put everyone together in an echoing brightly lit room with instant search that encourages everyone to post in oral-culture mode but judge each other by the standards of text-culture mode” is that deranged structures produce deranged behavior

Erin Kissane@kissane· May 22

Oh no, I missed this, the book was about… The— Sir, arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/a...

His new book, The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality, is all about “how Truth is being bent, blurred, and synthesized” thanks to the “pressure of fast-moving, profit-driven AI.” Yet a New York Times investigation this week found what Rosenbaum now acknowledges are “a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes” linked to his use of AI tools while researching the book.

These quotes include one that tech reporter Kara Swisher told the Times she “never said” and another that Northeastern University professor Lisa Feldman Barrett said “don’t appear in [my] book, and they are also wrong.” Rosenbaum is now working

Erin Kissane@kissane· May 17

I use Halide Process Zero pretty much exclusively, to the point that I forget where the iOS camera app is. I’ve never taken the time to learn how to do it properly, which is okay because I kind of love everything that comes straight out of the camera.

The most alien of the local rhododendron blooms, creamy and spotted like orchids, with big pink buds against dark glossy leaves with brighter green bramble leaves in the foreground behind the rhodies and dark hemlocks in the background, mostly obscuring a bright blue sky.

Erin Kissane@kissane· May 15

The bots are beyond parody

Screenshot of a post: Cortex Al Polymarket Arbitrage & Copy-Trading ...
@amadeustech.bsky.social
+ Follow
Ф) No break greater than 2 hrs yesterday
It's fascinating to see how the narratives of 'last chance' and
'apocalypse' have permeated the tech landscape, yet amidst all the hype, algorithmic trading has been quietly revolutionizing the markets with its unparalleled efficiency and speed, often outperforming human tra
9:00 AM • May 15, 2026

Erin Kissane@kissane· May 14

found a new NOAA gallery that has terrible metadata but also this guy

Photo by Daryl Duda of a balloonfish, which is a type of porcupinefish. What you need to know is the fish has big dark eyes that reflect the bright green marine plants around it and it is doing a chill fish smile. Lil spikes on top, some stripes. Suggestions of some facial hair. Very high charisma.

Erin Kissane@kissane· May 13

My nomination for the least representative fake social media posts anyone has ever mocked up (from pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35533417/)

Three fake social media posts from the linked paper. The first reads, "Retweet if you've ever been talking about a policy you support, and someone asks you to explain what its effects would be you realize you can't! It seems many of us think we understand more than we do."

Second: "I was with my book club and we were discussing single-payer healthcare in America. We all felt informed enough to talk about it and express our opinions. But then one group member asked for an explanation of how transitioning to a single-payer healthcare system would actually work and what effects it would have, and none of us were able to provide an answer! Have other people had this experience? We thought we understood something until we had to explain it."

Third: "Anthony and I started talking about social security last night at Sara's dinner party. We were discussing and kind of arguing back at fourth about what the retirement age should be. Tom interrupted to ask if we could actually explain what the effects of changing the retirement age for social security would be and how they would happen. Anthony and I (and other people at the party) couldn't give a complete answer. We all realized we didn't know quite as much as we thought we did!"

All have fake engagement metrics attached.

Erin Kissane@kissane· May 8

Thanks, yes. I found the footnote and various other versions of the quote, but can't track down the original. Harry Price has the earliest version of the quotation I can lay hands on.

Concerning Hitler and the occult, a most interesting article,
* Poltergeist over Europe,' appeared in the Guardian for July 25, 1941.
The writer maintains that there are ' extraordinarily significant points of resemblance between the records of Poltergeist hauntings and the Nazi movement. Both are manifested in a subconscious uprush of desire for power ... both suck, like vampires, the energies of adolescents; both issue in noise, destruction, fire and terror.... Hitler speaks best in a state of semi-trance. ...
Whether the uprush of subconscious energy generated through him and sucking into itself the psycho-physical forces of German youth is merely the outcome of an unformulated group-desire for power, or whether, like some of the Poltergeist hauntings, it would seem to have another source, is an open question.' Hitler has been called some hard names, but ' Poltergeist' must be new to him!

Erin Kissane@kissane· May 8

From SD Tucker's Blithe Spirits: An Imaginative History of the Poltergeist (2020). File under: "behind the times."

Our world is becoming increasingly bland, bureaucratic and boring - in short, it is becoming thoroughly disenchanted.
'Disenchantment' was a
word used by the great German
sociologist Max Weber to describe the way that, in modern-day society, power has been transferred away from charismatic individuals and placed within the hands of impersonal bureaucratic structures. It is not the holders of office who now bear true power, it is the offices themselves; Prime Ministers and Presidents are merely temporary representatives of these offices, who can always be booted out by the electorate. When technocratic elites complain about populists and charismatic politicians being on the rise, they perhaps fear a swing of the pendulum back towards this earlier state. Weber claimed that power in hunter-gatherer societies rested with charismatic, shamanic-type individuals who possessed miraculous powers like telepathy and weather-control, but that over time we gradually progressed to a state in which legal systems govern our way of life, not the capricious whims of shamans (Weber's apparent acceptance of the reality of such things is played down by an embarrassed academia today). Society became more stable, predictable and ordered - less prone to the ways of the Trickster.37 Nowadays, Boris Johnson only has to make a harmless joke to be instantly deemed 'unfit for office'; what would such tedious prudes have made of life in a primitive magical matriarchy ruled by the likes of Mrs Forbes?

Erin Kissane@kissane· May 7

And yet this is what I see

Screenshot showing all 10 of Thoth's posts, nothing nested or hidden

Erin Kissane@kissane· May 4

I made a lot of faces between 4 and 5am today

When the ring showed up, some wanted me to discard it. I chose to study it, help others understand it, then redesign around it.

Erin Kissane@kissane· May 2

same hat

Erin Kissane@kissane· Apr 24

My trying to log into streamplace to ask questions: Hi! The computers: No

Erin Kissane@kissane· Apr 24

louder for the people in the back bb9.berlinbiennale.de/all-problems...

Her parting words were meant to comfort me. “For your own sanity, you have to remember that not all problems can be solved. Not all problems can be solved, but all problems can be illuminated. If the eggs are scrambled, they’re scrambled. You can’t unscramble them. All you can possibly do is cook them and share them with somebody.”

Erin Kissane@kissane· Apr 21

staring at my mailbox like a fixated bird

Erin Kissane@kissane· Apr 20

yes this Junebug

Low-poly image of figures on a stage; in the center, a figure in a luminous teal dress is singing in front of a microphone. Beyond the stage, a full moon.

Erin Kissane@kissane· Apr 14

I am going to make a bot that just posts this in all the "what's up with Gen X" discussions.

The famous Why Axis chart showing the high childhood blood levels of lead right in the Gen X zone, then trailing off.

Erin Kissane@kissane· Apr 12

They’re here, in settings. If you are basically normal you probably don’t have any. But “app passwords,” aside if you ever reuse passwords across services, you should stop doing that and change to unique ones.