Matthew Kirschenbaum

@mkirschenbaum

Critical tech and literary/cultural AI. Also cats, letterpress printing, and tabletop gaming. Commonwealth Professor of AI and English at the University of Virginia but speaking for myself and in my own capacity here. Rudeness will get you blocked.

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Bluesky

¿Es tu perfil?Reclámalo y mkirschenbaum.dirty.social es tuyo.Reclamar perfil

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· 23d

I am about to murder the father.

A slice of sachertorte bearing Sigmund Freud’s likeness as a sugar medallion.

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· 28d

Oh! Where are you?

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· Jul 10

Four in a row.

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· Jul 9

Somehow the fact that it’s *a* submachine gun—singular—like the mascot or the chancellor’s mace—makes its worse.

Screenshot of quoted article: “These grenades have "always been in our armory", Capt Jermaine Thomas said. "We will ever use them." He added that the department plans to destroy them, along with the university's submachine gun, which is also not
authorized under Cal State”

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· Jul 7

Jeremy spoke in class today.

Headline and picture of Mitch McConnell from the Hill: MCCONNELL SPOKE TO GOP LEADERS AMID UNCERTAINTY ABOUT HIS SENATE RETURN

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· Jul 7

Every time I’m in a Sheetz or a WaWa I think: this would be the outpost I’d choose to fortify and defend civilization from in a plague or a zombie apocalypse.

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· Jul 7

Thanks to everyone who came out for this! I’ve already sent to @eve.gd , but here’s a behind the scenes look at my prep.

Kitten dozing on top of my copy of Martin’s Theses on Metaphors of Digital Textual History.

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· Jul 6

Random book I noticed on display in a public reading area in UVA’s Shannon Library. @uvalibrary.bsky.social

Cloth bound book with an illustrated cover titled THE MOTOR GIRLS ON TOUR. By Margaret Penrose. Illustration shows a group of flapper-era women crammed into some kind of open-wheeled convertible red coupe.

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· Jul 6

Later.

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· Jul 6

At the RBS lunch buffet. Described to me as a social experiment.

A sole mid-sized chocolate chip cookie presented as part of the lunch buffet for a large group, labelled as “The Cookie.”

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· Jul 6

Don’t tempt me with a good time UVA 📌

Multiple large clusters of blue, white, and orange balloons, clustered for a ballon drop

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· Jul 5

Who wore it better?

President Donald J Trump, apparently asleep during his fireworks display last night.

Famous John Blanche painting of the undead God Emperor of Mankind from Warhammer 40K.

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· Jul 2

Faux one-star Yelp review:

Maj. Gen. Harry Heth Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
July 1, 1863
*
It started out as a minor scrap with a few militia, the next thing I know, I'm tangled with half the Union Army!
No recon, no support, no clue.
Terrain was a mess—ridges, fences, and not a decent map in sight. Tried to press the attack, and suddenly Reynolds shows up like he owns the place. Whole thing escalated way beyond expectations. Poor communication, poor planning, terrible outcome. One star-would not invade again.

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· Jun 30

Not vouching for the accuracy of this until I see it verified, but . . . holy shit?

Screenshot of post by Jo Beam: “You know your high-tech air defense is a total joke when it gets completely outsmarted by a weapon that looks like an ordinary flock of migrating birds...
Ukrainian forces have officially pushed drone warfare into pure science fiction territory. They deployed a swarm of bio-mimetic drones against the Engels-2 strategic bomber base near Saratov. These drones are custom-designed and programmed to mimic the exact migration patterns and natural flight formations of birds.
And guess what? Russian radar systems didn't suspect a thing.
They probably assumed it was just geese heading south-right up until
tha llhirdall aeddanhs dars”

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· Jun 28

This chart has certainly been making the rounds in my circles, and of course I love to see it. I would caution though that there is another interpretation that is possible, namely that English, first amongst all majors, prepares students for nothing much in particular. +

Graph from a recent Forbes article, The Most Versatile College Majors
Here are the top 15 college majors on Linkedin and the share of 2022 to 2024 graduates who landed jobs farther afield from their majors.

English is in the top slot at 69%.

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· Jun 28

People, I have been sitting at the proverbial kitchen table tending to some neglected bills and paperwork, and it has been given unto me to receive a vision of The Next Fresh Hell. It is online forms for bill pays *replaced by a chat interface*. You’re welcome.

Chat-style interface for online bill pay replacing traditional forms with a “conversational” interface to solicit routine personal information one item at a time.

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· Jun 24

Wow. RUSH just cancelled and rescheduled tonight’s show in Fort Worth, and their post cites border control issues entering the US. Keep in mind the band and much of the crew are Canadian (and German); their previous set of gigs was in Mexico City.

Screenshot from official Rush FB page: RUSH •
...
9m • S
Due to unforeseen travel and border-related delays impacting our touring production following our recent Mexico City tour dates, tonight's show in Fort Worth at Dickies Arena has been rescheduled for Thursday, July 2.
X
All fans holding a ticket for tonight's June 24 show will be able to use that same ticket for the rescheduled performance on July 2 at Dickies
Arena.
We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your understanding given this circumstance out of our control.
Fans who are unable to attend the rescheduled date may request a refund through
Ticketmaster if tickets were purchased there.
For tickets purchased through other outlets, please contact your original point of purchase for assistance.
The Fifty Something tour will resume as scheduled for the remaining dates, and we look forward to seeing everyone starting this Friday!
Friday June 26 @ Dickies Arena
Sunday June 28 @ Dickies Arena
Tuesday June 30 @ Dickies Arena
** Original June 24** now rescheduled for

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· Jun 24

Yas

A flavored ice tea from Li Chun Cafe in College Park, Maryland. Aqua blue with lemon and a sprig of time. 😋

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· Jun 23

They’re going to start bombing the algae.

Screenshot of a post: “Military flyovers are coming to the National Mall this week - Here's what you should know” Includes photo of an A-10 fighter jet.

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· Jun 23

Grande cappuccinos on me!

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· Jun 22

Here again, my take.

Matthew Kirschenbaum
The Writing Lesson
Revisited: AI [and | in | is]
the Scriptural Economy
ABSTRACT. This essay uses Michel de Certeau’s framing of mo-
dernity as a scriptural economy—and that concept’s parafictional
deployment in Tom McCarthy’s 2015 novel Satin Island and the
novel’s debt to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous chapter “A Writing
Lesson”—to situate large language models (LLMs) in a tradition
of writing and textual production rooted in capitalism and trans-
actional practices. It argues that generative artificial intelligence
should be understood not as the disruption of writing or an aber-
ration but as the completion of the structural logic of the scriptural
economy and that LLMs are very likely the final word on a system
of production wherein writing is tokenized and transacted for ex-
traction of value in ways that render the technology’s current limi-
tations, such as a propensity for hallucinations, largely beside the
point. Lest there be any misunderstanding, this is not intended as
a salutary diagnosis.
friedrich kittler (1995) pronounced the last historical act of
writing as taking place in the early 1970s when engineers at Intel
leaned over their boards to draw up blueprints for the 4004 micro-
processor, the first ever for the commercial market. But Kittler might
have done better to declare a long goodbye. Consider a parallel episode
almost a half century later, sometime in early 2017, when an engineer
at Google used software to create a diagram for a machine learning
paper titled “Attention Is All You Need”: The diagram limned the novel
transformer architecture that became the basis for OpenAI’s ChatGPT
and many other generative artificial intelligence (AI) models (Vaswani
et al. 2017, 3).
© 2026 The New School
social research Vol. 93 : No. 2 : Summer 2026 285

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· Jun 22

I’ve only read the abstract because paywall, but it’s clear that this argument is much greater and scope than simply academic publishing. On the contrary, it applies to most forms of writing in the world today.

Manabu'
Received: 28 April 2026 / Revised: 27 May 2026 / Accepted: 28 May 2026
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2026
Abstract
This paper advances a structural, critical-theoretical argument: the publish-or-per-ish model, one of the organizing logics of academic labour under bioinformational capitalism, is not being disrupted by Large Language Models (LLMs). Instead, the publish-or-perish model is being completed, and thereby destroyed, by LLMs-if not now, then in the very near future. Drawing on Bourdieu, the paper reads academia as a field whose dominant doxa is metric productivism, with publication counts functioning as symbolic capital. Drawing on Slaughter and Leslie, Peters and Jandrić, and the Leiden Manifesto, the paper shows how this doxa is the signature of market logics colonizing knowledge production. Drawing on Lyotard and on Lave and Wenger, it argues that the postmodern reduction of legitimacy to performativ-ity is now literally instantiated by machines that play the language game of academic publishing, and that the apprenticeship pathway to scholarly identity is being severed. The crisis is incremental and existential: the relation between publication, labour, judgement, and recognition on which publish-or-perish depends is becoming increasingly untenable. The paper closes by sketching a postdigital scholarly commons grounded in contribution, dialogue, and situated practice. What is scholarship for, after the machine?
Keywords Postdigital • Publish-or-perish • Academic capitalism • Epistemic disruption • Artificial intelligence • Symbolic capital • Knowledge production
Introduction: The Machine Consumes Itself
This is not a paper about Artificial Intelligence (Al) as a tool in education. It is not a paper about how scholars might use Large Language Models (LLMs) prudently, nor about the etiquette of disclosure, nor about the design of better detection systems!
* Thomas Manabu
Educators echnology
15h'
London, …

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum· Jun 21

This is just to say I have eaten the shishito peppers drizzled in lime and which you were probably saving for the table Forgive me they were delicious but not hot well, only one in ten