I’ve written a few times recently on the concept of friction(less) pedagogy and learning in relation to AI. At the end of Rhetorics of the Digital Nonhumanities, I devote a chapter to pedagogical design, particularly in relation to Rittel and Webber’s wicked design problems. For a number of years, EDUCAUSE’s Horizon Report employed this concept.…
Keep readingYes, the AI is jammed in there. This is the May 2026 edition. It is interesting to see how our views develop on these matters. I know mine have shifted. Frontier AI’s has created a great deal of cultural instability, particularly in relation to higher education. Gen AI fundamentally undermined how students learn and faculty…
Keep readingLast month at the Conference for College Composition and Communication, the national conference in the discipline of rhetoric and composition, the following resolution was passed “we affirm the rights of students and teachers to refuse to sign up for, prompt, or otherwise use generative AI in the writing classroom.” The resolution articulates several concerns that I would…
Keep readingThe question is do we want a “more clear/communicative” version of Deleuze and Guattari? How about ourselves? We wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was already multiple, there was always a crowd. We drew on whatever came within range—what was nearest as well as what was farthest. We used pseudonyms to avoid recognition. Why, then, did…
Keep readingI’ve been asked to discuss CCCC’s recent resolution on the right to refuse AI. I have already written about it here. From my perspective, this particular resolution is an academic freedom issue within a single discipline and largely focused on one kind of course: first-year composition. As this course is often taught by adjuncts, graduate…
Keep reading“Teaching for Transfer” is an operative concept in rhetoric and composition studies that address the concern that the learning experiences of first-year composition courses be transferable to future academic and/or professional writing contexts. It is not a concept without critics, but I would describe it as deeply embedded in disciplinary best practices. Following the basic…
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My academic career has roughly corresponded with the rise of the internet, and the developments of networked digital media have been the focus of my research for the last 30 years. I have investigated the role intelligent machines play in the ways we communicate, the communities we form, and our engagement with larger world.
My current research (book) project is tentatively titled Empire, AI and Society: Artificial Warfare in the Digital Interregnum. My most recent open access publication is “Living on Digital Flatlands: Assemblies of Computer Vision.” Here’s the abstract.
This article explores computer vision not only in terms of its use with “intelligent” machines, such as autonomous vehicles, but also more broadly in terms of quotidian, digitally-mediated human vision, such as that experienced through smartphones. Drawing on assemblage theory and radical media archeology, I describe the technological processes that link together materially different spatiotemporal assemblages to produce a posthuman condition of computer vision typified by what Wolfgang Ernst terms the “epistemogenic momentum” of “techno-mathematical configurations.” Manuel DeLanda’s flat ontologies prove useful here for describing how assemblages operating in different space-times interact. I then turn to Deleuze and Guatarri’s techno-semiological stratum, specifically their discussion of the stratum’s spatiotemporal superlinearity, to articulate an emerging digital-calculative layer. I argue that understanding computer vision assemblages requires more than setting technical descriptions alongside cultural-ideological critique; it also requires an integrated analysis of the roles digital nonhumans perform in the production of a new visual regime with new capacities and desires. The shared human-nonhuman capacity of computer vision moves sight from the biological and linguistic assemblages of humans into digital assemblages where vision becomes calculable and subject to algorithmic modifications. The results are not only digitally-composed, screened images, but also new means of production, organization, and identity.
Alex Reid, Professor of Digital Rhetoric, Media, and Artificial Intelligence 