Lauren Woolsey

@cgsunit.com

1020 Followers 597 Following

Earthling, she/her, educator, reader, tabletop gamer, and more. Avatar by Corinne Roberts. If you want my views and zines on AI, check out padlet.com/laurenUU/antiAI

The text of the poem "Oh Children", by Margaret Atwood (in Dearly) is presented in the image and it reads as follows: Oh children, will you grow up in a world without birds? Will there be crickets where you are? Will there be asters? Clams, at a minimum? Maybe not clams. We know there will be waves. Not much life needed for those. A breeze, a storm, a cyclone. Ripples as well. Stones. Stones are consoling. There will be sunsets as long as there is dust. There will be dust. Oh children, will you grow up in a world without songs? Without pines? Without mosses? Will you spend your life in a cave? A sealed cave with an oxygen line, until there’s a failure? Will your eyes blank out like the white eyes of sunless fish? In there, what will you wish for? Oh children, will you grow up in a world without ice? Without mice? Without lichens? Oh children, will you grow up?
Value connected Digital conversations Heard text together
Text in screenshot reads: If you have enough flex tokens available to make up work, you can fill out the Flex Token Form with your planned revised due date. My two main goals for this late assignment policy are 1) to build your personal accountability by asking you to take responsibility for connecting with me, via a simple form, to plan a revised timeline rather than waiting for me to reach out to you, and 2) to acknowledge the intention of due dates as a shared agreement of timely feedback; late work takes me more time to review and I may provide fewer comments in my feedback on late work. Let’s work in a community of mutual respect for each other’s time. Please let me know if you have questions or concerns about this policy.
Text of a syllabus clip: Late Assignment Policy, aka “Flex Token Policy” If you missed a due date or know you will be absent, you are often able to still submit work for full credit using flex tokens. You do not require my permission to extend a due date, are you not required to share the details of what is going on in your life that prevented you from turning something in on time. Everyone experiences situations that are unexpected, overwhelming, or both. Each student begins the semester with three flex tokens. You regenerate one after submitting a PI and can earn more when needed by attending student support hours. Your total available at any given time is listed in the gradebook. So, what can a flex token do?
Two photos stacked. The top photo shows a teeny baby bearded dragon in the palm of someone's hand, and the bottom photo shows a clay disk with claw prints, a heart, and the letters that spell Trent as a memento of a pet that has passed away.
Poem titled "of the empire" by Mary Oliver. The text follows: We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.
A sharpie drawing of a hanging set of objects in a mobile (like over a child's crib). There are four shapes. The circle mass hangs 15 cm from the top rope, and the rest of the mobile hangs 5 cm from the top rope. A square, hexagon, and triangle all hang below it at different distances and levels on the mobile.
A hanging set of objects in a mobile (like over a child's crib). There are four shapes. The circle mass hangs 15 cm from the top rope, and the rest of the mobile hangs 5 cm from the top rope. A square, hexagon, and triangle all hang below it at different distances and levels on the mobile.
A spreadsheet with the following books (one per line, title and author separated by tab): Imagination: A Manifesto Ruha Benjamin The Beginning Comes After the End Rebecca Solnit A Psalm for the Wild-Built Becky Chambers The Serviceberry Robin Wall Kimmerer Emergent Strategy adrienne maree brown Imagination Sundial Rob Hopkins and Rob Shorter We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope (editors:) Malka Older, Annalee Newitz and Karen Lord Beyond the Glittering World (editors:) Darcie Little Badger, Stacie Shannon Denetsosie, and Kinsale Drake Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (editors:) adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha Automatic Noodle Annalee Newitz All Systems Red Martha Wells The Dispossessed Ursula K. LeGuin The Grievers Trilogy (esp. 3rd book!) adrienne maree brown Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America from Around the Globe Natasha Hakimi Zapata
OpenAI webpage screenshot with a post from July 8, 2025 in the category of Global Affairs. Title is: "Working with 400,000 teachers to shape the future of AI in schools" followed by the text "OpenAI Joins the American Federation of Teachers to launch the National Academy for AI Instruction."
A book on a shelf labeled "TBR" where the book cover has a circle that is black and white spirals on one side and rainbow gradient on the other. The book is titled "The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie" and is written by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
An information card for the moth species Zygaena dorycnii, including a picture from iNaturalist showing a moth with red dots on its wings sitting on a flower.
A graphic from StoryGraph showing four books read, 1044 pages, average rating 4.5. The books are "The Best of Jane Kenyon," "Babel," "Things As It Is," and "Platform Decay."
Six books in a stack, five of which are poetry books. The sixth is a blue cover with the title Everything to Everyone.
A variety of outdoor art installations featuring sculpted colorful glass by artist Dale Chihuly
A squirrel sitting and eating a peanut on a concrete walk, with part of a sign saying Edward showing behind the squirrel.
A page of a zine with the title "ten synonyms for LLMs (listed in no particular order)": stochastic parrots, synthetic text extruding machines, single-use plastic of the mind, linear algebraic sociopathy, tarpitting 8-ball assistants, improv comedy group, a thneed, jumped up autocorrect, bullshit engines, ocean-boiling fakery
Three books standing upright on a counter with "Cellar Bird Books" logo on the wall behind them. The books are: The Edge of Space-Time by Chanda Prescod Weinstein, Auguries of Innocence by Patti Smith, and Against Technoableism by Ashley Shew.
A photo of a greeting card that has the Artemis 2 flight path and the words "I love you to the moon and back!"
A detailed image of the planet Earth taken by Commander Reid Wiseman of Artemis II, showing the very thin atmosphere that protects us from space, with Earth's South Pole at the top of the image. Shine from sunset illuminates the lower right, and aurora can be seen in the upper right and lower left of the image.
A huge composite mosaic of the planet Saturn taken from the far side so that it is illuminated by the Sun behind it. A faint blue dot is hard to make out in the lower right of the image, near Saturn's ring system; that faint blue dot is the planet Earth.
A photograph of a small part of space taken from the outer solar system looking back toward Earth. Earth appears as a small speck, a "pale blue dot" in a beam of dusty light.
A full view of our planet taken by a human, the second human photograph of our planet. The Earth appears in the lower right quarter of the shot and is a gibbous shape as part of its night side is facing the camera.
The photograph called Earthrise, taken by Bill Anders on Apollo 8. A gibbous Earth is visible against a black sky, with the moon's surface dominating the bottom of the photograph. From NASA's caption: "this iconic picture shows Earth peeking out from beyond the lunar surface as the first crewed spacecraft circumnavigated the Moon, with astronauts Anders, Frank Borman, and Jim Lovell aboard."
Text from the essay: The results, in a strict practical sense, don't matter. What matters is the process of getting them: the development and application of methods, the training of minds, the creation of people who know how to think about hard problems. If you hand that process to a machine, you haven't accelerated science. You've removed the only part of it that anyone actually needed.
StoryGraph data for the book "Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are" by Rebecca Boyle. The description at the bottom begins with the text "An intimate look at the Moon and its relationship to life on Earth–from the primordial soup to the Artemis launches–from an acclaimed Scientific American and Atlantic contributor"
A cat sitting on top of a short multi-level cat tree inside a house looking through a window screen on a sunny day
A photo of the Earth-Moon system taken from space, with the following quote from the book Contact, by Carl Sagan: "You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other."
Four stickers with different sayings on them, such as The Future is Refusal and There is no responsible AI use under technofascism.
A tiny waxing crescent moon in a clear periwinkle sky
Branches with cherry blossom buds
A printed copy of Ralph's translation of the zine, folded and placed next to a potted plant in a window.
A screenshot from the linked post. The text reads as follows: "I refuse to use generative AI because I simply don’t want to be the kind of person who uses generative AI. The promise of AI is that it removes friction. It doesn’t matter whether it can actually fulfill that promise, it matters that the sovereign wealth funds with seemingly infinite pockets and patience for Sam Altman’s megalomania believe it can. In their ideal world, you don’t have to think about anything because an AI will do your thinking for you, and so you can fire everyone whose job it was to think. In this ideal world, they never have to think about other people at all, whose desires and needs and rights might come into conflict with their whims. I don’t know where they imagine we’ll have gone; six feet under, probably. I quite like thinking, and I think humans should do more of it, and I think the less we do it the more our thinking muscles will atrophy. This seems bad for everyone except for authoritarians who wish we were easier to control. I also happen to think AI is quite bad at thinking and that what LLMs do is not thinking at all, but I could be wrong! It’s genuinely beside the point. I do not want the frictionless world that the political project of generative AI promises, one in which you never have to interact with a human being if you don’t want to, and therefore I would simply prefer not to be complicit in its advancement."
From page 101 in the belonging chapter of the book The Four Pivots. The text reads: But what does it mean to reimagine the meaning of winning? What does it mean to become a more enlightened version of ourselves? These questions get to the heart of the new-world view of transformative change. The new-world view of change is not simply about winning but more importantly involves focusing on how we make change and who we become in the process. In our journey for justice, how we get there is just as important as the destination; the two cannot be separated. There is an ongoing debate among social justice leaders about old-world versus new-world social change. For old-world leaders and organizers, voting, mobilizing the base, and movement building are the only real levers of power. Power in the old-world view is onsidered a form of capital that can be deployed in order to exert influence on people, events, and institutions. Researchers of social movements,
A big slice of apple pie and a small slice of pumpkin pie
On the left: a cat covering her eyes while sleeping on a red cushion. On the right: a cat covering her eyes while sleeping on a plaid sheet on a bed.
A long haired cat sits calmly on the top of a crocheted blanket in front of a window. She is looking sideways relative to the camera.
Cover of the book The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth by Andreas Malm
A tiny patch of short closed white blooms on the ground, surrounded by leaves
A screenshot of an email from Senator Elissa Slotkin whose subject line is "Where to find me." I circled in the screenshot the text "our new Substack," which is a platform known to be pro-Nazi.
A orange tabby cat sits in a lap with her head down
Success came first! Wicked problems finally put to rest. After which the Anth (for that is what humans called their civilization at its apex) applied themselves eagerly to the extension of good health, the invention of new arts, and the speed of light. They cracked it! Of course they did. There wasn't anything they couldn't crack, because they had learned at last the secret of titanic cooperation. They cracked it, millions of people working together.
A quote from Ursula K. Le Guin's Rant on Technology from 2005: "We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology” at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers — as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe..."
My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
Two large inflated lit sculptures that look humanoid with warm hooded coats that are doing cartwheels, and a live human about a third as tall pretending to also cartwheel. The human has a coat, mittens, and knee high snow boots.
A diagram showing the cycle of the year, with labels for the Winter Solstice, the Spring (Vernal) Equinox, the Summer Solstice, and the Fall (Autumnal Equinox). A label has been drawn on for Groundhog Day in the center of the segment marked Winter.
"It is widely observed that ours is a culture of post-truth and anti-expert populism, in which every man does his own research in his own corner of the internet. Individuals live in impenetrable information bubbles; cults and conspiracies are on the rise; science rejection has been modeled the world's largest corporations' knowing acceleration of atmospheric carbonization, a trickle-down denialism manifesting in vaccine truthers, home schoolers, and cabal believers. Immediacy reason issues from plutocratic destruction of public education and independent media, but it also bears the imprint of theory's divestment from knowledge and individuation of epistemology. Circling viciously, immediacy style for theory actively suborns further deskilling of academic labor."
A graphic of data from The StoryGraph with info on the user's reading for January 2026: 7 books read, 1539 pages, average rating 4.36. Highest rated reads were Resisting AI by Dan McQuillan, Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh, and Brigands & Breadknives by Travis Baldree. The daily reading is pretty consistently between 20 and 60 pages, with a huge spike on two days around 150 pages each.
A section of Audre Lorde's essay, linked in the post. The text reads: "[...] theory, or heterosexuality and power. And what does it mean in personal and political terms when even the two Black women who did present here were literally found at the last hour? What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable."
A night sky with snow-lined trees on the left and right of the frame, and above a roof and chimney there are the bright stars within the constellation of Orion, including the recognizable pattern of Orion's Belt.
An icon of the doomsday clock from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists with the update from January 27th, 2026. Text in a maroon color reads: "IT IS 85 SECONDS TO MIDNIGHT"
Poem text of "Ode to Dirt" by Sharon Olds: Dear dirt, I am sorry I slighted you, I thought that you were only the background for the leading characters—the plants and animals and human animals. It’s as if I had loved only the stars and not the sky which gave them space in which to shine. Subtle, various, sensitive, you are the skin of our terrain, you’re our democracy. When I understood I had never honored you as a living equal, I was ashamed of myself, as if I had not recognized a character who looked so different from me, but now I can see us all, made of the same basic materials— cousins of that first exploding from nothing— in our intricate equation together. O dirt, help us find ways to serve your life, you who have brought us forth, and fed us, and who at the end will take us in and rotate with us, and wobble, and orbit.
A set of three by four square shelves, organized with books and trinkets. General categories of each shelf reading across are: to-be-read, nature, poetry for the next four squares, social justice, spirituality, polyamory, German/fiction, speculative/sci fi, German.
Grand Rapids weather widget shows the current temperature is negative five degrees. The cartoon person shown in slacks and a sweater is going to get frostbite and should go indoors. It is Partly Cloudy with a high of 0° and a low of -11°. The "Feels like" temperature is -23° on Fri,8:52AM. There is one Severe weather alert: Winter Weather Advisory until FRI 7:00PM EST.
A shiny metal ball reflecting a curved perspective of the artist's studio and self-portrait, a detail from the painting "The Night Garden" by Brian Connelly.
A man looks at a painting called The Night Garden, and a second painting called Tiffany Landscape hangs on the other wall near the same corner.
A photo of the painting titled "Tiffany Landscape" by Brian Connelly from 1950. There are three tiffany lamps of various styles set amidst plants including ferns and trees. The sky is relatively dark and the lamps are on and glowing.
Wrap up summary with the following data: first book was Enchantment; last book was Atmosphere. Longest book was Leaves of Grass; shortest book was To Wake, To Rise. Some listed 5 star reads are Enchantment, Mutual Aid, Let This Radicalize You. My most read genre was poetry, my most read author was adrienne maree brown.
A collection of plants in pots. Most of the plants are spider plants, and most of the pots are plastic.
Quote from LAB GIRL by Hope Jahren, page 64: "...which hinges humankind. Leaves make sugar. Plants are the only things in the universe that can make sugar out of nonliving inorganic matter. All the sugar that you have ever eaten was first made within a leaf. Without a constant supply of glucose to your brain, you will die. Period. Under duress, your liver can make glucose out of protein or fat-but that protein or fat was originally constructed from a plant sugar within some other animal. It's inescapable: at this very moment, within the synapses of your brain, leaves are fueling thoughts of leaves."