Joe Germuska

@joe.germuska.com

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Chief Nerd @ Northwestern University Knight Lab • Project lead @ Census Reporter • Board Member @ City Bureau • Information Design • Digital Journalism • Civic Technology

I was assigned the character of Tonya Lighthorse at the sign-in table. According to my lanyard, I was a 65-year-old woman with deep lesions on her right leg and a lower-than-average heart rate—satisfyingly dramatic, I thought, though others were disappointed by the mildness of their conditions. They haggled for more wounds from staff and volunteers. One woman pressed a small, intimidated teenager to trade assignments so that she could have her own head done up in blood. Later, in the staging area, the same woman asked the moulage artists if she could have propeller blades stuck into her head.
A pink plate with several pieces of pastry, including a half of a rose pączek, a piece of a pistachio stuffed croissant with some chocolate coating and a sprinkle of crushed pistachios; half of a "sweet pretzel", and half of a jagodzianka (polish blueberry bun)
MOST OF THE PEOPLE I SPOKE WITH said they wouldn't bother subscribing to Instagram Plus. But a number of them said that they would feel differently if they'd recently gone through a breakup. Both Tracy and Begg worried about the app preying on vulnerable people in exactly that situation, as well as those who struggle with attachment disorders, OCD, or sensitivity to rejection. It's not good for anyone, Tracy said, to "know where people are, what they're doing, who they're with; it can create these obsessive tendencies where it's just a lot healthier to have some blank canvas in your mind." She predicted the features would "increase anxiety, stalking behaviors, and time on social media, which is obviously what the platforms are going for."
Screenshot from the Slingshot documentation reading: Current status A Slingshot is currently in a v.0, pre-release state. There is one production instance and you can use it! Expect short downtimes for restarts as development progresses and lower cache hit-rates as the internal storage caches are adjusted and reset.
Do you already have a Bluesky or other Atmosphere account, like 61,807, 379 others? New profiles every minute. Real people, real activity.
On the left, behind a window, a very large reproduction of the notorious birthday greeting from Trump to Epstein in the shape of a woman's torso. On the right, a window with the text "the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room".
A Peanuts illustration: the kite-eating tree has its teeth need and a kite is dangling out of its mouth. Charlie Brown stands under the tree, one hand holding the kite string, a dismayed expression on his face. Nearby, Linus stands, holding his hand up to his face with a shocked expression.
To say that spontaneous thought is "unproductive" isn't quite right; rather, whether it is or not depends on how you define productivity. Capitalism may have little patience for mind-wandering workers, yet spontaneous thought is surely one of the mothers of creativity. Michael Pollan in A World Appears
A coyote sits in a suburban front yard, next to a young oak tree and with its head and shoulders visible from behind a yard sign. The sign reads "All we can do is take care of each other." In the background is a small set of wind chimes, the front door of the house, a small sign reading "wildlife habitat" and the edge of a US flag.
Ebook screenshot from Michael Pollan's A World Appears I asked Levin if the Xenobots can reproduce. "They've developed a mode of reproduction never before seen in evolution that I call kinematic replication," he told me. If some tadpole skin cells are sprinkled into the water, the older Xenobots will round them up and clump them together, forming "offspring"—a new generation of Xenobots. And lest you think there is something special about tadpole skin cells that allows for this radical developmental flexibility, Levin's lab has made Xenobots from human tracheal cells as well. He calls them Anthrobots.
Ebook screenshot: He has demonstrated that by simply messing with the bioelectric field, he can overturn that division of labor to create all sorts of freak crea-tures: planaria with two heads and no tails, or two tails and no heads; tadpoles with eyes on the tips of their tails (which can see nonetheless!); and a creature never before seen in evolution that he calls a Xenobot. The recipe for a Xenobot is simple: Scrape some cells from the skin of a tadpole, and put them in a solution with nutrients. Freed from their "boring day job as 2-D skin cells" (the role assigned to them by the frog's bioelectric field), the cells will clump together, forming a tiny round proto-organism; a new bioelec-tric field will then emerge, linking the cells and allowing them to cooperate. Why do cells left to their own devices spontaneously get together? There is safety and predictability in numbers, Levin explained, as well as the added benefit of "collective intelligence," which arises when the boundary of self expands from the individual cell membrane to the collective's outermost edge. A multicellular creature can do all sorts of things that a unicellular one cannot. It can step up from the simple "metabolic space" in which cells operate to the three-dimensional space of animals, allowing it to form more ambitious goals. For example, tadpole skin cells have cilia to protect the animal from infection; the Xenobots "repurpose" the cilia to function as a mode of locomotion, allowing them to swim around and even navigate mazes.
Screenshot from the Puzzmo "social news" feed with the text "S____ played Loop Set for the first time"
"In its third edition, this workshop builds on and expands its exploration of friction-in-design in AI systems, hosting a full-day event that challenges the pursuit of seamless, rapid interactions. In contrast to the conventional narrative that human over-reliance on AI stems solely from cognitive biases, we emphasize the critical role of designers and developers in fostering user empowerment, skill retention, and ethical responsibility. This approach advocates for a balanced perspective on Human-AI interaction: one that harmonizes operational efficiency with the demands of meaningful, mindful, and effective human knowledge work. Central to our discussion is the concept of friction-in-design or frictional protocols in AI systems, which are deliberate design choices that introduce moments of reflection and cognitive engagement, even at the expense of speed. The main aim of these protocols is reducing risks of overreliance on AI."
"So, what does sociology teach that so incenses fascists? For one thing, that we share a common humanity with others whose beliefs and ways of living are different. Most people, everywhere, struggle to get through life safely, in reasonable material comfort, while caring for those around them. They are fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, romantic partners, workers of all kinds. If their culture or social organization is different from ours, sociology teaches us to study these differences as adaptations to history and circumstance. Sociology makes human variation, built atop our species kinship, fascinating, not threatening." from "Why Fascists Hate Sociology" by Michael Schwalbe https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2026/04/02/why-fascists-hate-sociology-opinion
"Each panic uses identical rhetoric: addiction metaphors, moral corruption, passive victimhood, apocalyptic predictions. Each time, the research eventually shows complex effects mediated by content, context and individual differences. And, each time, when the disaster fails to materialise, attention simply shifts to the next technology." From "Your inability to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time " by Carlo Iacono in Aeon https://aeon.co/essays/what-we-think-is-a-decline-in-literacy-is-a-design-problem
A classic Memorex dBS 90 cassette tape. The shell is transparent plastic, with yellow internal gears. There is a yellow bar across the top with the letter A at the left and checkboxes on the right to note if noise reduction was used when the recording was made. Blue and hot pink accents liven up the transparent casing.
Photo of page 26 of "The History of White People". The caption reads "Figs. 2.1-4. Monstrous people: Cyclops, Dog-Head, Sciopod, drawn by Nell Painter from Thomas de Cantimpré; Panotii, drawn by Nell Painter, after the Cotton Tiberius MS of the British Library." The top-left image, Cyclops, is a tall, skinny humanoid figure holding its right hand over its groin. It has a single large eye in the center of its face and shaggy hair and beard. The top-right image, sciopod: a humanoid lying on its back. From the waist down, it has a single leg and large foot, aloft and casting a shadow over the torso. Bottom left: Dog-Head, a creature with human arms and legs on "all-fours", with a very furry torso and a sort of dog-shaped head. Bottom right: panotii, a humanoid figure with long tentacle-like features which I guess are supposed to be ears dangling and wrapping around its arms; if they were free-hanging, they would probably be as long as the figure.
Except from Margaret Mitchell's ‘No, "Al" is not a Stochastic Parrot’ (linked in quoted post): “…the relevant concepts in our human experience - thought, understanding - were all developed to describe other kinds of things. Applying them to a fundamentally different kind of system is both an entirely natural human impulse, and a serious obstacle to understanding what is actually going on. These terms do not illuminate Al systems so much as they project onto them.”
Screenshot of two BlueSky posts: Patrick Wyman: Something I've been trying to do lately is formulate my principles and beliefs in positive rather than negative terms - "I believe X" rather than "I'm not like those fucking guys" - and it's been a useful and (I think) healthy little reorientation Erin Kissane: A year or so into my experiment to swap contempt out for other approaches, I...think spending a lot of time being contemptuous is kind of a major cognitive vuln
Photo of a bronze sculpture of Shukongojin, a muscular humanoid form with a fierce facial expression and a third eye in the middle of the forehead. It brandishes a short rod, the vajra, in one raised hand. The hair is flames standing upright.
Screenshot of a news aggregator app. The three headlines are: Reuters: US-Israeli attack triggers fear and panic in Iran ABC News: Iran live updates: Trump announces 'major combat operations,' could last for days Business Insider: US forces are locked in air-defense battles, fending off attacks on American bases amid the fighting with Iran, official says Above the headlines is an advertisement for We the People 250th Anniversary whiskey. There is no text, just a bottle shown next to a gift box. The bottle top is a tiny Liberty Bell. At the bottom of the label is an image of the US Capitol. At either end of the wings is an array of revolutionary soldiers around a cannon with an American flag. On the either side of the Capitol dome is the text "E Pluribus Unum". (This full text is repeated on each side.) At the bottom left off the images is a clip art American flag.
Text: I went there for berries, but I also went there for the quiet, the calm, the feeling of cool water on my feet and sometimes up to my knees as I waded in where the picking was good. At home I made jars of jam. When I gave them away I was trying to give not just my jam – which was admittedly runny and seedy – but something of the peace of that creek, of summer itself.
Text: Gelernter is known for contributions to parallel computation in the 1980s, and for books on topics such as computed worlds (Mirror Worlds). Gelernter is also known for his belief, expressed in his book America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats), that liberal academia has a destructive influence on American society. He is in addition known for his views against women in the workforce, and his rejection of the scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic climate change and evolution.
text: 2) Online judicial archive named after a courtroom call
Text: It’s one thing to tank or slow-walk an investigation. It’s quite another to publicly declare that no investigation will happen on any level and then announce that you’ll be investigating the victim’s partner and supporters instead. Both paths are unethical and corrupt. Undermining an investigation at least pays lip service to the idea of accountability and public trust. The administration’s actions in Ms. Good’s case are a declaration that there will be no accountability and that it would prefer to instill fear rather than trust.
"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?" (Herman Melville, Moby Dick)
A painting, black on white, bold, flat style, portrait orientation. On the right, a full length view of a smiling person wearing a poncho or similar full-body shapeless garment, with alternating black and white vertical stripes. On the person's head is a hat that is made of two symmetrical bird heads facing opposite directions. To the left off the figure, text: THROW YOUR FEARS INTO THE RIVER
A holiday themed image advertising a service. Text: Two college students will remove your tree and clean around the area — then we'll drop it off at Warren Park to recycle. Text 773-550-0418 $25 @chitowntrees on insta
A 1970s NASA concept art illustration showing the interior of a rotating space habitat. The view looks along the curved inner surface of a cylindrical colony, with residential areas, trees, and waterways curving upward on all sides. At the center axis, large transparent windows and a cylindrical structure allow sunlight into the habitat. In the foreground, people in 1970s attire gather socially on a grassy area. The landscape features suburban-style houses, green spaces, and palm trees arranged along the curved interior walls, demonstrating how artificial gravity would be created through rotation.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
Rather than asserting that the language machine is a thinking machine, we might step back from this conflation of thought and language. We can begin to cultivate a literacy that immunizes us against the persuasion of a chatbot, which is steered by statistical probability but also by design decisions — the fine-tuning and system prompting of the commercial enterprises that sell them. AI won't “decide” to persuade people to do harmful things on a global scale any time soon; but AI companies are persuading us to do harmful things on a global scale already. This stems from believing AI is “intelligent.”
In documents created prior to the publication of our article, there is zero mention of concern about the woman’s safety. The records show that the police retroactively created a separate document about the Flock search a week after our article was published, in which they justify the search by saying they were concerned for her safety.
The lesson that stuck with me is that data is political. I saw firsthand how departments could shape numbers to make their performance look better than it was. It also taught me that data models are political artifacts. They reflect a shared understanding, but that "shared" understanding is often shaped by influence, competing interests, and unwritten rules. [Begin highlighted text]A poor model in a dysfunctional organization creates a downward spiral where trust erodes and bad decisions multiply.[end highlighted text] In contrast, a supportive and constructive organization with psychological safety will likely provide you with numerous opportunities to properly model your data, which in turn gives people better data upon which to base decisions and act. This positive feedback loop is far more desirable. [Begin highlighted text]In high-trust organizations, data models become accelerators of alignment instead of weapons in turf wars. Trust creates clarity, and clarity reinforces trust.[end highlighted text]
James has long been a particular source of outrage for Trump, in part because of a civil lawsuit she filed against him and his company that resulted in a massive financial penalty. That penalty was thrown out in August by an appeals court that narrowly upheld a judge’s finding that Trump had engaged in fraud by exaggerating his wealth for decades. The case has taken a series of unorthodox turns. It emerged in August that Ed Martin, who helms the justice department’s weaponization working group and is helping coordinate the investigation, had sent a letter urging James to resign from office “as an act of good faith” after starting his mortgage fraud investigation of her. [Begin highlighted text]He later turned up outside James’s Brooklyn townhouse in a “Columbo” style trench coat. A New York Post writer at the scene observed him tell a neighbor: “I’m just looking at houses, interesting houses. It’s an important house.”[end highlighted text]
"The coming together of these two trajectories and others has led to some mournful consequences. A big one is that a lot of thinking about technology today is marked by a simplistic and, at times, downright bizarre form of Manicheanism - a black and white view that splits the world into opposing forces of good and evil. One would hope that humanistic and social scientific inquirers would be immune to such a pitfall, given that irony, nuance, and self-challenge are central pillars of those thinking traditions, but alas . . . There are times I check in on Bluesky, that great bastion of liberal anxiety, see people talking about Generative AI, and wonder to myself, "Hold on, are you talking about software that spits out text, images, and code or are you talking about literal demons?!?!" The zero-sum worldview of Manicheanism, which I suspect has been encouraged by simplified, binary-like forms of social media communications, has a number of negative effects. One of the more important ones is that it leads us to be un-curious about others, who are obviously bad and worthy not of attention but scorn."
"“What’s the most important thing humanity has engineered?” Kwan asked me, over coffee in a West Village restaurant. “Arguably, it wasn’t the internet, or agriculture. It was the creation of the systemic and institutional trust that was required for us to build societies. And a lot of that engineering was actually collective stories—God, government—that helped us see ourselves as one family, one community. With our current technology, it’s like we’re playing Jenga.”" (Joshua Rothman, A.I. Is Coming for Culture | The New Yorker)
A decision tree flowchart showing a guessing game between a bot and user. Starting with “Bot: I’m thinking of an object. Guess what it is,” the tree branches based on the user asking “Is it bigger than a car?” If yes, the bot responds “Yes, it’s bigger than a car” and if no, “No, it’s smaller than a car.” Each branch then has the user ask “Is it alive?” leading to four paths with bot responses of “Yes, it’s alive” or “No, it’s not alive.” When the user says “I give up” on each path, the bot reveals different objects: house/star (bigger, not alive), whale/rhino (bigger, alive), dog/snail (smaller, alive), or book/cup (smaller, not alive). Caption: Fig. 3 | LLMs are multiverse generators. The stochastic nature of autoregressive sampling means that, at each point in a conversation, multiple possibilities for continuation branch into the future. Here this is illustrated with a dialogue agent playing the game of 20 questions (Box 2). The dialogue agent doesn’t in fact commit to a specific object at the start of the game. Rather, we can think of it as maintaining a set of possible objects in superposition, a set that is refined as the game progresses. This is analogous to the distribution over multiple roles the dialogue agent maintains during an ongoing conversation.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
Israel has produced an unconvincing dossier of unverified evidence on Sharif’s purported Hamas links, and failed to address how he would have juggled a military command role with regular broadcast duties in one of the most heavily surveilled places on Earth. Israel did not attempt to justify killing his three colleagues.
All this suggests that there is a chance for a deep reordering of the earth's power systems, in every sense of the word "power," offering a plausible check to not only the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel-the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply. The sun and the wind are available everywhere, and they complement each other well; when sunlight diminishes in the northern latitudes at the approach of winter, the winds pick up. This energy is impossible to hoard and difficult to fight wars over. If you're interested in abundance, the sun beams tens of thousands of times more energy at the earth than we currently need. Paradigm shifts like this don't come along often: the Industrial Revolution, the computer revolution. But, when they do, they change the world in profound and unpredictable ways.
"The year is 1975. Brian Eno is up to his ankles in mud, being enthusiastically greeted by two large dogs. He has come to an isolated cottage in Wales to meet Stafford Beer for the second time. They talk for hours about algorithms, self-organising music and the future of democratic society, until Eno practically collapses from hunger. When Beer tells Eno that he wants to pass on the torch of cybernetics, the musician replies, “I’m very flattered that you think that, but I don't see how I can accept it without giving up the work that I do now — and I'd have to think very hard about that.” It might sound like a scene from a psychedelic movie, but this conversation actually happened. And although booze had clearly been consumed, Beer's offer appears to have been made seriously." (Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine)
Screenshot of a Mastodon post. Text: "This is an appreciation thread for EuterPen, a multimodal music notation system by @Vincent_Cavez et al. It aims to support the non-linear process of exploration during composition. It's the most sensitive and imaginative academic HCI design work I've seen in quite some time!"
"Stafford Beer used to say that the way in which computers were used in the 1970s was as if companies had recruited the greatest geniuses of humanity, before setting them to work memorising the phone book to save a few seconds turning pages." (Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine)
“The dream of Al research is still of the prospect of ‘getting out more than you put in’. In fact, ‘explainability’, for all that it's seen as an important ethical goal, is practically a contradiction in terms when applied to a system that you also want to see as intelligent.” Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine
Screenshot of a tweet from @MadeleineLengle 2023-07-25 "“Progo, what is it? What happened?” “The Echthroi have Xed.” “What?” “Annihilated. Negated. Extinguished. Xed.” A Wind in the Door"
text: "In the 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush, one of the big issues was Social Security privatization. Bush wanted to (partially) privatize, Gore didn't. Political scientist Gabriel Lenz looked at survey data gathered from voters both early in the election cycle and then again right before the election. He found that initially, there was little correlation between voters' positions on Social Security privatization and their choice of candidate. By the time the election rolled around, however, the voters had seemingly sorted themselves: people who supported privatization tended to support Bush, and people who opposed it supported Gore. You might think this makes sense: people saw what the candidates stood for, and then aligned with the candidate who matched their position. But that's not what happened. The surveys showed that the voters' choice of candidates generally hadn't changed. Instead, they had changed their position on Social Security privatization to match their chosen candidate. Not only that, but almost no voters changed their preferred candidate based on the issue. The voters weren't switching candidates based on their policy positions, they were switching policy positions based on their candidate. There are countless studies reaching similar conclusions. "Party cues," as political scientists call them, are powerful things. It's been found that party cues have lasting effects, and in some cases can even overcome voters' own self-interest. Lenz wrote a book on the subject where he compiled and analyzed much of the existing research. He concluded that "instead of politicians following voters on policy, voters appear to follow politicians."
A pencil drawing of a power-mad Uncle Sam at a control desk that surrounds him with buttons and levers. Caption reads: “From the November 1967 cover of the Atlantic. Credit: Drawing by Edward Sorel.”
Front cover of the first issue of the People’s Computer Company newsletter. Across the top, handwritten text: “Computers are mostly used against people instead of for people; used to control people instead of to free them. Time to change all that—we need a People’s Computer Company” Below the text is a drawing of a sailing ship sailing into the sunset. The text “People’s Computer Company” is in large 3D lettering extending from the horizon to the foreground.