How Blacksky built user-governed social media
We're thrilled to share the recording of our recent event with Dr. KáLyn “Kay” Coghill, the Community Safety and Support Steward for Blacksky Algorithms, which is a Black-led platform in the Bluesky ecosystem. Learn how Dr. Kay draws on their experience as a survivor in their work of stewardship, and how Blacksky has integrated community self-governance while pushing the technical limits of decentralized social media.
Watch it at the Internet Archive.
Calls for papers: Protocols and the art of community
MEDLab director Nathan Schneider is organizing a session at the annual conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) in Toronto. The sesion is called Protocols, Among Humans and Machines. Learn more and submit your abstract here by April 30.
Our friends at CU Boulder's Center for Media, Religion and Culture have announced a forthcoming conference on “Why We Come Together”: Media, Religion, and Community, featuring Fred Moten and Stefano Harney as keynote speakers, along with others to be announced. It will be in October in Boulder. Learn more and submit abstracts here by May 1.
Magic Mountain Talks: Alyssa Battistoni on capitalism and the politics of nature, in conversation with Benjamin Kunkel
April 23, 2026
6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
MEDLab, along with collaborators on and off campus, is helping to build a new event series around the intersection of literature and politics. The events take place at Trident Booksellers & Cafe, an employee-owned business. This month:
Alyssa Battistoni is a professor of political science at Barnard College. She is the author of Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton UP 2025) and co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019). She works and teaches on climate and environmental politics, capitalism, Marxism, feminism, and other topics in modern social and political theory.
Benjamin Kunkel is the bestselling author of Indecisionand Utopia or Bust, and a co-founder of n+1. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books.
Podcast: Can AI be rebuilt to serve communities?
MEDLab's radio show, Looks Like New, comes out the fourth Thursday of every month on KGNU, 88.5 FM, or online as a podcast. Last month's episode is now available:
In this month’s episode, in conversation with MEDLab fellow Stephanie Abdalla, Dr. Timnit Gebru discusses AI ethics research, the history of the AGI movement, and movements of resistance that can lead us to alternative AI futures.
Dr. Timnit Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR for short), an independent organization of academics, activists, and engineers who believe in technology that benefits everyone. Dr. Gebru is also the co-founder of Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility, and health of Black people in the field of AI, and is on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching algorithms and computer programming to Ethiopian and Jamaican high school students. She has received a number of accolades, including being named one of Nature’s Ten people who helped shape science and one of TIME 100’s most influential people.
Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or directly through our website. You can also follow the show on Instagram, Mastodon, and X.
