Hello!

If you have the next book (Resisting AI by Dan McQuillan) and you know how the reading group works, you can skip to the end to see our (tentative) next books. The section you're looking for is titled ... "next books".

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(back to regularly scheduled programming)

(Mostly this email is to get myself used to sending stuff on Mondays, and to give you a sense of what to expect if you're new to the reading group.)

Next week we'll get started reading Resisting AI by Dan McQuillan. If you don't have the book yet, you should order it now.

Format

There are a few ways to keep up to date with the group:

• newsletter: I send updates on Mondays and Thursdays. In the Monday updates, I'll point to what to read; in the Thursday updates, I'll send an icebreaker question to think about, and a reminder of where & how to join the video chat later that day.
• video chats: Thursdays at 8pm (ET) we have a video chat¹ where we talk about that week's readings. Sometimes we'll have a guest to talk about something related to what we read that week.
• group chat: if you want to chat with people on signal, we have a pretty active group chat. You can join the signal group chat here.

Reading goals

I'm not trying to have us read fast; we might be able to finish Resisting AI in a week or two, but I have us taking more than a month. I realize for some people that'll be frustratingly slow.

I want us sit with each thing we read and think about how ideas and movements are connected to and in communication with each other. In my experience, that takes time. If you can do the reading for each week, and then have a few days to dwell on it, I think you'll get a lot more out of it than if we speed-run through each book.

What that means in practical terms is this: we'll read one chapter of Resisting AI each week and one or two things from the web. Usually it'll be a piece of reporting, or an essay/blog post someone wrote; but I also like to share videos, zines, images, podcasts, or whatever else.

I try to match stuff up so they're thematically relevant to each other, or just connected in some way, but sometimes it's just a really interesting thing I want to share with people and talk about.²

Schedule

If it helps, here's my reading plan for this group. Remember, I'll also try to share other stuff (tbd) to read each week:

next books

I'm thinking ahead to the next several books. If you want to order them now, feel free to go ahead and do that, but as you can see from the schedule just up above, we're not going to get to the next book until something like March.

Why We Fear AI by Hagen Blix & Ingeborg Glimmer

(probably early March until mid-April)

Disabling Intelligences by Rua Williams

(probably late-April through May)

Okay, that was a lot, but that's all you need to know for a while. Like I said, next Monday I'll point us to the readings for that week, and then on Thursday we'll reconvene on video chat to discuss things. Until then, take care.