Holding the Line @ Backchannels
I’m joining 4S Backchannels, the Society for Social Studies of Science blog for shorter, timelier, media-rich STS scholarship, and my first piece is live: “Holding the Line: Values Drift, AI Anomia, and the Craft of Accountable Leadership.” 👇
Image: Firefly
I wrote it from a familiar scene: a room full of dashboards and “uplift” projections, with almost no language for what the system would do to people, how it would quietly redefine good work, care, and enough.
In the essay, I name three patterns I see repeatedly in AI-intensive environments:
Values drift: not necessarily intentional betrayal, but a thousand plausible decisions that move the moral center to the side.
AI anomia: when “fairness,” “governance,” “transparency,” etc., stop meaning the same thing to the people using them
Artificial mirroring: systems that simulate attunement so well we forget to ask who owns the defaults.
What I’m most excited to do in this role is help prospective authors find their clearest voice to share the story they want to tell.
🚨 If you’re working in a university, public sector shop, lab, company, classroom, or community org: Where are you seeing “the dashboard win” while meaning leaks out the side? [View our submission guidelines, share with your networks.]
📫 Contact me if you’d like to publish with Backchannels, especially if you’ve got a story worth surfacing.
🙏 Huge thanks to Aaron Gregory, PhD, for his insightful and supportive editorial stewardship, and the editorial and production staff for assisting in getting my piece posted. It was thirty years in the making.
Link to the article here.
Hi, I’m Christine. 👋
In a world awash in buzzwords and borrowed courage, Dative.works is a pocket of resistance—where data pros, skeptics, and stray idealists come to build something less disposable.
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