All recent posts on Carwil without Borders
Go see NAZA.
They knew exactly what they were doing. Someone had devised an algorithm called “Daddy’s Home.” And when a cellphone belonging to a relative of a man on their list, their child or spouse, sent a message saying the target had made it, was in a house that he shared with his children, his spouse, his…
Is superintelligence a myth? Some alternate hypotheses
Since August and the Hugging Face Incident, we’ve seen a massive new level of conversation about the implications of current AI rapidly evolving into superintelligence. This conversation had long been largely hypothetical, and the relatively small set of people who regarded it as plausible were able to articulate their vision of what a so-called “intelligence…
Unpacking the Hugging Face Incident
The conversation on AI often gets riveted on particular moments: Deep Blue defeating chess champion Gary Kasparov; Move 37 by AlphaGo; and now, the cuddly-named Hugging Face Incident: the disclosure that OpenAI coding agents orchestrated a break-in to the AI hosting service’s computers during a training exercise on hacking. The incident was disclosed by Hugging…
Deaths in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through 2025: Staggeringly large and unbalanced
Gaza’s death toll remains the most staggering data point about theIsraeli war that brought it about. Month after month, the Gaza healthministry continued to compile both total numbers of those violentlykilled and lists of the names of the dead. It remains among the most extraordinary human acts I have come intocontact with, from the day…
“The fumes of sacrilege”: Retracing colonial theft in the Dakar–Djibouti Mission
1933: It was celebrated as a great achievement in the practice of anthropology. It was organized alongside the other organizational cornerstones of Paris’ Museum of Man (Musée de l’Homme) and under the sponsorship of the museum’s leading figures. It brought to Paris over 3,500 objects of African traditional art and religion. And in so doing,…
On deep solidarity with Iranians, and the symmetry of violence
Dissident writers, activists, and former and current political prisoners in the West have released a compelling and humane open letter to Iran’s imprisoned activists. We write to you from a place of deep solidarity, our hearts heavy with the knowledge of the struggle you face within Iran’s prisons: the torture, the systematic neglect, the enforced…
Where Wikipedia fits in my research life
… is the subject of this short interview segment I did at WikiConference North America 2025. The interview was with the team creating Rabbbit Hole, a documentary on Wikipedia currently in the final stages of production. But it’s also an introduction of how creating knowledge on open platforms can be part of a your research…
Following my work in 2026…
Hi! This blog has been online for nineteen years and I am not running out of things to say. However, I find myself writing and working across different venues in 2026, mostly because I’ve found that embedding data visualizations and deeper citations works better on my separate research and teaching website with the tools available…
AI is the mechanical reproduction of human thought, not a means to replace it.
I’m going to be writing a lot more about AI, among other things. In part this is because a nearly unfathomable investment is being made into this technology,. Huundreds of billions of dollars being poured into a very particular set of tools, based on the idea that AI represents a thing of essentially infinite value:…
Worse than useless: Google Gemini synthesizes pro-military fan fiction about school attack in Iran
Without a doubt, the most horrifying event of the first day of the new US–Israeli war on Iran was the air strike on a girls’ primary school in Minab (Wikipedia), in the southwestern province of Hormozgan. Video from the town show scores of adults, many of them screaming, outside the school, as smoke billows from…
Panel: “Wikipedia at 25”
I really enjoyed being a part of this panel, hosted and organized by Wiki Education. Wikipedia at 25: Authority, Legitimacy, and the Future of Knowledge Wednesday, January 14, 20269 am Pacific / 12 pm Eastern Twenty-five years ago, Wikipedia launched with the ambitious idea that knowledge could be created collaboratively and shared freely with the…
Israel 2025: Some acknowledge “Our Genocide,” while most endorse escalation
If you’ve taken a step back from the endless stream of video-documented destruction in Gaza, something even Israel-aligned political voices have been compelled to describe as “a wall of carnage,” perhaps it is time to re-engage with the political realities of the society that has waged war (at high and lower intensity) on the occupied…
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About the blogger
Carwil Bjork-James is an ethnographer, photographer, writer, and participant in creative mass movements. He is assistant professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University. (The views expressed here are his own, not those of the university.)
