Greetings — I have just returned from #AOIR2026, our annual gathering of members held for only the second time in Latin America, and, for the first time, in México. This conference was two years in the making, saw a change of venue from Los Angeles, USA, to a broadening coalition/partnership of scholars making up the local host committee (led by Dr. Stacy Wood, and an expansion/rethinking of what constitutes “local” in the most generative and fruitful ways), brought together over 600 people, with fully 49% being-first timers, and a large retention of representation from Brazil and throughout Latin America (shout-outs to Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Costa Rica and all others represented). We listened to and learned from Mixe linguist, activist and educator Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, who delivered her keynote in Spanish (also not her first language), which was simultaneously interpreted by professional humans and introduced by local committee member and Brazil 2025 plenary speaker Dr. Paola Ricaurte. Our plenary consisted of two Mexican women historians, Drs. Nithia Castorena-Sáenz and Diana Irina Córdoba Ramírez, invited by Dr. Melissa Villa Nicholas and engaging with Dr. Maga Miranda, both of the local organizing team, to provide us with key context and perspective. This plenary was also delivered in Spanish with on-site, human simultaneous interpretation. It was also my great honor to open the event in Spanish. I intended to set a tone for the space in so doing - of intellectual openness, of linguistic and cultural respect and welcoming, of acknowledgment of situatedness, of a direct and clear call-out of our organization as firmly multi/international, and the embodiedness reflecting our growing and broadening demographics across all meaningful distinctions one might care to measure. I saw it as I looked out at the many people participating in the Annual General Meeting (AGM) on Saturday, which was a packed room. I will reach out again as we move toward elections to invite your participation at the executive board level, on ad-hoc and project-based committees, and so on. Stay tuned for that. I will send a full conference report along in the next AoIRWaves, our monthly members’ newsletter, with numbers and data shared at the AGM, as well as more information on how to get involved. We saw all members of the exec board who were at the conference on-site and visible. We welcomed several volunteers, including Spanish-speaking colleagues and a professional photographer. We acknowledged the efforts of our two new professional staff members, Association Coordinator Emerson Johnston and Conference Coordinator Ann McLean. We brought in an 11th hour on-site operations manager to work with our professional staff. And we were blown away by the staff, the hospitality and the food(!!) made available to us at our venue. With the exception of our professional staff and on-site venue folks, every single thing about this gathering was volunteer-run, including our review process and the labor of producing and delivering all the panels, workshops, sessions and events. I informally heard many times, including from some longtime members, that the quality of the sessions and the thoughtfulness of the program progression were a highlight. This is thanks to all of you. I think it’s safe to now say that this year’s conference was a marvelous success. It was my great pleasure to watch all the engagement among the participants, with publishers, seeing old friends connecting and new friends being made. The quality of the discussions were incredibly high. We challenged each other on occasion and have a course upon which to steer. I think we’re headed in the right direction, together. All of which brings me to the matter of the mailing list and what has transpired over the past days while AOIR leadership and many of our members were busy on the ground. The Air-L listserv has been active for decades; many of the subscribers have been a part of it since its inception and others for many years. I’ve personally been on the social internet since 1993 (having thought I’d arrived late to the party and missed its peak), but tenure on the list aside: the irony is not lost on me that Air-L exists primarily as a mechanism for those interested in the academic study of the Internet, broadly construed, to meet and exchange thoughts and ideas. As such, this list has largely been open to membership by any individual, and is mostly unmoderated. We have, to my knowledge, never claimed otherwise. In fact, our rules and etiquette document ( https://aoir.org/mailing-lists/mailing-list-rules-and-etiquette/) makes these very points. AOIR AC Emerson Johnston does a great job of keeping spam bots, advertisers and other crap (including those of you accidentally sending reply-all out-of-office notices, a form of automated bot engagement) off the list, as did her predecessors. I will also add that participation on Air-L is free, a service provided by paid members of AOIR. While all members of AOIR are likely members of Air-L, just because one participates on Air-L doesn’t make one an AOIR member. Joining is easy and it’s relatively inexpensive, comparatively. https://aoir.org/membership/ The organization is volunteer-run. Membership gives you access to discounted conference rates, online events such as lectures and workshops, a growing archive of such events, and the ability to vote in and stand for elections, which will be upcoming. We have had a variety of fracases, incidents, blow-ups and the like on the list over the years. Such phenomena strike me as something that most Internet scholars should recognize, and appropriately contextualize as such. They tend to also work themselves out in some form or fashion; often, the resulting discussion and the working out of it is the more intellectually interesting part of whatever the precipitating event may have been. Speaking personally, I am also somewhat surprised that, on a list of people who are, broadly speaking, dedicated to the social implications of digital technologies, the impetus is to understand the incursion of a so-called AI persona (frankly, what the hell even is that?) as something other than a deeply-human display of some kind of self-expression. A human created this bot (sorry, “persona”), deployed it, and ostensibly wanted something out of it. There are potentially limitless reasons a person might do this. From my perspective, I can think of many that might be close to the work so many of us do: a desire to connect; a wish to explore other self-presentations/identities; an interest in understanding how new (or old) technologies work. Some of the reasons, too, may be less benign, and have been suggested, in somewhat conspiratorial tones: data-gathering; trolling; social experimentation. The last one has perhaps been the thing that has struck most personally: the idea that one may be unwittingly being monitored, manipulated, sold to, or bought. Sound like the business model of anything else we might know about? Of course, most of us aren’t Meta, or “X,” or Palantir — although rest assured that I’m sure some current or former employees of those and other entities might be on the list, or have been at one time. But for those of us who are researchers, we tend to hold ourselves to higher standards of conduct with each other, especially as many of us have long argued that just because something happens online doesn’t negate the social exigencies one might expect in face-to-face communication. In fact, some might say, it could demand more. AOIR has long concerned itself with what we might loosely describe as “internet research ethics” (https://aoir.org/ethics/). Some more vociferous objection in the past days on this list gestures at this. What doesn’t seem to have been considered, however, is that a Ph.D. in social sciences, and the concomitant training it suggests, is not a precondition for joining Air-L. Nor is a Ph.D. in social sciences an automatic guarantor of ethical behavior on the part of its possessor. And what constitutes ethical research at all is part of what has been under discussion. That’s the interesting part, no? I don’t think there is any reason to assume the the individual who deployed this bot (whom this individual believes to be a “persona” all its own, a problem or issue of its own, from my perspective) is in any way trained the way many of us are. Perhaps Occam’s razor might suggest it’s better to assume the person is not at all trained, did not at all understand the norms and sensitivities being violated, did not recognize the brouhaha this would cause, and is ill-equipped to deal with all of it. Again, if the concern is one of privacy, I’ll invite you to reflect on the fact that our mailing list is both open and its archive public. Just like with my monograph, I have no doubt that my posts to this list are inside many training data sets and other such corpora taken largely “without consent.” What constitutes such consent in our current moment is a conversation very much worthy of having, and I’d love to engage in it with others, as I await my supposed Anthropic settlement payout (of which my publisher is claiming fully half, despite my contract being silent on matters of copyright violation). In the first days of this episode, AC Emerson Johnston posted a message that seems to have largely fallen by the wayside in favor of the outrage machine carrying on. I’ll reiterate some of what she said: while we don’t have an explicit policy against “AI personae” joining the list, we do disallow bots (which is what this would probably be best classified under). When “Velvet Vale” first showed up asking to join the list, Emerson shared that request with me, noted that it was basically a bot of indeterminate motives, and we would deny it as a matter of course. She did, and we moved on. As noted, this is a largely unmoderated list, with subscribers coming and going in multitudes on a daily basis. Despite us saying no, this entity signed up, anyway. The person responsible for creating the bot is responsible for violating our decision, even though that person claims to have not directly instructed the bot to have done so. I am not sure that the person gets the distinction, or lack of it, between those things. I think we have much more work to do to educate the general public. May this be a case in point. When the leaders and CEOs of AI companies are out here claiming that “sentient” AI is a thing, and another form of pundit is warning against the destruction of humanity because of the “singularity” — all the while ignoring the creep of totalitarianism enabled by social media manipulation, the destruction of the environment and of communities through data centers, the devaluation of human labor because a shitty pastiche version might be available via their products — who can blame a regular person for not really knowing where the hype and BS ends and something legitimate begins? Aren’t we, in fact, arguing about same? I believe that what the CEOs call “sentient AI” is just a way for them to disavow the outcomes of the things they’ve created. Perhaps that’s also, on a smaller scale, what’s going on here. After Emerson posted her brief explanation, someone asked how would we know if a bot is a bot unless it identifies itself. I would argue that that question goes to the essence of the thing we’re all engaged in doing: asking questions about what it means to be connected as humans via the internet, via mediated forms of all sorts, which ultimately gets us to what it means to be human at all. In all seriousness, the situation on the mailing list is reminiscent to me of an early online social event that was chronicled at the time in print that sparked much debate about internet realities, consent, social behavior online and off, etc. Required reading for many of us in grad school, but I also remember when it happened. TW for SA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_in_Cyberspace Plus ça change… One final note: there was some suggestion that this whole thing was a psyop designed to sell AOIR tee-shirts, I can assure you that that wasn’t the case. For the first time this year, we decided to introduce a swag shop. We had wanted to offer conference tees to participants but were worried about waste, not knowing which sizes to get, etc. For similar reasons, we didn’t make tote bags this year and, instead, did a tote bag swap where people brought totes from other events and traded with each other. This allowed us to use the swag budget on the beautiful wooden handmade alebrije figurines that were also the talk of the conference, memorializing our time in CDMX and bringing a bit of artisanal beauty and opportunity to trade and talk to each other about which animal we received. We therefore came up with the idea of using a print-on-demand shop, and were able to make custom tees that arrived within a couple of days of order. I wore my AOIR CDMX shirt on two of the conference days and I saw a few other folks had them, too. We also have a batch of tees with silly slogans, a sort of inside joke vibe for members of AOIR and/or Air-L. A couple of my contributions, including mention of 14.4 kbps modems, fixing printers, and so on, are drawn from my personal experience but shared by others in the org and on the list who are of a certain age. We also have a line dedicated to those members who focus on “influencer studies,” which has been a prominent cohort in the past few years. Because of the print-on-demand nature of the tees, we have the ability to be somewhat whimsical and responsive, certainly as we were all gathered in CDMX for the conference while our inboxes simultaneously overflowed. In the spirit of full disclosure, I don’t know if any were even bought (but I’ll check in) and therefore one might say that their existence is more potential and “for the lulz” than anything else. But if you do feel like buying one, or any other, the funds earned will go to sustaining of the org and doing things like funding our travel bursary for conference attendance in the future. I guess here is where I say: https://shop.aoir.org I extend my thanks to my wonderful, brilliant, creative and tireless exec board this year (https://aoir.org/executivecommittee/). We’re on deck for another one and will be seeing all of you who can make it in person in Rimini next November. Thanks to all of you who made it to #AOIR2026 and participated with such warmth and collegiality. Thanks to all of you on this list who reminded others that human beings run and participate in this org and are owed gratitude and respect for their efforts on our behalf. Thanks to those of you who survived this episode and exercised patience. Thanks to those of you who respectfully participated in the open debate it sparked. I sure didn’t know quite exactly what I was in for when I stood for VP/President-Elect of this org a few years back, but I think I will look back on having held this office as a pinnacle of my professional career and the honor of a lifetime. Nos vemos muy pronto. Cordially, Sarah T. Roberts President, Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) 2025-2027 prez@aoir.org ---