Univers, the university paper at Tilburg University, interviewed me about the use of AI chatbots to acquire voting advice and why that’s a terrible idea. They accidentally called me full professor, so I am expecting an e-mail to confirm my promotion any day now 😅 universonline.nl/nieuws/2025/...

When criticizing Kantian liberalism, remember: “Nothing but ad hominem abuse is more than nothing.” From Raymond Geuss’ Philosophy and Real Politi

‘The “three energy transitions” narrative is a story that progresses logically to a happy ending. And that raises a question. What if it is a fairy tale dressed up in a business suit or, worse, a mirage, a dangerously seductive illusion?’ — @adamtooze.bsky.social www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Calling it a “race” suggests that you should want to win. But my inner luddite is saying: “Do we really want to spend all this money and effort on traveling to the moon?” Traveling to a sunny beach sounds much nicer and feasible, to be honest.

Verschijnt deze winter! Een Inleiding in Het Kapitaal van Karl Marx door Michael Heinrich Nog altijd de beste korte inleiding in Het Kapitaal. uitgeverijgrondwerk.nl/product/een-...

I know of very few arguments as good for a 5% voting threshold as the Dutch electoral system.

With the cover ready, proofs submitted and index made, I am very happy that my next book “An Introduction to Contemporary Italian Thought” is now ready for release on 22 January 2026. Co-authored with my friends Stijn De Cauwer and Joost de Bloois 🥳 www.bloomsbury.com/uk/introduct...

New conference program just dropped! Go check it out! marxistiskestudier.com/wp-content/u...

🚨 Conditions remain dire at at Amazon India. A recent survey conducted by @uniglobalunion.org reveals 68% of workers suffer heat-related illness, and 42% fear retaliation for raising safety concerns. We need to keep up the pressure and boycott Amazon this coming Black Friday to #MakeAmazonPay.

With the cover ready, proofs submitted and index made, I am very happy that my next book “An Introduction to Contemporary Italian Thought” is now ready for release on 22 January 2026. Co-authored with my friends Stijn De Cauwer and Joost de Bloois 🥳 www.bloomsbury.com/uk/introduct...

The day we will finally know what “room temperature” means!

When you’re in Paris and you know you overdid it on the book purchases.

Call for abstracts Dan Halliday and I are organizing a workshop on philosophy of taxation. Papers presented at the workshop will be considered for inclusion in a special issue of the Monist that we are editing. Details on the workshop can be found here: philevents.org/event/show/1...

Just received the blurbs for our new book on Contemporary Italian Thought 🥳

On my way to Paris to give a seminar on community-building among platform workers. With Federica Castelli’s book on Jane Addams and feminist democracy to keep me company.

What it is like to read Bruno Latour, a tortuously imprecise mega-star 😅 From “Technology as Fetish” by Alf Hornborg. @masssimons.bsky.social

*new article* We bring the Frankfurt School into the Spotify age — and it was a fun one to write! 😎 'From Adorno to 50 Cent: Financialized platform capitalism, Spotify, and the culture industry in the twenty-first century' in @finandsoc.bsky.social Check it out here: doi.org/10.1017/fas....

Just had a fun talk about organizing an event in Tilburg about the history and philosophy of carnival 🤩 I should probably brush up my Bakhtin soon.

Are you dying to know if Hegel hated ersatz coffee? Then boy do I have the piece for you. Very happy to be part of the JHI blog forum on political economy in intellectual history!

People sometimes talk about suddenly seeing your own name when refereeing journal papers. But allow me to highlight a particular joy: reading papers that explicitly discuss your friends’ work who are doing their PhDs on the paper’s topic!

A key truth in today’s politics: the media are an attention market and all the time spent on culture wars or “woke gone mad” is time not spent on the crises that really matter.

New book review -- Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson's "The Rest and the West: Capital and Power in a Multipolar World" antipodeonline.org/2025/09/19/t... @versobooks.bsky.social

One danger of branding “antifa” as a terrorist organisation is that there is no “antifa organisation” you can point your finger at. Hence, anything can be “antifa” if you just shout it loudly enough. To quote Pasolini’s Salò: “The only true anarchy is the anarchy of power.”

The strategy of late-stage liberalism: pit yourself as the only thing stopping the right from getting into power. The program offers nothing but postponing a political apocalypse. Making the people choose between accelerationist collapse or slowed down decline.

Preparing for a reading group on Malabou’s book on anarchism and philosophy. I must admit I’m always disappointed when philosophers talk about political anarchism to immediately move to “anarchy” as metaphysical concept. I don’t think anarchist practice really needs all that theoretical baggage.

Just learned Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, Ian Hacking, and others, once wrote a book about the human capacity to empathize with animals and the inability of philosophy to articulate this capacity. I think that’s pretty cool. cup.columbia.edu/book/philoso...

"We are told that AI is inevitable, that we must adapt or be left behind. But universities are not tech companies. Our role is to foster critical thinking, not to follow industry trends uncritically." www.ru.nl/en/research/...

Lisa Herzog on the necessity of economic democracy 👇

An indication of how the media are partly responsible for the slide into authoritarianism. People like Farage are just better television. And nothing to glue people to their screens like the threat of the end of democracy. They are creating the reality they supposedly report on.

Not even going to share or link the NYT piece on Charlie Kirk. It’s pure ragebait meant to trick people into clicks. Sad how newspapers’ opinion pages have just devolved into attention grabbers and clickbait to boost papers’ ad revenue. Contents don’t matter as long as you have a ‘juicy take’.

Preparation for a research seminar today about what Shakespeare’s tragedy Coriolanus can teach us about bitterness today.

C’est la rentrée des séminaires DiPLab. Si vous êtes à Paris, venez écouter @timchristiaens.bsky.social et ses collègue parler de leur nouvelle étude sur comment les travailleurs créent des communautés au sein des plateformes de crowdwork. C’est le vendredi 26 septembre à 15h au @iscpif.bsky.social.

New books arrived. Federici on global commons, Dan McQuillan’s Resisting AI, two books on the politics of social work in Jane Addams, and Federico Luisetti on posthuman biopolitics.

I will be in Paris on 26 September to talk about community-building among online crowdworkers. Looking forward to visiting @casilli.bsky.social .

“How is my lecture prep on philosophy of cybersecurity going?” you ask. Well, my extensive reading about tongue kissing among orcas should explain that. www.sciencefocus.com/news/orcas-k...

Sometimes you read a novel where the story is only a bit so and so (Notes of a Crocodile leans a bit too heavy on the LGBT+ self-loathing trope imo). But every now and then, there’s a sentence or paragraph that makes it entirely worth it.

Noticing that there is apparently not a single publication about the existential risk craze in AI and Ulrich Beck’s risk society theory. That’s a gaping hole in the literature, right?

Sometimes you read a novel where the story is only a bit so and so (Notes of a Crocodile leans a bit too heavy on the LGBT+ self-loathing trope imo). But every now and then, there’s a sentence or paragraph that makes it entirely worth it.

Class preparation for my students in computer science and cybersecurity. What better opening lecture to teach them than Langdon Winner’s plea for a political theory of technology?

New books arrived. Federici on global commons, Dan McQuillan’s Resisting AI, two books on the politics of social work in Jane Addams, and Federico Luisetti on posthuman biopolitics.

New policy proposal: instead of curbing immigration governments should limit tabloids writing about immigration. Much more effective in reassuring people, it seems.

Universities getting into financial problems due to government crackdowns on international students. Unfortunately, that is not a bug but a feature of government policy. They *want* to silence critical universities by defunding them.

Class preparation for my students in computer science and cybersecurity. What better opening lecture to teach them than Langdon Winner’s plea for a political theory of technology?

From IBM’s christening of the ordinateur to today’s platforms, our essay of the week highlights how datafied feedback loops sort, score, and steer people into an "ordinal society" that fundamentally alters our social life. By Marion Fourcade & @kjhealy.co in @aeon.co buff.ly/g9wd9Sx

Preparations for a talk next week on Shakespeare’s Roman tragedies are taking me places I never thought I would go.

The world’s leading genocide scholars’ association has passed a resolution saying that the legal criteria have been met to establish Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, its president says. There was no immediate response from the Israeli foreign ministry.

Train reading. Sometimes a nice cover and title is all that it takes. Bought this book yesterday solely because of the title and intriguing synopsis.

Soon my paper on postcolonialism and the gig economy will be published in Global Political Economy 🥳 I use Geertz on informal bazaars and Gago on popular entrepreneurship in the Global South to argue that not American neoliberalism but Global South practices of making do explain platform work.

A military defense policy I can get behind. Reviving wild nature as a natural barrier against invasion. Bring back the swamps! www.politico.eu/article/esto...

Cambridge university happily complying with transphobic politics.