New article out:

One more sign that we’re living in neofeudal times is that papal schisms and antipopes are back.

After encouraging prospective students to come study philosophy at @tilburgphilosophy.bsky.social, treating myself to a coffee and an Andrei Platonov novel.

Been thinking about this piece quite a bit. You want to make your teaching matter, but there’s so much bureaucracy and surveillance to go through and sometimes you just hit a wall of student-consumers who only want to pass an exam. criticallegalthinking.com/2026/03/11/t...

Some AI company thought it was a good idea to build AI toys to teach toddlers how to speak. As anyone who had ever seen a furby should know, that’s just asking for disaster.

one of my favorite Sohn-Rethel texts is all about how in Napoli technical objects can be repurposed in weird and liberating ways when they break down hardcrackers.com/ideal-broken...

Kenyan workers are still the underpaid labor behind AI training, moderation, and sex chatbots. The Data Labelers Association is fighting back.

“What we are witnessing, then, is the renewal of a nakedly imperial project: a politics of permanent siege, existential paranoia, and millenarian last stands.”

In Lebanon, Israel seems to be following the same logic it deployed in Gaza: emptying out entire areas through what amounts to ethnic cleansing. @joelleabirached.bsky.social writes from Beirut as bombs rain down once again:

More Clara Zetkin, please!

What it's like to "be a man" doing platform food deliveries when you're caught between entrepreneurial discourses and precarious work? My latest (open access) publication, for the Journal of Sociology. journals.sagepub.com/eprint/HDW2T...

Teaching about the globalization of platform capitalism and Trotsky’s notion of uneven and combined development today. Or how to fit in one lecture Trotsky on international capitalism, the “varieties of capitalism” literature, postcolonial theory, and the issues of introducing Uber in Ghana.

Sleeping in on Sunday morning like ...

New research from Tilburg University's Philosophy Department: Paolo Santori in the Journal of Business Ethics "Against Spiritual Leadership in (For-Profit) Organizations". link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Yet more evidence of the moral bankruptcy of football. www.aljazeera.com/sports/2026/...

"The online environment offers new ground for harassment both in scale and impact. Unless legislators (and society) start to treat these offenses more seriously, tech will be weaponized against women.” My interview with @newsweek.com & Marni Rose McFall www.newsweek.com/women-online...

Let’s just all agree to call these “smart” glasses by their true name: creep glasses. www.svd.se/a/K8nrV4/met...

Some people wait for Taylor Swift’s tour announcements, others hope for blockbuster movie teasers … but I eagerly anticipate the CFP for the Danish Marxist Society.

Reading for the weekend: Vishwas Satgar and Michelle Williams on worker cooperatives and workplace democracy.

Tocqueville is genuinely one of the midt underestimated commentators of the US in political philosophy. People always look to Rawls and Nozick as the two sides of American political imaginary, but Tocqueville is far more spot on.

EU in Iraq: “After Saddam Hussein, things will get better.” EU in Syria: “After Assad, things will get better.” EU in Iran: “After Khamenei, things will get better.”

The US and Israel are bombing Iran. Anyone reporting it as “preventive” is engaging in propaganda, by definition. There is no interpretation of what’s happening as anything else than a crime. You don’t have to like the Iranian regime to understand why this is bad.

Reading for the weekend: Vishwas Satgar and Michelle Williams on worker cooperatives and workplace democracy.

Tous les écrits de W. E. B. Du Bois ont été publiés, à l'exception d'un imposant manuscrit d'environ 320 pages, terminé en 1950 et intitulé "Russia and America : an Interpretation". Le jugeant trop stalinien, l'éditeur l'a refusé et il n'a ensuite jamais été publié.

From now on, I will be acting as the Janus face of the Tilburg philosophy department, speaking both for myself and the department as a whole.

21st-century Nietzsche: “Haven't you heard of the madman who in the bright morning ran around YouTube crying incessantly, 'I'm looking for an influencer! I'm looking for an influencer!’ Since many of those who did not believe in influencers were standing around together, he caused great laughter.”

Teaching an all-time classic today: the young Marx on alienation. With in the background the new Dutch translation of Michael Heinrich’s intro to Marx’s Capital. Got it at Linksboven’s Ecosocialism day yesterday and very excited!

#OtD 21 Feb 1848 the Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was published. Widely read by workers across the world, it remains one of the most influential texts ever written. A modern edition of the text is available in our online store: shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/...

For those living close to Utrecht, tomorrow (Sunday) I will be speaking at the Day of Ecosocialism for Linksboven. How to establish and organize an economy that is sustainable, democratic, and fair for everyone? linksboven.org/event/ecosoc...

My co-author received his author copies 🥳

When you're making lecture slides and discover memes so good they make you want to change course topic.

Important administrative announcement for philosophers 🚨 From now on, analytic philosophers are only allowed to base their arguments on “intuitions” if they wear the proper “intuition pumps”. Without the required attire, their papers will not stand.

Quite sure I am the first philosophy professor ever to assign a paper from Case Studies on Transport Policy as required reading for a philosophy lecture.

Teaching a course on Marxism and platform work but still unsure about the last 2 sessions. I could either (1) discuss the debate between left accelerationism vs neo-Luddites or (2) talk about non-Western approaches to platform work and informal labor. What do you think?

Teaching a course on Marxism and platform work but still unsure about the last 2 sessions. I could either (1) discuss the debate between left accelerationism vs neo-Luddites or (2) talk about non-Western approaches to platform work and informal labor. What do you think?

(1/11) If you live in NY, you’ve probably started seeing a new warning: “THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA.” This mandatory disclosure went into effect late last year, and it’s the first attempt by a US state to grapple with a new generation of surveillance pricing.

Yet another opinion piece claiming that too leftist academics erode trust in universities. But their own constant repetition and moral panic is far more damaging for trust in universities. If you bang people in the head with the same mantra again and again, they might start to believe it one day.

Enjoying the rare bit of sunshine in the Netherlands to read about the difference between “varieties of capitalism” and … “variegated capitalism”.

The “appeal to the median voter” chorus in US politics is definitely a myth. And it’s even proven to be a myth 👇 www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-no...

Teaching a class at a local high school on racial oppression this Tuesday. Reading about the history of the Black Panther Party as preparation. Will be rather strange to talk about black liberation as a white professor, but on the other hand glad they themselves asked for this topic.

Policy-makers take note: “The CO2 numbers imply that China’s carbon intensity – its fossil-fuel emissions per unit of GDP – fell by 4.7% in 2025 and by 12% during 2020-25.” www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chi...

This should be stressed in the news a lot more: Spain’s economy is doing so well *thanks to* immigration. Regularisation of undocumented immigrants has also encouraged better labor protections. If you want to have a vibrant economy, migration is good. theconversation.com/spain-alread...

We joined 140 feminist and LGBTQ+ organisations together to call on the United Kingdom to scrap ‘bathroom ban’ policies and ensure trans inclusion 🏳️‍⚧️🇬🇧 transsolidarityalliance.com @transsolidarity.bsky.social

I regularly talk in panel discussions on AI and its social repercussions, and exactly this is the thing I constantly need to remind people of. Your nice and shiny AI or social media platform runs on the invisible labor of poor data workers. But it’s a subject Westerners prefer to ignore.

Quite glad with how this class went. The teens were especially amazed at how the white gaze even invades automatic soap dispensers. And some seemed to like Frantz Fanon’s writing style.

Opium is the opium of the people.

Another tech entrepreneur from the Forbes “30 under 30”-list facing prison over fraud charges. After Sam Bankman-Fried & Elizabeth Holmes already in prison. Good time to question whether the tech start-up sector isn’t inherently a grifter economy. “Fake it till you make it” with billions of dollars.

Just finished Herbert Marcuse’s Counterrevolution and Revolt. Really prophetic book from the Nixon era about how left-wing movements can move on when there is no clear political agent for progressive change and far-right authoritarianism is on the rise.

Teaching a class at a local high school on racial oppression this Tuesday. Reading about the history of the Black Panther Party as preparation. Will be rather strange to talk about black liberation as a white professor, but on the other hand glad they themselves asked for this topic.