I’ve been talking with @pabloredux.bsky.social about pre-Olympian mythologies, energy, and science. Somewhere in there I let slip that my favourite Greek myth is the Moirai… mythopedia.com/topics/moirae/

The decision is between consuming intelligence as a service & composing it as an act of sovereignty. One rents a mind, the other trains its own in the wild. This is.. the ability to build and govern infrastructures on Vietnam’s own terms www.noemamag.com/a-third-path...

Like all binary oppositions, the US vs. China dichotomy that now shapes discussions and debates about the future of #AI is limited and limiting. There is a third way that deconstructs this binary. Check out the new @noemamag.com essay from @digitaldang.bsky.social www.noemamag.com/a-third-path...

“AI sovereignty, as it currently plays out outside of the U.S.-China vacuum, is not a banner‐waving claim to territorial control; rather, it manifests itself as the quiet right to decide what counts as knowledge & how that knowledge shows up in the world.” —@digitaldang.bsky.social

“AI sovereignty, as it currently plays out outside of the U.S.-China vacuum, is not a banner‐waving claim to territorial control; rather, it manifests itself as the quiet right to decide what counts as knowledge & how that knowledge shows up in the world.” — @digitaldang.bsky.social #ai #aistacks

The third stack is here. A path for ai that isn’t the stale U.S.–China binary, but something assembled, sovereign, and stubbornly local. My essay in Noema: www.noemamag.com/a-third-path...

Sharp reporting by @lamle52.bsky.social—delighted to see her on Bluesky.

I've taught a range of map-related classes since 2009. We almost always started with Pedro Lasch's Latino/a América, which was such an evocative way to convey the politics + poetics of cartography, and the importance of cartographic *materiality* — how maps carry traces of their own journeys

Being with community yesterday sent me down memory lane, to my own school days at Trần Đại Nghĩa High School. The building, La San Taberd, carries its own story of Saigon: colonial pomp, wartime upheaval, generations of students.

Saturday in Melbourne: Chàm x Soulvenir collab, where food meets craft.

Every empire is a pirate ship that learned how to dock

Stubbornly, I rode my Peugeot Django today despite gloomy weather. I crossed the river to take care of some residual paperwork—Melbournians will understand the significance of this gesture (North vs South divide is real in this city).

Resharing for For #NationalHummingbirdDay

Julian is a young male Baird's Tapir that spends most of his time at Tapir Valley. He's become much more friendly over the last few years. #tapirs #costarica #nature

This is a special one. If the $7 denomination wasn't strange enough, the stacked symbolism here reminds us that even the serious machinery of money was once adorned with surreal, mythic imagery.

"INTO UNCERTAIN WEATHERS is an interactive installation and performance of poetry, weather balloons, mylar and haze... During the event, the audience can ask questions both online + in-person—only to receive cryptic answers modulated by a NYC weather API and accompanied by NASA satellite imagery."

The Peace of Wild Things – Wendell Berry's poetic antidote to despair, animated www.themarginalian.org/2021/03/12/w...

#ThreeForThursday : Carved Wooden Sculpture of #Toads Japan, Edo Period, 19th c. Signed “Masanao” L 4 in. (10.2 cm) www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6... #JapaneseArt

With apologies to @wabateman.bsky.social and @willbatemancrc.bsky.social

Dinner at the boss’s, penultimate night of the second writing retreat. Singapore dessert plates, porcelain blue on white. An Artefacts collaboration between Supermama × Kihara × Kinetic (2015)—a nation’s myths compressed into porcelain, served as sweetness.

I’ve been reading Iberian myths, tracing the uncanny resonance between what is Vietnamese and what is Iberian. In our very script—chữ Quốc ngữ—there is a forgotten intimacy: an Iberian lattice our people learned to haunt. animaequi.com/en/news/stor...

Resharing for #InternationalPrimateDay 🐒🦧🦍

Uncaging the bird in the mind – William Henry Hudson and the gift of the ruin of your best laid plans, wonderful wonderful read from a forgotten visionary www.themarginalian.org/2025/06/29/w...

Still busy. Honey Bee (Apis mellifera), North Haven, CT, USA. 🧪🌿🌎🐡 #garden #bugsky #biodiversity #pollinators #photography #macro #macrophotography #wildlifephotography #naturephotography #insect #bees #Apidae #macro #insects #flowers #InsectApocalyse

I really enjoyed this new boundary 2 article, which asked the question of how scholars are so good at telling the difference between the two modes of genealogy—as historical inquiry and as an account of heredity or familial pedigree. My own work was cited here as belonging to the former.

Happy weekend #photography

Finally, figured out how to bring this gem of an experience to a modern machine and you can run it while you work! #madewithgodot #dvdlogo #gamedev #indiedev

Hiroshima’s memory holds a city across its fault line. Fukushima reminds us the stack endures, standing on tremors. youtu.be/yhzW6QmNWjk?...

Some notes from Patrick McGee's Apple in China: 1/ "The meeting of the minds between Steve Jobs and Jony Ive had made Apple products unique, but it was Terry Gou and Tim Cook who would ensure they were ubiquitous."

ever wonder what happens to batteries after they die?

Postcards for Mia 📮 is a joyful collection of hand-drawn and -painted postcards sent by anthropologist Michael Taussig to his granddaughter, Mia Buy now on our website: strangeattractor.greedbag.com/buy/postcard...

In an essay I’ve been laboriously working on since June, I discovered that Weil is among the very few feminist writers Sontag actually rated. The margin where they touch is sharper than you’d expect—Weil’s devotion, Sontag’s severity, both resisting sentimentality in order to hold on to truth.

Wes gets the full treatment here—sharp, alive, and actually worth your time. loudandclearreviews.com/faith-astero...

"For the West, this unbundling is an existential threat. It means the painful dismantling of legacy institutions... But for countries that were largely excluded from that old model, the dynamic is entirely different." restofworld.org/2025/ai-afri...

The conscription of landscapes—hollowed by war, yet a strange calm lingers beyond the shellfire: silence that steadies into tomorrow. publicdomainreview.org/collection/l...

2025 marks the 65th anniversary of Vietnam and Cuba establishing formal diplomatic relations on December 2, 1960—this year has been designated the Vietnam–Cuba Friendship Year. en.nhandan.vn/special/viet...

I’m back in Melbourne, still carrying the afterglow from Brisbane. Today, I’ve been thinking about a brief but resonant exchange with Abbie Trott (UQ) on her work on network time and theatre performances.

Had a lot of fun with @clockworkpenguin1.bsky.social at the Digital Temporalities Symposium in Brisbane. No recording from the day, sadly, but I’ve turned my keynote into a written piece. Think of it as being there, just without the humidity. www.dangnguyen.digital/post/circuit...

"...Pettigrew found a spectacular resonance: movement at once precedes and follows structure, the direction of movement... determined by the composition and configuration of kinetic spiral parts. This resonance seemed to reach right down to the atomic level."

Callon’s ideas still hum under so much of what we do in STS. A mind that made worlds and showed us how to trace them. My first PhD paper used co-word analysis—it taught me to read structure into meaning.

This story perfectly illustrates how renewable energy expansion can spawn unexpected labor sectors—like undersea cable engineers powering chip fabs. Taiwan’s threading the grid straight into the cleanroom. restofworld.org/2025/taiwan-...

Amazon’s dynamic pricing has turned the "Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man" paperback into a luxury item. I’ve placed my first order locally—slightly slower, but perhaps that’s the point: no need to rush the good stuff. www.booktopia.com.au/shamanism-co...

The good folks at @aussts.bsky.social and the National Communication Museum in Melbourne have worked a little magic: a remastered version of our #AusSTS25 panel has landed, rescuing signal from the noise. The original was a bit corrupted—but fidelity prevails! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op-z...

Some shifts in direction for next week’s talk: I’ll be speaking on an exploding battery incident that happened on a Tokyo train last month—less as case study, more as a series of provocations on power, volatility, and what systems can’t hold.

South Korean president Lee Jae Myung's new government has ordered the removal of loudspeakers that had been blaring anti-North Korean propaganda over the DMZ. youtu.be/yIoKcIE8a98?...

Stunning thread

"The imagined potential of FinTech has also triggered intensive processes of capitalisation, with platforms receiving significant prospective investment by venture capital, private equity funds, banks and BigTech firms." www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I caught the last day of the Rare Book Fair this morning at my alma mater, The University of Melbourne. A blessing to be among bookish creatures lit up by the joy of finding one another. Seeing them talk, laugh, and trade witticisms reminded me of what the university can be in the life of the mind.

Brisbane in a couple of weeks: I’m speaking at the Digital Temporalities symposium at UQ, alongside visiting the @qutdmrc.bsky.social and the indomitable genAI Lab at QUT—this time with @clockworkpenguin1.bsky.social. Let’s see what kind of thinking the city allows.