Seems like a good weekend for a "Black Monday" rewatch.

I’m pretty psyched about this visit to Penn State’s Humanities Institute next month.

Gary Marcus had created a graphic to visualize the increasingly fragile financing system for commercial AI.

Sociologist C. Wright Mills saw this coming—and tried to warn us—60+ years ago. jacobin.com/2026/02/wrig...

I understand the structural forces that desensitize finance & politics reporters to the cruelty, callousness & violence of people they cover But I hope these reputations never recover from this weird thing they did not need to do NOBODY WAS TALKING ABOUT YOU UNTIL YOU MADE IT ABOUT YOU, DINGALINGS

This 9-month-old episode suddenly spiked 200+ downloads today. I love it when this shit happens & will never fail to post about it. The episode features Yanis Varoufakis & James Livingston mainly, with some side quests into Galbraith's "Age of Uncertainty," "Mad Men," & Taylor's "Age of Insecurity"

In my eighteenth year of teaching I have never yet met an occasion when it was necessary, relevant, or advantageous to describe a student's physical appearance.

really really good piece by @mattseybold.bsky.social : theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/you-have-t...

you personally have the ability to secure elections for yourself and your neighbors.

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

The billionaire class wants to decimate the white collar workforce. Because white collar workers are expensive. And because white collar workers—who historically sided with billionaires—are questioning that alliance. Which makes their knowledge and resources a huge threat to billionaire power.

”what stood out to me as I listened to the recorded conversation between Nadella and Fink is that they have largely given up on organic adoption by consumers. They have moved on to a new dream of forced adoption mandated by government and managerial coercion.”

This is very good.

They’ve been on this for a minute. More teaching + post tenure review (and contracts) plus ai supercharged productivity surveillance tools also makes professors more vulnerable to student evals, which gives admin more power to fire you. That’s the plan.

democratic vs authoritarian > left vs right

Today is a good day to remember that cosplay publisher, Jeff Bezos, once owned a company that spent like 100x its annual revenue on a marketing campaign fronted by Michael Ian Black.

The majority of slop is also not directly human-prompted, but is used to destabilize information environments with nullformation. Slop matters as an epistemic weapon. It does not respond to collective taste so much as attack the aggregation and assessment of collective aesthetic demands.

Slopologia?

Last Week: You’re being a catastrophist doomer, Prof. Seybold. This Week: Your compensation will be determined by an AI that tracks how much you use AI.

Oligarch fear has intensified, hence the police state. The thing is, the Western historical imagination overselects for revolution. If they took a capacious view, they would realize oligarchs are much more likely to be unceremoniously murdered by bodyguards than guillotined by a proletarian mob.

“durr this is white flight because asians” is the explanation you come up with when you’re barely sentient except for your gutter racism

I'm in the new look @publicbooks.bsky.social talking with @anniemcc.bsky.social, Vineeta Singh, Dan Nemser, and Rana Jaleel about higher education, how we have studied and organized around it, and what possibility lies therein.

I’m here to tell you, nothing makes you feel more unwelcome amongst Left Liberal intellectuals than being the guy who tells them that AbeBooks is owned by Amazon.

this is what you are missing on Twitter/X

Surely you’ve seen this one It’s even funnier that they put a “Patricia Heaton is a mom who loves oat milk” ad before it youtu.be/-wQhY5CMMl4?...

Cruel Futurism is seeking to achieve AGI 2030 by making everybody as illiterate as Mike Johnson.

Who Owns Your Image and Narrative? Naomi Klein & Yanis Varoufakis — Live tonight (18.30CET) Join us! www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iRc...

Really enjoyed this Q&A with @biblioracle.bsky.social, who pushed me to think about my work in terms of the somewhat amorphous, but not obsolescent principles of academic freedom.

It’s been frustrating how little attention legacy news has paid to how Silicon Valley is “helping this administration aggressively scale a data dragnet that will eat our civil liberties for lunch, if we let it.” Grateful to @tressiemcphd.bsky.social. We don’t have to let them build Big Brother.

I keep saying to people in my life that the problem with writing in these days is that you sound absolutely off your nut for simply saying what is happening.

This is as close to motivational speaker as I’m ever gonna get.

Dang it @aprilanson.bsky.social & @mattseybold.bsky.social, look what you made me do!

The biggest crowd I have ever seen in my twenty plus years living here. www.pressherald.com/2026/01/30/t...

How many men mentioned in the Epstein files have vowed to “fix” U.S. education?

It won't surprise anyone to learn that Data Center lobbying has exploded. www.techpolicy.press/amidst-boom-...

@biblioracle.bsky.social has a great interview with @mattseybold.bsky.social on techno-feudalism, mass surveillance, Ed Tech, and what this means for academic freedom, and higher ED more generally. A chilling read. @aaup.org academicfreedomontheline.substack.com/p/the-techno...

Thank you, Victor. I spent a few weeks on this. As usual, it’s always a negotiation with length. So a few other bon mots: 1. The admin has issued DOJ guidance to challenge state laws that would regulate AI www.wired.com/story/ai-sup...

The first customer for relational databases was the CIA. The surveillance program they tasked a Silicon Valley start-up with building was given the code name Oracle. That founder of that company, given the capital he needed to scale by serving U.S. intelligence operations, decided he liked the name.

This is everywhere. I've got a Q&A coming with @mattseybold.bsky.social later today where he walks me through the way tech has captured higher ed institutions. The only rational response is resistance because anything else allows the continuing encroachment and distortions of our work.

We are only a few dozen jargon scolds away from fully automated luxury communism.

Given the news drop of elite institution in the Epstein files, I hesitate to say this about *any* institution but…if Harvard continues to hold out, it will matter. Something that he cannot buy. Nominally anyway.

Early returns on work-in-progress: even the part of my argument that I consider expositional throat-clearing are liable to make some readers angry. Great.

"I insulted a stranger and they unceremoniously blocked me. Isn't that rude of them?" is one of the most incomprehensible, but also most reliable postures of Web 2.0 discourse.

The real question is why the Chronicle continues to find this stuff newsworthy. It is very strange to continue this focus on "viewpoint diversity" and "woke" in 2026, when faculty are confronting state censorship and students are getting abducted. I've told the editors I think it's strange.

Oh cmon!!! The author of this season of Humanity is tripping.

I wrote about Plato, Huxley, and Dewey— thepointmag.com/examined-lif...

We did not attain mass literacy because of teachers and schools. Any approach to the “literacy crisis” which focuses exclusively on educational reform is naive, or worse.

I would like to be able to do a fulltext search of my iCloud docs. In fact, I’d like search functions across all ecosystems to start working like it’s 2019 again.

The people who push the EdTech, Apps, and Test Prep do not want us to solve the problem they’ve created. These outcomes are not an accident or a side effect. They are the intention.