You can also check out Benjamin Litherland’s podcast about it: open.spotify.com/episode/16jI... @benlitherland.bsky.social

Have you read our 28.6 issue yet? Follow the thread to know more about the articles 🧵

My article assessing some of the overly celebratory discourses about the positive effects of media now has an issue number. 🙂

There seriously needs to be a study about how the everyday life friction of increased grift and enshittification in every aspect of life weighs on people’s institutional trust and what effects they may have on political attitudes and participation.

The whole of the internet is now run on the things that would have not made it past your email junk filter 20 years ago.

Can someone come and collect Psychology, they're trying to do sociotechnology again.

This is grim at the best of times, but a writer full of so much humanity and soul and wisdom and a product of a very particular society and history. Just horrific.

Every single interview in this piece.

Can't think of a more relevant tweet for this prick.

Watching a Rolling Stones concert and Mick Jagger is wearing a shirt with a swastika on and apologised if the show is low energy because they were up all night fucking. I guess they don't make them like they used to, but in a good way?

I appreciated the discussion about the phrase "pregnant barefoot in the kitchen" on @annieknk.bsky.social's new pod. I do the cooking and I'm clumsy and regularly spill hot food on my slippers, and cooking barefoot always seemed like a serious health and safety concern regardless of ideology.

I watched this yesterday, and think the dynamic of younger woman who runs community stuff with empathy and kindness, downtrodden younger people annoyed with racist family members, and angry old man showing you YouTube clips and predicting civil war very accurately captures UK demographics.

lmao

There's certain parts of the discipline where having a political-science degree might make it harder to understand that, actually.

I do wonder if this sort of reporting about "AI psychosis" is as much about how OpenAI wants you to think about the power of chatgpt than any meaningful, widespread relationship users have with the software.

Just skimmed an article from 2013 on social media that opens with the story about Time naming You as person of the year, what a blast from the past.

Remember when the American right lost their shit about confederate statues being removed and all of a sudden historical preservation was the most important thing in global politics.

Someone has dumped a fascinating and provocative conceptual art piece at the bottom of my street.

I can't think of a more depressing cultural future than the one tech-Hollywood wants us to have. Fiddling with the library of 20th C creative works with AI for the rest of time. Jesus.

Realising that Kemi Badenoch, a woman who claims she's extremely busy and loves detail, put out a statement denying that she'd read her own parties draft mass deportations bill and slowly going mad.

I suppose the Manchester Pride shit show is the counterweight argument to a lot of the "Manchester miracle" discourse knocking about. Beloved cultural institution run into the ground due to commercialisation, greed, and pathological desire for growth at all costs.

The politics are rancid, but misses the point that Reform/Farage are only popular because they get to be "anti-immigration" without ever really spelling out what that means. They're an empty signifier that a thousand positions can be projected.

I am desperate to hear further details about this man's political biography. Libertarian (drugs) in college. Pacifist around the Iraq war. Communist around Occupy Wall Street. Nazi ????? Liberal again.

This sums up how academia has operated for my whole career (and presumably a fair bit before that). Goodhart's law + universities responding to policy in obvious ways before government goes "no, not like that". Well like what then?

I can't remember if I properly promoted this before I went on pat leave, so if not here is our chat on Tate, the manosphere, and "influence".

It is amazing to see nationalists continue to keep trying to square the circle of keeping all the bits of globalisation they like while removing the bits of globalisation they dislike.

I am fascinated at the moment in how discussions of "audience capture" have reframed fans/audiences as at risk of influence are now framed as being the threat of influence. It's quite a spectacular change in narrative in a short period of time.

I think "I've never had a curry and I never will" is going to rattle around my brain as the discourse that captures Britain c.2025 for the rest of my life. I can't stop thinking about it.

"People who used more garlic than the recipe suggested" was such an early type of Twitter Guy, I forgot about them. Too much garlic and bacon guys. I wonder what happened to them.

I've seen this knocking about for a few days, and I can't formulate mine apart from something like: poetry, what's going on there then?

I've seen the discourse that the left called everything fascist which weakened the term allowing real fascism to slip in unnoticed. But let me tell you the left called everything neoliberal, fairly and unfairly, until fascism came along, and then they called that fascist.

I can't tell you how little I want to see Marilyn Monroe in Game of Thrones.

Say what you will about Victor Frankenstein but it’s impressive that he was able to imbue dead flesh with life, regardless of how that wound up turning out

Good luck to all the undergraduate historians studying this era trying to untangle that mess in their revisions.

It's very good when the crypto market crashes as you get all of the schadenfreude of a stock market crash with none of the anxiety for ordinary people who will lose their jobs and homes.

I bought a very nice royal blue duffel coat and a lined brown bucket hat for the autumn and early winter and realised I can't wear them together as this is literally just Paddington's look.

It's never been a better time in the whole of history to be extraordinarily wealthy and they spend the whole time whining and moaning and scared that there will be a couple of extra percentage points on their taxes. It's kind of sad.

The Smashing Machine makes some absolutely wild choices based on how familiar they incorrectly expect audiences to be of early MMA history.

Grateful for the sickos that are Horny For AI because finally those of us who are Horny For Cartoon have somebody to look down on.

Imagine cheating on Oz with Xander.

I've been living in my part of Manchester for 8 years now and only just noticed this street name.

"Anti-woke" as a vaguely coherent counter-hegemony is surely dead, but I reckon this might be the final nail.

One of the greatest achievements of the populist right over the last 50 years is reframing their deep anxiety of the masses and the social as somehow being an authentic expression of the masses.

For all the brilliance and problems with Banality of Evil, as a phrase and series of essays, this is basically Hannah Arendt's main point.

He does what to her bull?!?

*mobile privatisation intensifies*

I saw someone recently say that the left had been crying wolf for a decade so when it really arrived in America no one listened to them and I was like "we were warning you of something that was happening".

I dunno, I feel like I'm getting the exact future that all the sci-fi I was consuming as a teenager warned me about.

Entrance pyro at a memorial rally! I know I've made this point once or twice, but the aesthetics of American fascism is just the aesthetics of pro wrestling.

Staying up late on baby duty and seeing the feed become US dominated.