New Open Access paper: "Moving ideas: An agenda for expanding the political scope of the policy mobilities approach" in @proghumgeog.bsky.social. Arguing that the #policymobilities & #socialmovements literatures can be combined to study counter-hegemonic activism. 1/6 tinyurl.com/88xmursz

First post in a new forum on Rowan Lubbock's book *Cultivating Socialism: Venezuela, ALBA, and the Politics of Food Sovereignty*, with the engagement started by @chrishesketh.bsky.social -- more to follow in subsequent weeks!!

Vertical rows are the agrivoltaic winner! “The vertical panels produce slightly less electricity—but with higher value, as generation peaks coincide with morning and late afternoon demand…The crops don't seem to mind the presence of solar panels and they like the wind protection they provide.”

Green Party - Nationalise the water companies, tax the super rich, invest in our public services, stop the genocide, lower bills. The Telegraph - Greens are "hard left."

A new piece on extractive capitalism for @thetls.bsky.social, reviewing 4 new books, including @triofrancos.bsky.social's much-anticipated EXTRACTION and Partha Dasgupta's widely- praised ON NATURAL CAPITAL

Proper thread after the summer break– but if you were looking for a beach read about political reasoning in today's working class, look no further: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The £22bn deal announced today between the British government and Microsoft to build AI data centres across the country makes it all the more imperative that we read @pbresnihan.bsky.social and Pat Brody’s new book From the Bog to the Cloud. A quick thread. 1/7

An excellent electroclash feature, featuring Larry Tee, Peaches, Jonny Slut and the time Cilla Black apparently turned up at Nag Nag Nag. Just one of my favourite ever times for music, horny and funny and queer; daft and deadly serious all at once. www.theguardian.com/music/2025/s...

Revisiting the "dead internet" theory www.popularmechanics.com/science/a659...

Stuart Hall on “Studying the Conjuncture" is so good: “If you don't agree there is a good degree of openness & contingency to every historical conjuncture, you don't believe in politics. You don't believe that anything can be done." youtu.be/bHpht1nNtB0?...

Absolutely brilliant piece by @jamiemerchant.bsky.social for the latest Brooklyn Rail, bringing together Simon Clarke, @benbraun.bsky.social's asset management capitalism, @iliasalami.bsky.social's state capitalism and much, much more. brooklynrail.org/2025/09/fiel...

Quite a big deal this - there will be a few VCs and governing bodies across UK reading the fine print… @wonkhe.bsky.social wonkhe.com/blogs/the-fi...

"Multiple studies have shown that AI systems degenerate when they are fed on too much of their own outputs—a phenomenon researchers call MAD (Model Autophagy Disease) [...] AI will eat itself, then gradually collapse into nonsense and noise [...] The researchers compare it to mad cow disease."

There are two versions of "AI bubble" narrative. 1. It's all a mirage, it can't spell blueberry. Which is suspect. 2. It's rapidly evolving at a pace the real economy can't absorb and sucking in enormous levels of capital This latter one is the one to watch www.theatlantic.com/economy/arch...

Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:

Comrades, registration for the twenty-second annual Historical Materialism Conference in London is now open. The plenaries and programme will be released soon. Join us this year (and every year) in November!

Trevor Jackson's review of ABUNDANCE (Klein/Thompson) alongside OVERSHOOT (Malm/Carton) is very, very good.

I've finally done a podcast episode about the work Adam Curtis, wherein I describe his films as a kind of 'archive fever dream', and suggest that the left history of Andy Beckett might be the antidote we need... culturepowerpolitics.org/2025/09/04/w... This is also available on any podcast app.

Perhaps still the best general purpose explainer of how an LLM works and the one I give to students. Here’s why I like it (short🧵): ig.ft.com/generative-ai/

Radical right accommodation really does not work. New paper out with this exceptionally talented team @katharinalawall.bsky.social @robjohns75.bsky.social @drjennings.bsky.social @sarahobolt.bsky.social @zachdickson.bsky.social @danjdevine.bsky.social & @jack-bailey.co.uk doi.org/10.31235/osf...

Pat Brodie and I have a book coming out in October. Really hoping it can be useful for analysing the imperialist political ecology of big tech and the energy transition. Big thanks to @kaiheron.bsky.social, @triofrancos.bsky.social, Anne Pasek (and others) for their generous words and engagement.

As a former resident of wonk-land, this made me snort www.economist.com/britain/2025...

Despite ruling last year that Google is “a monopolist” in the online search space, this week a federal judge resisted DoJ calls to break up the company. Why was Google able to avoid accountability for its excessive market power? 🧵 Arguably, it’s because of AI. Find out why 👇

This piece is now free to read. @kmilb.bsky.social, @bertrussell.bsky.social and I argue that popular power and social property - rather than merely nationalisation - are important goals for working class struggles today. tribunemag.co.uk/2025/08/the-...

Part 2 is now published, time for the debates to begin! newleftreview.org/issues/ii154...

Interesting take @neilmcinroy.bsky.social on all these trendy system change models - agreed, many are shiny toothless elite policy commodities. But surely some can work together with community wealth building? The foundational economy for one, as sketched out here: sfb294-eigentum.de/en/blog/gath...

#1 paper explored urban revolution: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... #2 explored agricultural revolution: www.researchgate.net/publication/... #3 attempts a kind of urban-rural synthesis with the concept of metabolic municipalism… …open access here: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Oxford Spatial Action Lab is back with a creative workshop ("Sounding the Commons") exploring histories of enclosure and resistance in Oxford. Details here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sounding-t...

Trendy 'economic system change' frameworks and ideas may be admired in elite intellectual and policy circles - but they are high theory, low practice. Instead we must root change in everyday lives and take real action- #communitywealthbuilding www.democracycollaborative.org/blogs/beyond...

New paper on 'metabolic municipalism' in Barcelona, presenting Yousaf Nishat-Botero's PhD research in the city Recently published in @societyandspace.bsky.social here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... A kind of urban-rural synthesis of our ongoing work together on ecological economic planning…

there are six types of abundance now

The Express is taking a Waiting for Godot approach to the much anticipated mass protests today

can't believe it's been 30 years to the day since the release of Brian Eno's most popular song

This is the best product listing copy I’ve ever read

The University of Michigan is now claiming that students have an ‘ethical responsibility’ to use AI.

Nvidia gets the spotlight, but *two* major groups are selling shovels in the AI gold rush, who profit whether or not AI products pan out: Chipmakers and Big Cloud—Google, Microsoft + Amazon. A new study by @davidthewid.bsky.social + Nathan Kim shows how the AI boom is fueling Big Cloud's land grab:

translation from the minutes Pollock took during Horkheimer’s lecture on Marx (Summer 1931): on the the uniqueness of Marx’s dialectic & his double-distance from the absolute

Someone finally wrote the data-center/electricity inflation story. @nytimes.com #CPI www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/b...

Two days left 👇

Flattered to get a small footnote in this. My point is that capital's metabolism works across commodified and informal (minimally commodified) economic activities not only in "cities of the global South" but explicitly in the so-called "advanced economies" aswell. doi.org/10.1111/anti...

Instead of regurgitating the bromide that LLMs are just "autocomplete on steroids" (even by people who know better), maybe we can actually engage in some public education. The problem with genAI is better expressed through a classic computer science concept, known as SYMBOL GROUNDING. 🧵

Looking forward to this event in Amsterdam in November … in great company asca.uva.nl/shared/subsi...

Phil A. Neel launched a substack: “Geopolitics has, quite literally, become a bread-and-butter issue across much of the globe, [...] Whether ecological, economic, or political, it appears that the “planetary” is now, in every sense, immediate.” philneel.substack.com/p/welcome-to...

just a reminder again that we were told over and over that a 13 year old downloading a Limp Bizkit mp3 was an existential threat to society

read this Brilliant & brooding piece by @kyla.bsky.social on the three different americas kyla.substack.com/p/how-ai-healthcare-and-labubu-became

'In fairness to GPT5, in my career I have indeed encountered PhDs with this level of commitment to their particular blueberry.' kieranhealy.org/blog/archive...

Announcing the new journal: "Historical Materialism: Workers and Capital" We've launched a new Historical Materialism project with a CfP for the first issue. Abstracts due 31st of October Full details and the new website here: workersandcapital.historicalmaterialism.org/index.php/jo...

Might be obvious but that Microsoft AI-affected industries study is so clearly designed not to inform, since it is premised on a buffet of questionable assumptions, but to perform (to be reshared and reshared until it is embedded as a stylized fact in the world). 1/x

First Mamdani, now Wilson! Attacking the cost of living crisis, promising real solutions for working people. Green economic populism is surging.