Forthcoming double special issue of #JournalofVisualArtPractice: 'Between Hawaiki Nui and the Liquid Continent' (forthcoming, Vol. 24, 1-2). Find out more... www.linkedin.com/pulse/spring...

Where has the left’s technological audacity gone? | Leigh Phillips @theguardian.com: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... (Consider Postcapitalism @paulmason.bsky.social)

‘The big idea’ @theguardian.com: ‘Should we abolish #art?’ by Morgan Falconer (…not as bad as it sounds!) | www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

New series @theguardian.com, opening with ‘The left needs its own version of techno-optimism’ by Amana Fontanella-Khan | www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

(Obviously) Deepfake as satire: World Leaders Sing 'We Are the World': youtu.be/knDb9VfYdHw - but like most satire it’s mere entertainment.

Achille Mbembe and Ruth Wilson Gilmore write @theguardian.com ‘Trump’s attacks on South Africa are a punishment for independence’: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

While AI seems to be the big story in tech, arguably it’s not. Rather it is #Quantum #Computing: www.linkedin.com/posts/mangha...

Possibly getting ahead of ourselves... 'Artificial intelligence systems capable of feelings or self-awareness are at risk of being harmed' @theguardian.com | www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Visited O.P. Jindal Global University s Constitution Museum; established as part of the 75th-anniversary celebrations of India’s foundational document. One exhibit allows your own image to be seamlessly incorporated into a historical photograph…

Everyone is talking about DeepSeek's impact on industry. But another huge impact is the leveling of playing field between academia and industry: if these efficiency numbers bear out, then academia can both use LLMs and study/research them at scale!

Paris friends, next Monday (Jan 27), you can catch me and Théo Lepage-Richer talking about neural networks at the Social History of Informatics Seminar organized by , drawing upon our book, 'Neural Networks' (@uminnpress.bsky.social and meson press, 2024), co-authored with Lucy Suchman.

A short piece on Emile Benveniste and the Linguistic Circle of Prague, his relation with Nicolai Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson, and including a brief report of his 1937 lecture to the Circle, translated from the Czech by @johnraimo.bsky.social progressivegeographies.com/2025/01/19/b...

‘What people like Elon Musk want,’ @garyseconomics.bsky.social, ‘is for you guys all to be in this squid game … you need to change the game.’ Further sense of a shift to feudalism and of a broken global as well as local system…

Thinking of using AI to solve a problem? A publication from The Alan Turing Institute sets out 8 questions you need to ask: www.turing.ac.uk/blog/thinkin...

A short post on what we know, and what we don’t know, about Michel Foucault’s 1972 visit to Cornell University progressivegeographies.com/2025/01/12/f...

shameless plug: I've got a chapter in this edited volume on feminist AI, with oxford university press: global.oup.com/academic/pro...

‘The AI-Copyright Trap’: Carys J. Craig argues copyright overreach ‘will satisfy the wants of a small group of powerful stakeholders [… while] poised to harm the interests of the more vulnerable actors who are, perhaps, most naturally drawn to it’. | papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Books received from Routledge in recompense for review work; and some second-hand ones by Philippe Ariès, and about Linear B and the Prague Linguistic Circle. Most of these relate to my Mapping Indo-European thought in twentieth-century France project. progressivegeographies.com/2025/01/04/b...

New article: ‘Quantum Life, but not as we know it’: do we have the imagination for it? Inspired by report in yesterday’s @newscientist.bsky.social on quantum sensor built from a glowing protein found in bioluminescent jellyfish. | medium.com/electronic-l...

What's possible when AI understands what you're seeing, not just what you're saying? If voice was the breakout feature of 2024, I'm predicting it will be vision that takes center stage in 2025. More predictions from me & some great company: www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/is...

Crow in Tokyo. Winter sign of something more? Barthes no longer here.

Happy New Year

Online First: Mike Featherstone introduces and contextualizes a set of papers exploring the connections between the public sphere, the post-university and the scholarly apparatus. (Open Access) journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

ICYMI: Michel Foucault, Jonathan Simon and Stuart Elden, 'Danger, Crime and Rights: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Jonathan Simon' - discusses Foucault’s 1977 lecture ‘About the Concept of the “Dangerous Individual” in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry’. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Coffe & Garage Night?

ICYMI: Walter D. Mignolo, 'The Logic of the In-Visible: Decolonial Reflections on the Change of Epoch' - argues that the lived experience we, the human species, went through in 2020 is no longer an epoch of changes but a change of epoch. (Free Access) journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

2024 HIGHLIGHT: Grateful to work with all involved @barthesstudies.bsky.social special issue, #Preparations | sites.cardiff.ac.uk/barthes/volu...

The Lévi-Strauss (Les plus vastes horizons du monde) sounds wonderful. Not only photographs, early texts and film transcripts, but intriguing the book ‘gives you access to the films themselves’.

Decolonising the Earth: Anticolonial Environmentalism... Carreira da Silva explores how anticolonial theorists conceptualized humanity's relationship with soil amid growing interest in theorizing human-nature interactions. | @theoryculturesociety | journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Nice! I listened as an audiobook recently. Enjoy! (…I never fail to hear the tones of Alec Guinness’ Smiley). According to Barthes’ schedule, he’d approve, regularly reading a detective novel of an evening.

#DiogenesClub (the fictional club for unsociables partial to a comfortable chair) comes to contemporary #Tokyo, with bookstores charging admission: unseen-japan.com/tokyo-bunkit...

Kenny Cupers, The Earth That Modernism Built: Empire and the Rise of Planetary Design – @utexaspress.bsky.social, 2024 utpress.utexas.edu/9781477330210/ @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social discussion with Miranda Melcher. newbooksnetwork.com/the-earth-th...

Shunya Yoshimi presented on this topic at @theoryculturesociety.org Summer School (www.theoryculturesociety.org/tcs-summer-s...). It’s great to see this work now published in the journal. Lots to consider for the ‘post-university’…

Ignacio de Gregorio Noblejas (AI Executive Advisory) sets the record straight on numerous excited claims #OpenAI #o3 is #AGI | www.linkedin.com/posts/ignaci...

Centres around the case of Stafford Beer’s cybernetic accountability-first approach to management, which ‘might have taken off had his biggest client (the Chilean government) not fallen to a bloody coup in 1973’.

I’ve shared this before, but was thinking again about Daniel Defert’s memories of Foucault’s working routines in an interview - "Christmas day without writing, that was impossible!" .https://progressivegeographies.com/2024/12/25/foucaults-christmas-2/

🎄

‘Animal Cultures at the Edge of Extinction’ @theoryculturesociety.org - explores how and why animal cultures matter at the edge of extinction, with considerations for the environmental humanities, extinction studies, and philosophical ethology… journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

#Quantum news abounds: Published in Optica, researchers demonstrate quantum teleportation over existing fibre optic cables. Merging quantum communication with existing internet infrastructure in this way simplifies future tech like quantum computing | opg.optica.org/optica/fullt...

The observations provide ‘concrete evidence’ for neurons allowing #quantum operations. We are perhaps a step closer to understanding how the brain—even #consciousness—is linked to a quantum universe. Adds further significance to advances in #quantumcomputing: medium.com/electronic-l...

The mind ‘as a quantum phenomenon’… quantum effects have only been produced in labs under extremely cold conditions, seeming to rule out quantum states operating in the warm brain. But new experiment suggests otherwise: www.popularmechanics.com/science/a629...

Train Less, Think More 🚀 Review of @hf.co research that demonstrates smarter inference methods, allowing smaller language models to rival massive systems (so cutting down on the impact of training). #AI #LLMs #Sustainability #ComputeOptimization #Innovation | medium.com/electronic-l...

…a compelling, long lost interview with Mary Douglas on ‘Purity and Danger’, available open access @theoryculturesociety.org (Vol. 39, Issue 7-8, 2022; part of section ‘Notes on Structuralism’) | journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Writing with images website @purelyfiction.bsky.social: A cornucopia of ideas, materials and possibilities… writingwithimages.com

Calling all arts, humanities and social sciences early-career researchers! 📢 Applications are now open for a collections-based fellowship to explore sustainability and the environment through our collections. Apply by 7 January 2025: bit.ly/BLSustainabi...

Fascinating read… ‘For more than four billion years, there has been no mirror life. The authors refer to its dangers as ‘unprecedented’. An overused word – but here literally true.’

HOMMAGE À BRUNO LATOUR (Sciences Po, 4-7 Dec’ 24). 4 days, 60+ philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, political scientists, lawyers, artists. Guest editor Antoine Hennion showcased @theoryculturesociety.org special issue, ‘Thinking with Latour’ | journals.sagepub.com/toc/tcsa/41/5

A must read! Insightful, elegant, rigorous, yet always accessible.

I've mentioned before how much I admire @anilananth.bsky.social book, #WhyMachinesLearn. Eg. He nicely explains the probability of the #MontyHallProblem (to win a car behind 1 of 3 doors!). Try this online version. See how the probabilities play out: claude.site/artifacts/8b...

Excellent read! Be great to pick up your remarks on ‘structures that structure’; & seeing ‘as a whole’. I was re-reading Freud’s account of the dreamwork. He refers to the condensing image, suggesting something close to your remarks on compression (plus a need to relate to tokenisation).