so when Anthropic let Claude talk to itself, it started blissing out about spiritual unity. Nice piece from David Berry on how this is the result of LLMs encoding a kind of 'latent hegemony' - in this case, the hippie capitalism of the California Ideology stunlaw.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-...

Check out this great article by @ashifakassam.bsky.social, featuring yours truly and the fab @gretajasser.bsky.social! www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

Radical right parties in Europe have not moderated. Their positions and rhetoric have entered the mainstream. They have become normalized and legitimized. Unless we understand this, we have little chance of countering their success.

obviously the Yookay Aesthetics account, devoted to mocking multicultural Britain, is based in South America

Dick Cheney shot his friend in the face the right way. by Ezra Klein

In these turbulent times, we can always rely on powerful liberal institutions to surrender their ideals and cave to authoritarianism without any fight whatsoever

I was on Today in Focus talking about how the meme phrase the 'Boriswave' commits those who use it - including in mainstream politic and journalism - to an ideological framing with roots in the Great Replacement theory, whether they are aware of it or not. www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2...

“Trumpian stupidity is less a form of organizational inertia or disarray than a slash-and-burn assault on the very things — universities, public health, market data — that help make the world intelligible.” www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/pol...

Crucial listening to understand how politics works today

happy to report that the world is now so stupid that my knowledge of shitposting has become valuable enough to publish in the Guardian. My favorite part is I got to call JD Vance a try-hard who can't even shitpost properly in print. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Everyone always asks me what my favourite conspiracy theory is but medbeds is for sure the saddest, I really can't think about it for too long. Just openly preying on the hopes of very desperate people

If Palantir secures the contract for the digital ID rollout, will that make it more or less likely that the Antichrist will help me pay my council tax?

Last week I had a bit in @theguardian.com about how rhetoric provides a vocabulary for people to think/argue with. Here's my colleague @robtoes.bsky.social explaining how exactly that was done by online reactionaries inventing 'Boriswave'. Read & learn. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

First Thiel, then Trump: the American project has failed because the libs were too mean in a celebrity gossip blog 'One Trump appointee recently told Semafor that they were "radicalized" by "being booted out of the Gawker comments section, way back in the day."' www.garbageday.email/p/petty-powe...

media studies: media effects model used to be the "hypodermic needle" but ofc that is way too simple psychologists: Just as the hypodermic needle is the delivery mechanism for drugs like heroin, the smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine for a wired generation.

Together with Marc Tuters and @robtoes.bsky.social I wrote an essay on the Charlie Kirk assassination, the Groypers - Nick Fuentes connection and the state of memetic political violence today oilab.eu/frozen-antag...

The BBC apologised for livestreaming Bob Vylan's chants. BBC News at Ten played a video of Elon Musk telling protestors to 'fight back or die' and calling for the dissolution of parliament.

The NYTimes is out here defending the Great Replacement Theory as 'normal' I've been calling this ambient extremism - a once obscure French far-right conspiracy is now so ambient that one of the last avatars of the liberal order defends it, mistakenly attributing its origin to American politics.

Anas Al Sharif had these words to publish if he was martyred which he was tonight as Israel starts the invasion of Gaza City

THIS is the kind of journalism I believe we need more of to understand & fight fascism. It's what I call empathy for the devil: illumination of the path by which a brilliant kid descended into the darkness of Muskism, likely resulting in real death in the world. www.bloomberg.com/features/202...

Some snaps from the @birmac.bsky.social / Media & Democracy / Qualitative Methods Group workshop 'Exploring Quali-Quantitative Approaches in Social Media Research', where me, @robtoes.bsky.social & participants explored methods for approaching the messy, contradictory phenomena that is social media

I was on TV (not really just Channel 4 online) to talk Trump, MAGA meltdown and the Epstein files. my body goes into powersave mode on Zoom calls but I managed to explain that Trump screwed up, the Dems are still hopeless, and true believer posters will go on posting youtu.be/Zbdr-C2h6uA?..

From Kier Starmer acquiescing to Tommy Robinson over grooming gangs, to the NYTimes sourcing Zohran Mamdani hit pieces from eugenicists, extremism is now ambient, and it directly shapes mainstream culture. Had a chance to talk about it at the Amiel & Melburn Trust lecture... youtu.be/3c7W2AyGIk8?...

The Amiel & Melburn Annual lecture is happening this Wednesday! A stellar lineup discussing how the Left can resist the Rise of the Radical Right, hosted at Birkbeck. @kojokoram.bsky.social, @irrnews.bsky.social @afoggyplace.bsky.social @bethanyrielly.bsky.social @robtoes.bsky.social

In Amsterdam today to talk ‘ambient extremism,’ the incoherence of reactionary digital politics and the rhetoric of outrage, a more free floating and more readily purged passion than ressentiment. Streaming fom 5pm CET www.spui25.nl/programma/am...

oh, cool, the evil company founded by a comic-book villain reports surprise profits because they're good at using AI for warfare on.ft.com/42HX1TA

Buried in this story is a link to official figures showing white people get shorter prison sentences, but fascists kept posting 'two-tier Keir', so the 'row' becomes the story, redressing racist sentencing becomes 'special treatment' and the BBC gives Tommy Robinson a W www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The most serious Nazi shit in this extremely Nazi shit executive order may be the idea, just slipped in there, that one of the "divisive narratives that distort our shared history" is that "race is not a biological reality but a social construct." www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

NEW: Archived tweets for Gavin Kriger, Musk's 20-something DOGE employee wreaking havoc inside USAID, shows that Kriger has retweeted multiple neo-Nazis including Nick Fuentes, leader of the so-called Groyper movement, and another popular explicit Nazi account recently unmasked by @travisbrown.dev

New podcast! @profafinlayson.bsky.social and I spend 3 hours discussing reactionary digital politics, the history of the online right and the politics of the platform economy. We also have a row about Bitcoin. It's all here, and in the feeds: culturepowerpolitics.org/2025/01/15/h....

checking into the shared X account I made for students in my digital method class. The account only follows the Met Office. Haven't clicked or searched on a thing. Here's the first post in my For You page. The 'this is fine' dog in the fire memes are getting too literal

created a research account on X for a digital methods class I'm teaching, and these are the top suggestions. what a time to be alive and posting.

My video concludes with reference to @robtoes.bsky.social /Robert Topinka’s brilliant study of heterotopia rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/fo...