“The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google’s abstraction on top of it.”

I spoke at The Internet Left event at The European Parliament last week. You can watch the entire event here, including insights from strategists working with Zohran Mamdani and Die Linke and Heidi Reichinnek, plus my panel with Joshua Citeralla and Joanna Walsh left.eu/events/the-i...

'By uploading instructional content onto Canvas, the learning management system that ASU uses, professors open their intellectual property to much wider distribution' www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

Sadiq Khan is considering blocking Palantir’s contract with the Met Police. Say no to Palantir in the NHS here 👇 https://notopalantir.goodlawproject.org/email-to-target/stop-palantir-in-the-nhs

Come work at Birkbeck! We're hiring a full-time, permanent Lecturer in Digital Media and AI. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRH875/l...

At the EU today talking about 'The Internet Left - Progressive politics in the digital age' for The Left in the European Parliament with Marc Botenga of @ptbbelgique.bsky.social and @robtoes.bsky.social (Birckbeck)

Excited to be speaking at 'The Internet Left' at European Parliament tomorrow morning. Very cool mixes of strategists, artists, meme makers and...me. Join the livestream Tuesday morning! left.eu/events/the-i...

The right has a well-financed apparatus for amplifying social media momentum. Democrats just try to squash it www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Schwemmer said he would accept a world in which slavery was legal if abortion was criminalised, describes himself as “very much an anti universal suffrage guy” and accepts a supporter’s description of him as “our Mormon Nick Fuentes”

My latest in the Guardian: 'The defence from Farage is that he can’t be held responsible for what people do with the messages he sends them, which is perhaps why most politicians don’t send personal endorsements to random people over the internet for money' www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

if Louis Theroux had really wanted to get inside the manosphere he would have sat alone in his bedroom watching Kick streams and spamming the chat

Happy to be quoted in this great piece on Farage's Cameo work, but this line got me: 'Analysis of the 4,366 videos reviewed by the Guardian suggests Farage has been recording the equivalent of almost three videos a day.' Truly we live in the age of the poster. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ng-i...

Survey of Silicon Valley coders finds 'feedback loop between beliefs and digital ecosystems': ~75% said CEO worldviews directly shape products -90% said bias was 'injected' into algorithms -74% would implement features even if they would restrict human freedom www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

#BrainrotPropaganda: You take the patriotic imagery of the past and strip it of all content. There's no narrative left, no promise of meaning, only vibes. The total destruction of meaning is the content, no matter if it's AI generated or manually stitched together from YouTube clips #MemeFascism

From LibsOfTikTok to Christopher Rufo and Jordan Peterson, reactionary watchdogs play a big role in digital politics. A great concept from @sean-phelan.bsky.social

Troops told Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon & mark his return to Earth." Non-evangelicals might not know the Left Behind series, but it sold like the Da Vinci Code. Maybe QAnon was just a rapture subplot jonathanlarsen.substack.com/p/us-troops-...

This is very bad. Handing CNN to Bari Weiss/David Ellison is very, very bad.

Really good piece on the stylelessness of liberals: 'There is no liberal Joe Rogan because his liberal equivalent would rather soliloquize and tweak a couple of ordinances than enter into an unscripted tête-à-tête for hours.' thepointmag.com/criticism/li...

'British centrism tries to defuse extremism by absorbing it, only to find that it hasn’t defused it but amplified it.' www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/fe...

Labour members & MPs need to understand, they aren’t just tarnished by this. They’re soaked through with it. The combination of wealth & sexual abuse is central to the anti-politics worldview (for good reasons). Only slight recovery is possible & it will take a significant purgation.

This is the last of the three Guardian articles by @robtoes.bsky.social on digital politics - well worth reading There is a lot to mull on in this line: "The demands of the attention economy exacerbate the age-old leftist tendency toward infighting" www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

These pieces by @robtoes.bsky.social are well worth reading

Part 2, on the online right, out now: “The convergence of monetary incentives with ideologically charged engagement produces a kind of ambient extremism in contemporary politics…” www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

“The overwhelming liberal focus on disinformation misreads how digital platforms work…cutting-edge propagandists now focus less on policy messaging and more on massaging vibes”. Start of a new series by the excellent @robtoes.bsky.social

“The overwhelming liberal focus on disinformation misreads how digital platforms work: misleading content is everywhere, but the real battleground is over emotion and attention” A must read by @robtoes.bsky.social in @theguardian.com www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The 1st of my 3-part series on digital politics is out in the Guardian. Read, comment, tell me I'm wrong, attack me. As I argue: 'The real battleground is over emotion and attention, which is what determines whether information – good or bad – finds an audience. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I got a quote in about how to think about penguin posting in this excellent primer on Trump’s AI slopaganda, its reactionary nostalgia, its clumsy white nationalism, its obvious mistakes - it’s all on purpose. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Interview by Aamna Mohdin of my @bisa-bkk.bsky.social colleague @dmf101.bsky.social in which he crisply articulates why we need a reset in our antisemitism debate www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j... @runnymedetrust.bsky.social @shabna.bsky.social

Murray Rothbard wanted to repeal the 20th century. Curtis Yarvin thinks liberalism got out of hand when the Union won the US Civil War. The 'Donroe Doctrine' fits this line of thinking. Trump is more erratic now, but his 2nd term is actually more ideologically coherent. www.ft.com/content/4e0e...

Was great to be on the @overunderpod.bsky.social to talk about Grok and the future of AI porn and how Trump's comments about Civil Rights going too far shows MAGA is not just about being anti-woke - it's also a rejection of the basic idea of equality pod.link/1744973171/e...

nice materialist debunking of Jacob Savage's pseudo-materialist account of DEI hurting white Millennial males. www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/12/17/w...

In a bout of insomnia the night before last I wrote something about Trump’s regime capture in Caracas leftrenewal.org/articles-en/... #LeftRenewal

I usually go on r/PoliticalCompassMemes to get annoyed but sometimes you find some bangers

Trump’s lies always tell an ideological truth. The ICE agent obviously wasn’t hit, which is why Trump says he was nearly killed - ICE acts on Trump’s behalf, so anything bad ICE does must actually be the work of the enemy. The less popular Trump gets, the more detached he’ll become

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...