I have written a brief response to it, where I argue that stylistics has become the primary medium through which readers conduct what I call "folk forensics" and renegotiate meaning and judgment under persistent uncertainty about textual origins. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

I’m currently writing a book about the attempted Nazi demonstration in Skokie in 1977. This is indistinguishable from how American Nazis talked in public.

"Surveys have found that nineteen percent of 18-to-24-year-olds qualify as problem gamblers, and thirty-seven percent of Gen Z gamblers self-report as having an addiction. A 2025 Siena poll found that forty-eight percent of all men aged 18-49 have an active online sports betting account."

It’s not snark. I say a lot of stuff that intentionally blurs the line between seriousness and unseriousness as a performance of thought that helps me, and maybe others, break out of pre-conceived distinctions. I mean it and I don’t mean it at the same time. The tension is generative for me.

We need an arms race to ensure that nuclear weapons benefit everyone

Earlier this week @pbaskar.bsky.social quoted me in this excellent piece about how extremists around the world use platforms like Roblox & Minecraft to recruit children. Please read & share—especially with parents of young children. Gift link! ⤵️

Collective make-believe is going to get us all killed

When people argue “the hype is real”, the ‘hype’ in that rhetorical statement doesn’t refer to any specific one of the multiple distinct ‘hypes’ that are being circulated in the discourse at any given time. The ‘hype’ is simply the suspension of disbelief that there is something to believe in.

Watching the reaction to the end of GPT-4o, the last thing I’ll say before I shut down this account, is that SV built the most effective and _well-documented_ project to manipulate behavior at scale and when you point that out to ppl in tech, they cry it couldn’t possibly influence *their* behavior.

Almost all people in power are writing dangerously unhinged and ridiculous fictions.

So Moltbook was human-orchestrated performance art. This is exactly the sort of thing you would expect when a bunch of people want to believe in a shared collective delusion and engage in performing the belief publicly as a means of convincing other people to suspend their disbelief.

Google are *proactively* supporting ICE by voluntarily providing data without legal requirement to do so. Look at this list: "Google also turned over Thomas-Johnson’s IP addresses, phone numbers, subscriber numbers and identities, and credit card and bank account numbers linked to his account." 🧵

If you can get enough people to pretend that human life and human death are not real and do not matter, you can get them to pretend anything.

it's deeply funny how maintaining the belief in fascism requires hiding any contrary information, and how every institution has to abase itself toward that end.

Lol, the bluesky "Reactivate my account" feature apparently stopped working, so that was a nice break.

they fired everybody who knows that Puerto Ricans are American

Having successfully completed his mission of turning the Washington Post into a conservative opinion-first megaphone for Jeff Bezos, Will Lewis is moving on.

So, the March for Life appears to have brought Measles to DC. www.nbcwashington.com/news/health/...

Computer touchers learn what consent is challenge: impossible

I just block them. What I’m actually complaining about is that there is a dev community here who likes the LLM bots and likes making them and are proud that they have dark forest trolled up the place, and some of them are deeply enmeshed in the atproto dev community.

Big day for being inundated with new bot followers and unsolicited harassment by LLM bots in my replies.

They’re called “Takes” because they take possession of your soul, like the demons of old.

reminded that hamish mcsubstack's 2023 explanation of why he takes nazi money is: "Given that, we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetising publications) makes the problem go away – in fact, it makes it worse.." This is false. Like it's false false. Very false.

how do you write this story without noting there was a campaign literally called SUBSTACKERS AGAINST NAZIS in…2023

at this point when someone gets on substack I just assume that they know and don't care.

sorry what's this about marc andreessen giving the nsa a way to eavesdrop on skype in the epstein files

There is a radical politics of laying down to die that has dressed itself up as revolutionary action, and which seeks the disintegration of any form of organization that is not equally revolutionary in its aims.

In a new report, PEN America said the federal government has emerged in 2025 as the newest force fueling campaigns to restrict materials related to race, racism and LGBTQ+ issues.

one of the greatest human triumphs of my lifetime is the relentless, unceasing, heroic effort by DECADES' worth of doctors and scientists to find a cure for a disease much of the world didn't take seriously for years because it predominantly affected a community they thought kinda deserved it

we really need to talk about how AI is being used to provide cover for government policy based on deadly misinformation — and how every one of us who writes about AI in health, but doesn't center that fact, is lending credence to the enterprise.

minor point of order since it keeps coming up, it's "Woke 2" and not "Woke 2.0". we're leaving tech industry bullshit behind too

I do want to shout-out my fellow sociologists, who have collectively created a discipline so woke that not a single one of our introductory textbooks can make it past Florida's censors. Great work everyone.

NEW: lawmakers in new york rolled out a proposed data center moratorium bill today, making NY at least the sixth state to introduce legislation pausing data center development in the past few *weeks*:

BREAKING NEWS: ELON MUSK TO FOCUS ON MARSHMALLOW FARM INSTEAD OF GUMDROP CITY www.wsj.com/science/spac...

Moral crumple society

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but “Butlerian Jihad” is a reference to Frank Herbert’s Dune novels and not a reference to the actual Taliban

If you're building a startup in 2026, you are expected to work with the world's largest venture capital firm (which is not even really a VC firm), where one partner strangled my neighbor to death for being Black, and another actively sought Jeffrey Epstein's counsel for years. This is *normal*.

New breach: Substack had 663k records compromised in October and published online this week. Data included email address, phone number and associated public account info. 53% were already in @haveibeenpwned.com. Read more: haveibeenpwned.com/Breach/Subst...

This is bleak: Jes Staley, currently CEO of Barclays, reassuring Epstein that popular revolt against financial elites is unlikely because capitalism and pop culture have defanged social movements, leaving people more invested in consumption than justice.

According to this article about the guy putting on the San Francisco March For Billionaires he is literally a “temporarily embarrassed billionaire” who wants to draw attention to the plight of billionaires and organize against a wealth tax on their behalf because he hopes to one day be one himself.

I keep saying we should take a note from cyberpunk(ttrpg) and take the current internet, shove it into a network isolated basement, and start the fuck over

They don’t tell you this, but the rogue AIs in CyberPunk 2077 were a swarm of OpenClaw agents and other agentic coding LLMs

It’s so fucked up that emergency services still use X. I just checked the 47 X accounts listed on the official RCMP social media page, and 10 have no gray check. It’s like an open invitation to impersonators.

VA Gov. Spanberger (moderate, was in CIA) and NYC Mayor Mamdani (left, is in DSA) both taking steps to block local law enforcement from helping ICE as it violently violates people's rights is a good example of how the relevant divide in the Dem coalition isn't center-left, it's fight-don't fight.

The Epstein files have made it so clear that the struggles against misogyny, racism, and plutocracy are linked struggles against a small, largely identifiable group of people.

Has anyone written about the conspicious consumption of computing resources in the age of climate change fueled fascism?

"Mobile Fortify’s primary function is to expand the number of photos and biometric data that DHS collects by shifting its collection from ports of entry to routine ICE encounters far from US borders."

I know Python and Java relatively well, and the last time I made app UIs was in C# .NET 15 years ago, but does it really make sense for me to learn Rust and JavaScript (and Svelte) in order to make my dream desktop app? Is it a learning exercise for modern tech or am I procrastinating somehow?

I suspect that the echo chamber of Truth Social and conservative media, along with X becoming a safe space for racism and extremism under Musk, has given our Republican leaders a deeply skewed idea of what ordinary Americans find acceptable www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...