on the topic of dick cheney, one thing i’ve always said is that you shouldn’t kill a million people

The international news story about the Dutch elections is sadly misleading: fewer votes were cast for leftwing parties, while the far right remained stable. And Geert Wilders may yet come out on top.

Great essay, and great rebuttal of that tired 'but it's already being used' argument: "The simplest reason to refuse resignation is that resignation can only harmonize with the tech-industry narrative of AI inevitability. When we give in, we join the sales force." www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...

YES! THIS on GenAI! Please read this absolutely splendid piece of writing that had me cheering, a little bit weepy, and writing in the margins: "An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny."

Assata Shakur has "died in Havana, Cuba, as a result of health conditions and her advanced age." She was 78.

New publication! On the digitized visual economy of the Gaza genocide - if your social media feed's anything like mine, you've been awash in images of atrocities committed by the Israeli occupation forces. Here's an attempt to trace this livestreamed genocide and its social responses. 🇵🇸

While defending the luddite argument in Discord, I stumbled into this IMO succinct explanation for opposing generative AI: At every step in the process, it impoverishes us.

Barely an hour ago, Palestinian journalist Anas Al-Sharif warned us all: “If this madness doesn’t end, Gaza will be reduced to ruins, its people’s voices silenced, their faces erased — and history will remember you as silent witnesses to a genocide you chose not to stop.” Israel just killed him.

Generative AI by definition is conformity. It is an averaging of anything you ask of it - quite literally guessing what the most likely version of a thing might be. It is, by definition, mainstream, as is everything it creates old and deeply ideological, as every model trains on similar data.

The time has come to reinvent academic publishing. Over the last years conglomerates have bought up once respectable publishers and turned them into rent extraction machines, generating obscene profits from tax-payer funded research and unremunerated academic labor./ mediastudies.hypotheses.org/6850

All the dire implications notwithstanding it is hilarious how evil this technology is. Billions of dollars spent on this greasy lying stupid thing that was literally built to replace people, and everyone that uses it gets weaker, lazier, dumber, and sadder for having done so. Well done all around.

AI is perfect tech for 21st-century capitalism: almost no legitimate use cases, unhelpful even when there is a use case, causes cognitive disability and emotional distress in users, destroys privacy, exploits labor, harvests data, disastrous for the environment, unprofitable – and totally ubiquitous

Is Marx a degrowth communist and does he advance a conception of "ecological freedom"? The video of Kohei Saito's talk and the conversation w/ Rahel Jaeggi and Thomas Khurana at Volksbühne is online: cpkp.net/event/freedo... @ktbberlin.bsky.social @cominsitu.bsky.social @tbheinze.bsky.social

🚨NEW ARTICLE🚨 How does ecological stuff become economic value? I survey various approaches to the question--environmental and ecological economics, ecofeminist Marxism and value-form theory--in order to sharpen the question and formulate the eco-Marxist problematic. muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/artic...

WeTransfer just changed their TOS giving themselves permission to train AI on any content you transfer and produce derivative works based on content you transfer that they are allowed to monetize and you are not allowed payment for. Stop using WeTransfer.

A Borges story about a guy who gets AI to summarize all the world’s information for him, and then summarize the summary, until the AI has the whole world summarized into a single word. He sits alone at his desk, staring at the word, repeating it endlessly, certain he is experiencing everything

In solidarity with the movement in Los Angeles and elsewhere across the US, we've made Joshua Clover's Riot. Strike. Riot free to download.

People who are still shouting that Israel is not committing genocide must be clapping their hands over their ears every time an Israeli minister steps onto a podium because

It is, sadly, necessary to reiterate our plea as workers in Dutch higher education to our institutions: cut ties with genocide, and keep cops off our campuses. If you're in Dutch higher ed, please consider signing the letter below! And as always, Free Palestine 🇵🇸 openletter.earth/nederlandse-...

I’ve found it’s more visually appealing to just paste in his head at the inflection points

"On the day that police have as much to fear from literature professors as Black kids do from police, I will definitely have a statement. Until then I have nothing further to add." RIP Joshua Clover, 👑 www.newsweek.com/uc-davis-cal...

Nu het Maagdenhuis is bezet moeten universiteiten ingaan op de terechte eisen van hun studenten in plaats van hen opnieuw door de politie in elkaar te laten slaan, betoogt hoogleraar Yolande Jansen. rightsforum.org/opinie/open-...

Basically, the far right accurately identified the weak point in liberal democracy: mainstream media institutions that were collapsing and therefore easy to purchase or pressure, combined with a public that got most of its information from an almost totally unstructured info ecosystem.

Rebuilding a powerful labor movement is THE key to defeating Trumpism & the billionaires Had a great conversation about the stakes & potential of widescale worker-to-worker organizing with @gabrielwinant.bsky.social on the new episode of @thedigradio.bsky.social thedigradio.com/podcast/work...

I spent more than a year working on this SEP entry on ideology, and I actually think it is some of the best work I've ever done. There are three parts of it that I am especially happy with: plato.stanford.edu/entries/ideo...

Gillian Rose's 1987 lecture at the University of Sussex has now been published in Thesis Eleven. In it, she explores the idea of "method" in Marx's work and its broader implications for philosophy, sociology, & social theory. Here are a few brief thoughts on it. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

just saying: it's possible that "I'm gonna dramatically constrict my state capacity while plotting dramatic imperial expansion, and expanding my set of internal enemies while alienating most of my foreign allies" is the beginning of a world-historical masterstroke. but also possible that it isn't

🌞Tomorrow, we're sending a fresh urban futures studio newsletter featuring our upcoming #summerschool , the #FriendsOfTheFuture seminar, and we're introducing our new researchers @ahendriks.bsky.social and @lcdanny.bsky.social ✍️Subscribe here: mailings.uu.nl/hp/rt6Oc-q1P...

New publication! Very happy and proud to finally see in print (open access!) a volume that grew out of a wonderful conference in Warwick some years ago, examining cultural production and body politics in the age of permanent polycrisis.

At least we have this photo of David Lynch and Billy Wilder.

Without a doubt, no other artist has impacted my life - in so many ways - more than Lynch did. Rest in peace to the greatest artist I've had the privilege of sharing some time on this earth with; so grateful to have his work in my life, so so saddened by his loss. www.youtube.com/watch?v=qauo...

Thanks to all for your kind remembrances on this awful day. Words will come later. Only feelings at the moment. Mourn and remember him but don’t forget to celebrate too. We won’t see his like again. The man from another place has gone home. #DavidLynch #TwinPeaks

Love you forever 🖤

The Apartment is a Christmas movie and a New Year's Eve movie and a perfect movie, period

I started putting together a starter pack on Marx, Marxism, Critical Theory, and more. Please share if you find it useful and respond to this post if you feel like you should be added to the list (or removed for that matter).

With the exodus from twitter and the influx of new users and followers, this might be a good time for a bio post: I’m Danny, currently a teacher at university of Amsterdam. I’m trained in cultural studies, post-/decolonial thought, though nowadays more interested in climate justice, ...

Feeling absolutely helpless, infuriated and inconsolable about the news coming from Gaza these days. Please consider donating (again) to one of these Palestinian aid organizations: www.pcrf.net www.anera.org www.map.org.uk

This statement from Jeremy Corbyn on Gaza and Israel is exactly what is called for. tribunemag.co.uk/2023/10/jere...

inaugural post: with twitter steadily disintegrating, I’m glad to have sailed into a new endorphin port - though I’m also bummed that that ecosystem is collapsing. it certainly wasn’t flawless, but it did acquaint me with a lot of cool things and people (especially a lot of cultural Discourse).