Nairobi has become a test-site for China’s techno-capital. Our book of the week maps how the city's new digital ecosystem challenges both the West-centric script of technological “catch-up” and alarmist tales of neocolonialism. By @andretwp.bsky.social on @ucpress.bsky.social buff.ly/Jo6qN6X

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

Excellent new paper from @js-tan.bsky.social and Kathleen Thelen, on the political economy of the cloud company business model and how it feeds the AI race and techno-nationalism journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

An open letter on the proscription of Palestine Action – defend the right to protest against war and genocide! protestisnotterrorism.uk/2026/01/12/g...

Statement on the Israeli army’s invasion of Birzeit University We call on universities and international institutions worldwide to condemn this onslaught against the production and dissemination of knowledge in Palestine. criticaltheoryconsortium.org/announcement...

Just picked up @nsrnicek.bsky.social’s new book. Congrats Nick, it looks great and I’m excited to dig in!

The #AoIR2026 Call for Papers is officially up on the www: aoir.org/aoir2026/ This year marks AoIRs' first time in Mexico and it will be the second bilingual AoIR. Please share with your networks. 🌮

🌟New book! SAGE Handbook of Digital Labour, edited by Ergin Bulut, Julie Chen, Rafael Grohmann, and Kylie Jarrett. us.sagepub.com/en-us/sam/th...

Trying to think through the regime's actions in Venezuela.— www.unpopularfront.news/p/crude-ideo...

One of the best pieces I read in 2025.

Here’s to 2026

❗ We are urgently looking for a new Lecturer in Cultural Data & AI at the University of Amsterdam: werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies... The deadline for applying is very soon: Jan 4th. You’ll work with @tpoell.bsky.social, @riederb.bsky.social, @dluitse.bsky.social, @louravn.bsky.social, me, & more

me to grad students: share your work with each other, talk, exchange ideas! me to me: no one can ever see this draft it's garbage and they'll think i'm garbage and then i'll have to move into a dumpster where i belong

It’s that time of year: what was the piece of writing about AI that stuck with you the most this year, pop press or academic? A few of mine in the thread. ⬇️

The special issue on Authortarianism in the Digital Age is now live (eds. @kylzjarrett.bsky.social @robkitchin.bsky.social @steelecat717.bsky.social and Jing Hiah). It is comprised of 48 commentaries from around the world exploring how the digital is implicated in creeping authoritarianism.

New post from me, trying to understand the various deals being made to build out AI infrastructure. Plus some news and research I thought was interesting recently. siliconempires.substack.com/p/financing-...

The reason why platform companies do make it hard to find account location information is not because they believe in privacy, it's so that advertisers do not know how much is lost to low-tier engagement. Growth, at all costs, means avoiding publishing basic metadata so that advertisers don't sue.

X's location "transparency" feature showing many MAGA accounts are based internationally reveals what we already knew: The world is using American social media and American politics as a slot machine and social media companies are directly incentivizing this: www.404media.co/americas-pol...

Sovereignty as a service, sovereignty washing. The fact is that Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet are selling "local clouds" to governments and businesses and calling it sovereignty lol. More in the article we published last week in Media, Culture & Society. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Yes! Very happy to see that this great conversation is now out in @platformsnsociety.bsky.social.

Japanese giant SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its entire stake in tech giant Nvidia for $5.83 billion. Click here to read more: https://cnb.cx/49LCIs8

In the arts, in academia, in public discourse, we have only one task, and that is fighting the rise of authoritarianism and fascism. If we fail at that, we fail completely

Congratulations to @nielsvdoorn.bsky.social! More exciting research coming in our book series for MIT Press!

quite literally everything i hear about the economics of this feels insane, especially given the big issue of the tools not doing what boosters say they will do. so many details make me feel very not good!

Very happy to announce that I’ve signed a contract with @mitpress.bsky.social for the publication of my forthcoming book The Platform Fix. 🥳 It will be part of their Labor & Technology series, edited by Winifred Poster. @labortechresearchnetwork.org

We now have multiple visualizations of this phenomenon from various news organizations. Which one is the best?

I’m hiring for a 2.5 year postdoc position in digital methods and the creator economy, details here: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPG525/p...

There’s no ‘energy transition’, there’s a geographical, organizational, technological restructuring of production. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

In a follow-up to his and Brenna Bhandar's "Slumlord Empire," Alberto Toscano writes on the genocidal plans for the "redevelopment" of Gaza in the wake of ethnic cleansing. Trump, Curtis Yarvin, Blair, and other elites are scheming for accumulation and dispossession. proteanmag.com/2025/10/13/p...

I knew it reminded me of something

Today, 250.000 people took to the streets of Amsterdam to protest Israel's genocidal violence in Gaza and the cowardly response by the Dutch government. It followed on two earlier protests, one with 150.000 protesters, and the first one with about 100.000. By Dutch standards, these are huge numbers.

Hot off the press: Chris J Young, Daniel J Joseph and @nieborg.bsky.social trace a platform historiography of #Unity to discuss how workflows create dexterous corporate lockins in cultural production journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... enjoy!

A longish thread to announce that the Themed Issue "Digital Platform Economies: Value from Data?" is now fully available online "https://journals.sagepub.com/topic/collections-pns/pns-1-digital_platform_economies_value_from_data/pns

Very happy to share that the TI ‘Digital Platform Economies: Value from Data?’ is now available online. The essays critically examine the multifaceted and complex relation between platforms, data & value, asking how forms of “data-value” are made actionable: journals.sagepub.com/topic/collec...

If you want to ignore the news for a moment and read something whip smart that teaches you about Alipay’s global interoperability, allowing Kakao users to pay in Japan and much else - read this 👇

I am very pleased to see this super insightful piece by @jingwangnyu.bsky.social out in @platformsnsociety.bsky.social! It examines how the “productization of APIs allows Alipay+ to extend its platform logic into global financial infrastructures. Read it here: doi.org/10.1177/2976...

Digital payments against the convenience of cash? Read more from our editor @msteinbrg.bsky.social writing about PayPay, Japanese convenience stores, and the digital payment wars of the late 2010s. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

New article out in @platformsnsociety.bsky.social! "Toward a platform–labor–territory nexus: Platform-driven deterritorialization and reterritorialization processes in the Chilean Andes" by #sfb1265 PhD Scholar @jyelee.bsky.social 👇📰 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

A belated catch-up with the papers that came out this (boreal) summer: we start with @alexturvy.bsky.social with a comparative analysis of how TikTok and Instagram shape the conditions for cultural production through their platform configurations. Read more here journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

And another gem from the summer: Nicholas Proferes @kelleyhas2es.bsky.social @kthorson.bsky.social @ankolika.bsky.social Chia-Fang Chang and Ava Francesca Battocchio write about the rhetoric of localism in platform content moderation. Read more here journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

And another piece for our readers: Margherita Di Cicco & Davide Beraldo explore how sex workers engage in cross-platform promotion more than in the production of sexual content itself, arguing that precarious success on OF depends on cross-platform dependency journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

“As authorities round up their work force, the big players in the world of Silicon Valley-developed delivery apps have largely remained silent. Three of the biggest — Uber, Grubhub, and DoorDash — did not respond to requests for comment.” theintercept.com/2025/08/26/t...

This summer's interviews with instant delivery workers made it clear: 7 countries were traveled to bring you a burrito. The scars on their faces, the rented bikes, the women who show up w/ trunks full of prepared meals to sell to these deliveristas, the long waits...

Instead of regurgitating the bromide that LLMs are just "autocomplete on steroids" (even by people who know better), maybe we can actually engage in some public education. The problem with genAI is better expressed through a classic computer science concept, known as SYMBOL GROUNDING. 🧵

This text is life-giving.

The Trump presidency has three pillars: - transformative tariffs - American hegemony via AI/stablecoins - accelerate Big Finance occupation of welfare state

Tech giants are lavishing on AI development the kind of capital that would be needed to secure the social and ecological transition necessary to counter the apocalyptic horizon that is looming over the planet and the human species.... www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

sorry to post about myself, but i'm getting pretty desperate, so if anyone has a lead on any jobs in AI policy or research, i would be very grateful for a positive reference or just a pointer in the direction of the job listing. thanks a ton in advance.

This is an important “long view” contribution to the gig economy/platform work scholarship. Congrats @maffie.bsky.social! I recognize many of the decay/degradation mechanisms you describe. They’re why so many seasoned gig workers have left these platforms, when possible.

Fresh! The first episode of the second season of Delivery Charge. It's about migrants from South Asia doing food delivery work in Berlin. Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/1tDm... Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/e... Podbean: deliverycharge.podbean.com/e/e1-punjab-...