A top job for someone - Associate Professor of History, University of Toronto: looking for an economic historian of the Soviet Union and successor states

Congratulations to @quinnslobodian.com for winning the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for Hayek‘s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right! Read an excerpt from the book here:

Congratulations to all including @karenhao.bsky.social @quinnslobodian.com (whose prizes are not immediately apparent based on how the article is illustrated…)

Picking up newspaper to see VW will likely transition its Osnabrück factory from making cars to making missiles for Israel's Iron Dome, putting down newspaper.

"It's not fair of environmentalists to point out that in addition to being finite resources that are actively destroying the planet, fossil fuels also leave us at the mercy of fragile supply and logistics chains significantly controlled by autocrats in geopolitically chaotic parts of the world."

Andreas Malm & Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel (2021)

Die sehr sehr spannende Vorstellung von @quinnslobodian.com und @bentarnoff.com neuem Buch “Muskism” und anschließender Diskussion mit @nataschastrobl.bsky.social ist nun online. Schaut rein!

Adding this to the “AI is just the Hegelian master/slave dialectic” folder (i.e., the point of using AI is to perform the status of the master, whose frictionless existence is subtended by the friction-full labor of subordinates). AI ‘democratizes’ this position of mastery.

Adam Becker is my favorite interplanetary colonization hater

Arrived in Cambridge for a talk about how Silicon Valley materializes science fiction. Brought a guide. Feeling less perplexed already! @quinnslobodian.com @bentarnoff.com

specifically being told he was losing to the literary theorists is villain origin story you could not make up to explain the present - improbable veracity

Neither Claude nor any other LLMs detects targets, processes radar, fuses sensor data, or pairs weapons to targets. Its Maven. And Maven= Palantir artificialbureaucracy.substack.com/p/kill-chain

I'm indeed bloody perplexed at the moment! But I'm sure this'll help. Excited to dig in. @quinnslobodian.com @bentarnoff.com

They‘re competing profit models.

Top two types of replies when a post gets traction 1. What did you expect 2. This is what Capital wants

How many people died of AIDS because of the US/WTO's obsession with preserving TRIPS and the capital preserving sanctity of pharmaceutical patents?

First line of NYT Daily: “It’s been about one year of tariffs on China.” It’s been almost a decade. Inability of media to see continuity in geoeconomic policy from Trump 1 through Biden to Trump 2 is a big and symptomatic problem.

Related:

More thoughts on the “are intellectual property rights neoliberal or not” question here 👇

Weirdly moved by the yacht rock documentary where all these frumpy technical guys had a silent-stars-in-age-of-talkies moment the second MTV arrived. From Christopher Cross to Michael Jackson is quite a jump.

Speaking of plunder, universities building fancy data science centers and launching AI majors and minors will soon find all qualified profs have fled for companies where they are paid 4-10x more and can publish and research instead of teach.

"writing about it at a time when it was neither profitable nor popular," says I, puffing up my chest for effect. www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-politi...

regimes of propertization always seem to work this way. networking itself seems like an ongoing primitive accumulation, and all things which circulate within the property form are fully prepared for this "blithe plunder", the forcible reclamation of its "gifts" always owed back at a later date

In Trump 1, boomers raised on fears of mind control from the East gobbled up narratives that updated their Cold War anxieties to the present. It’s interesting to see them search for a new storyline now.

The British and American gunboats opening Hong Kong and Tokyo except it's our souls.

Underrated that the era of neoliberal globalism characterized by fierce defense of intellectual property as rents, patents, and copyrights gave way so quickly to a new paradigm marked by the blithe plunder of all human creativity for LLM training data.

Almost too on the nose that political scientist come far right firebrand Matt Goodwin used genAI to hallucinate the following quote: “’The most dangerous experiments’ warned the economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek, ‘are those conducted on entire societies.’”

Us talking to @newstatesman1913.bsky.social youtu.be/qoiEgHWc70o?...

Obligatory book promotion post for the new platform. Check out my @ucpress.bsky.social book THE CELLULOID SPECIMEN: MOVING IMAGE RESEARCH INTO ANIMAL LIFE for free here: www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520...

We are all dril now

Discovering the critical public sphere is about being treated dismissively when your arguments are not up to snuff and turning to full automation as a response…as an origin story it’s not bad.

Ecofordism

Almost too on the nose that political scientist come far right firebrand Matt Goodwin used genAI to hallucinate the following quote: “’The most dangerous experiments’ warned the economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek, ‘are those conducted on entire societies.’”

We're hiring! 🌿 The Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger invites applications for a 3-year postdoc in Environmental History. See thread for more details. #envhist #envhum

In my case it was literally X

Karp being radicalized by a mean professor is the first relatable thing I've heard from him. www.politico.com/news/magazin...

Dr Alessandra Marino and a team received £1.245m from UKRI to launch MoonRISE, a major new project exploring how we can protect fragile and significant sites on the Moon. Bringing science, law, ethics & global voices together — shaping sustainable lunar governance for the future. buff.ly/UfzMvkP

👀

Case to be made that the Ur-scene of FAFO was the ease with which the global investor class metabolized the trade war.

yep www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/...

"Market dependence makes freedom's material foundations precarious. Markets don't give you what you need - they give you what you can afford."

rug pull is the new red pill

Hadn’t seen this had gone up, based on an interview I did with them. Second Thought do some of the best produced medium length videos on important political topics, especially strong on archival footage use. youtu.be/JpIF8MPRWyI?...

Prisoner’s dilemma where each prisoner is placing big polymarket bets on the other side defecting.

„Tech-Bros waren nie liberal“ – mit @annanosthoff.bsky.social habe ich für @taz.de über die ideologischen Abgründe des Silicon Valley, das AGI-Wettrüsten und über Hoffnung in düsteren digitalen Zeiten gesprochen. Ich freue mich das Gespräch beim @tazlab.bsky.social am 25.4 in Berlin weiterzuführen!

Probably more than a suspicion if the head of product is crowing about user numbers in the middle of the scandal

tombstone

Was Christianity the Muskism of the 4th century? In Domination, I explore how it became a multidivisional corporation - taking over state welfare, healthcare, legal services, agribusiness - and making itself indispensable to the Roman state. Fascinated by the resonance here - watch from 15.30 mins: