Another seminal essay by Fred Turner, this time on "The Texan Ideology": While the Californian Ideology fused 1960s counterculture with tech entrepreneurship to imagine a connected digital utopia, the Texan Ideology combines neoliberal economics, Christian nationalism, and resource extraction.

This is a great special issue that explores capitalism and its visual representation, revealing how exploitative production is masked as free, equal exchange, with images serving as the key tool of this concealment and inversion.

it's here! FILMING CAPITAL special issue of SAQ "Visual and film studies provide a distinctive lens through which to unravel and confront the complexities of capitalism’s elusive appearance." read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlant...

Today is the official UK publication day for Silicon Empires! I'm excited to have it out and hear what people think. There's an enormous amount happening every day in AI, and it's difficult to gain a stable perspective. I wrote the book to try and get some secure hold on that constant flux. 🧵

The West has decided coastal Bangladesh will drown. Bangladeshis disagree. @amitav.bsky.social on apocalyptic thinking, disastrous "climate solutions," and who gets to imagine the future. With photos by Dayanita Singh www.equator.org/articles/bey...

Copenhagen looks to be swinging significantly to the left in local election. Social democrats (currently leading a centrist government nationally) are collapsing in the polls. Parties to the left of SD could gain a majority for the first time in the city (and probably any Danish municipality)

Great piece - AI isn’t saving society; it’s corroding truth, democracy, and mental stability while enriching a handful of tech corporations. The real danger isn’t future superintelligence, but the present-day chaos that governments are enabling by failing to regulate.

Feed: "Untold" By: Ali Rıza Taşkale on Tuesday, August 26, 2025

New at @distinktionjournal.bsky.social: Immediacy, mediation and praxis: reading @annakornbluh.bsky.social through the lens of Guy Debord. The article is currently open access! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The second (excellent) article from Distinktion’s special issue on Silicon Valley imaginaries is now available. Check it out below.

My article in @the-breakdown.bsky.social is now free to read online! While far-right parties have traditionally ignored climate, I explore how the Sweden Democrats embrace it as a wedge issue, creating redistributive conflicts around class & urban-rural divides: www.break-down.org/petrol-for-t...

Today the application period starts for our Master’s Programme in Human Ecology: Culture, Power, and Sustainability (CPS). Come to Lund and learn about radical alternatives and get critical perspectives on contemporary environmental and societal challenges!

We’ve met with Greta Thunberg and others in the flotilla. They describe hours-long scenes of torture and sexual harassment in Israeli captivity. Experts conclude that they have been subjected to serious crimes – Sweden’s foreign minister believes they have themselves to blame. tinyurl.se/crR

Great piece on Peter Thiel’s off-the-record Antichrist lectures: a mix of Silicon Valley anxieties, pop culture, and self-reflection. Less theology, more self-fashioning; he’s both prophet and protagonist in his own apocalypse. www.theguardian.com/technology/n...

Excited to share that I’ve signed with @springernature.com for my book, Fictional Worlds and Financial Realities in Speculative Literature and Film. The book explores the critical intersections between speculative finance & speculative fiction, and I look forward to bringing it into the world soon!

Wonderful research day at the University of Essex - great discussions, networking, and the pleasure of giving a talk. So happy to be back in the UK after a decade!

I’ve just received wonderful news here in London! My book proposal, Fictional Worlds and Financial Realities in Speculative Literature and Film, has been accepted for publication by Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture. The book will be out in July 2026 - I couldn’t be happier!

The tech oligarchy today isn’t new. What’s new is its open rejection of democracy, replaced by a privatized techno-authoritarianism built on surveillance, monopoly, and “noble lies". This piece explains it well. jacobin.com/2025/10/pete...

Whatever Dylan Riley writes merits close reading. Here he argues we’re entering a “post-mass culture”: not high or low, but after both, where class fragments even leisure, and culture becomes a mirror of inequality. Disney queues as political economy. newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

Greta Thunberg is held prisoner by Israel at a jail in the Negev. Read what Sweden’s embassy in Israel reports are the conditions of her detention ⬇️ Now just imagine: if Israel treats a world-famous Swedish activist this way, how badly are its prisons abusing Palestinians? 1/

My essay on stupidology (originally published in N+1) is in today's Guardian www.theguardian.com/news/2025/oc...

“Venture capitalists in clean tech are starting to say out loud what they’ve suspected for a while: China’s dominance has left key sectors in the West uninvestable.”

"What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline." Love this line by Adorno, as quoted in this truly brilliant essay by Jacob Blumenfeld: curedquail.com/Managing-Dec...

New conference program just dropped! Go check it out! marxistiskestudier.com/wp-content/u...

Jānoliek pie lasāmvielas nedēļas nogalei.

Final touches to slides before tomorrow’s long class on genealogy and degrowth - following Nietzsche and Foucault to understand the foundations of modern growth culture and imagine a slower, fairer future.

I was back at 26 Federal Plaza today, where an ICE agent violently threw this bereft woman to the ground in front of her kids. She had not touched him. She did not pose any threat. She had to be taken to the hospital. (🎥: Elias Eliahu)

Känns som detta är up your alley @myrannosaurus.doomscroll.se

MORE DINNER TICKETS AVAILABLE FOR THE CONFERENCE DINNER!🍷🍛 It turns out that we could not in fact accept that the dinner tickets were already gone! So after the bargain stage (with the restaurant) more tickets are now available! So go get your ticket now! marxistiskestudier.nemtilmeld.dk/8/

Corporate capture everywhere and in action: At ICAO, airlines & fossil fuel reps swamp climate voices 14 to 1. Instead of curbing emissions, they lock in policies steering us toward 4°C warming.

Something experimental is on the way. The central argument is that the era of post-politics is over. Antagonism, aggression, and brute force are no longer lurking at the margins; they have become the primary architects of a new and chaotic world order.

My new piece is up: Silicon Valley billionaires use science fiction to justify dystopia, AI overlords, space colonies, escape plans. I call this “science fiction materialized”. But radical science fiction offers blueprints for resistance + rebuilding and new worlds. untoldmag.org/silicon-vall...

Fascinating read: AI doomers & AI utopians aren’t opposites; they’re allies. Both sell the fantasy that AI will transform humanity, serving tech billionaires who profit from "hype". The real threat isn’t superintelligence. It’s the tech oligarchs building AI today.

A student wrote a brilliant op-ed: "How do you think the students from Bangladesh experience the rhetoric they encounter? Being treated as a problem rather than recognized as fellow students? ... RUC must start to take responsibility for its students, regardless of where they are from."

Are you in Copenhagen and unable to make to Aarhus in time for @genderhorizon.com's keynote talk? Then Frida Sandström got your back with these great events in Copenhagen! artsandculturalstudies.ku.dk/research/glo... dukop.dk/da/event/me-... artsandculturalstudies.ku.dk/research/oik...

Management abruptly shut down MA Business Management and Leadership this week and the chairperson of the board resigned, before the new one conceded to political pressure, announcing that Roskilde had failed to service Danes over foreigners. My colleague Louison explains in more detail.

Hostility towards #academia and #immigrants is widespread. #Denmark is no exception. Under political and media pressure, earlier this week @roskildeuni.bsky.social decided overnight to close its Master's degree in Business Administration and Leadership (BAL) from 2026. 🧶 1/20

I have a review of John Ganz's When The Clock Broke in the new LRB www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Breaking news: Robert Redford, the big-screen idol turned Oscar-winning director, independent film advocate and environmental activist, died at 89.

Billionaires are building cities only for themselves: gated, heavily policed, and insulated from democracy. Starbase, Indian Creek, Forest City; public roads, taxes, and funds, but only the wealthy allowed in. An age where modern feudalism meets privatized power. jacobin.com/2025/09/star...

UC-Berkeley gives Trump administration 160 names “related” to anti-semitism, mostly for voicing support for Palestinians. Judith Butler is among them, she calls this “McCarthyism” UC Berkeley gives Trump administration 160 names in antisemitism probe www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/arti...

Absolutely brilliant piece by @jamiemerchant.bsky.social for the latest Brooklyn Rail, bringing together Simon Clarke, @benbraun.bsky.social's asset management capitalism, @iliasalami.bsky.social's state capitalism and much, much more. brooklynrail.org/2025/09/fiel...

Sometimes I think we underestimate the power of art. Banksy’s latest mural doesn’t just paint walls; it lays bare the skeletons of power. Injustice and inequality try to hide, but the street has eyes and ears, and cracks are already forming.

Today’s job market: AI writes your application, AI reads it, AI rejects it, and somewhere, a tech oligarch is laughing all the way to the bank while nobody gets hired.

I'm excited to share the final cover for Silicon Empires and very grateful for the kind words that others have offered. Pre-order here: www.amazon.co.uk/Silicon-Empi...

This is what I've also said (already in the old twitter when it was decent place). Cyberpunk is here today. All we are missing is cybernetic limbs and tight human-machine fusion. But that was never the point of Cyberpunk....

just out, get it, lovers

What happens when finance meets art, thrillers, and critique? I feel nothing but pride and honor in joining some of Denmark’s brightest minds for the launch of Finance Aesthetics & The Birth of the Financial Thriller at KU. Come along!

If you’re in Copenhagen on 23 September, come out for this stellar event ✨

A stellar lineup 🔥 Emma Holten ("Underskud"/"Deficit"), the authors Jonas Eika and Ursula Andkjær Olsen, the brilliant scholar @alirizataskale.bsky.social, and the locals ones: Emma Sofie Brogaard, Frederik Tygstrup and me