Very glad to share this piece in @modamhist.bsky.social! I am glad they let me squeeze 7 figures into the article. You can see one of them here:

A moving manifesto against despair in higher education from @adapalmer.bsky.social: "Despair is very emotionally tempting." Yet: "We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers." www.chronicle.com/article/high...

An exciting AI an citizenship initiative at Georgetown. It's being led by some wonderful humanists!

This how you isolate and capture "the worst of the worst" of these dangerous immigrants. You show yourself to be in need of help, and the worst criminals reveal themselves and their criminality by doing whatever they can to provide you with help. Masterful law enforcement.

Glad to share a new article in @modamhist.bsky.social: "Phreaking Politics in Modern America." Come for fun bits about Abbie Hoffman and Steve Jobs, stay for the analysis of how critiques of AT&T planted seeds of the techno-libertarian politics all around us today. doi.org/10.1017/mah....

Jacob Bruggeman has a neat new article out, "Phreaking Politics in Modern America," which covers telephone hacking, AT&T's status as an icon of American technology, and the New Left-to-libertarian pipeline in modern American political order doi.org/10.1017/mah....

"In his search for the Antichrist lurking in college protests and international institutions, Peter Thiel never glances at the mirror. The real threat to his eschatological vision may be staring back from it." 🔥 from @jacobbruggeman.bsky.social in @theunpopulist.net

It's out! My review of "Abundance", my review of "Breakneck" and the slogan "rent extraction is always what the other guy does" open.substack.com/pub/hypertex...

Have we acclimated? 5 million people were in the streets, nationwide 3 days ago

These illustrations of the basic components of a home computer in Family Computing Magazine issue 4, from 1983.

🚀 New podcast alert! Introducing Future Knowledge—a podcast from the Internet Archive & Authors Alliance exploring how knowledge is created, shared & preserved in the digital age. 🎧 Listen and subscribe: futureknowledge.transistor.fm #FutureKnowledge @archive.org @authorsalliance.bsky.social

“The group estimated that reducing the operating budget by $900 million, as the Trump administration wants to do, would require closing 350 of the 433 parks, monuments, historic sites and other locations overseen by the Park Service… we would be witnessing the dismantling of a century-old system”

@alisongopnik.bsky.social suggests that there is no such thing as general intelligence, natural or artificial. Instead, multiple intelligences trade off in salience throughout our life histories: As children, we explore. As adults, we exploit. As elders, we empower.

“The product will be capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk, and will be a third core device a person would put on a desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.” 🫠

Giving political donors “dedicated VIP experiences” with the US military is not only corrupt, it will damagingly make Americans think of our military as partisan. Congress should prevent this.

Digital criminals depicted in a 1978 issue of an Ann Arbor paper

Science as Culture has a CFP for contributions to a forum on "Tech Oligarchy": think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issu...

Monica Isham is the 1st woman & 1st minority to serve as a circuit court judge in Sawyer County. In an email to all Wisconsin state judges she said: “If there is no support for us, l will refuse to hold court. If this costs me my job or gets me arrested, then at least I know I did the right thing.”

New at PB, Jacob Bruggeman (@jacobbruggeman.bsky.social) interviews historian Steven Conn about his new book “Lies of the Land” (@uchicagopress.bsky.social) which interrogates the myth of the rural in American politics and culture.

This is high art

More evidence that Trump 2.0/DOGE is setting the stage for unprecedented cyberattacks. Or, as Bruce Schneier has quipped, this administration represents the most significant hack in the country’s history. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/05/u...

A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile removed by employer Indiana University, & had his homes raided by the FBI. No one knows why. arstechnica.com/security/202...

My thoughts on the Signal business: "nobody wearing an American military uniform can doubt that if they took details of an ongoing operation off a classified system and transmitted them on an unclassified commercial platform, they would be court martialled and probably go to prison."

A 1980s computer surveillance cartoon to brighten up your morning...

> Every day, about 100 terabytes of material are uploaded to the Internet Archive, or about a billion URLs, with the assistance of automated crawlers. Woah.

📢 CALL FOR PAPERS 📢 "Moral Economies of the Polycrisis. Conflict, Critique, and Legitimation in Critical Times" Workshop, June 16-17 University of Hamburg Deadline for abstracts: 07/04 Supported by the Economic Sociology section of @dgsoziologie.bsky.social linuswestheuser.com/cfp-moral-ec...

Money quote:

Spotted in Midtown Atlanta

Absolutely perfect illustration of comparative advantage here: Japan builds the bullet train but Britain provides the bullshit design agency copy about it being inspired by cherry blossom www.designboom.com/technology/j...

Glad to be in TIME explaining how DOGE draws on anti-bureaucracy and Clinton era New Economy thinking. It was a blast to write with my colleague and friend Casey Eilbert, & longer form work is coming soon. Thanks to @brianros1.bsky.social for edits! time.com/7260722/atte...

a tiny bit of reminiscing today: remembering when Alan Kay visited the @mediaarchaeology.bsky.social in 2019 and found our copy of Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines...big before-times energy

Protestors lined up outside of a Tesla dealership on Route 35 in Eatontown NJ, a town sitting inside cherry red district 4, represented by congress’s longest serving Republican, Chris Smith

COLBERT, on Rep. Al Green’s removal: “Some people questioned why so much muscle was needed to remove an old man with a cane. But it turns out it was for a serious reason. When security searched him, they found that he smuggled in a spine." @latenightercom.bsky.social

Glad to be in TIME explaining how DOGE draws on anti-bureaucracy and Clinton era New Economy thinking. It was a blast to write with my colleague and friend Casey Eilbert, & longer form work is coming soon. Thanks to @brianros1.bsky.social for edits! time.com/7260722/atte...

I got laid off today, with the rest of 18F. 18F was an elite federal software shop. We made gov't websites work better, more efficiently for the American people. We saved taxpayers from getting screwed over by contractors. And were fired for it. We made this website to tell our story: 18f.org

RIP to the Hack. Hackman’s portrayal of Harry Caul in The Conversation is still my favorite of his performances.

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

An amazing resignation letter to Bove from an AUSA who worked on the Adams case. Money quote: “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”

Squid game season 3: DOJ Public Integrity Section.

Last week Meta admitted that it "torrented 80.6 terabytes of data from LibGen"! It never ceases to amaze how corporations mobilize copyright law against awesome nonprofits like @archive.org while making their own carless end-runs around copyright. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

Newsfeeds from the past few weeks sketch a dark horizon for American politics, but we have historical resources for this moment. Plutocrats populate every chapter in the history of American industrial capitalism. They wield enormous power—but so do the American people. The future isn’t foreclosed.

in what meaningful way can we say that the constitution is in effect when an unelected and unaccountable billionaire is wielding state power to unilaterally cancel congressional appropriations?

Motherfucker.

🕳️ #VanishingCulture ➡️ https://blog.archive.org/2025/02/05/vanishing-culture-what-early-internet-era-gifs-show-us-about-preserving-digital-culture/

RONALD REAGAN (1988): We should be aware of the demagogues who are ready to declare a trade war against our friends, weakening our economy, our national security, and the entire free world—all while cynically waving the American flag.

This by historian Daniel Immerwahr in the @newyorker.com is a convincing counter-blast to the 'panic over lost attention'. Even cites TikTok as an example of people putting huge concentration into creativity. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

If you need some optimism in your reading world, I highly recommend giving this collection of essays/interviews a read. We’ve heard all the doom about our climate emergency. “What If We Get It Right” takes a moment to share a vision of the future if we do make changes. It’s hope, for a change.