Let’s goooooooo!!!!!

This book is a godsend for academic workers! Read it, share it with folks who care about the fate of democracy and the planet, teach it, talk it up within organizing, union, and faculty governance spaces. It's gonna be indispensable to the struggle to build a political economy that works for all.

So much I wanna say about this episode. For now, just wanna extend my most heartfelt thanks to Matt and the collective of good folks who make AV possible—and are fighting, on the daily, to build a more just, beautiful, and verdant future. Burn, burn—always, Matt—with Pater's "hard, gem-like flame"!

Thinking (too much!) about technofeudalism, the seemingly unstoppable genocidal/ecocidal violence/madness directed toward Palestinians, climate apartheid, the death drive, Eisenhower's warnings about the military-industrial complex, Trump's interminable bloviating, then happened upon this title...

Academic workers at public regional universities MUST have a seat at the table with admin to determine their respective digital strategies; it's also imperative they have a say in their contracts with EdTech, AI startups, and companies like Ziplines. If not, they need to ORGANIZE and DEMAND it!

Just formed a faculty-staff-student led Land-Use group at Grand Valley State University to collectively resist technofeudal projects in the Great Lakes region, such as the building of data centers that will drive up the costs of energy and water for working people...

Close reading—FUCK YEAH!

As I keep tellin' my students while they're makin' their podcasts together, if we're gonna make a revolution, we gotta become maestros in the ART of LISTENING. If yer feelin' down or downright disgusted with the state of things, then simply pour this tasty episode of AV into your ear!

Paging all critical university studies folks—and anyone interested in understanding university budgets in the context of polycrisis—please join us for our webinar this Wednesday, April 16, 4:30-5:45, EDT. Link to register: us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Paging all critical university studies folks—and anyone keen to learn more about university budgets—I'm jazzed to announce this is happenin' next week! Join us👇✊

From @aaup.bsky.social, what to do if ICE is on your campus.

"The Iron Dome is a global project [....] a certain kind of fortressed inequality and apartheid that is actually a global project."

Anticipatory obedience is suicide.

Methinks the late Fredric Jameson would have deep and penetrating insight into the fact that a US president-elect/greedhead/bullyboy/con-man/real estate mogul just brokered a ceasefire in Gaza: "I will put a very simple proposition to you: namely that today, all politics is about real estate."

"These developments expose without a shadow of a doubt that the Biden administration’s failure to achieve a ceasefire was always wilful, and that the Democratic Party government positively chose to arm and support the genocide. There will have to be accountability for that."

Galvanizing to witness hundreds of fellow academic workers protesting the MLA's refusal to allow its members to vote to approve a resolution endorsing the 2005 call of Palestinian civil society organizations to boycott, sanction, and divest from Israel at the Delegate Assembly meeting today✊🇵🇸♾️

Matt has answers to the ongoing and accelerating climate catastrophe—build and harness the power of a transnational labor movement. Wanna do something about the wildfires in California? Or the genocide in Gaza? Support and build unions that are excited and ready to FIGHT to defend the planet!

Lookin' out my hotel window at the MLA in New Orleans and ... cruise ships on the Mississippi—WTF?😱

Warm thanks to colleagues in the MLA for their principled stance on the genocide in Gaza. Anti-BDS legislation is fascistic and continuous with the barbarous logics of coloniality since 1492. To capitulate to the idol of neoliberal economic rationality at this historical moment is MADNESS!

“In order to shoot off one email per week for a year, ChatGPT would use up 27 liters of water, or about one-and-a-half jugs… that means if one in 10 U.S. residents—16 million people—asked ChatGPT to write an email a week, it’d cost more than 435 million liters of water.”

Events like the California fires demonstrate why it's so dangerous when tech billionaires decide to eschew rigorous fact-checking. Social media remains a vital source of real-time life-saving information during crises and disasters. Having accurate information is often a matter of life or death.

Holy smokin' mother of SIN! "BILLIONS AND BILLIONS SERVED"—indeed ... and legions upon legions of wild-ass chickens comin' home to roost! So this is 2025—buckle up, folks ... and UNIONIZE, UNIONIZE, UNIONIZE!

Always read Mike Davis: "You say fire, I say climate change, and we both ignore the financial and real-estate juggernaut that drives the suburbanisation of our increasingly inflammable wildlands." "Unnecessarily, our children, and theirs, will continue to face the flames."

Gearing up to write an abstract for an essay on indebted life and the ways that higher education is entangled with neoliberal, extractivist, racial capitalist political economies. Gotta recognize the ways that listening to @mattseybold.bsky.social's podcast has made this work possible.

"Collective actions that have material impacts can also remind people that we can affect the heartbreaking conditions that discourage us. Feelings of powerlessness and overwhelm are responsible for many of the harmful dynamics that hinder our work as activists and organizers."

"And local sources of news, which could counter the political narratives being shamelessly promoted by the billionaire class, are facing censorship, layoffs and closures." In the absence of local news, colleges and unis can do their part to train up an army of muckrakers to counter fascist bs.

Intrigued, pissed, and a touch terrified by the AI advertising blitz happenin' on ESPN and elsewhere during college bowl season. Same shit goin' down while watchin' the Lions last night🤔😱

"What might it mean to live a life, if we can't risk desiring and working towards utopia?" – Rinaldo Walcott, "Towards Another Shape of this World"

Warm thanks to our colleagues in the MLA for their principled stance on the genocide in Gaza. Anti-BDS legislation is fascistic and continuous with the barbarous logics of coloniality since 1492. To capitulate to the idol of economic rationality at this historical moment is madness.

"By reimagining the global economy as a means to exert pressure on Israel, BDS has transformed boycotts into one of the most effective forms of nonviolent resistance in a capitalist world, creating ripple effects that resonate far beyond the checkout counter."

““A few days ago I visited the ruins of the village.The devastation is total.One wall of the school is still partially standing. It has an elegiac inscription in Arabic: “We have the right to an education.” I have never seen people so devoted to educating their children as the Palestinians”

Jimmy Carter was the one ex-president in the modern era to openly admit (and lament) the truth about what America has become in the post-Citizens United era. The national press corps probably won’t mention this, but it was really something. He was a real one. RIP.

Had a thimbleful of hope that perhaps the Biden administration might cancel the debt of aging borrowers. Reading this article just killed it. Takes me back to the moment when Biden and the Dems blocked Bernie—and an entire movement that joyfully embraced and defended the dignity of ordinary people.

Fetch me a bucket. I think I'm gonna throw up!

Reading Jameson's An America Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army mañana en Mexico ... y descubrí este artículo—feelin' groovy✌️

Gonna start givin' friends and family a solid ribbing if they're still hangin' onto the flamin' shit-missile, AKA X. Nuthin' good can come from continuing to enfranchise, empower, and enrich this knuckle-draggin' nincompoop—NADA!

K-12 educators, college professors, librarians, journalists—ANYONE invested in reclaiming the commons from the depredations of American oligarchy—listen to this episode of @mattseybold.bsky.social's The American Vandal. Wanna make sense of polycrisis? Cravin' a lil' hope to make it through the day?👇

Our 2025 playbook: "Neoliberal capitalists have planted the seeds of their own destruction by using debt to shape and control educational institutions. They erred when they decided to put debtors–faculty, staff, students and universities themselves–in the same location." Let's go, y'all!

Brilliant

"NOTHING is more popular than a story about Higher Ed." – Tressie McMillan Cottom Gilded Age 2.0 + Climate Breakdown = the opportunity to train up an army of muckrakers. New interdisciplinary programming in "Media, Storytelling, and Public Engagement"? Anybody down for this convo at MLA 2025?

“The leaving the power on the table story might be the great story of higher education right now. We have so much and yet are absolutely terrified to use it.” - Tressie McMillan Cottom

"I want Democrats lying down on train tracks. I want them reviewing the civil rights–era playbook and remembering how people who had no institutional power brought about structural change by demanding better from institutionalists."

Proud, inveterate anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist comrades, please sign here👇✊♥️🇵🇸

If the MLA is going to suppress our ability to discuss important issues and take collective action, we can withhold our dues & stop doing service for them. Join me in pledging to not renew your membership & to resign from any governance/leadership position you hold: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Mexico has this badass national science agency called CONAHCYT, the National Council of the Humanities, Science, and Technology, that is making beautifully informed decisions and developing eminently rational policies concerning public and planetary health. ¡Viva Mexico!

If you like protest songs I made a whole playlist of them during the WGA strike which became low-key popular (omg a hit playlist, &c): open.spotify.com/playlist/6EC...

There is a fundamental connection between violence against the earth and violence against people. Historian Sunil Amrith and I explore how languages of violence perpetuate mass harms, muddling our understanding of humankind's place in nature. Full episode: www.planetcritical.com/p/language-a...

Robin DG Kelley on Speaking Out of Place. #FreePalestine

Last week, I resigned from the MLA Executive Council in solidarity with members working to mobilize the org to take a stand against the scholasticide and genocide in Palestine. Please read and share their powerful call to MLA leadership today in LitHub. lithub.com/the-modern-l...