Palantir chore coat, Anduril Porta Pro. Can't wait for hipster-war-crime summer!

The metaverse is dead... Or at least Meta's original vision for the metaverse is. It's down $80 million and phasing out support for Horizon Worlds. At BSLS 2026 I looked at how recent metaverse narratives are moving away from cyberpunk, while retaining a critical (and often satirical) edge.

Back in 2018, David Graeber reflected on fascists attacking @bookmarksbookshop.bsky.social: "Why do they attack a bookshop? Because they don't have any ideas" Same thing when DOGE bro admits "There were no books". They torched research funding because all they have is crypto-bullshit and memes.

Our latest issue of the Journal of Science Fiction is out now! I've got a short thing in there critiquing the relationship between sf and silicon valley. Plus, there's a bunch of neat stuff around cyberspace, neoliberalism, and (unavoidably) AI. publish.lib.umd.edu/index.php/sc...

This is pure Kendall in Succession Season 1. Endlessly throwing money at a deal in a desperate attempt to impress daddy... variety.com/2026/biz/new...

Given the release of a certain library of heavily-redacted files, there couldn't be a better time for this banger from @maxhaiven.bsky.social and @plutopress.bsky.social to arrive.

Frube in the shower Is there anything sweeter or more indulgent? 🍓

Yesterday me and some pals shot our first short film on an old Panasonic M10 VHS camera. It's a horror twist on the BBC culture series Arena - an interview with a fictional photographer who, we learn, has taken his work too far. "Warren Mann: The Dark Room" will be out some time next year.

Road trip from Oaxaca to CDMX

The only thing that can stop a bad guy with smart glasses is a good guy with anti-smart-glasses glasses

In December I'll be co-hosting a workshop entitled "Utopia, Dystopia and the Post-Capitalist State" with the wonderful people at @ucl-ccs.bsky.social. This is an open CFP, and we're keen to bring together researchers across multiple disciplines. For more information, drop me a message!

The GenAI ecosystem in two charts. The first covers its (circular) funding - what could possibly go wrong? 👀 The second addresses everything else: the footprint of physical infrastructure, resource use, human labour, etc. www.bloomberg.com/news/feature... www.cartography-of-generative-ai.net

Sam Altman last week: Unless we bring more AI-ready compute online, we might have to choose between curing cancer and free global education Sam Altman this week: We've launched an AI brainrot engine lol gizmodo.com/openai-offic...

As Mark Zuckerberg continues to humiliate himself trying to capture the AR and VR space, I figured it was worth taking the pulse of the "metaverse". tl;dr: It’s sub-par escapism for people experiencing a sub-par way of living—cyberpunk with the knobs turned down. gabrielburrow.com/2025/09/22/m...

The violent criminality...

Your dad doomscrolling LinkedIn at Glastonbury

Was great to catch up with Birkbeck colleagues at this year's CACC conference. So many cool projects underway (mushrooms, Cornish knockers, human compost, a breast cancer memoir, Silicon Valley theology, etc.) Being a humanities researcher in the UK often feels pretty bleak. But not yesterday!

Not many places would let me quote both Huey Newton and Marx www.currentaffairs.org/news/andor-s...

😞

🌌 Our latest issue of JOSF is LIVE 🌌 Lots of cool stuff in there, including an essay on science fictional librarians from fellow editor John J. Doherty. I didn't work on this one – getting stuck into our forthcoming VR special issue. Watch this (virtual) space. publish.lib.umd.edu/index.php/sc...

Best torso in the game.

"In the clown nursery it's always time to dance."

Looking forward to this! I'll be talking about the aesthetics of digital activism in contemporary science fiction.

My new book #MoreEverythingForever is out now in the UK too! If you're tired of Silicon Valley billionaires forcing their awful ideas on the rest of us, this one is for you. www.hachette.co.uk/titles/adam-...

Jordan from Rizzle Kicks and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. This is my Super Bowl.

Late to the party (I was rewatching S1) but the Andor 3-episode premiere ending with Mon Mothma drunkenly dancing to "Niamos!" is inspired. Go off, queen.

Gassed to be joining the Museum of Science Fiction's Journal of Science Fiction (try saying that five times fast) as an Editor. It's an open-access, peer-reviewed publication with an interdisciplinary approach to all things SF (books, games, film, oral history, and more). Right up my street.

UK launch for @koheisaito.bsky.social's Slow Down, hosted by @ariskomporozos.bsky.social & @ucl-ccs.bsky.social! A wide ranging conversation spanning the commons, planning, revolutionary reformism, and why you should collectively own forest with your mates.

Still recovering from last week's #BSLS2025 in Lancaster! So many great interdisciplinary panels and talks, spanning robots, clones, gene editing, astrology, etc. I presented a paper on SF models and the ways they're being instrumentalised as part of a session on New Narrative Structures.

Sydney Padua speaking wonderfully about play and creativity at #BSLS2025

THANKS, WENDY

Can't wait to acquire a luxury bunker of my very own. kck.st/4cjeV27

Like many people, the recent glut of Studio-Ghibli-styled AI images has left a bad taste in my mouth. My grandma (we called her “granarch” because she was 𝘢𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘤) wrote “Howl's Moving Castle”, which was adapted by Hayao Miyazaki into a film of the same name.

💥 New: Academic libraries cannot afford to carry on with transformative agreements 👩‍💻 @theblochian.bsky.social @ojcollective.bsky.social #AcademicSky #OpenAccess #ScholComm

OpenAI is using Studio Ghibli-style memes as an ad hoc promotional campaign for its new image generator—despite Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki's famous hatred of AI. Sam Altman made his X avatar a 'Ghiblified' portrait. Disgracing Miyazaki is part of the point: It's more proof to them tech has won.

The large kettle-like entity will return as Phillip Jeffries in Avengers: Doomsday

Am I not merciful?

“Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Researchers from @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social quote Tolstoy to explain how multi-agent LLM systems fail (as much as 75% of the time). Source: arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13657

Oops.

Back in 2023, I tried to test ChatGPT based on Marie-Laure Ryan's “Embedded Narratives and Tellability”(which features a fictional AI storyteller). I used Ryan's prompts, planning to analyse the output's tellability. It was pointless: ChatGPT just copied the stories from the original article.

"What is beautiful and moving about this story is its understanding of its lack of understanding. Its reflection on its limits." That's how Jeanette Winterson described a short piece of AI-produced metafiction shared by Sam Altman. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

It’s deeply frustrating how basic elements of the criminal justice system only become visible when they happen to an ‘acceptable’ person. Part of the operation of the carceral state is to reassure us that those experiencing state violence deserve it - a seemingly unshakeable belief for some

Anarcho capitalists like Thiel used to think floating cities were their best shot at this. They resorted to Rapture-lite imaginaries because the current level of state capture was unthinkable... But here we are.

Last week Sam Altman claimed that, in a decade’s time, “a single data center [will be] smarter than the current total intellectual capacity of earth.” There’s a lot to unpack there... Here’s what I made of it: gabrielburrow.com/2025/02/09/d...

I forgot how awful PS4 controllers were. History will damn them. Horizon: Zero Dawn has aged much better (or rather AAA games have barely progressed since 2017...)

New Mogwai album reminding me that vocoders are just wah-wah pedals for perverts.

Rough notes on an AI Carbon Multiplier: medium.com/@jolindsaywa...

No one else could dive the depths of inner space, and also find this much joy in two cookies and a coke. youtu.be/vUJTemgaqjI?...