do what @onthemedia.bsky.social says, please and thank you; information pollution has real effects

Stuart Hall in the 80s, sounding familiar

I'm going to turn this into an archive of era-defining terms, starting with: "the bleach community"

The challenge, I guess, is to be just deluded enough to be able to keep going without retreating into full individualistic denial of horror

AI worship feels a little too on the nose vis-a-vis reification

"Men with good or bad intentions enter into structures they have not revolutionized—and are tamed by them. They take over the structures of exploitation and power: they internalize the beliefs, the justifications, the rationalizations, the motivations of power and privilege..."

crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their consultants

i probably would be more sympathetic than the average bsky user to the idea that there's a time and place for totally unrestricted intellectual inquiry, to let ideas go wherever inferences might take us. but anyone who thinks that that time and place is the front page of the newspaper is delusional

reveal the random phrase that runs through your head regularly

while plenty of them clearly do not believe me, I enjoy telling students that using ChatGPT in research is a mistake

the no-post post

Chronological feeds privilege posting volume, so rather than screaming loudly to get attention, you have just keep screaming at a moderate volume for a long time

Put differently, if concept creep and debasement is inevitable, I wonder what "rebasement" practices would look like?

Latour has that article "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?" and I think in an era of "do your own research," we can now firmly ask "Why Has 'Critical Thinking' Run Out of Steam?"

I mean...

microblogging that should've been macroblogging

this led me to think about public history and the importance of the radical archive, but before that I had to pick my face up off the floor please make sure you keep watching past 4:18 too

barbecue

pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will -- it still lands

make sure you spell "fascist" correctly

@bigmolly.bsky.social "raw water" has leveled up to "no water"

Every time you see what sounds like a wild claim about woke research, you can assume a) it will fall apart under the most basic of inspection, b) the person making the claim will never be held accountable for lying, and c) it is a cover to gut useful research that we benefit from.

I don't really use the term "propaganda" lightly, but I think we should outline what's happening at the White House and elsewhere: the rise of a new state media. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

This. I'm not defending Musk's intelligence (which is hugely overblown), but we must understand that he doesn't believe the things he says. His statements do not reflect his *analysis* or actual understanding of anything. He doesn't want to weaponize facts; he wants to make them irrelevant.

Elon and Thiel and Vance and the other SV bros have jock software running on dork hardware. They can’t stop competing even when they’ve won. Their brainpower got them this far; shouldn’t that be infinitely transferable to any situation, any sphere?

saving to return to later / exhibit A if anyone thinks social media shouldn't be a part of the scholarly ecosystem

Roy De Forest, Country Dog Gentlemen, 1972

Very lucid thread here re: the administrative coup

I didn't anticipate the ways that cultivating an anti-conspiracy-theory mindset would make it challenging to adequately process current events

my best posts in previous social media were sentence fragments

I'm continuing to work on making a comprehensive mapping of the media ecosystem, but I'm also still thinking about how hot dogs, soft pretzels, and other stadium food should not be allowed at rock shows because I believe they impede musical transcendence

I know Seeing Like a State is the one that gets the most attention now, but this one has always been the most fun monoskop.org/images/0/0f/...

I said it as a joke but now I'm seriously considering writing a poem called My Propaganda Essay

Useful thread for conceptual frameworks and a look at practical opposition

There's a species of post that I write that I didn't realize until now is in the cadence of Jenny Holzer

Teaching logos/ethos/pathos starting in 1st grade wouldn't save us but it wouldn't be the worst

This thread does a better job of saying what I was trying to say in the previous post + additional useful things

It's not that the salute and the intention behind it (or lack thereof) don't matter, but perhaps its most important effect is as disorienting propaganda. There'll be debate and outrage and fear, but what it leads to is emotional exhaustion, and to exhaust is the ultimate goal. This isn't a new...

still lands

I was deeply annoyed by folks laughing at the "wrong" times at Nosferatu, but I was also deeply annoyed by my own policing of "high art." Because Nosferatu *is* camp, and I get why people would laugh at those parts, but I also wonder...

The "Was the firefighting budget cut or not" discourse here is a good example of "flooding the zone" dynamics in action. This is an important question to sort out, clearly, but the speed at which contradictory information goes back and forth, 1/2

"big, if true" -- more like "true, if big" amirite

A dashed off thought: we know that academic librarians' precarious relationship to their institutions is part of what feeds the continued use of "we teach information literacy" as a justification for our continued existence, but then we buy into our own propaganda 1/2

@bigmolly.bsky.social ...

I used to view social media as a kind of textual art project to fill with fragments and half thoughts but now am kind of pleased at the way my mind tends to resist creating consumable content, to the point where I almost erased this too

wherein I baptize this account