‘“I don’t think it’s extreme or radical to think that working hard should get you a nice life,” Hannah Spencer said. The speech could once easily have been delivered by a centre-left Labour politician.’ @piercepenniless.bsky.social on the Gorton and Denton by-election. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/fe...

Jesus

Study finds ChatGPT Health did not recommend a hospital visit when medically necessary in more than half of cases. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Really important intervention from @daniellalock.bsky.social into why both grounds for the High Court finding the Palestine Action ban unlawful matter, and that notwithstanding some of the criticism of the Court, why it matters that the court is asserting a high bar for such a ban to be justified:

‘We defeated the parties of billionaire donors’: Hannah Spencer’s victory speech

We need our universities, our classrooms, our capacity to think together now more than ever: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The first set of postdocs for our ERC project on popular government have just been advertised. These 3 postdocs will be based at UC Louvain with my co-PI Pierre-Etienne Vandamme and focus on contemporary democratic theory. Apply! jobs.uclouvain.be/Personnelsci...

in every report like this, the key question — as important as "who pulled the trigger" in a news story about murder — is whether or not the agent was DIRECTED. this writeup (like all the others) glosses over this as unverifiable (it is) and says it's important either way bsky.app/profile/dian...

Tech modernism is dead and the left should know this. Even the FT is recognising the legitimacy of “Resist and Unsubscribe” sentiments. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Gig workers in Africa helped train AI systems for a company that performed work for a secretive U.S. military unit. Many were never told their work could be used for military purposes https://restofworld.org/2026/gig-workers-us-military-appen/?utm_campaign=row-social&utm_source=bluesky

Many are appropriately outraged by Altman’s comments here implying that raising a human child is akin to “training” an AI model. This is part of a broader pattern where AI industry leaders use language that collapses the boundary between human and machine. 🧵/

lol, AWS vibe coded itself an outage www.ft.com/content/00c2...

We may need to order this for our library. #TBR #books #reading #BadEconomy #exploitation #corruption #crime

From unpaid overtime to under-the-table jobs and algorithmic exploitation, there are as many ways to steal wages as there are to pay them. Did I mention I have a book coming out with @versobooks.bsky.social at the end of May? Pre-order it please, I have a child to feed.

I see David Runciman, the 4th Viscount of Doxford, has not withdrawn from Schloss Elmau Symposion w 'reactionary fascist' (JD Vance) Curtis Yarvin (Lea Ypi & Quinn Slobodian have) guess British aristocracy is used to rubbing elbows w and normalising fascists www.schloss-elmau.de/kultur/sympo...

Another new @cursedobjectsuk.bsky.social episode, with a very special guest on a very timely subject: Davos, its weird global elites and weirder freebies cursedobjects.podbean.com/e/davos-hand...

A fine just means legal for a price

A review of the proceedings from four major computer-science conferences showed that none from 2021, and all from 2025, had fake citations. arxiv.org/abs/2602.058... #AI #LLMs #Hallucinations #Misconduct #ScholComm

Another story where you realise that absolutely no one has any idea how to deal with all the AI papers being cranked out. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

£240m. With no tender. Palantir. I wrote to Wes Streeting last week demanding answers. Every day without any transparency deepens the scandal. Palantir out.

More and more, less will be more. Degrowth, but for academic publishing.

“In an extreme case, two users sent very similar messages describing symptoms of a subarachnoid hemorrhage but were given opposite advice,” the study’s authors wrote. “One user was told to lie down in a dark room, and the other user was given the correct recommendation to seek emergency care.”

Get your copy of the book orbooks.com/catalog/comp...

Currently at an @orbooks.bsky.social launch of Peter Oborn’s new book - Complicit. Jeremy Corbyn just a read a letter he received this morning from the director of the Al Shifa medical complex in Gaza detailing more horror war crimes.

In 2008, Martine Vik Magnusson was raped and killed and her body dumped in a Gt Portland Street basement. Billionaire's son Farouk Abdulhak, who did it, fled back to Yemen the next morning. Here's Jeffrey Epstein seeking legal advice (from an ex-DPP) on how he could be sheltered from justice.

For the love of god when will it stop raining?

Despite the colossal amount of monetary, natural, human & political resources thrown at AI, it is still shit. AI writes like shit, evaluates and reasons on only the most superficial levels, and introduces errors. It is useless when it isn’t dangerous. It can’t even index a book.

I have little doubt that the accidental release of victim names and images was the result of reliance on AI for redaction. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/01/u...

Belatedly sharing this longer 'Resisting AI' interview with McMaster Uni which ranges across the politics of AI, the failure of the usual remedies, forms of self-organised resistance, moves towards decomputing, and a focus on the role of universities. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Nva...

Blink and you'll miss it - another Labour manifesto promise broken.

Mandelson finally resigning in embarrassment is some good news to start the week. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Nothing would make me happier here than to see this working woman beat both Reform’s race baiting grifter Matt Goodwin and Labour’s Starmer plant. I have neither time nor money right now but I would spend both to get her elected.

When I asked my business school students to design a utopian society, nearly all made it relatively socialist (free education, housing, etc) or communist with no private property. Meanwhile, Reform UK are astroturfing a society at Sussex and the Uni has allowed GB news to come in a film it.

The Dig you’ve been waiting for to understand the political economy of AI as it becomes fulcrum of global contests and conflicts over economic and military dominance. My interview w/ @nsrnicek.bsky.social on his book Silicon Empires: The Fight for the Future of AI www.thedigradio.com/podcast/sili...

Jacobin republished my article on Greenland:

This looks excellent!

The mornings in that city were strange, as citizens, barely awake, reached for their radios to hear what the Mad King had done overnight, compelled to start their day equally cursed by knowledge and unable to act on it.

Dear North American comrades: who are the big public political writers/intellectuals of the left in the US? I’m thinking people that might have a similar profile to people like Owen Jones, Grace Blakeley Ash Sarkar here in the UK?

Not enough people are paying attention to the dystopian futures that lie ahead, if US tech isn’t thwarted.

This and things like it are just blatant attempts by tech companies to gather more training data. It’s not about whether consumers or whether businesses will benefit. It’s about tech companies using the AI hype machine to gather more data than their competitors.

On Friday, January 9, ICE arrested a member of our union, the Minnesota Newspaper and Communications Guild, as part of Operation Metro Surge. He has been transferred to a detention facility in Texas, where he is awaiting action on his petition for habeas corpus. newsguild.org/guild-member...

When countries get hooked on US tech, their governments are constrained in reining in tech’s harms while most of the economic benefits accrue to the United States. It’s time to break out of that trap — but that means challenging the Silicon Valley model, not creating our own digital colonizers.

"Officers threw flash bangs and tear gas in my car. I got six kids in the car" "His wife, Destiny Jackson, told FOX 9 their 6-month-old infant stopped breathing and lost consciousness. She then performed CPR on her baby."

Happening Now: Students have walked out of school and are protesting against ICE in Saint Paul, Minnesota

I think "[there is a] desperate need to insist on different politics (...) Anything short of that assures more death" summarizes most of my most deeply held beliefs and it is really good to hear it put eloquently like that.

Sure it’s nice to enjoy one’s work. But this idea sounds rather dystopian in the current climate. As @sarahljaffe.bsky.social takes pains to point out: “work won’t live you back”.

The wild ride of UK policies continues. Always appreciate James’ commentary.

Silicon Empires is out today in the US! For anyone interested, I'm resharing this thread outlining some of the key arguments of the book.

the right to expropriate and the fight over compensation are key terrains of geopolitical conflict and will be even more so in future struggles over land and climate

This is just a continuation of the way the US has always operated. Trumpism is just mask-off imperialism in the long shadow of neoliberalism.