Today's events with Practitioner in Residence Dr. Katherine Guinness: (all times GMT-7) 11 AM - Making Music For and With Ghosts (Twitch) 5 - 8 PM: Live-stream Séance (on Twitch and in-person!) 8 PM: Ghost Hunting Live at MAL (on Twitch and in-person!) twitch.tv/mediaarchaeology

We have 2 more Twitch streams with Practitioner in Residence Dr. Katherine Guinness today! First up, Ghost Tech Talk with Two Ians at 2PM Followed by the Ghost Help Hotline at 4PM (both GMT-7) Join us if you can! www. twitch.tv/mediaarchaeology

Katherine will go live again next tomorrow (Wednesday, March 4) at 2pm for Tech Time with Ian McDermott and again at 4pm for the Ghost Help Hotline. twitch.tv/mediaarchaeology

Our next livestream with Katherine will be today at 2PM - Dream Incubation Practice (Creating our Ghost Bodies)

Now, if you DO want a more academic evaluation of the book, here's a great review of it in @ijoc-usc.bsky.social by Oscar Gómez Pascual, who I feel really gets what the book is going for!

It genuinely surprises me when there's some reference to the Influencer Factory out there from actual influencers and content creators - but here it is, discussed at length in a video essay by the Ashley Embers!

The lowest share of Americans ever view capitalism positively and big business rates even worse in new Gallup data released today.

THERE IS STILL TIME TO ENJOY SUP'S SUMMER SALE! Take advantage of 50% off of all in-stock print and ebooks sitewide* now through Monday, 9/8. Whether by the pool or in the shade, we'd love to be your last summer read. www.sup.org/about-our-en...

You can pick up "The Influencer Factory" for just $14! A book novelist and media strategist Andrew Ladd has said, "I feel like this is how nineteenth century proletarians must have felt reading Marx"! (And our book seems to be more popular among actual influencers than the academics who study them!)

WE'RE HAVING AN END OF SUMMER SALE! The weather may be cooling, but SUP's end of summer sale is hot! Take advantage of 50% off of all in-stock print and ebooks sitewide starting today, 8/25, through 9/8. #ReadUP www.sup.org/about-our-en...

Every single one of mine is in there, as well!

I got a flu booster today and it made me reflect on the sense of national accomplishment I felt when I drove to a public facility, waited in my car until my number was called on an app, and got my first covid jab. It's fucked the right gets to erase what a moment of technological liberation that was

Joseph Weizenbaum in 1975: "The very asking of the question, 'What does a judge (or psychiatrist) know that we cannot tell a computer?' is a monstrous obscenity. That it has to be put into print at all, even for the purpose of exposing its morbidity, is a sign of the madness of our times." #ai

In case anyone happens to be in Korea next weekend, I'm going to be presenting at the Nam June Paik Art Center's "48-hour NJP School" on the 19th - the entire event looks exceptionally cool, and I'm very excited to be part of it! njpart.ggcf.kr/events/250

We have an amazing sale going on at the University of Minnesota Press this week... stock on summer reading with $10 paperbacks presswide when you buy 3 or more and use checkout code MN93820! Wondering where to start? Check out this 🧵 for some starter packs to unlock $10 books:

Finally, a Holy War I can join

Every future imagined by a tech company is worse than the previous iteration.

It seems the best responses to The Influencer Factory so far have come from people who either are influencers themselves or are really invested in influencers, and not even remotely academic, which is genuinely shocking to me.

Just got in the mail today the absolutely gorgeous Korean translation of Materialist Media Theory! Thanks to Sungyong Ahn for sending it along!

New in Social Media + Society ⬇️⬇️⬇️ Bollmer, G., & Tillerson, B. (2025). Platform Fandom: Weverse and the Technological Domestication of Fan Community #FanStudies journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

It’s day 2 in the book exhibit at #SCMS25 #SCMS2025! Stop by and see us @uminnpress.bsky.social or check out our online exhibit at www.upress.umn.edu/scms25/ for 30% off!

Checked out the #scms25 book room - you can pick up The Affect Lab from @uminnpress.bsky.social but The Influencer Factory has already been accounted for! @stanfordpress.bsky.social

Perhaps you don't want to hear anything about the American tech industry and Silicon Valley--well, can I interest you in this brand new article which I coauthored with a former undergrad student at NC State, on the Korean media platform Weverse and the political economy of K-pop fandom!

If you're at #SCMS25 and want to hear some papers about how terrible the tech industry is, how it's going to destroy the world, etc. etc., then head over to the Fairmont Crystal room today at 2:15!

What people in every part of higher education need to understand is that Republicans now want to do to universities what they’ve tried to do to labor unions: erase them from the institutional landscape. The question is how much you want to collaborate in your own destruction.

“The scariest words in the English language are ‘I’m from the private sector and I’m here to maximize efficiency.’”

And a few College Art Association authors have already stopped by our booth! Below are Grant Bollmer and Katherine Guinness with their @stanfordpress.bsky.social book, Influencer Factory, followed by Serena Keshavjee and her University of Manitoba Press book, The Art of Ectoplasm. #CAA2025

"If you want a labor force, a regulatory bureaucracy, or accountability to disappear, you simply say, 'AI can do it.' Then, the conversation shifts from explaining why these things should or should not go away to questions about how AI would work in their place." - @eryk.bsky.social

Endowment tax + slashing overhead on federal grants is designed to cripple the university. This weakened university is going to be even more susceptible to the efficiency claims of genAI. All of these moves further concentrate wealth and power in the private sector. Don't capitulate in advance.

That’s quite the opener from Marina Hyde www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

it's not hyperbolic to say we're witnessing a coup.

this is completely insane. like, literally insane. that water is supposed to be stored for the summer.

This should be 25th amendment level conduct. The president ordered water to be released from a random dam in California nowhere near the wildfires and then claimed it would help. That’s literally Mad King behavior.

➡️ January 20: FAA director fired ➡️ January 21: Air Traffic Controller hiring frozen ➡️ January 22: Aviation Safety Advisory Committee disbanded ➡️ January 28: Buyout/retirement demand sent to existing employees ➡️ January 29: First American mid-air collision in 16 years Making America Great Again!

Today’s though: big tech is enabling Trumpism. Trumpism wants to destroy the university. Higher ed should therefore perform our own ‘pause’ on tech partnerships. No ethical university should continue their investment in commercial genAI companies.

👀 Robert Cluely's review of The Influencer Factory: A Marxist Theory of Corporate Personhood on YouTube by Grant Bollmer and Katherine Guinness www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

2025's hottest game is, once again, Who Goes Nazi it's a lot of people harpers.org/archive/1941...

I have taken the resources that were in the budget and which you were probably saving for higher education Forgive me they were needed to feed the AI bubble and to dismantle the humanities

A frustrated letter from the Library of Congress asking Norbert Weiner what section of a library his book is supposed to be in (1949).

This book is amazing www.sup.org/books/media-...

New from me: Two influencers make very similar content promoting Amazon products. They dress the same. They buy the same stuff. They even have a similar tattoo. Now one is suing the other, claiming her rival won't stop copying her. But who influenced whom? www.theverge.com/2024/11/26/2...

Agree very much with this from @davekarpf.bsky.social davekarpf.substack.com/p/what-the-f...

i think that the people interested in recriminations and score settling right now aren’t seriously grappling with the magnitude of what happened and the implications for the rest of our lives. most of us will probably die living in the political order that will emerge out of this election.

Today is publication day for my book DIGITAL VICTORIANS, part of @stanfordpress.bsky.social 's excellent series in Text Technologies www.sup.org/books/litera... (use code FYFE20 for a discount!)

Katherine and I were on a podcast to talk about The Influencer Factory! It's named "Policy Prompt," which is pretty new and is run by the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Canada. Listen here:

This would be a great time to pick up The Influencer Factory, for just $14! sup.org/books/title/...

"AI is not a product; it is propaganda meant to degrade labor, steal intellectual property, destabilize facts, discredit government institutions and regulatory agencies, destroy the environment, and corrode democratic society."

You want to complain about technology and the internet for fucking up students' attention spans? How about you aim that blame in the direction of admin who blow stacks of money on ed tech so they can mandate we softwarify every Goddamn thing we do?

Influencers are more than social media personalities who attract attention for brands, argue Grant Bollmer & Katherine Guinness. Demonstrating the reality of producing the self as a commodity, The Influencer Factory contributes to our understanding of economic life www.sup.org/books/title/...

Super happy and excited to announce the publication this week of The Influencer Factory, which I wrote with Katherine Guinness - in which we provide what may be the first discussion of what MrBeast tells us about global capitalist infrastructures, among many other things! @stanfordpress.bsky.social