A day we’ve all been waiting for – the incredible news that Egypt has pardoned Alaa Ab el-Fattah after many long years behind bars. Looking forward to hearing from his family that he’s walked out of prison a free man.

Alaa has been pardoned! Wonderful, wonderful news. Yet, it also brings to mind the tens of thousands of political prisoners who remain behind bars in Egypt under terrible conditions. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/w...

“If formal recognition becomes a substitute for defending the primacy of international law and addressing core realities of Palestinian suffering, it would be at best a hollow gesture—and at worst an epic misallocation of scarce international political capital.” sadat.umd.edu/sites/sadat....

BREAKING: Canada, the U.K. and Australia recognize a Palestinian state despite opposition from the U.S. and Israel.

UK officially recognises Palestine as a state

More stuff on the libertarianism decaying into "generalized corruption" take

For its 25th anniversary, iMAL Brussels asks, "Big Tech monoculture promotes consumerism while obfuscating its social and ecological impact. What does that mean for artists working with digital media ?" we-make-money-not-art.com/woven-antenn...

Look at academia giving me a little hope

We’re appealing this unprecedented ruling against our client, Mahmoud Khalil. The Trump administration is trying to use every baseless avenue they can think of to punish and deport Mahmoud for his protected speech, but we won’t back down.

Immigration Judge Jamee Comans has ordered Mahmoud Khalil to be deported to either Syria or Algeria, in a move seen widely as retaliation for Khalil's Palestine activism. mondoweiss.net/2025/09/immi...

if you read one thing today, make it this absolutely devastating piece from a fact-checker who quit the New Yorker bidoun.org/articles/hou...

you don’t understand bro, if we didn’t lie, no one would buy our product 😩

Discovering computer as an adult makes you go crazy. Discovering computer as a baby makes you go crazy. In all of human history, there will only ever be one generation to discover computer at the correct age: 13

An old school ransomware attack has a new twist: threatening to feed data to AI companies so it’ll be added to LLM datasets. 🔗 www.404media.co/hackers-thre...

"When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. We hand over our autonomy, at the very moment of emerging American fascism."

There are mercifully few overlaps between my current remit to study scams/fraud and my prior work studying extremism. Leave it to GiveSendGo to fill that gap, enabling one "Mike Smith" to solicit for a Kirk fundraiser from bustling "Singapore, IN" - a metro so busy it needs a 6 digit zip code

‘Another sleepless night’ in Gaza City as Israel intensifies assault, and Doha summit condemns Israel for Qatar strike

Until 1993, I felt everyone was living in the same epistemic house—which had 1 TV, and 1 library The internet was "there are tunnels under the house," and social media was "plus a whole civilization down there," but AI is "plus portals to other dimensions" and this house is now the Backrooms/SCP?

very clear that these ai enhance tools are a scourge

Please have a look at this petition, which is very important for me

On Lawfare Daily, @noupside.bsky.social, @laismartins.com, and @jgorgen.bsky.social discussed the intersection of tech policy and geopolitics unfolding in Brazil, the trial of fmr President Jair Bolsonaro, the legal battles surrounding social media regulation and platform liability, and more.

Sometimes the art market is an early indicator that the economy is going into recession (although I wonder how much of this particular crash is because of a closing of easy credit when interest rates rose?)

“In their latest biweekly survey of AI adoption, the US Census Bureau found evidence of an obvious drop-off in corporate AI use — the largest since the survey began in November of 2023.”

lalalala casadellago.unam.mx/nuevo/evento...

“by far the most likely outcome is for the tech to be used for massive enrichment and centralisation of power into an even smaller elite than before, with even more terrifying mechanisms of control at their disposal.”

on ai slop economies: “this instability creates space for what we might call ‘post-synthetic’ cultural organization…requires not a nostalgic return to pre-digital cultural forms, but practices adequate to our ecological and social moment.” @katecrawford.bsky.social www.e-flux.com/architecture...

This long read in The Verge does a remarkable job of describing how Wikipedia's editing community works, the project's strengths and weaknesses, and the threats it faces. www.theverge.com/cs/features/...

"There is a link between finance and paranoia, and that link may well be inescapable." www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?b...

This person is a charlatan. Why is there so much uncritical coverage of this obvious nonsense? Where is the actual journalism?

There’s infinite money to paper over dissent at institutions with AI and police powers, but no interest in programs that force hierarchical organizations to question their assumptions.

society has to do something about tech people

The leaked Gaza Riviera plan is more grotesque than you could ever have imagined.

It’s crazy that what comes after neoliberalism is just 19th century imperialism 2

⚠️ International Association of Genocide Scholars: "Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide” “Israel's policies and actions in Gaza constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity” genocidescholars.org/wp-content/u...

This is with my non law hat on and I know the legal difference btw data and work, but honestly how is it even that we individual nonprofit academics are being hassled for every image or quotation we even attribute and then this mass scraping can even be conceived as research exemption

I shouldn’t be surprised by it or judge it or whatever this reaction is, but it depresses me when I see artists paying to make their posts sponsored ads injected into my instagram feed. Self promotion is already embarrassing enough, and now I know you paid for the indignity too

Sometimes I think about this insane figure from a popular computer-science ethics textbook.

As the US considers acquiring agentic AI systems to produce AI-generated propaganda campaigns, @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social warned @sambiddle.com of @theintercept.com that these systems are easily compromised, threatening national security rather than protecting it: theintercept.com/2025/08/25/p...

We at Goldsmiths, in the @mediacomgold.bsky.social department, are looking for a talented Technical Tutor for Digital Media and Animation - please share or apply here! Come and work with us and our amazing students jobs.gold.ac.uk/vacancy/tech...

We built a calculator that doesn't work, but don't worry, it's also a plagiarism machine that will tell you to kill yourself. It runs on the world's oceans and costs 10 trillion dollars.

The fact that the thing we're calling artificial intelligence *can't do math* and yet we're jamming it into programs that successfully *have done math* for decades, then warning people against using the AI to do math, seems like an excellent summary of where we are.

"Everywhere, the bureaucratic logic of organisations merges with the calculative logic of machines, feeding on data emitted by ever-smaller and more powerful devices that ended up first in the homes, then on the laps, and then in the hands of billions of individuals." —Marion Fourcade, @kjhealy.co

As Israel intensifies its assault, 'famine will be declared in Gaza City for first time by the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) – a globally recognized system for classifying the severity of food insecurity and malnutrition.' www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2...