NEW: ICE has hired the infamous for-profit prison company GEO Group to help its immigrant bounty hunter program. GEO Group now stands to make money both tracking down immigrants and imprisoning them. theintercept.com/2025/12/19/i...

It was a pleasure to go on This Is Hell! this year and talk about the longtime influence of right-wing ideas in Silicon Valley

NEW FREE "BEST OF 2025" EP! The 'Hellidaze' continues! In February, @beccalew.bsky.social spoke with us about her article at the @theguardian.com, “‘Headed for technofascism’: the rightwing roots of Silicon Valley." Join to keep us free! Here's our conversation: www.patreon.com/posts/best-o...

Bill Gates and Sergey Brin among newly released Epstein photos ft.trib.al/SdFHK35

David Brooks, who wrote in the NYT last month, "The Epstein Story? Count Me Out" is... in the latest Epstein photo dump published by @oversightdemocrats.house.gov. He should absolutely be fired by NYT for this. Major conflict of interest that he didn't disclose.

In 2022, I taught a class called “History of YouTube,” which helped students think critically about digital platforms. I showed them this video to teach them about early virality and copyright debates, thinking it would get a few chuckles. Instead, the entire class was stone-faced and silent.

All the centers they’re cutting add up to less than $7 million in spending. UNC athletics budget is $185.4 million for the 2025-26 fiscal year.

yes! i am a bit of a broken record on this but among elite male commentators there is such obvious gender anxiety

What a time to decide to learn less about the world. dailytarheel.com/article/univ...

One thing I haven't seen discussed in this wave of discourse is that the contraction of higher ed and the media is not only a byproduct of neoliberalism. it's also the direct result of attacks from those who believed these spaces had become too "feminized"

this is so fucking grim

Increasingly, I've been interested in understanding the ideas and beliefs that have shaped Silicon Valley and its technologies. "Engagement" is one of them. Far from merely a base economic impulse, the concept did--and continues to do--important ideological work for the high-tech industry

Hardest thing about travel is deciding which books to pack

New article out from me and Angèle Christin in the Annals of the AAPSS! In "The Politics of Engagement in Platform Governance," we unpack and historicize the concept of "social media engagement," an idea that has dominated debate over platform politics in recent years. doi.org/10.1177/0002...

Last week, the New School issued voluntary separation & early retirement offers to 40% of the full-time faculty & the majority of non-union staff. These cuts to the bone are an ideological attempt to decimate historic spaces of critical inquiry & social justice. Share our statement tr.ee/qQBIDCpIuj

Skill issue

Truly no one else is doing it like @404media.co www.instagram.com/p/DSArC44Eug...

imho, "data colonialism" is ultimately a much stronger conceptual framework than "surveillance capitalism" for understanding contemporary tech, and it truly is a shame it's gotten only a fraction of the public attention

“School officials have created a Microsoft Copilot prompt to review course descriptions with an eye toward avoiding ‘advocacy-oriented or prescriptive terms.’” Terms: “dismantling, decolonizing, interrogating, challenging, centering, combating, liberation, resistance, activism, justice oriented”

Seems extra relevant after today’s news

Truly like clockwork, the minute I have a deadline crop up is when I start posting again

That in itself is a carefully curated performance. They are extremely bothered but it manifests in a show of being too “visionary” for common concerns like fashion

It’s almost impressive how many truly despicable people the @nytimes.com dealbook summit managed to assemble: Blackrock CEO Larry Fink; Palantir CEO Alex Karp; Benjamin Netanyahu; MrBeast; and, of course, Erika Kirk www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/b...

I cannot stress enough how much I love borrowing DVDs from the public library www.404media.co/the-last-vid...

For all of Silicon Valley’s claims to be creating the future, it’s always striking to me that one of their biggest animating fantasies — the exploration of space — is a dream they’re holding onto from the mid-twentieth century

They should invent a university that prioritizes teaching and research

Ask yourself why there wasn’t this level of wall to wall coverage for this shooting wgme.com/news/local/i...

In this drought of academic job postings, here's an amazing position for junior faculty in AI Policy and Media at Northeastern. Come join the intellectual community in Boston!!! northeastern.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/careers/job/...

Google defaulting all Gmail users to a setting that enables Google to harvest all your emails into chatbot training is straight-up evil and invasive. www.huffpost.com/entry/opt-ou...

A significant number of Congressmen and their staffs have been identified as having friendly relations with a straight up neo-Nazi outfit called the Liberty Lobby, run by a man named Willis Carto who has busts of Hitler in his office. Strangely, it seems few are all that concerned. The year is 1967.

While some elements of AI are genuinely new, the harms it enables are evolutions of those we have seen before, writes Sarah Barrington. It is time to recognize the myth of the “unprecedented” and hold tech accountable, she says.

davekarpf.substack.com/p/every-gene... This by @davekarpf.bsky.social is very, _very_ good. Much traditional media is badly geared to understand movement politics, and often, it helps to actually know stuff!

I spoke to CNN about how demoralizing it was to watch Stanford leadership stay silent while contrarians on campus launched unscientific attacks to stifle Stanford researchers. Now, those attacks have gone nationwide and much of MAHA leadership have ties to Stanford. www.cnn.com/2025/11/08/p...

thank you for the outpouring of support! those of us laid off from Teen Vogue yesterday are now sharing our GoFundMe to help us cover our emergency expenses now that we've lost our incomes, as we get back on our feet.

"Many of the deals OpenAI has struck — with chipmakers, cloud computing companies and others — are strangely circular. OpenAI receives billions from tech companies before sending those billions back to the same companies to pay for computing power and other services." www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Lewis brilliantly takes us through the building of this conservative network -- biiig woof to this particular slide from me :

@beccalew.bsky.social talks for a bit about the promise of the Microchip — I think the subtext here (the one I'm thinking about anyhow) is the parallel between the "promise of the Microchip" and the "promise of AI"

Extremely disturbing developments here www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

So excited about the upcoming release of Equator! "We began to imagine a new cultural venture, one that rejects the nihilistic idea that the powerful do what they please, and success is the only measure of moral virtue."

““They dragged little Greta [Thunberg] by her hair before our eyes, beat her, and forced her to kiss the Israeli flag. They did everything imaginable to her, as a warning to others,” the Turkish activist ErsinÇelik, a participant in the Sumud flotilla, told Anadolu news agency.”+

New from 404 Media: ICE to buy tool that tracks locations of hundreds of millions of phones every day. Billions of pieces of location data. ICE previously stopped using data remotely harvested from smartphones. Now it's buying it again. Usually used w/o warrant www.404media.co/ice-to-buy-t...

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it). But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

Does anyone have any good recs on literature about the rise of celebrity CEOs as a cultural and/or economic phenomenon?

A cool CFP for academics studying podcasting! criesandwhispers2026.wordpress.com

Powerful analysis by @beccalew.bsky.social in @theguardian.com what looks like a recent backlash against diversity on digital platforms is in fact rooted in the 1990s, when masculinity, entrepreneurship & deregulation fused into a high-tech civilizational project www.theguardian.com/technology/n...

On this week's @onthemedia.bsky.social: @micahloewinger.bsky.social asking @beccalew.bsky.social about some of silicon valley's technocratic right-wing roots; Buckley and George Gilder to Marc Andreesen, Futurism to Fascism. You might already know it, but i guarantee you know somebody who doesn't.

Hi hello @onthemedia.bsky.social is rerunning some interviews I did. One with @beccalew.bsky.social and another with Bluesky CEO @jay.bsky.team. The episode also features @mmasnick.bsky.social, and @mollyfication.bsky.social’s excellent interview with @amandahess.bsky.social. Great show! Listen:

@beccalew.bsky.social sempre no ponto