danny

The international news story about the Dutch elections is sadly misleading: fewer votes were cast for leftwing parties, while the far right remained stable. And Geert Wilders may yet come out on top.

Large Language Muddle | The Editors The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the ...

Great essay, and great rebuttal of that tired 'but it's already being used' argument: "The simplest reason to refuse resignation is that resignation can only harmonize with the tech-industry narrative of AI inevitability. When we give in, we join the sales force." www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...

Large Language Muddle | The Editors The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the ...

YES! THIS on GenAI!

Please read this absolutely splendid piece of writing that had me cheering, a little bit weepy, and writing in the margins:

"An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny."

Assata Shakur, political activist and ex-Black Liberation Army member, has died Assata Shakur “died in Havana, Cuba, as a result of health conditions and her advanced age,” according to Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Assata Shakur has "died in Havana, Cuba, as a result of health conditions and her advanced age."

She was 78.

“What our ruling class has decided will be normal”: On how a digitized visual economy constructs, enables, and contests the Gaza genocide - Danny Steur, Jeroen Oomen, 2025 Images of the Gaza genocide spread rapidly through the communication networks that pervade our mediatized social world. Watching this atrocity unfold has been a...

In this piece, I try to make sense of this global experience of watching a massacre unfold, and trace the social construction of a genocide that is publicly recognized but continues apace with the active support of our increasingly authoritarian ruling class. doi.org/10.1177/2976....

“What our ruling class has decided will be normal”: On how a digitized visual economy constructs, enables, and contests the Gaza genocide - Danny Steur, Jeroen Oomen, 2025 Images of the Gaza genocide spread rapidly through the communication networks that pervade our mediatized social world. Watching this atrocity unfold has been a...

New publication! On the digitized visual economy of the Gaza genocide - if your social media feed's anything like mine, you've been awash in images of atrocities committed by the Israeli occupation forces. Here's an attempt to trace this livestreamed genocide and its social responses. 🇵🇸

AI impoverishes us at every step of the process: - data centers pollute our environment - energy use drives up costs - content theft robs creators of income - the actual output is used to displace workers and depress wages - using it harms our mental health and impairs our competence - the flood of AI slop is damaging our sociopolitical landscape All in service of making a worse product - and world - to enrich a handful of already spectacularly wealthy people

While defending the luddite argument in Discord, I stumbled into this IMO succinct explanation for opposing generative AI:

At every step in the process, it impoverishes us.

Barely an hour ago, Palestinian journalist Anas Al-Sharif warned us all:

“If this madness doesn’t end, Gaza will be reduced to ruins, its people’s voices silenced, their faces erased — and history will remember you as silent witnesses to a genocide you chose not to stop.”

Israel just killed him.

Generative AI by definition is conformity. It is an averaging of anything you ask of it - quite literally guessing what the most likely version of a thing might be. It is, by definition, mainstream, as is everything it creates old and deeply ideological, as every model trains on similar data.

Sale of the Amsterdam University Press (AUP) film, media and communication list to Taylor & Francis – Resignation of series editors and editorial board members It is with great dismay that we, the undersigned, learned that the film, media and communication list of Amsterdam University Press (AUP) has been taken over by Taylor & Francis, a subsidiary of Infor...

The time has come to reinvent academic publishing. Over the last years conglomerates have bought up once respectable publishers and turned them into rent extraction machines, generating obscene profits from tax-payer funded research and unremunerated academic labor./
mediastudies.hypotheses.org/6850

All the dire implications notwithstanding it is hilarious how evil this technology is. Billions of dollars spent on this greasy lying stupid thing that was literally built to replace people, and everyone that uses it gets weaker, lazier, dumber, and sadder for having done so. Well done all around.

AI is perfect tech for 21st-century capitalism: almost no legitimate use cases, unhelpful even when there is a use case, causes cognitive disability and emotional distress in users, destroys privacy, exploits labor, harvests data, disastrous for the environment, unprofitable – and totally ubiquitous

Freedom Within the Limits of Nature - Center for Post-Kantian Philosophy Talk by Kohei Saito, followed by a discussion with Rahel Jaeggi, and Thomas Khurana

Is Marx a degrowth communist and does he advance a conception of "ecological freedom"? The video of Kohei Saito's talk and the conversation w/ Rahel Jaeggi and Thomas Khurana at Volksbühne is online: cpkp.net/event/freedo...
@ktbberlin.bsky.social @cominsitu.bsky.social @tbheinze.bsky.social

🚨NEW ARTICLE🚨
How does ecological stuff become economic value? I survey various approaches to the question--environmental and ecological economics, ecofeminist Marxism and value-form theory--in order to sharpen the question and formulate the eco-Marxist problematic.
muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/artic...

WeTransfer just changed their TOS giving themselves permission to train AI on any content you transfer and produce derivative works based on content you transfer that they are allowed to monetize and you are not allowed payment for.

Stop using WeTransfer.

A Borges story about a guy who gets AI to summarize all the world’s information for him, and then summarize the summary, until the AI has the whole world summarized into a single word. He sits alone at his desk, staring at the word, repeating it endlessly, certain he is experiencing everything

Riot. Strike. Riot Baltimore. Ferguson. Tottenham. Clichy-sous-Bois. Oakland. Ours has become an “age of riots” as the struggle of people versus state and capital has taken to the streets. Award-winning poet and scholar...

In solidarity with the movement in Los Angeles and elsewhere across the US, we've made Joshua Clover's Riot. Strike. Riot free to download.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich: We are destroying everything that remains in Gaza, the world isn't stopping us.

People who are still shouting that Israel is not committing genocide must be clapping their hands over their ears every time an Israeli minister steps onto a podium because

It is, sadly, necessary to reiterate our plea as workers in Dutch higher education to our institutions: cut ties with genocide, and keep cops off our campuses. If you're in Dutch higher ed, please consider signing the letter below! And as always, Free Palestine 🇵🇸

openletter.earth/nederlandse-...

I’ve found it’s more visually appealing to just paste in his head at the inflection points

GOP congressman James Gallagher of Yuba City, California, introduced H.R. 22 to the California legislature on March 12. The bill calls for the dismissal of University of California, Davis, professor Joshua Clover over several remarks he made about killing police officers several years ago. Clover made multiple anti-police comments on Twitter and to local publications, including how he's "thankful that every living cop will one day be dead." The professor stood by his remarks after they were unearthed last month, but the university issued a statement condemning his statements and noted the January shooting death of a young officer in downtown Davis.

Clover has repeatedly declined opportunities to offer an apology for his comments, telling Newsweek in an email statement Thursday, "On the day that police have as much to fear from literature professors as Black kids do from police, I will definitely have a statement. Until then I have nothing further to add."

"On the day that police have as much to fear from literature professors as Black kids do from police, I will definitely have a statement. Until then I have nothing further to add."

RIP Joshua Clover, 👑

www.newsweek.com/uc-davis-cal...

Nu het Maagdenhuis is bezet moeten universiteiten ingaan op de terechte eisen van hun studenten in plaats van hen opnieuw door de politie in elkaar te laten slaan, betoogt hoogleraar Yolande Jansen.

rightsforum.org/opinie/open-...

A page of text describing fascism, highlighting sentences about fascism organizing proletarian masses, denying them rights, and providing a chance to express themselves, while discussing property rights and aesthetics in political life.

Walter Benjamin writing about fascism in 1936

"Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves."

Basically, the far right accurately identified the weak point in liberal democracy: mainstream media institutions that were collapsing and therefore easy to purchase or pressure, combined with a public that got most of its information from an almost totally unstructured info ecosystem.

Workers Organizing Workers w/ Eric Blanc Featuring Eric Blanc on We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. Interview conducted by guest host Gabriel Winant.

Rebuilding a powerful labor movement is THE key to defeating Trumpism & the billionaires

Had a great conversation about the stakes & potential of widescale worker-to-worker organizing with @gabrielwinant.bsky.social on the new episode of @thedigradio.bsky.social

thedigradio.com/podcast/work...

I spent more than a year working on this SEP entry on ideology, and I actually think it is some of the best work I've ever done.

There are three parts of it that I am especially happy with:

plato.stanford.edu/entries/ideo...

Does Marx have a method? - Gillian Rose, 2025 This previously unpublished lecture was delivered by Gillian Rose in 1987 at the University of Sussex, as part of a multi-lecturer series called Sociological Th...

Gillian Rose's 1987 lecture at the University of Sussex has now been published in Thesis Eleven. In it, she explores the idea of "method" in Marx's work and its broader implications for philosophy, sociology, & social theory. Here are a few brief thoughts on it. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Not been able to find the time (the half-day a trip there + runtime would take) yet, unfortunately. Still curious to see it, although I see the ‘second half kinda sucks’ critique more and more. Keeping an open mind tho!

Glad it worked out this time! (Shame you didn’t like it, but alas)