Christian Haines

Actually, the left is winning the AI debate But it does need to get organized.

“In fact, the left appears to be so successfully engaged in matters related to AI that one can’t help but wonder if allegations about its supposed ignorance of the technology are motivated by a desire to change the very terms of the debate.” - @bcmerchant.bsky.social

🔔🔔🔔

Snap! Criticism: Okotie and Thien Dan Hartland In a letter on May 14, 1981, Philip K. Dick was characteristically pugnacious: “I will define science fiction, first, by saying what sf is not. It cannot be defined as ‘a story (or nov…

Novel temporalities: for the latest Snap! Criticism, @danhartland.bsky.social looks at recent work by Simon Okotie & Madeleine Thien to highlight how speculative and formal elements interact.

All serious historical novels are works of speculative fiction, even ones set in the ‘60s and ‘70s. These three are absolutely brilliant.

“Is there a technology the left is excited about?”

High-speed rail! MRNA vaccines! New cancer treatments! Solar and wind energy collection! Better and longer-range EVs! That wood that's harder than steel! New apples! Fibermaxxing! Buldak Swicy ramen! Muppets! Muppets are too a technology, shut up!

Future Anterior 22.1&2 cover featuring alternating green, white, dark blue, light blue, khaki, grey, and brown stripes. The journal's title, and titles of 13 articles and their authors, appear on the stripes.

Cultural Critique 130 cover featuring the journal title running off the edges of the cover. The letter "C" in the title, as well as a large stripe at the cover's bottom, are blue.

Two new journal issues:
-Future Anterior 22.1-2: The Potential of Provenance. Editor Jorge Otero-Pailos; guest editors Mari Lending, Alena Beth Rieger, Simon Mitchell.
-Cultural Critique 130. Editors Cesare Casarino, Frieda Ekotto, Maggie Hennefeld, John Mowitt, Simona Sawhney.

(links in comments)

Just out: Jeffrey Sacks thinks settler colonial life philosophically, philologically and politically. An essential book that moves between close readings of Arabic poetry and art and broad questions of living in a world of slaughter.

Melting and Morphing Into Mastery: On Greg Egan’s Morphotrophic John Knych Under Review:Morphotrophic. Greg Egan. Self-published, April 2024. Greg Egan, often considered the hardest of all hard SF authors, is mostly unknown outside of his dedicated following. N…

Melting and Morphing Into Mastery: John Knych on Greg Egan's MORPHOTROPIC

“If you wanted to create a tool that would enable the destruction of institutions that prop up democratic life, you could not do better than AI. Authoritarian leaders & tech oligarchs are deploying AI systems to hollow out public institutions with an astonishing alacrity.”

BREAKING: The House passed the so-called SAVE America Act which threatens to upend our freedom to vote.

The bill could disenfranchise millions of eligible voters by requiring documents like passports or birth certificates to register to vote and forcing voter roll purges. The Senate must reject it.

Auspicious Omens and Excellent Insubordination I started this out as a letter to a friend who's feeling down about where we as a nation are at in this moment, and I am still learning how this newsletter thing works so thought I could use the newsl...

In Dublin last year, an annoying interviewer demanded of me: “Your country has been overtaken by fascists. Why are you smiling?” I was too jetlagged to have a sensible answer so I said, “I’m smiling because I have a knife between my teeth.” The knife might look like this:

This is my first attempt to capture a live event of this size.

I’m thankful to @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social & @johannawinant.bsky.social for letting me adapt the launch of their tremendous book.

I think these episodes will be an additive supplement to it.

Nice!

Just out: John Drabinski reads Black and deconstructive thought together to grapple with the kinds of life that are possible in the face of social death. Don't miss it!

Preorder The Edge of Space-Time by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein by 3/30 to Receive a Signed, Personalized copy! ON SALE 4/7/2026 loyaltybookstores.com/preordersspacetime featuring a photo of me, the loyalty logo and the cover of the book

!!!BOOK NEWS!!!

Do you want a signed copy of *The Edge of Space-Time*? Do you want to support a queer/Black and Asian-owned bookstore?

Through 30 March, if you preorder from @loyaltybooks.bsky.social, you are guaranteed a signed AND personalized copy:
loyaltybookstores.com/preordersspa...

😻 📚💙

The National Labor Relations Act Is Anti-Strike Legislation Nate Holdren explains how the very legislation that gave workers the right to strike also ensured strikes would become less frequent.

since talk of general strikes has come back (a good thing imo!), re-upping this piece on some of why the law is an obstacle to those and fosters a labor movement less inclined to those

organizing.work/2023/08/the-...

when I visited the Galaxy's Edge section of Disney World, the Stormtroopers were walking around pretending to ask random people for IDs and this was understood to be an obvious sign of fascist villainy.

Star Trek is Delivering on Gene Roddenberry's Original Dream (Despite the "Outrage") Despite some backlash online, new Star Trek show, Starfleet Academy, has remained true to Roddenberry's dream.

‘Roddenberry understood that progress required visibility. You don’t reach a future that “takes delight in differences” by hiding them. You reach it by putting those differences front and center‘

Cédric Durand, After AI — Sidecar Legacies of the bubble.

Promises of a radical breakthrough in post-human intelligence and miraculous productivity gains have captured the animal spirits of investors to the point where, as the FT’s Ruchir Sharma put it, ‘America is now one big bet on AI’.
newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

This comes up in movement histories over and over again! Despair is your enemy’s friend! Good organizers know this!!

Going to Fennario, by the Mountain Goats track by the Mountain Goats

it should not surprise anybody who follows my work that I wrote a bunch more songs last year. (Peter Balkan was written in 2024.) Here's one we're releasing early in honor of Bob Weir. Enjoy -- we're donating proceeds to the American Cancer Society. themountaingoats.bandcamp.com/track/going-...

Bernard Stiegler extended this point into the present in an incisive manner (though with incredibly obtuse and clun prose).

New Claudia Rankine, poetic reckonings with history.

Shipping this week! Issue 07: Romance. Dependent. Detached. Trauma Bonded. The Incest Lobby. Revolution Against Romance. Reading for Love and Labor. Surrealist Bedfellows. Mad Love. Essays by Nadia Bou Ali, hannah baer, Moon Charania, Davey Davis, Kaleem Hawa, Anna Kornbluh, Thomas Ogden, & more.

Neutral Ground On politicization and the decay of legitimacy

Some good political theology from Adam Kotsko (or, why it's not going to get any better): adamkotsko.substack.com/p/neutral-gr...

An Elegy for My Neighbor, Renee Nicole Good Fellow poet Danez Smith memorializes the Minneapolis mother's call to witness

“Our country is at war with its people, and your goodness makes you an enemy, a citizen insurgent.“ —Danez Smith

Yeah, I really need to revisit That book. Also, I would like to read some of his fiction at some point.

Feminist Futurism Versus Project 2025: An Empowering Speculative Salon When Le Guin talks about genre writers as “the realists of a larger reality” we surrender the power of that when we narrow our work to only depict one type of future. We have great power to restore…

this is great @strangehorizons.bsky.social feat. @charliejane.bsky.social @annaleen.bsky.social and more! strangehorizons.com/wordpress/no...

Socialism and British Literature | Home Roberto del Valle Alcalá is Associate Professor of English Literature at Södertörn University in Sweden and a Beatriz Galindo Senior Fellow at the University of Alcalá in Spain.

If you're interested in radical politics and literature, do not miss my recently published book "Socialism and British Literature: A People to Come" @livunipress.bsky.social liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10....

The 5 stages of the ‘enshittification’ of academic publishing Academic publishing now shows the same decline that has hit social media and online marketplaces.

The Conversation has a good account of where we are in a scholarly publishing environment increasingly driven by commercial publishers. The culmination: "The scholarly system is overwhelmed by quantity, distorted by profit motives, and is stripped of its purpose of advancing knowledge."

Monopoly Capital Goes to War
graceblakeley.substack.com/p/monopoly-c...