Moira Weigel

The Epstein files document what many women researchers have long experienced but rarely seen laid bare so starkly: exclusion operating behind closed doors, shaping who gets funded, invited, mentored, and taken seriously. How many of these networks, norms, and gatekeepers remain in place?

Our symposyum 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙒𝙤𝙧𝙡𝙙 𝘼𝙡𝙜𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙝𝙢: 𝙆𝙣𝙤𝙬𝙡𝙚𝙙𝙜𝙚 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙋𝙤𝙬𝙚𝙧 𝙞𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙉𝙚𝙬 𝙂𝙡𝙤𝙗𝙖𝙡 𝙊𝙧𝙙𝙚𝙧 will take place on 2-3 February 2026.

The 𝗳𝘂𝗹𝗹 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗺𝗲 is now online: www.unive.it/worldalgorithm

𝗞𝗲𝘆𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗲𝘀: Grégoire Chamayou, Ben Tarnoff, Moira Weigel, Cédric Durand and Cecilia Rikap.

Stochastic Flocks and the Critical Problem of 'Useful' AI Acknowledging that AI systems are advancing does not buy into hype, it sharpens the precision of critical thinking about their impacts, says Eryk Salvaggio.

To acknowledge the ways AI systems are changing does not buy into hype, it sharpens the precision of critical thinking about their impacts. To make sense of what AI does to people, you also need to understand what it does for them, writes Eryk Salvaggio.

Concerned about ICE's $45 billion plan to convert warehouses into immigration detention centers? This is what they'll look like inside. From ICE's plan for the Social Circle, GA facility. Each little dot: a person. www.socialcirclega.gov/home/showpub...

My “Literature and/as AI” students have finished their first assignment, which was to extract and generate an “Encyclopedia of Ancient Robots” from thousands of pages of Homer, Hero of Alexandria, Vitruvius, Liezi, Al Jazari, etc., and I must say they’re cool! code.chuanqisun.com/ancient-robo...

People Think | Ben Tarnoff Asad Haider, the foremost socialist thinker of his generation, staked his philosophy on the principle that everyone should be fundamentally free.

“Every situation…contains a certain openness; people can and do act in ways that reject the necessity of what exists. Asad Haider’s word for this undertaking was politics.” —Ben Tarnoff

The Trump administration is engaged in norm destruction -breaking expectations about transparent governance and public oversight while installing new assumptions about how technological development should be directed. What it has advanced is not the absence of Al regulation but its rearrangement, often by caprice: intensive state intervention operating through industrial policy, trade restric-tions, immigration controls, equity stakes in private firms (selected by the state), the redirection of research funding, and the strategic preemption of state authority. Many of these actions face legal challenge, and some may not survive judicial review. But the pattern itself-the systematic preference for executive discretion over deliberative process-reveals an approach to governance that will shape Al policy regardless of how individual cases are de-cided. This is not deregulation. Not in the least. It is hyper-regulation by other means.

There's something very important in this from @alondra.bsky.social about how a government of bosses understands its relationship to AI: as a means to avoid preexisting, even nominal, deference to popular deliberation or expert consultation. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

People Think | Ben Tarnoff Asad Haider, the foremost socialist thinker of his generation, staked his philosophy on the principle that everyone should be fundamentally free.

I wrote something about my friend Asad Haider for the new issue of @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Stuart Hall and the Rise of Cultural Studies Thirty years ago, many academics considered the study of popular culture beneath them. Stuart Hall helped change that.

Happy birthday or happy Stuart Hall day. You were somply the best www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...

Chinese Universities Surge in Global Rankings as U.S. Schools Slip

Today’s news is reminds me of the time I went to buy a cell phone at an electronics mall in Shanghai in 2011 and presented my Yale ID to get a student discount. “Wow, the second best university! 你很厉害!” The salesperson exclaimed. I wonder how she’s doing www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/u...

Meanwhile the interview looks to be straight Girard by way of Thiel

Moira Weigel — Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School Moira Weigel This essay has been peer-reviewed by "The New Extremism" special issue editors (Adrienne Massanari and David Golumbia), and the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board. Since the election ...

@moiraweigel.bsky.social is great on this: www.boundary2.org/2020/07/moir...

If you're in the Boston area, come along to the first Capitalism and its Critics workshop today! @moiraweigel.bsky.social and I are hosting the legendary Leopoldina Fortunati to discuss the new translation of The Arcana of Reproduction. At Harvard, Sever Hall 113, at 4pm

Coming March 2026

Zu Karp, Palantir und der Frankfurter Schule empfehle ich den tollen Text von Moira Weigel, die Karps Doktorarbeit sehr genau durchgegangen ist.

www.boundary2.org/2020/07/moir...

I put my “dating historian” hat back on to write about a good movie about bad men, now out in a new edition from @criterion.bsky.social www.criterion.com/current/post...

Lauch comes up a lot too

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE.

This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined.

It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

just found a post it in my office that reads “NIGHTBITCH is also a novel about work”

@linzhang.bsky.social @elainejyuan.bsky.social

Notes Toward a World Systems Theory of Platforms: Made in China and India on Amazon.com - Moira Weigel, 2025 This article examines the key role that Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs have played in the growth of Amazon and the varied ways in which they interact with its...

I’m honored to have an article in the new issue on “Platform Economies in Digital Asia” edited by Lin Zhang and Elaine Yuan!

I take a comparative look at Amazon entrepreneurs in China and India—and a stab at what “third wave” platform studies might look like. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

I know a group of sociologists of technology at Zhejiang University working on these questions and fascinating ways. Happy to connect you if you like!

TIL that this book, which I desperately wanted to teach with but thought had not been translated, is coming out in English in October! Profs teaching tech / labor / digital society take note! www.penguin.co.uk/books/465353...

to me the most interesting thing may be the fact that the trade war has led to Google and Meta losing their biggest advertisers more or less overnight

I talked to @nytimes.com again, this time about the end of the de minimis exemption www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/b...

See you tonight, Harvard! 6PM! #MoreEverythingForever @harvard.edu @harvardbookstore.bsky.social @maxgladstone.bsky.social @moiraweigel.bsky.social

Opinion | I Trained at an Amazon Center in Hangzhou. You’d Be Surprised What They Think of Trump. China’s e-commerce ecosystem illustrates how Trump’s tariffs only strengthen that country’s hand.

The one person I wanted to hear on tariffs is Moira Weigel.

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/o...

@moiraweigel.bsky.social knows WTF is going on. 🙌🙌🙌

Ok so yeah, this has quickly become the #1 misunderstanding about the canceled grants

the grants are not “subsidies” or “entitlements” to Harvard or Princeton or whatever

they aren’t going into universities’ endowments

they are competitive contracts won by these universities to do research

Wish me luck!