Grant Bollmer

Americans give capitalism its lowest ever rating in new Gallup survey A slim majority of Americans rate capitalism positively.

The lowest share of Americans ever view capitalism positively and big business rates even worse in new Gallup data released today.

THERE IS STILL TIME TO ENJOY SUP'S SUMMER SALE!

Take advantage of 50% off of all in-stock print and ebooks sitewide* now through Monday, 9/8. Whether by the pool or in the shade, we'd love to be your last summer read.

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I mean, a worldview that says that an impenetrable measurement machine can show you the aliens hidden in your soul seems like something they may already believe

You can pick up "The Influencer Factory" for just $14! A book novelist and media strategist Andrew Ladd has said, "I feel like this is how nineteenth century proletarians must have felt reading Marx"! (And our book seems to be more popular among actual influencers than the academics who study them!)

Blue banner with a tropical water background. The centered text says the following: End of Summer Sale, 50% off sitewide, August 25 - September 8, browse now

WE'RE HAVING AN END OF SUMMER SALE! The weather may be cooling, but SUP's end of summer sale is hot!

Take advantage of 50% off of all in-stock print and ebooks sitewide starting today, 8/25, through 9/8. #ReadUP

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Every single one of mine is in there, as well!

I got a flu booster today and it made me reflect on the sense of national accomplishment I felt when I drove to a public facility, waited in my car until my number was called on an app, and got my first covid jab. It's fucked the right gets to erase what a moment of technological liberation that was

Joseph Weizenbaum in 1975: "The very asking of the question, 'What does a judge (or psychiatrist) know that we cannot tell a computer?' is a monstrous obscenity. That it has to be put into print at all, even for the purpose of exposing its morbidity, is a sign of the madness of our times." #ai

In case anyone happens to be in Korea next weekend, I'm going to be presenting at the Nam June Paik Art Center's "48-hour NJP School" on the 19th - the entire event looks exceptionally cool, and I'm very excited to be part of it! njpart.ggcf.kr/events/250

We have an amazing sale going on at the University of Minnesota Press this week... stock on summer reading with $10 paperbacks presswide when you buy 3 or more and use checkout code MN93820!

Wondering where to start? Check out this 🧵 for some starter packs to unlock $10 books:

Wall Street journal article with the headline “Pope Leo Takes On Al as a Potential Threat to Humanity”

Finally, a Holy War I can join

OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has a plan to overhaul college education — by embedding its artificial intelligence tools in every facet of campus life. If the company’s strategy succeeds, universities would give students A.I. assistants to help guide and tutor them from orientation day through graduation. Professors would provide customized A.I. study bots for each class. Career services would offer recruiter chatbots for students to practice job interviews. And undergrads could turn on a chatbot’s voice mode to be quizzed aloud ahead of a test. OpenAI dubs its sales pitch “A.I.-native universities.”

Every future imagined by a tech company is worse than the previous iteration.

From the emergencyintercom community on Reddit: Elisa’s Insta Story Explore this post and more from the emergencyintercom community

It seems the best responses to The Influencer Factory so far have come from people who either are influencers themselves or are really invested in influencers, and not even remotely academic, which is genuinely shocking to me.

Just got in the mail today the absolutely gorgeous Korean translation of Materialist Media Theory! Thanks to Sungyong Ahn for sending it along!

Platform Fandom: Weverse and the Technological Domestication of Fan Community - Grant Bollmer, Bethany Tillerson, 2025 This article is a critical examination of the social media platform Weverse and its associated e-commerce platform Weverse Shop, platforms developed and operate...

New in Social Media + Society ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Bollmer, G., & Tillerson, B. (2025). Platform Fandom: Weverse and the Technological Domestication of Fan Community

#FanStudies

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

It’s day 2 in the book exhibit at #SCMS25 #SCMS2025! Stop by and see us @uminnpress.bsky.social or check out our online exhibit at www.upress.umn.edu/scms25/ for 30% off!

Checked out the #scms25 book room - you can pick up The Affect Lab from @uminnpress.bsky.social but The Influencer Factory has already been accounted for! @stanfordpress.bsky.social

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Perhaps you don't want to hear anything about the American tech industry and Silicon Valley--well, can I interest you in this brand new article which I coauthored with a former undergrad student at NC State, on the Korean media platform Weverse and the political economy of K-pop fandom!

The schedule for the panel Unearthing Silicon Valley and the Creative Industries, at SCMS25, in the Fairmont Crystal Room Chair: Grant Bollmer • University of Maryland, College Park Gerald Sim • Florida Atlantic University • “Ranchers, Machinists, and Working Moms: Silicon Valley’s Human Shields Against the Wrath of Lina Khan” Grant Bollmer • University of Maryland, College Park and Katherine Guinness • University of Maryland, College Park • “Technofeudalism in the Wake of Apocalypse” Josh David Jackson • University of California, Berkeley • “‘Practical Entertainment Tech’: ‘Silicon Beach’ Firms in Collaboration with Hollywood” Lore M. FitzWhittemore • University of Wisconsin- Madison • “‘You’re On Your Own, Kid’: Unregulated Intellectual Property Law, Fictional Characters, and Taylor Swift”

If you're at #SCMS25 and want to hear some papers about how terrible the tech industry is, how it's going to destroy the world, etc. etc., then head over to the Fairmont Crystal room today at 2:15!

What people in every part of higher education need to understand is that Republicans now want to do to universities what they’ve tried to do to labor unions: erase them from the institutional landscape. The question is how much you want to collaborate in your own destruction.

“The scariest words in the English language are ‘I’m from the private sector and I’m here to maximize efficiency.’”

And a few College Art Association authors have already stopped by our booth! Below are Grant Bollmer and Katherine Guinness with their @stanfordpress.bsky.social book, Influencer Factory, followed by Serena Keshavjee and her University of Manitoba Press book, The Art of Ectoplasm. #CAA2025

Anatomy of an AI Coup | TechPolicy.Press DOGE is gutting federal agencies to install AI across the government. Democracy is on the line, writes Tech Policy Press fellow Eryk Salvaggio.

"If you want a labor force, a regulatory bureaucracy, or accountability to disappear, you simply say, 'AI can do it.' Then, the conversation shifts from explaining why these things should or should not go away to questions about how AI would work in their place." - @eryk.bsky.social

Endowment tax + slashing overhead on federal grants is designed to cripple the university. This weakened university is going to be even more susceptible to the efficiency claims of genAI. All of these moves further concentrate wealth and power in the private sector. Don't capitulate in advance.

I once saw an episode of America’s Dumbest Criminals where a man called the cops to report his car stolen, only for it to turn out he’d stolen it from someone else in the first place. I couldn’t help thinking of him this week while watching OpenAI’s Sam Altman wet his pants about the fact that a Chinese hedge fund might have made unauthorised use of his own chatbot models, including ChatGPT, to train its new little side project.

That’s quite the opener from Marina Hyde
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Exclusive: Musk aides lock government workers out of computer systems at US agency, sources say Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials.

it's not hyperbolic to say we're witnessing a coup.

this is completely insane. like, literally insane. that water is supposed to be stored for the summer.

This should be 25th amendment level conduct. The president ordered water to be released from a random dam in California nowhere near the wildfires and then claimed it would help. That’s literally Mad King behavior.

➡️ January 20: FAA director fired
➡️ January 21: Air Traffic Controller hiring frozen
➡️ January 22: Aviation Safety Advisory Committee disbanded
➡️ January 28: Buyout/retirement demand sent to existing employees
➡️ January 29: First American mid-air collision in 16 years

Making America Great Again!

Today’s though: big tech is enabling Trumpism. Trumpism wants to destroy the university. Higher ed should therefore perform our own ‘pause’ on tech partnerships. No ethical university should continue their investment in commercial genAI companies.