Matthew Archer

This👇👇👇 is what I’ve been trying to say about #FoodInsecurity for ages. Money—or perhaps more fully the commodification of food is a cause of the problem but just giving people cash isn’t going to solve the outcome.

Digital twins of the ocean: Wet environing media and marine futures - Adam Wickberg, Susanna Lidström, 2025 The EU’s Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO) is presented as a coherent, high-resolution, multi-dimensional, multi-variable and near real-time representation of the...

Our paper on digital twins of the ocean is out now in this great special issue of New Media & Society, alongside contributions from Jussi Parikka, Rob Kitchin,Geoffrey Bowker among others. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

journals.sagepub.com/toc/nmsa/27/8

#envhist #bluehumanities #envhum

AI Is Coming for the Consultants. Inside McKinsey, ‘This Is Existential.’ If AI can analyze information, crunch data and deliver a slick PowerPoint deck within seconds, how does the biggest name in consulting stay relevant?

Have the consulting firms finally figured out that a LLM can in fact replace their core product offering: 22-year-olds with Ivy League degrees who don’t know anything other than how to make PowerPoints?

Good point. Imagine having to check every calculation a calculator gave you by hand after to make sure it was correct

Anyway, when all of this started, I kept saying that you have to always look at these new technologies through the contempt that the tech world has for labor, and their campaign to destroy anything they can get their hands on for a bit more money. Human deskilling, not flourishing, is their goal.

ICYMI from yesterday: more evidence that the UK news media is a racism factory, deliberately training the public to be more bigoted. This is the intended outcome of editorial policy at the behest of media owners and operators for political ends.

👇👇👇

Amazon Ring Cashes in on Techno-Authoritarianism and Mass Surveillance Ring founder Jamie Siminoff is back at the helm of the surveillance doorbell company, and with him is the surveillance-first-privacy-last approach that made Ring one of the most maligned tech devices....

ICYMI: Amazon still doing Amazon things

The company is not only reintroducing new versions of old features that allow police to access footage from Ring users

Amazon is introducing a new Ring feature that will allow police to request *livestream* access to our home security devices.

@eff.org

"The AI infrastructure build-out is so gigantic that in the past 6 months, it contributed more to the growth of the U.S. economy than /all of consumer spending/" - @mims.bsky.social

My takeway is that The US has gone ALL IN BET OF THE 21st Century on AI, while China has gone all in on green tech

me whispering in the grocery store every time i put something in the basket

food for me ⬅️
➡️ food for me
↘️
food for me

(this is sending me a little bit)

Proud to author “Shaping a Resilient Future for Food & Agriculture,” a summary of 2025 Farm Foundation Summit.

This paper summarizes how bipartisan leadership and cross-sector collaboration for strengthening food and ag. system.

www.farmfoundation.org/2025/07/29/s...
@lsuagcenter.bsky.social

How the Moomins Showed Us a More Compassionate World At the Brooklyn Public Library, an exhibition on queer Finnish artist Tove Jansson's beloved characters reminds visitors of all ages that justice and joy are within our grasp.

«To my mind, it’s no accident that a queer artist and author dreamt up such a compassionate haven, where difference isn’t demonized and conflict is an opportunity for growth.» hyperallergic.com/1030064/tove...

agrowingculture 3 hours ago 2/5 This morning, Israeli forces raided and demolished the Seed Multiplication Unit of the Union of Agricultural Work Committees' (UAWC) national seed bank in Hebron. Using bulldozers and heavy machinery, the Israeli army destroyed the storage warehouses and infrastructure where essential equipment, seed materials, and tools for indigenous seed reproduction were kept. This is not just an attack on a building-its an attack on Palestinian food sovereignty, biodiversity and cultural memory.

Israel destroyed a Palestinian seed bank today. This is such a specific kind of evil, targeting literal hope for the future. Attempting to further alienate Palestinians from their home and land. So much destroyed just for the sake of destroying. It's awful.

what if the transhumanists don’t actually care about AI and are flogging it just to accelerate earth system collapse?

失态 余佳運 · 余佳运SINCE1994 · Song · 2019

open.spotify.com/track/5r2C93...

a wheel of pressed tea leaves

steeped tea leaves in a gaiwan next to a small teacup with light yellow tea and a woof and metal pick used to pull the tea cake apart

morning break with the most delicious white tea from hubei, courtesy of hermitage tea

www.hermitagetea.org/product-page...

This surprisingly relaxing footage is from SIX MILES under the ocean – and it’s the deepest ecosystem yet discovered

Ceramic vase with repeated square motifs in orange, green and white

Paula Estevan, contemporary Native American potter born in Acoma Pueblo who learned the art of making pottery in the traditional way from her mother #WomensArt

"ChatGPT is great for brainstorming!"

Actually we have a tool for that already! It's called thinking. We use our brain. It's called brainstorming! Clue is in the name.

The reaction to this being essentially completely positive has me pleasantly surprised. I sometimes get so worried that such analyses aren't wanted anymore and people just want to be left alone to gloat while cheating on coursework and rot their brains with vibe coding... Thanks everyone. 💖

Famines and mass starvation to kill off a population is a colonial tactic used by European colonizers for centuries. This is a continuity of European colonizers in Palestine

For the next three years I'll have the (additional) post of Frank Jackson Professor of the Environment at Gresham College, giving a series of free public lectures on Earth and how it works. All will be freely available online. You can see their whole programme here: www.gresham.ac.uk/whats-on?see...

I had a good time doing this interview and the result is a good window into my research. www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/news/ais-mor...

Relationships between rural migration and perceptions of environmental change: Insights from Bushbuckridge, South Africa Environmental change is increasingly threatening rural livelihoods across the globe. Yet rural communities possess valuable knowledge that could infor…

New paper out with Farirai Rusere, @csamimi.bsky.social & colleagues. Minor contribution of mine, but was a great learning experience to work with physical geographers/ environmental science & population studies and sociology colleagues. Open access. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Incredibly instructive reporting on what appears well on its way to becoming the biggest, most concentrated, most energy- and resource-intensive, and most speculative wave of capital investment ever.
ig.ft.com/ai-data-cent...

Spotify Is Forcing Users to Undergo Face Scanning to Access Explicit Content Submit to biometric face scanning or risk your account being deleted, Spotify says, following the enactment of the UK's Online Safety Act.

getting my phrenology checked by my laptop camera before I can listen to WAP, a future I always wanted www.404media.co/spotify-uk-a...

Whoosh Goes the Market A vivid, fast-paced inside look at financial markets, the people who work on them, and how technology is changing their world (and ours).   Markets are messy, and no one knows this better than traders...

press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

people think only the dumbest investors would give him money after saying this, but they’ve been flinging obscene amounts of $$ at “algorithmic traders” for years. all altman is offering is an interface that makes algorithmic finance “cheaper.” @danthroagogo.bsky.social has a great new book on this.

no amount of words would convince people who don’t like qualitative research that qualitative research is valid.