Chris Muellerleile

Agreed. @biblioracle.bsky.social is really good on this. I've used his work recently in developing a Freshman class on writing in human geography in the wake of 'AI'.

Do Humans Really Understand the World’s Disorderly Rivers? In James C. Scott’s last book, In Praise of Floods, he questions the limits of human hegemony and our misplaced sense that we have any control over the Earth’s depleted watershed.

Rather than adapt to the river, we have tried to bend it to our will. Scott traces the history of this struggle to the dawn of sedentary agriculture.
https://bit.ly/3MYGrcY

“Credit derivatives tied to single companies didn’t exist on many high-grade Big Tech issuers a year ago, and are now some of the most actively traded US contracts in the market outside of the financial sector”

This is very good. It's easier to blame universities for a poor economy than it is to blame, well, everything else. But you certainly won't *fix* the economy by just forcing people into trades apprenticeships.

Ha! It's certainly good for the financial sector!

If you send me an email, I will reply with the article. c.m.muellerleile@swansea.ac.uk

AI Bubble Fears Are Creating New Derivatives Debt investors are worried that the biggest tech companies will keep borrowing until it hurts in the battle to develop the most powerful artificial intelligence.

Massive capital switching exercise in process, enabled as always by exotic financial instruments. The debt fuelled $3 trillion AI data center build out is enabled by quickly expanding market for credit default swaps and other credit derivatives. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Alphabet 100-Year Bond Gets Most Demand in Sterling Sale Alphabet Inc. has received close to ten times orders for a £1 billion ($1.4 billion) sale of an ultra rare 100-year bond, a landmark transaction in the debt-fueled race for artificial intelligence sup...

Alphabet's 100 year AI build debt instruments have a higher credit rating than UK government debt.
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

COMING WINTER 2026: Cancelling Billionaires Before They Cancel Us: The Urgent Case for a Wealth Tax by Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks

“A must read.”
— Thomas Piketty, bestselling author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Pre-order now: buff.ly/tj2zi24

#wealthtax #capitalism #billionaires

MAGA

“In blue-collar industries—such as manufacturing, construction, logging and mining, transportation and warehousing, and utilities—a cumulative total of nearly 166,000 jobs were lost from February 2025 to January 2026.” www.americanprogress.org/article/work...

Issue 96 – Redefining solvency Sam Bankman-Fried makes his case for a retrial and aspiring crypto banks hit roadblocks

And finally he demands Judge Kaplan recuse himself, arguing he showed "extreme prejudice". Both that argument and his "no actual loss" theory are already being litigated in his pending appeal before the Second Circuit, which I wrote about here: www.citationneeded.news/issue-96/#sbf

What a vision of the future. All else aside, does anyone who doesn't directly profit from it, actually want this?

Opinion | How the Capitalists Broke Capitalism

Absolute anti-financialization screed by Oren Cass in NYTs (paywall). I wish populists would start to take these arguments (which many of us in the academy have been making for years if not decades) more seriously. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/o...

Private Equity Ripped the Heart Out of Skateboarding Multiple buyouts and bankruptcies have ruined iconic brands and hollowed out skateboarding culture. It’s our financialized economy in miniature.

Private Equity Ripped the Heart Out of Skateboarding
prospect.org/economy/2025...

Graduates are paying more and getting less Jim Dickinson traces how a student loans system once sold as cost-sharing has become one where graduates fund everything – and where Labour has quietly reversed promises to make things fairer Jim Dick...

I expect to spend today staring at this: ‘we’ve gone from government suggesting that the state would subsidise undergraduate student loans by about 45p in the pound, to making a profit on them for that cohort’.

A *profit* on student loans: everyone should read this. 🤯
wonkhe.com/blogs/gradua...

Curls, caves, and shadows: how cryptocurrencies thrive in (poly)crisis Bitcoin, the most important and well-known cryptocurrency, was born out of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008–9. In a context of institutional mistrust, cryptocurrencies emerged as part of a...

Over 11 MM ppl use cryptocurrencies in #Argentina, (over 20% of the population!)

I explain the success of the crypto in Argentina, paying close attention to its intertwining with crisis.

🧵
Curls, caves, and shadows: how cryptocurrencies thrive in (poly)crisis
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Fintech Capital A thorough examination of the worldwide digital transformation of people’s everyday monetary and financial relations driven by the emergence of FinTech

Coming Soon! FinTech Capital, by @paullangley.bsky.social and me, accounts for the rise and ubiquity of fintech and its global transformation of everyday financial transactions. The book is out in July in the US, and in September in the UK. Available for pre-order here: tinyurl.com/bdz2pjn5

AI thinks these are the most racist places in the UK ChatGPT answers often repeat negative stereotypes and reinforce prejudices, study shows

New @oii.ox.ac.uk and University of Kentucky study shows how ChatGPT amplifies global inequalities, with LLMs reflecting historic biases in training data. With thanks to @telegraph.co.uk for sharing the study. @geoplace.bsky.social
www.telegraph.co.uk/business/202...

Call for proposals - Measurement of social and cultural infrastructure in the higher education sector The British Academy is commissioning a major new research element as part of its work theme on social and cultural infrastructure. The research will investigate how social and cultural infrastructure ...

Of especial interest for UK researchers, research institutes/organisations and/or partnerships with higher education expertise and the ability to measure social & cultural infrastructure.

Deadline 17:00 GMT 4 February; duration 10 months; value c. £60k. 1/2

States of precarity in UK geography report launch We're invitomh all geographers to the launch of the States of Precarity in UK Higher Education Geography report.

TOMORROW:
Report Launch and Discussion
1:00-2:30PM GMT

Guest Speakers:
Matilda Fitzmaurice (@matildaf.bsky.social)
Jay Todd (@jaytoddgla.bsky.social)
Lekan Adekola
Gillian Rose (@profgillian.bsky.social)

Register:
www.rgs.org/events/upcom...

That's an interesting way to frame it. Makes sense. I always had a hunch that one explanation of the timing of the 2008-9 GFC was that it was roughly an average lifespan after 1929.

Indeed. And furthermore, now that almost everyone that experienced them has died, there were these things called 'World Wars' that happened in the wake of competing 'Great Powers' and widespread imperialist impulses.

Dialogues on Digital Society - Volume 1, Number 3 Table of contents for Dialogues on Digital Society, 1, 3

Special issue on Authoritarianism in the Digital Age, vol 1(3) in @dialoguesdigsoc.bsky.social, edited by @kylzjarrett.bsky.social, Jing Hiah, @robkitchin.bsky.social & @steelecat717.bsky.social y.social. All 49 pieces open access. journals.sagepub.com/toc/ddsa/1/3

Publishing Beyond the Market Publishing Beyond the Market argues that the move to open access should focus less on the free accessibility of research outputs and more on who controls the publications and infrastructures for schol...

Samuel A. Moore, Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons – University of Michigan Press @uofmpress.bsky.social, September 2025
press.umich.edu/Books/P/Publ...
@newbooksnetwork.bsky.social discussion with Stephen Pinfield
newbooksnetwork.com/publishing-b...

Thanks, Jana!

In the process the paper shows how the (de)centralized political economy of cryptocurrency has changed dramatically over the last decade. The paper concludes by speculating on the implications of the emergent crypto-state nexus in the U.S. @financeandspace.bsky.social

From cryptocurrency to cryptofinance: FTX, disintermediation and the US state During the first decade of cryptocurrencies (2008–2017) there were few connections established between crypto and the conventional finance sector, but in the US in 2025 the integration of these two...

I wrote a paper about Cryptofinance, and the ways the U.S. state has negotiated the consolidation of cryptocurrency trading in large platform firms. It traces the rise of FTX (Sam Bankman-Fried's firm) as it moves from Berkeley to Hong Kong to the Bahamas.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Miss you too, Bacevic. Sad news just came through reminding me of UNIKE. I will check if it got to your Durham email.

What if the old country is actually the new country, but the new country is worse than the old country (except for the pickles). Confusing, ain't it? Happy Thanksgiving!

ISRF Newsletter – November 2025 This month's newsletter features a Director's Note unpacking the UK government's latest White Paper on higher education. Also included: upcoming ISRF events, Fellows news and our latest blog posts.

"Closures and mergers [of universities] are Labour policy, not a problem Labour policy wants to solve."
ISRF Director @cnewf.bsky.social explains the logic behind the current UK University funding crisis and why it will be counterproductive mailinglist.isrf.org/p/isrf-newsl...