Ulises Navarro Aguiar

If you missed the news about Elsevier and Wiley (and doubtless the rest to follow) remaking themselves as AI companies with plans to profit from selling AI summaries of academic work back to the institutions that produced the original work:
bsky.app/profile/benp...

Frustratingly relatable. Please take note, Swedish funding agencies.

In case you ever wondered how edtech companies, academic publishers, and big AI corporations, as well as HE institutions, make money out of your academic work, here's our new paper starting to unpack the assetization of academic content

It's the economy, stupid. 🫠

😂

Can you imagine raising a kid without ChatGPT? Sam Altman can’t | Arwa Mahdawi The OpenAI CEO gushed about the bot’s parental-assistance abilities. Is it really his best child-rearing hack?

Both “could” and “cannot”:

“I cannot imagine having gone through figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT,” says Altman.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

analytic phil 🤝 "AI" ethics 🤝 "effective altruism" 🤝 technofinance

Exactly this bsky.app/profile/spav...

Manufacturing the Leviathan: Palantir’s ‘Technological republic’ and the nationalist faction of the tech oligarchy Palantir a ‘superweapon' or a marketing masterclass? This article examines the emergence of a ‘nationalist-militarist' faction within the contemporary tech oligarchy through a critical reading of T...

Lastly, it feels great to publish in Science as Culture, where Barbrook & Cameron’s seminal essay “The Californian Ideology” appeared! I hope my piece helps carry that critique forward into the era of tech oligarchy & algorithmic governance.
50 free copies here. www.tandfonline.com/eprint/QNVIT...

Worth reading this take on forced diffusion of #genAI

⬇️ exactly this & where much of the investment is increasingly coming from, not public markets but private credit, pension and 🥁 insurance funds…

Can anything halt Latin America’s lurch to the right? The Venezuela incursion might have strengthened populist candidates promising law and order ahead of key elections

‘Can anything halt Latin America’s lurch to the right?’

giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

""It’s hard to script a clearer emblem of what I’ve called education’s auto-cannibalism: universities consuming their own purpose while cheerfully marketing the tools of their undoing."

Really enjoyed the conversation for the @jcultecon.bsky.social podcast. We discussed the paper we wrote with @arturocastro.bsky.social on how crypto embeds and reproduces neoliberalism, and how it participates in and benefits from crisis.

Enjoy the podcast, and please be patient with my Spanglish!

I was invited to discuss some recent work in @jcultecon.bsky.social's new podcast hosted by @philiproscoe.bsky.social and @addiemcgowan.bsky.social.

Thankfully, the episode doesn't only feature my own ramblings, which are redeemed by the contributions of Karl Palmås and @koraycaliskan.bsky.social.

In case you missed it, a podcast to enhance the design of all your weekends with @koraycaliskan.bsky.social @ulissess.bsky.social Karl Palmas and of course @philiproscoe.bsky.social and @addiemcgowan.bsky.social

I'm co-chairing the Society for Social Studies of Science @4sweb.bsky.social Conference in Toronto, Oct 2026. #STS #scipol #innovation

Theme: "TechnoPower • Technoscientific Futures".

Open panel submissions portal is open! ls!

Deadline: 2nd February 2026

www.4sonline.org/about_the_co...

The FT got is architecture critic Edwin Heathcote to write about data centres and it's wonderful. www.ft.com/content/7692...

McKinsey challenges graduates to use AI chatbot in recruitment overhaul Candidates in pilot assessed on how they prompted consulting firm’s AI assistant and ability to adapt responses

Out with the old cut and paste slide decks, and in with the new approach of prompting a model that confirms the slide decks were correct all along www.ft.com/content/de78... via @FT

YouTube video by Cultural Economy in the Kitchen The design episode! Cultural economies of design

We’re kicking off 2026 with The Design episode! Cultural economies of design. Find out how design shapes the way businesses and platforms imagine the future. @addiemcgowan.bsky.social and me with @ulissess.bsky.social Karl Palmas KorayCaliskan @jcultecon.bsky.social
youtu.be/M57gwqdwsXA

Fascinating piece on the role of the Mexican military as an economic actor nacla.org/the-militari...

Starting in the late noughties, cultural theorist Mark Fisher observed how the contemporary social condition is marked by the loss of a future. (Fisher, 2013) Tormented by the loss of political dreams that failed to materialize, he described a cultural state of being “haunted” by memories of a time when one could hope for a better, alternative future. Citing social philosopher Franco Berardi, Fisher argued his generation had been witness to a “slow cancellation of the future”. More recently, sociologist and STS scholar Richard Tutton (2023) has pointed out that these accounts are presented by theorists concerned about alternative futures to neoliberalism. While valid in their own right, Tutton points out, they “offer little empirical evidence that such feelings are experienced by groups of people in their everyday lives”. (Tutton, 2023: 448) He thus calls for a more empirically-oriented studies of “futurelessness” – a term sourced from psychology, based on studies of young people who find that their personal future opportunities are foreclosed, implying that it is futile to plan for the future. Heeding this call, this panel invites contributions that provide further empirical substantiation of whether or not a sense of “lost futures” or “futurelessness” is indeed experienced in particular professional settings. For Fisher, the loss of the future can be traced in popular culture – not least pop music – which seems to have lost the ability to grasp the present, and produce work that consciously seeks to articulate alternative futures. In this vein, this panel invites empirically informed work that focuses on how such a loss of futures is – or isn’t – expressed within the design professions, such as design, architecture, planning, or engineering.

We are pleased to invite proposals to our 'lost futures in design professions' panel at the EASST2026 (@easst.bsky.social) 'More than now: Exploring resilient futures' conference in Krakow (8-11 September). The CfP is open until 28 February 2026.

easst.net/conference/e...

Better stay away! Now that's intergenerational care ;)

we know this is a stretch but any of you jce fluent people out there active on tiktok? or know any good acad-related accounts? think of it as an exercise in intergenerational care

Tech elites are starting their own for-profit cities They want to escape from regulation and ‘failing’ democracy — but are they more opportunistic than libertarian?

“Membership and accommodation, which he dubs ‘society-as-a-service’, starts at $1,500 a month.”

www.ft.com/content/b127...

Freed from a service mode to existing design activities, DCS has no stake in advocating for design itself. Instead, rather than improve these activities, the major corpus of DCS work sets out to understand how the assemblages, actors, and objects of design cultures come about and what these mean. Exploring DCS as a practice separates it from most mainstream design, as it suggests a form of intervention in the world without any intention to improve it. The ambition to solve problems has haunted design definitions ever since Herbert Simon’s declaration that design involves “changing existing circumstances into preferred ones” (Simon Citation1978, 111). Abandoning solutionism needn’t mean abandoning design practice, though.

doi.org/10.1080/1754...

Le sommaire de notre numéro spécial sur "Spéculation/réaction" pour la revue Multitudes 101 : Des spéculations anti-néolibérales aux spéculations réactionnaires 163 éo Bourgeron & Boris Le Roy Financiariser l’intelligence 168 Orit Halpern Spéculation: La deuxième page 174 Élie Ayache La Silicon Valley a-t-elle peur du genre ? 181 Apolline Taillandier Finance, paranoïa et radicalisationdelavaleur 186 Fabian Muniesa Contre-spéculations 191 Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou Geler pour dégeler! 198 Geraldine Juarez

Tiens, les épreuves de notre numéro spécial "Spéculation/Réaction" à corriger pour très bientôt pour la revue Multitudes... 👀

Donald MacKenzie · The Future of Search: Will we still google it? I’m starting to feel some pre-emptive nostalgia when I do a Google search. Yes, it’s true, search can sometimes take...

‘Search can sometimes take you to places you don’t want to go. But at least a “classical” search engine like Google in the 2000s and 2010s took you outside itself, and perhaps prompted you to evaluate what you found there.’

Donald MacKenzie on Google’s future: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Brain Rot Without Borders | Baffler Forum There’s no point in denying it anymore: literature as we know it is well on its way to becoming a lost art.

In our new issue, eight writers examine the worldwide decline in deep literacy. Read Nicolás Medina Mora, Annette Hug, Kim Hyesoon, Zhang Yueran, Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin, Yassin Adnan, Valeria Villalobos Guízar, and Alain Mabanckou on global brainrot.