Forum on Climate change and urban agrarian solidarities.
From food, water, and energy to social reproduction, the forum asks: how do we move from urban agrarian opposition to political solidarity?
Read: tandfonline.com/toc/ccit20/current
hello! meet MOSS, the newest painting toy from @brainfruit.bsky.social
MOSS is a pixel art creator with programmable brushes and shareable pads. it's kind of like if procreate and asesprite got together and made something weird together.
www.moss.town
Yes.
But the real villain all along was the "learning management system"
... and the entire neoliberal for-profit, ed-tech, text-book-publishing, anti-intellectual, anti-union, "efficiency" and metrics driven apparatus behind it. This is the last nail?
Calling it 'Einstein' is a low blow though.
This is great! I was just searching for Jill Lepore’s bit on the national data center from “If/then” for students, and this Acker piece is even better for driving home the “this all could be different” point.
Happy annual re-reading of George Lipsitz’s seminal 1988 essay “Mardi Gras Indians: Carnival and Counter-Narrative in Black New Orleans” to all who celebrate.
(it is admittedly gets more dated by each passing year, but remains such a point of departure in my life)
"When Ursula K Le Guin was writing a new story, she would begin by drawing a map. The Word for World, a book co-published by Spiral House + AA Publications, brings Le Guin’s maps together with poems, stories, interviews, recipes and essays" — video of AA launch (via @the-syllabus.bsky.social)
Replacing all social media with RSS feeds would fix the internet immediately.
"A budget is a statement of our values..."
Would be nice to hear this reflected in how we discuss financial modelling in UK HE. Currently, we seems to stuck at "number go up, number go down" rather than what kind of institution are we and why?
Grace Hopper holds up a piece of wire representing how far an electron can travel in one nanosecond.
For years I've relied on Grace Hopper's explanation that sending data via satellites is inherently slow because of the distances information has to travel up and down... but all the StarLink hoopla and NASA's TBRID, realising I may not really have a good grasp on this. Anyone have a good primer?
A bing news update on my work computer has informed me that the Victorian era ended on this day in 1901.
So you can stop debating that point at least.
1950s advertisement for CAMEL cigarettes with a smiling doctor holding a cigarette, modified to read "More Doctors prompt CHATGPT than any other generative ai." The doctor has six fingers as if made by an ai.
have reached a moment where friends and colleagues fully know their use of gen AIs is bad for everyone but the corporations who make them, but unprompted are pre-emptively defensive about it. Getting a lot of the same vibes from cigarette smokers in the 90s, "everyone does it, why am I the bad guy?"
I’m sure it was much more nuanced in the original French.
more like they're Bored of Peace?
the meme of Fred from Scooby Doo unmasking the villain—text above villain in masked frame says "infrastructure", text above villain in unmasked frame says "the means of production"
thinking about this some more
is this a question or an imperative?
not me on the BART website checking if they still run trains before 8 am
Could really use more reporting on the geography of why US companies 'need' Venezuelan oil. i.e. FT mentions in passing Gulf Coast refining infrastructure is built for crude they can't access now, so hundreds of billions in fixed capital not producing expected profits. Fix those spatial problems!
I mean, it'll definitely bias the audience towards jet-lagged nerds and help filter out the dudes who just show up to conferences to behave badly with their old pals 🤷♂️
I’d start with Oracle, personally, but any start seems wise.
I have long been working under the assumption that "political economy" was a red-scare friendly way to say "Marxism" without inviting marxology debates that distract from the actual point (capitalism bad), while "critical PE" is to still assert that one's crypto marxism is the most correct marxism.
Just to say, I am a supervisor here:
UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Responsible and Trustworthy in-the-world Natural Language Processing
www.responsiblenlp.org/2026-student...
If you are reading things like this and planning PhD project, do reach out:
www.ft.com/content/e5b7...
I know this paper is way over the word count, but just can’t bring myself to delete the footnote that simply states “Packard-Bell is not Hewlett-Packard.”
and this whole time I thought it was the spinning jenny that ruined the workplace.
"AIs, the models work just like us!"
Thinking about the early 2000s on this momentous November day, and what's really popped into my head is that, if I'm honest, my all time favourite rhyming lyric is "Candy left over from halloween, a unified theory of everything."
How far back do you want to go? Fred Turners “Democratic Surround” (which is more Media than tech per se, but in the McLuhan vein) or even Cyberculture books might be a place to start. Maybe the epilogue to Golumbias “Cultural Logic of Computational” too.
Earlier Wark??
computational humanities ==! digital humanities
Is this a conversation worth trying to have in 2025?
Turns out they're going to turn all the army bases into data centres and then let private equity plunder them?
www.ft.com/content/0e92...
To follow!
WARNING: THIS COMPUTER MUST BE EARTHED
Top of page 1 of the 1986 BBC AIV (advanced interactive video) user guide that accompanied the BBC Domesday Project (on 2 custom laser disks), where nearly a million UK children collected data for an interactive map, photos, videos and virtual tours project?!
