As historians of technology are pointing out, this is how automation has worked out in the past, too. The solution is unionization/collective action. If people work together (if!), editing can become a very, very expensive service.
Lurcher mum and lecturer in US lit. Writes on waste, gender, housework, appliances, ads, politics of nostalgia. Books: http://tinyurl.com/3rf4fr & https https://tinyurl.com/3er6t3h9 Founder http://literarywaste.com My views, not my employer’s, etc etc
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As historians of technology are pointing out, this is how automation has worked out in the past, too. The solution is unionization/collective action. If people work together (if!), editing can become a very, very expensive service.
But then where’s his arm…?
Folks, a party iffy on protecting completely innocent and ordinary immigrants and transgender people is not going to go out of its way to defend the human rights of accused drug traffickers. We're talking about people who lack the moral courage of the average Pomeranian. Don't know what to tell you.
Ed Balls, like a lot of Labour, feels that they are entitled to our votes and they are going to find out starting next May that being a far right party with a red rosette will mean the we will be voting elsewhere.
AMEN.
So many people supremely relaxed about inciting people to violence - and strangely none of them with a skin colour or gender or immigration status which makes them routine targets of violent people.
not sure you’d be allowed to write this in North Korea, lads
40% of Republicans think the COVID vaccine killed more people than the COVID virus. One in four believe that QAnon is real. No matter how far they radicalize, we are told over and over again that the people being rude to them are the problem.
To gauge how it’s “working,” one would have to be clear on what the actual work is, which is not helping to educate children but rather to imbed these systems in a way that they cannot be removed, establish them as a source of truth, and destabilize labor.
This ‘blue states closed schools too long’ narrative is becoming increasingly entrenched in the Polite Center but it’s arguable at best. Republican states had far more deaths during COVID and their students have roughly comparable learning loss.
8 cops making over $100k each to arrest one man. But your food, water & air are killing you. Your daughter is carrying her rapist’s baby to term & will probably die when it becomes complicated & your veteran son in jail for being unhoused. But at least that Brown guy sitting on a bench is gone.🙄
Getting yelled at on the internet is not what turns people into fascists.
Interesting thread.
Bluesky is now among and often *the* highest referer to @motherjones.com. That’s traffic that has been additive. Only Twitter has dipped btw, the rest as fairly steady state (and instagram impressions and video views on all platforms up enormously.)
🥰🥰
Gennaro was feeling especially contemplative today.
Whaaaaat!!! Oh my gosh! Congratulations!!
Please please this!
anyway if you want to find out more about empire, migration and British culture, BUY MY BOOK
“chicken ticket masala” — I’m dying. (Also: obv the slogan for that would have to be “hmmmm, that’s JUST THE TICKET” 😂😂)
“Gaza Riviera” is such a uniquely horrifying phrase, contemplating it is like looking at a death mask for the world.
Not a very long path from "Why wouldn't you want the regime to deploy federal troops in your city when it reduces carjackings?" to "Why would you be opposed to the erection of internment camps for deviants when it reduces crime?" And a good chunk of mainstream media will just follow along.
Remember, kids: A real big goal of "AI" is to entirely sever capital from labor, and no, there will be no universal basic income, you can all just starve and die, thanks www.axios.com/2025/08/26/a...
Must be Gruden’s favorite golf outfit since he wore it last week at Trump’s club in Virginia.
This is literally how I spent most of August. And now I’m too scared to go back to the piece since the prospect of having to go through the same process for the last section of the piece is TOO MUCH TO FACE.
ABC News is still calling RFK Jr. a “vaccine skeptic.” The dude was one of the most prominent anti-vaccine activists for decades. There’s video of him in 2023 saying that there’s no vaccine which is safe and effective. You can call him an anti-vaccine activist!
Jesus fucking christ. The Trump administration tried to send a bunch of children to Guatemala at 3 am and justified it by saying that the kids just wanted to return to their parents in Guatemala, but the kids actually told the court that they are afraid of being sent back to Guatemala.
Ok but how’s the car
My favorite sentence in the New York Times explainer on Mamdani and socialism.
Oh my god.
Ooooh I see. And yes, I remember reading this. I’d completely forgotten about it.
Oh I can absolutely see this trajectory! I’m glad you got out.
I’ve written a piece about this that’s still with the editors three months later, but this is what I had to say about Winterson and the humanisation of LLMs.
Wait who is “he” in this post? (Sorry if I’m being slow!)
That happened bc they went to uni in a supportive environment where they obtained the tools to see thru pseudo-intellectual right-wing drivel, a vocabulary for understanding themselves, and a creative outlet. Things could have gone very differently had they not.
I keep thinking abt a student I had yrs ago who had severe mental health issues&was a huge fan of Jordan Peterson. They hated (what JP said was) postmodernism. They ended up writing their disso on postmodern fiction, getting into poetry, and coming out as trans. They’re thriving now.
Yeah, come to think of it it’s basically how the Mafia operates, too…!
And her husband, a man w/a proven track record of sexual misconduct, rebranded as a bereaved widower and beacon of justice-seeking.
Jo Cox was murdered by a man with a house full of neo-Nazi agitprop and this was then retconned into a vague narrative about social media abuse
Exactly this. And the Klan as the OG pyramid scheme — my god, you’re right. Terrifying.
THIS. See also the tradwife movement’s nostalgia for what amounts to an LLM-generated collage of media narratives of domesticity that were themselves fabricated to begin with. Little House on the Prairie meets Leave it to Beaver, a 1955 Coca Cola ad, and like a photo shoot of Nancy Reagan.
HOW DARE YOU! WE ARE IMPARTIAL! WE ARE IMPARTIAL, WE TELL YOU! WE ARE IMPARTIAL!
Precisely this. And I’m convinced that this is how the so-called GC movement captures so many cis women. Both offer the illusion of dignity and justice.
Exactly. And I keep thinking about how well far-right spaces are funded. Like their presence is huge. It’s kind of a miracle more kids don’t get sucked into them.
Your regular reminder that The Guardian has a strategic partnership with OpenAI and without a shred of irony published ChatGPT’s “first” literary short story and had Jeanette Winterson write an utterly incoherent rhapsodic review of it that read like an LLM hallucination.
It’s really hard to do insightful satire of right-wing weirdos because almost any ridiculous stance you can come up with, they’ll just express freely without a shred of irony.
The reality is that far-right violence and politics is the most common and consistent threat to functioning democracy. The biggest obstacle to dealing with this threat is broad spectrum of centrist/centre-right opinion that considers acknowledging this reality "unfair".
Instead we’re going to get a bunch of lowest common denominator, more or less transphobic takes (this isn’t a jab at OP btw, who isn’t a journalist, and is trans. They raise important points in their thread. This is an “and/but also,” not a rebuttal). END
If our media class had any capacity for critical thought or, you know, hired trans people to write about these issues, this would be a great opportunity to explore the pull of far-right digital communities for kids who’ve been summarily rejected/alienated by mainstream culture. 4/
Probably bc the narratives about gender that places like 4chan offer reassurance in the way that fascist and extremist,&evangelical narratives generally do: rules, scapegoats, clear lines&boundaries, etc. 3/
And to be clear I’m not saying trans people = far right. Quite the contrary. I’m saying that marginalised kids struggling to reconcile what they know of themselves w/a transphobic culture’s refusal to give it to them end up finding community where they can. Some end up on 4chan. 2/
Counterpoint: there’s a large overlap between kids who don’t get support to transition & those who end up in alt-right spaces. This is one way in which the crisis of identity that comes from being told you can’t be what you are manifests. I’d argue it’s a form of psychosis&should be treated as such
I’d repeat my “hey academics are you reconsidering research trips and conferences in the US now” but I think we have already consolidated into “yikes yes” and “lol I have nothing to fear” camps.
📌
Jesus. I hadn’t thought about this. Then again I completely changed the remit of my British Academy/Leverhulme grant this year so I don’t have to travel there (despite having a U.S. passport and having grown up there!).
what if the UK had a major political party that appealed to people who didn't love pogroms
I just hate this tech. I've seen other people start to call it obscene and that is truly what it is. GenAI is obscene. It's an affront to humanity, pushed by tech bros and c-suiters who are forcing this rancid emptiness onto everyone else because they themselves believe in nothing.
And props to the BBC for "Meta does not intentionally encourage users to post false stories [...] about the Holocaust, but"
This thread is exactly how I feel about genAI. Completely turned off by it on all artistic, intellectual and moral levels. I have no interest in anything it can say or generate. It is anti-human.
#neverforget
Well there was an England flag here yesterday but I guess the students had a busy night!
An interesting development on Twitter dot com, where a Labour MP has spent the week angrily denying that she is part of Labour Friends of Israel, a group that her husband once led, and which says on its website that she’s affiliated with them.
So what precisely do the right want to do about the white working classes? Certainly not go to university, as they want numbers down. Nor to have a unionised manufacturing job, as they don't want unions. No, they just want pawns as part of their culture wars. They don't give a toss.
Dare she say trans women belong in womens spaces? Dare she say trans healthcare should be accessible? Dare she call out the ehrc and the supreme court? Or is it just please be nice to trannies but oh no dont wanna actually confront what transphobic politics means
'The decision is unusual - the US, as host country, is expected to facilitate travel for officials of all countries wishing to visit the UN headquarters.' www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Just saw someone refer to Cheryl Hines as The Marvelous Mrs. Measles and 💀💀💀💀💀💀
This seems weirdly unsustainable at first, but it's OK because we're building a Dyson sphere around the solar system to host it.
I have successfully collaborated with scientists but that's key. We collaborated. They included historians from the beginning of the project. I wasn't hostile to their methods because they listened to and respected mine. The Nature article wasn't interdisciplinary - it excluded the other discipline.
Spectacular article, all the major insights captured, but an early one here into how sincerely these men care about protecting our women and girls.
Nearly a million people marched against Brexit. Not front page news. 50 people gather outside a hotel. National news for weeks. "Fears of mass unrest", media says.
Goodness, if the President has a serious health problem I certainly hope he follows the expert medical advice of his Secretary of Health and Human Services
🥰🥰🥰🥰
I would read an academic murder book in which the murder was solved by reading the syllabus
Gonna post these until people understand it’s the every day experience of being Black and living in NYC and has always been this way regardless of administration to the point people EXPECT to get harassed. (1st and 2nd shot were 45 mins apart and I stopped at 2 different wine stores in between)
I can’t.
It’s going to be so satisfying when Taylor swift bankrupts Mark Zuckerberg
I keep saying this, but... ...punishing the homeless is how big-city and blue state liberals do fascism.
Biden would use almost none of these words. Biden got bodied. Mamdani would use most of these words. Mamdani is cleaning up. Democratic consultants don't know anything. "Change your words to appeal to the people who are mad at the Cracker Barrel logo!" is just bad advice.
realistic Star Trek
I would also say that only thinking in these immediate terms is part of the problem. Know preservation and production is a long-term collective endeavor — that administrators are delighted to disinvest in clearly.
Countless schools already do this of course. Extract without putting in. Every time a tenure line is cut — or, say, a university press is closed.
Opt out of the collective interinstitutional project of producing knowledge and intellectuals in some ways, then opt out in all, I say. You don’t get to endlessly extract labor and prestige from others.
Anyway I’m finishing a thing where I write very explicitly about how, as an editor, it’s clear to me that scholars and publishers continue to invest—intellectually and financially—in the very fields from which unis are eagerly disinvesting. The work doesn’t stop—at least it hasn’t yet.
For years and years I believed Ted Cruz was evil but brilliant, because I read a quote once from one of his liberal Harvard law professors, who said Cruz was the smartest student he’d ever had. Then one day I looked it up and realized it was Alan Dershowitz.
Also the fact that her workplace is sometimes the only place she feels safe? This is how bad the UK has gotten for trans people, and trans women especially. Jesus wept. www.reddit.com/r/MarksAndSp...
I actually got teary reading how supportive this woman’s employers have been towards her. What a model of inclusivity and respect. The media’s penchant for slinging dirt at trans people - and women in particular - continues unabated. www.reddit.com/r/MarksAndSp...
This is unsurprising but it’s important to hear it from ICE agents themselves.
"the more unfulfilled these technofutures go, the more pervasive and entrenched they become" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
The single most important thing to understand about digital futurism is this: When the digital future that Sam Altman ( or Elon, or Andreessen, etc) predicts fails to materialize, he doesn’t have to give the money back.
FYI for your shows today @msignorile.bsky.social @deanobeidallah.bsky.social @johnfugelsang.bsky.social and for your shows tomorrow @zerlinamornings.bsky.social @stephaniemiller.bsky.social @thomhartmann.bsky.social
Hey @jodyhamilton.bsky.social and @stephaniemiller.bsky.social see below. You reported this story WRONG today. Please correct yourselves tomorrow.
So...that means the "trans shooter" category is made up of: - Cis girl who they said was trans because she didn't look enough like a girl to them - A detransitioner who was also a Brandon Herrera fanatic That's like if I was making a list of "violent Pokemon games" but it was just Smash titles-
We need to call this person what they are - Liar. Anyone who goes through all of the energy and expense to transition to whatever degree - then de-transition - wasn't honest with themselves to begin with. Anyone who can lie that deeply to themselves, then blame others, is incredibly disturbed.
the aestheticization of politics means that apparently two pretty white people making out is MAGA obviously MAGA believes this--they couldn't stop yammering about it when she started dating the dude--but we don't exactly have to do their work for them
wild how people want to get rid of autistic trans people and think that the Internet would still work
That’s because conservatives tell each other it’s not cutting you off to say you can’t bring your same-sex partner to Christmas
Then why are you partnering with AI companies? Why are you taking their money to bring AI into classrooms? I’ve been a union member since I was five. AI companies have stolen my work. This is a workers’ rights issue.
I think people really struggle w partially consolidated authoritarianism, either understating our problem or understating our power It's like we're in a liminal fascist space. And not recognizing how far gone we are or thinking we're simply too far gone are both grave errors we can't afford to make