Alex Tarr
@avatarr8.bsky.social
Lecturer in Digital Cultures, Newcastle University he/him Co-Author of A People's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area
"It’s important to note that the Stargate Project is not affiliated with Project Stargate, the CIA’s defunct psychic research program of similar name, nor the science fiction series it inspired. This version is grounded firmly in data, energy and capital—not clairvoyance or wormholes." IBM's AI blog
"A hyperscale data center should not be considered a one-time purchase." IBM always providing reliable personal financial advice.
Happy new @downtownboys.bsky.social record day to all who celebrate! Listened through twice now already and, without hesitation, everyone should go out and get a copy!
Downtown Boys@downtownboys.bsky.social · 3mo agoOur new album Public Luxury is out TODAY on @subpop.bsky.social Our final single "Yellow Sun" is a song for Lebanon with lyrics inspired by Etel Adnan's poems, especially Beirut 1982. Watch the gorgeous video by animator Romy Matar www.youtube.com/watch?v=72pP...
Love everything about this project: digital cooperative building publicly accessible tools to uncover who owns land in the UK! Help them out-- www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/land-explo...
Help us build a better Land Explorer!
LandExplorer makes it simple to find out who owns the land & buildings in your community. Help us keep it free for everyone who needs it!
crowdfunder.co.uk
who is writing the cultural history of how hoodies became the symbol of hackers in the popular/design imaginary?
The hill I will die on (because it will be the death of me) is that file name conventions still matter. Lost *hours* again this week due to getting files names as short paragraphs (breaks ms cloud still 🙄), generic ("final final" ), or inaccurate ("my data.docx" is actually the final portfolio).
Preorders HUGELY help a book succeed. If you’re inclined to read (in hardcover, ebook, or audiobook), please preorder DATA EMPIRE or ask your library to order a copy! North America: tinyurl.com/DataEmpireUS Everywhere else: tinyurl.com/DataEmpireUK
Data Empire
From clay tablets to the algorithmic state, a groundbreaking new lens on human history arguing that information has always been the seed of power, for reade...
tinyurl.com
it is not judicial activism when it is going after what scalia called a “racial entitlement.” you know, voting rights.
Jay Willis@jaywillis.net · 5mo agoI have spent my entire career listening to FedSoc types complain about liberal “activist judges” who “legislate from the bench,” and none of them are going to say a single blessed thing about Sam Alito rewriting the Voting Rights Act to say what he thinks Congress ought to have said
"We've been saying for years that you don't need a representative democracy!"
reading all these stories about AI companies changing their token billing models, and what is the tech-company form of carcinisation where they all eventually look like Esri? esrinisation?
A critical supplement to this 🌟 list are those folks who help us imagine other political economies: Christina Dunbar Hester on community radio, Nathan Schneider on co-ops, Joy Lisi Rankin on the public history of computing, @hellobrittparis.bsky.social on other Internets... (plus me, too?)
Matt Seybold@mattseybold.bsky.social · 6mo agoThe thing is, I think these are all fundamentally correct & completely reconcilable political economies of the contemporary.
If our classroom activities comprise teaching students how to use a commercial product then we are not teachers; we are salespeople.
what could go wrong?
Chris Stokel-Walker@stokel.bsky.social · 5mo agoSpotted the accounts on here crowing about making moolah with fast-moving AI bots trading margins on Polymarket and Kalshi? My latest for @fastcompany.com suggests the reality may be more complicated than it seems www.fastcompany.com/91531389/ai-...
absolutely wild to see multiple Howard Rheingold references into contemporary work on digital media. Not in a historicising sense, just like "let's see what ol' Howard has to say about TikTok."
In Berkeley for less than 10 min, at original Peets, a stranger is telling me about a girlfriend sleeping with Bob Weir, tweaking machine language code to port millipede for Atari when working there in the 80s, and significance of discrete cosine transformation in making jpgs of his b&w photographs.
FT over here going “gee, would be a real shame if something were to unexpectedly happen to your data centre…” www.ft.com/content/5ba0...
Lenders struggle to find insurance cover for mega data centre projects
Lack of sufficient cover means some investors are walking away from deals
ft.com
8 am AAG session and once again can't keep track if we're talking about NDVI or NVIDIA
Sometimes I am still amazed Silicon Valley has become what it has become.
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
MOSS — A Painting Toy Where Every Brush Is a Tiny Program
A 128x128 pixel canvas with programmable brushes. Code a brush, see what it does, share it with your friends.
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.
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)
The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin
YouTube video by AA School of Architecture
youtube.com
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?
Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani@mayor.nyc.gov · 8mo agoThe City’s Budget is our future. And you deserve to know how it works.
