Travis McGee on Enshittifcation
There are said to be 118 islands in the Venetian lagoon, 30 of which are inhabited, I was told over an espresso in the morning in a bar in Canareggio, #Venice. „Murano, Burano and Lido are definitely worth a visit, Klaus.“ I decided in favour of Burano and packed my camera. …
The Houses of Burano
About a small fishing island in the Venetian Lagoon
open.substack.com
If you want a funded public service, don’t exclude the upper middle classes. Rather, make them the target consumer. I’m serious. Notice how the TSA got paid
Needless to say, also, the romantic image of the academic as solitary hero toiling away in the stacks is a very gendered one, and made possible only by all the similarly gendered and invisible labor that image leaves out. LLMs reproduce all of that as well.
As my partner puts it, AI is a technology that is reproducing the pre-existing knowledge economy, while also pulling the rug out from under that knowledge economy by changing how labor is understood as well as the exchange value of labor in the workplace, in academia as well as more broadly.
What's fascinating, too, is how AI, trained on a Western corpus and operating "alone," is now being presented as the future, at a time when the social sciences and the humanities were moving toward a global perspective operating in interdisciplinary and collective knowledge production.
Nanjala@nanjala.bsky.social · 5mo agoWhat does it mean to “do social science”? Is publishing papers the end goal of research or is it the process of inquiry, engaging with existing materials, proposing novel ways forward? Is “publish or perish” the purpose of higher education and social sciences or is it engaging with the world?
Bígí linn do #SnaG26 📚💖 Léamh & plé le Darach Ó Scolaí ar an úrscéal 'Bódléar', imeacht leabhar álainn atá á reachtáil ag Aonad Léann na Cumarsáide, Acadamh na hOllscolaíochta Gaeilge.📍 Seomra 116, Áras na Gaeilge, Ollscoil na Gaillimhe, 4 Márta, 1pm. #LoveLeabharGaeilge #Gaeilge
One of the defining features of Keir Starmer's time in office was his chronic inability to instill any sense of hope
Here’s part 2 of this week’s Better Offline special about why the AI bubble is worse than the dot com bubble. I explain the mythology used to convince the world to run millions of miles of fiber cable - and how different that is to GPUs. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/b... Linktr.ee/betteroffline
AI Is Worse Than The Dot Com Bubble: Part Two
Podcast Episode · Better Offline · 01/28/2026 · 20m
podcasts.apple.com
Having ranted about camera-obsessives & the need to have a good eye being more important than the camera, I can only offer one suggestion. Buy a book of 18-19th C Japanese prints & start drawing them [in planes & squiggles]. Japanese art has a magnificent understanding of how the eye works.
Katsushika Hokusai: The Woodblock Virtuoso Who Enthralled the World
Known as the creator of the world-famous Great Wave off Kanagawa, Hokusai constantly innovated and improved his craft through a long lifetime in Edo’s art world.
nippon.com
“AI is simply surveillance capitalism continuing to evolve and expand with some new methodologies, but still based on theft.”
Shoshana Zuboff, philosopher: ‘AI is surveillance capitalism continuing to evolve and expand’
The author of ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ applauds the EU’s initiatives to curb big tech and calls on the bloc not to bow to pressure from Trump
english.elpais.com
I am impressed that Your Party have somehow managed to communicate via national mainstream media the feeling of being in an interminably feuding local political organizers WhatsApp with so many daily notifications that it's impossible to keep track of the feuds
Good Afternoon, “Your Party” was a six month sociological study conducted by Royal Holloway, University of London. We are now complete with our study. Thank you for your time.
Nute@nutedawn.bsky.social · 9mo agoTHEY DID WHAT
❗️REPOST if you stand with President 🇺🇦Zelensky!
“Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.” Diary of Anne Frank January 13, 1943
"In time, US citizens may find themselves trapped in a diminished, nightmare America—like a post-Musk Twitter at scale—where everything works badly, everything can be turned against you, and everyone else has fled." @himself.bsky.social @abenewman.bsky.social www.wired.com/story/enshit...
The Enshittification of American Power
First Google and Facebook, then the world. Under Trump 2.0, US statecraft is starting to mimic the worst tendencies of Big Tech.
wired.com
This is actually the fault of the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, which unconstitutionally capped the size of the House at the 435 seats determined by the 1910 census. We have a legislature based on the year California had 2.3M people. Both chambers have shifted power from people to land.
Julian Sanchez@normative.bsky.social · last yr.Statistically “America” is its cities. But we’re stuck with an 18th century political architecture that gives votes to cornfields & thus makes it politically viable to treat them as some kind of weird tumor.
I appreciate that Jeffrey Goldberg did not sit on this news for a book that he writes two years from now
What we’re witnessing in America is what happens when disordered discourse captures a political party, then the state itself. The Republican Party was the first to fall - abandoning truth for conspiracy, ideology for grievance, and policy for performative outrage.
Rule 1: Troika always wins Rule 2: Never fight a comms war against Zelensky
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · last yr.Zelenskyy: "When they, for example say that Ukraine is almost destroyed, that our soldiers run away, that they are not heroes, that the president is a dictator, what is the reaction? It's not about me. The reaction is, where is the friendship between Ukraine and the US?"
Now that I have made this Bluesky we all share my only social media home, I thought it would be a lovely idea to create a starter pack for Buddhism/Meditation/Yoga. Please feel free to suggest more accounts for this starter pack. go.bsky.app/Tmrt5io #buddhism #meditation #yoga #zen #mindfulness
Wonderful film, not to be missed if you are in Italy. Beautifully shot, brilliantly acted. You will be entertained and learn some fundamental Italian history.
Keir Starmer announces a techutopian AI plan that reads like it was generated by ChatGPT. Shockingly naive & desperate capture of UK govt by corporate interests www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
‘Mainlined into UK’s veins’: Labour announces huge public rollout of AI
Plans to make UK world leader in AI sector include opening access to NHS and other public data
theguardian.com