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Matt Thompson

@mattthompson.bsky.social

• full-time urban geographer (UCL Bartlett) • spare-time cyclejographer (London mostly) • first-time author (*Reconstructing Public Housing: Liverpool’s hidden history of collective alternatives* https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv153k6cx

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Dr. Jeroen W.P. Wijnendaele@drdragases.bsky.social · last wk.

No longer content with pillaging intellectual work and dismembering our environment (already critically weakened), AI companies are now hellbent on destroying books galore including rare editions. Shut down these nefarious enterprises already.

AI labs buy, scan, shred millions of rare books

If you have retreated to physical books because the internet is too full of AI slop, bad news — now they’re shredding the books to feed their AI slop machines.

news.com.au

Caroline Ball@heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · last wk.

This article estimated global APC spend in 2023 to be around $2.5 billion, which was THREE TIMES the amount just four years earlier in 2019, at around $910 million.

Estimating global article processing charges paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023

This study presents estimates of the global expenditure on article processing charges (APCs) paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023. APCs are fees charged for publishing in some ...

arxiv.org

Tim White@timwhite100.bsky.social · 2w ago

We now know a bit about what happens when the likes of private equity firms and REITs enter housing markets. But what about venture capitalists?  My recent paper ‘Hyperscaling housing’ has been published in the latest volume of IJURR (spoiler: it's not pretty):

HYPERSCALING HOUSING: Venture Capital, Real Estate Start‐Ups and the Race to Build a Global Residential Brand

What happens when venture capitalists try to reinvent housing in their own image? Synonymous with the rise of Big Tech, venture capitalists (VCs) are asset managers that invest in early-stage compani...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Matt Thompson@mattthompson.bsky.social · 4w ago

How can Community Wealth Building and the Foundational Economy be combined in experimental ways to tackle problems of uneven development in peripheralised places? My chapter on alternative economic models in new book on the Evolution of UK Regional Policy: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

(PDF) Alternative Policy Models for Local Economic Regeneration: Combining Community Wealth Building with the Foundational Economy

PDF | In the absence of redistributive regional policy, yet with deepening uneven development, peripheralised places across the UK are left with little... | Find, read and cite all the research you ne...

researchgate.net

Matt Thompson@mattthompson.bsky.social · 4w ago

How can Community Wealth Building and the Foundational Economy be combined in experimental ways to tackle problems of uneven development in peripheralised places? My chapter on alternative economic models in new book on the Evolution of UK Regional Policy: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

(PDF) Alternative Policy Models for Local Economic Regeneration: Combining Community Wealth Building with the Foundational Economy

PDF | In the absence of redistributive regional policy, yet with deepening uneven development, peripheralised places across the UK are left with little... | Find, read and cite all the research you ne...

researchgate.net

Jonn Elledge@jonnelledge.bsky.social · last mo.

so a friend on a mailing list I've been on forever said he couldn't understand why so many people had wanted Starmer to stand down when he was obviously so much better than those who came before. I did my best to explain

Starmer is not only incapable of making difficult decisions, he seems not to understand it's his job. I've had it from multiple sources that he gets angry when officials decline to say which course of action is better, even though sometimes it's not clear which is better, it's a trade off, or all options have risks. This is why there is no coherence to our immigration or tax policies. Starmer refuses to meet MPs unless it's absolutely unavoidable. He doesn't like ministers who promote their own ideas but doesn't seem to have any of his own. He has utterly failed to articulate how he wants to change the country or what he thinks his government is for. He has presided over policies that have taken rights from protestors, migrants, refugees and trans people. He has made speeches and pursued immigration reforms intended to impress the far right, who are never going to vote for him, while alienating his own voters. He has seemed entirely disinterested in the fact the higher education system - which is a competitive advantage, a major export industry and a huge plank of regional economies, all at once - is collapsing. And on multiple occasions when coked up racist thugs have been committing acts of violence and mass civil disorder on our streets, he has been, at best, reluctant to get in front of a camera and say these people are racist thugs who will be punished by the full force of the law. Pensioners who support the Palestinians, by contrast, he is happy to throw away the key. Oh, and there's the small matter of last month's election results which suggest that under his leadership Labour is genuinely on course for extinction as a party less than two years after winning a huge majority. Obviously this government's politics is much closer to mine than any of the Tory administrations since 2010, but measured in terms of ability to actually do many of the jobs that being prime minister involves - making decisions, managing his MPs, articulating a vision and then moving Britain towards it, running the fucking government - I think it is entirely possible to argue that Starmer is worse than any of his immediate predecessors except Truss. Andy Burnham is, to put it mildly, a deeply flawed politician. It's possible this gets us nowhere. But I find it extremely hard to envision how rolling the dice could make things worse.
Temporary Bat@saredra.bsky.social · last mo.

People being deeply confused as to why he's gone, getting a load of responses as to how he pissed them off, and remaining confused because, like, that reason only affects that person, so where were these blunders? Also, the cat may be PM now, not sure.

London Review of Books@lrb.co.uk · 2mo ago

‘Andy Burnham has turned that anger and helplessness, so liable to become a poisonous and reactionary nostalgia, in another direction. His campaign has made unabashed use of the word “hope”.’ Tom Crewe on the rebirth of municipal England, from the blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ju...

Tom Crewe | The Strange Rebirth of Municipal England

It has been a very large part of the failure of the Labour Party since 2010 that it has been unable to link the grave...

lrb.co.uk

Matthew J Kuiper@matthewjkuiper.bsky.social · 2mo ago

“Even more depressing is how well suited this cauterisation of the self is to the political moment, one of a glut of content and bad information…What is at stake isn’t just a few unfortunate errors here and there, but a commitment to strive [to maintain] the veracity of the world we all experience.”

The Guardian@theguardian.com · 2mo ago

AI is devoid of meaning and humanity. That’s why its vapid voice suits this political moment | Nesrine Malik

Matt Seybold@mattseybold.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I really applaud both author & sources, & The Chronicle for running with this. As somebody who was a decade into recovery before I started grad school, I think there can be many reasons why addicts find their way into academe. But what resonates with me is this…

Sarah T Roberts, PhD@ubiquity75.xyz · 2mo ago

“'We think of drug addicts or substance abusers as people who really just can’t deny themselves the pleasure.' But it’s really about escaping pain."

DuckDuckGo@duckduckgo.com · 2mo ago

Since Google revealed its plans for an AI search overhaul, visits to our "No AI" search page have tripled…and they’re still rising! Want to make it your default on Chrome or Firefox? Grab our No-AI extensions and banish AI-assisted answers, chat, and AI images. (1/3)

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TIBG@tibg.bsky.social · 3mo ago

📢From now, reference lists will no longer be counted in the 10,000 word limit for papers submitted to TIBG In our latest editorial, we lay out the reasons behind this decision & encourage prospective authors to reflect on their citational practices. Available to read here ⬇️ doi.org/10.1111/tran...

Screenshot of an editorial abstract in Transactions by Anna Lawrence, James Esson, Ben Anderson, Katherine Brickell & Beth Greenhough (2026) entitled: 'Citational politics in Transactions' with a red banner at the top. From now on, authors writing in Transactions will no longer be expected to count their reference lists within the 10,000-word limit. In this editorial, we take the opportunity to lay out the reasons behind this decision. Our purpose in removing references from the word limit is not to encourage authors to cram in as many references as they can to the detriment of their own voice, but rather to encourage practices of careful, conscious, and capacious citational generosity. Picking up on threads running through past editorials (Bailey et al. 2023; Esson et al. 2024), here we continue discussions of ‘care’ in scholarly publishing and what constitutes a ‘landmark paper’ within the discipline, this time through the lens of citational politics. This editorial proceeds by locating the decision within current debates around citational justice and citation as a reproductive technology (Ahmed 2013; Kim 2020), before considering the broader landscape of source discovery, reading and referencing in the digital/AI-crowded world, following the publication of the last ever print volume of Transactions in December 2023. We end with a discussion of how the practice of citation might be imagined differently, from the teaching of citation as a joyful praxis (Quave and Ohbi 2024) and the reflective insights collected around the #CiteBlackWomen movement (Smith 2022) to the rethinking of citation templates to better account for knowledge that sits outside of the Western episteme (MacLeod 2021). We encourage authors writing in Transactions to reflect on their own practices of reading and citing, and we highlight the role that journals, reviewers, and editors must play in moving forward with more inclusive citational practices.
Thom Davies@thomdavies.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The University of Nottingham is cutting over 600 academic jobs. This includes 1 in 3 #geography lecturers. "The lecturers *are* the University, and without them it's nothing" - Geography student (BBC interview): www.instagram.com/reels/DYprAN...

BBC Nottingham on Instagram: "The action would "effectively block the university from handing out graduation certificates". Students have joined lecturers on the picket line at a protest over job los...

6,038 likes, 179 comments - bbceastmidlands on May 22, 2026: "The action would "effectively block the university from handing out graduation certificates". Students have joined lecturers on the picke...

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