Samantha Culp
@samanthaculp.bsky.social
Writer & filmmaker in LA after many years in greater China / Currently writing a book about the global landscapes of futures thought / newsletter: borderstudies.substack.com
A Los Angeles restaurant worker with a valid work permit was followed by ICE into her workplace. The manager used PAXIS.app to identify the kitchen as a non-public area, told agents they could not enter without consent, asked for a judicial warrant refused access, and requested that they leave.
PAXIS
A comprehensive guide and assistant for immigration-related queries and actions.
paxis.app
Here is a statement from Champagne, aka Benjamin Song, the most maligned of the Priarieland protestors. Champagne was just sentenced to 100 years for shooting and injuring a police officer who had just drawn a weapon on an unarmed, fleeing protestor. prairielanddefendants.com/defendant-wr...
Statement by Benjamin "Champagne" Song - Support the Prairieland Defendants
I don’t Hate. I don’t Hate anyone. I don’t Hate cops. I don’t Hate Trump. I don’t Hate nazis. My beliefs are composed thus:
prairielanddefendants.com
you either die a hero or live long enough to see the consensus reality required to make democracy function shattered into a million algorithmically ring-fenced backrooms
We are hiring a Research Manager or Sr Research Manager at DWN! This role will play a critical role in advancing DWN’s mission to end immigration detention through research, data and policy analysis, writing, strategy development, and coalition building. www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/about/jobs-o...
detentionwatchnetwork.org
Criminalization is the fuel of fascism. And the people who have been saying this for decades are the PIC abolitionists so many deride.
Most academics being interviewed: Blah, bland, meh. @naomioreskes.bsky.social interviewed: stand back because 🔥 🔥 🔥
Rebecca Sear@rebeccasear.bsky.social · 2mo ago“What gives you optimism right now? I think it’s borderline unethical to focus on the positive when really troubling things are happening that hurt people. What’s ethical is being honest about problems, confronting them clearly and asking what we can realistically do”
I just learned that the term "carbon footprint" was developed by BP to offload responsibility for climate change onto individuals. Something like that's happening in higher ed with AI. Institutions capitulate or dodge; students are submitting; & they believe it's their individual failing. 7/
Shirley Hazzard's Transit of Venus (as screenwritten by @specktor.bsky.social , who almost was able to make this happen in the early 2000s... still wish the stars would align for it)
☀️ Starshine@starshine.bsky.social · 2mo agoWhat’s your white whale tv/film adaptation that needs to happen
Data for Progress is hiring! We're looking for a Chief Operating Officer to help lead our internal operations and strengthen our impact across the progressive movement. Apply on our website 👇 www.dataforprogress.org/jobs/chief-o...
Chief Operating Officer
dataforprogress.org
I’m at the oil shock. I’m at the super El Niño. I’m at the combination oil shock super El Niño fertilizer shortages imminent famines historic droughts over half our oxygen lost to ocean acidification AMOC collapse portending a southeastern USA heat dome + Western Europe ice age
We need more rich people with normal interests like "your movie sounds neat" instead of, like, white fertility rates.
All The Right Movies@alltherightmovies.com · 2mo agoWhen EMI pulled funding on LIFE OF BRIAN days before shooting, the Pythons turned to a fan. George Harrison put up around £3 million of his own money to make the film, simply because he wanted to see it. Eric Idle called it "the world's most expensive cinema ticket."
This is an absurdly irresponsible piece filled with straight up lies, misinformation, and corporate propaganda lines straight from Anthropic. It ironically follows the form of corporate climate denial! An avalanch if misinformation on behalf of polluting corporations
Rutger Bregman@rutgerbregman.com · 2mo agoTwenty years ago, climate denial was a problem of the right. Today, AI denial is a problem of the left, and the consequences could be even more disastrous. www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpTZ...
To learn ways you can interrupt the ICE machine, see our toolkit! Updated regularly!
Block It! — Interrupting Criminalization
interruptingcriminalization.com
The Marshall Project@themarshallproject.org · 2mo agoOne detainee in Arizona told the paper that a guard told him, “It’s part of my job. I have to make your life miserable so that you request your own deportation.”
re: the Backrooms, something can be a silly unserious meme embraced by the young and also be a really obvious reflections of the ambient anxieties of its audience. because liminal spaces and backrooms stuff is absolutely a reflection of late capitalism in a fairly obvious and straightforward sense.
New research examines Waymo's California robotaxi trips btw Aug 2023 and Dec 2025. Conclusion: 46% of miles driven involved no one inside the car. That's 40 million miles of deadheading, with Waymo vehicles using road space w/o transporting a human. doi.org/10.32866/001...
A city that spends more on guns than on its children is a failure. Tomorrow, please vote for the candidate that loves Los Angeles enough to take care of its children - not one who panders to special interests, commuter freakouts, & vilifies our unhoused neighbors.
LA's continuing budget crisis can be felt in every essential city service. This evening, my 6 year old & I sat through the summer camp orientation at the Rose Hill Rec Center. The presentation was full of apologies for all the cutbacks -a deafening reminder of @mayor.lacity.gov broken promises.
“It’s absurd. It’s absolutely impossible for people to comply when the law is written loosely enough for police on the ground to interpret it however they would like. Police are chasing people into the night. It boggles my mind. It’s so irresponsible, and it’s not keeping anyone safe.”
After curfew set outside Newark migrant jail, numerous protesters arrested • New Jersey Monitor
A second weekend of strife outside migrant jail Delaney Hell resulted in potentially dozens of arrests.
newjerseymonitor.com
Scott Pelley is a hero, and it really makes you wonder: where has this spirit been? In other media figures, other executives, other people who have seen these oligarchs degrade everything of value in this country? Why is it so striking & unusual for *anyone to fight back*?
Justin Baragona@justinbaragona.bsky.social · 2mo agoOliver Darcy got the audio of the heated 60 Minutes meeting where Scott Pelley dressed Nick Bilton down! "You know what was rude? Black Thursday. That was the absolute definition of rudeness. Telling Tanya Simon she had to be out of here at five o'clock." www.status.news/p/scott-pell...
“It’s working for me” is such a fucking banger of a line
Justin Baragona@justinbaragona.bsky.social · 2mo agoOliver Darcy got the audio of the heated 60 Minutes meeting where Scott Pelley dressed Nick Bilton down! "You know what was rude? Black Thursday. That was the absolute definition of rudeness. Telling Tanya Simon she had to be out of here at five o'clock." www.status.news/p/scott-pell...
If LLMs are a "social technology" akin to a market, it might be interesting to bring Marx into the mix to think about how markets aren't just information processors but the means by which relations of social domination are organized (and mystified) knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a...
AI as Social Technology
knightcolumbia.org
oops, I should have done my homework first. Such tests HAVE been done (!), and the A.I. methods -- as I would have suspected -- come out looking really poor in such capacities (and yes, this is an A.I. summary 🤣): www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/....
'It is as much an exercise of history as it is an experiment of alchemy' - Wisconsin Death Trip.
On the occasion of the Backrooms film release, reposting my 2022 essay on the phenomenon, the inherent tensions btw collective worldbuilding and surrealist art, and Kane Parsons' original web series (which I predicted even then was bound for Hollywood). borderstudies.substack.com/p/the-backro...
The Backrooms, Before Hollywood: Lore vs. the Sublime
Before you head to the cineplex (ideally in a dead mall), my Backrooms essay from 2022
borderstudies.substack.com
[steps onto soapbox] The authors of all these articles about how women are the "new" enemy of the far-right, and misogyny is "new" fuel for extremist violence, apparently just didn't consult, you know, history.
