Hating Theory Today Abstract. Drawing on nearly a decade of research, this essay investigates the hatred of theory on the political right. The phobic fascination with theory is over a century old. Yet, in recent years, i...

"The phobic fascination with theory is over a century old. Yet, in recent years, it has taken on a new importance..." @moiraweigel.bsky.social doi.org/10.1162/OCTO...

An excerpt from the part of our book where we mustered all of our self-control and … took the category of “woke mind virus“ seriously.

Turns out it’s kind of revealing about how Musk and his brethren in the Silicon Valley leadership class see politics.

This book is going to be so important!

🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

Hating Theory Today Abstract. Drawing on nearly a decade of research, this essay investigates the hatred of theory on the political right. The phobic fascination with theory is over a century old. Yet, in recent years, i...

@moiraweigel.bsky.social wrote one of the most enlightening (and earliest) pieces on Alex Karp's fashy PhD. She now has written this luminous piece that gives a persuasive materialist account of the right wing assault on theory. Truly brilliant stuff.

direct.mit.edu/octo/article...

How ‘Muskism’ Is Changing the Way America Works

How did Elon Musk go from Silicon Valley nerd worried about climate change to chainsaw-wielding billionaire eviscerating government agencies?

On Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff's incisive new book, "Muskism: A Guide For the Perplexed."

New Englanders! @quinnslobodian.com and I have a couple of events coming up next week for our new book Muskism.

Wed, April 22, 7pm, at Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, with @jasonbjackson.bsky.social

Thurs, April 23, 7pm, at Riffraff Bookstore in Providence, with @madisoncondon.bsky.social

Grateful for Jennifer Szalai's thoughtful read of Muskism in today's NYT www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/b...

Buchcover: Lebenswelten der radikalen Rechten in der Bonner Republik.

Ein neuer Sammelband erkundet die historischen Lebenswelten der radikalen Rechten in der Bundesrepublik. Ab jetzt im Open Access als kostenloser Download verfügbar: www.wallstein-open-library.de/978383536043...

“Labor Tech Research Network invites submissions for our fifth annual Book, Graduate Student Paper, and Social Justice Awards. The deadline is June 1.” Via @labortechresearchnetwork.org

labortechresearchnetwork.org/awards

Abstract As Al-generated images and texts proliferate, people have developed techniques for identifying them using clues like misshapen hands in images or distinctive words in text. This commentary situates these emerging practices within what Carlo Ginzburg called the “conjectural paradigm”: a mode of knowing that links contemporary Al detection to older traditions of medical symptomatology, art historical connoisseurship, and detective work. Yet unlike the stable or slowly evolving clues of earlier conjectural practices, the signifiers of Al involvement are rapidly shifting. This instability has consequences not only for how texts are read but also for how they are written. Authors now navigate a landscape of suspicion where their words may be misrecognized as machine generated. Rather than resolving into stable literacies, our efforts to recognize Al’s handiwork reveal the deeper uncertainties of authorship and interpretation.

new publication alert: a little commentary I wrote about 🔎 clues 🔎 and the detection of AI-generated material is out in American Ethnologist (paywalled at the moment, but hit me up if you can't access it): doi.org/10.1111/amet...

If you're a tech worker who's interested in reading Marx's Capital with other tech workers, there's a free online course that's starting later this month cftw.ohrg.org

So excited!

Introduction: Traversing the Circuits of Global Trade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1. Systems at War in a Hostile Universe: The Informatic Roots of Logistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 2. Exploding the BOM: Digitizing Production in the Cold War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 3. 4. 5. 6. Phantoms, Backflushes, and the Trumpet of Doom: The Dilemmas of Just-in-Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Inventing SCM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 The Sensate Company in the Animate Cloud . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Transferring Risk in a Calamitous World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .000

(Decided I’m allowed this one moment as proud bae…)

How Elon Musk Infiltrated The Public Sector YouTube video by Times News

Listen to this smartie @bentarnoff.com youtu.be/03DlZ9zLaT8

Der edition suhrkamp-Band "Oben rechts" auf hellgrünem Hintergrund.

Rechtspopulismus als Revolte der »Abgehängten«? »Oben rechts« (Hg. Heinrich Geiselberger) versammelt Analysen, die eine andere Perspektive eröffnen: Rechte Politik erscheint hier als Projekt politischer Unternehmer – von Berlusconi bis Musk: shrk.vg/ObenRechts-B

lol I had not yet seen Quinn’s original post

Palantir CEO Makes Shocking Confession on Disrupting Democratic Power They’re saying the quiet part out loud now.

mehr dazu newrepublic.com/post/207693/...

Mehr dazu auch im Beitrag von @moiraweigel.bsky.social in OBEN RECHTS @suhrkamp.de.
www.suhrkamp.de/buch/oben-re...

Ein Stapel neuer Bücher aus dem Suhrkamp-Verlag vor weißem Hintergrund.

Unsere neuen Bücher im März sind da! Einen Überblick über alle Neuerscheinungen findet Ihr wie immer hier: shrk.vg/Neuerscheinu...

@tbiebricher.bsky.social @tgrdebate.bsky.social @lhaffert.bsky.social @moiraweigel.bsky.social

The Epstein files document what many women researchers have long experienced but rarely seen laid bare so starkly: exclusion operating behind closed doors, shaping who gets funded, invited, mentored, and taken seriously. How many of these networks, norms, and gatekeepers remain in place?

Our symposyum 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙒𝙤𝙧𝙡𝙙 𝘼𝙡𝙜𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙝𝙢: 𝙆𝙣𝙤𝙬𝙡𝙚𝙙𝙜𝙚 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙋𝙤𝙬𝙚𝙧 𝙞𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙉𝙚𝙬 𝙂𝙡𝙤𝙗𝙖𝙡 𝙊𝙧𝙙𝙚𝙧 will take place on 2-3 February 2026.

The 𝗳𝘂𝗹𝗹 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗺𝗲 is now online: www.unive.it/worldalgorithm

𝗞𝗲𝘆𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗲𝘀: Grégoire Chamayou, Ben Tarnoff, Moira Weigel, Cédric Durand and Cecilia Rikap.

Stochastic Flocks and the Critical Problem of 'Useful' AI Acknowledging that AI systems are advancing does not buy into hype, it sharpens the precision of critical thinking about their impacts, says Eryk Salvaggio.

To acknowledge the ways AI systems are changing does not buy into hype, it sharpens the precision of critical thinking about their impacts. To make sense of what AI does to people, you also need to understand what it does for them, writes Eryk Salvaggio.

Concerned about ICE's $45 billion plan to convert warehouses into immigration detention centers? This is what they'll look like inside. From ICE's plan for the Social Circle, GA facility. Each little dot: a person. www.socialcirclega.gov/home/showpub...

My “Literature and/as AI” students have finished their first assignment, which was to extract and generate an “Encyclopedia of Ancient Robots” from thousands of pages of Homer, Hero of Alexandria, Vitruvius, Liezi, Al Jazari, etc., and I must say they’re cool! code.chuanqisun.com/ancient-robo...

People Think | Ben Tarnoff Asad Haider, the foremost socialist thinker of his generation, staked his philosophy on the principle that everyone should be fundamentally free.

“Every situation…contains a certain openness; people can and do act in ways that reject the necessity of what exists. Asad Haider’s word for this undertaking was politics.” —Ben Tarnoff

The Trump administration is engaged in norm destruction -breaking expectations about transparent governance and public oversight while installing new assumptions about how technological development should be directed. What it has advanced is not the absence of Al regulation but its rearrangement, often by caprice: intensive state intervention operating through industrial policy, trade restric-tions, immigration controls, equity stakes in private firms (selected by the state), the redirection of research funding, and the strategic preemption of state authority. Many of these actions face legal challenge, and some may not survive judicial review. But the pattern itself-the systematic preference for executive discretion over deliberative process-reveals an approach to governance that will shape Al policy regardless of how individual cases are de-cided. This is not deregulation. Not in the least. It is hyper-regulation by other means.

There's something very important in this from @alondra.bsky.social about how a government of bosses understands its relationship to AI: as a means to avoid preexisting, even nominal, deference to popular deliberation or expert consultation. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

People Think | Ben Tarnoff Asad Haider, the foremost socialist thinker of his generation, staked his philosophy on the principle that everyone should be fundamentally free.

I wrote something about my friend Asad Haider for the new issue of @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...