Glad to have CMC at #UDC2025!
Our BD Justus joined Moody’s, Kaiko & CoinDesk JP on a panel “Financial Data: TradFi vs. Crypto.” Discussion touched on rising retail + institutional demand, the need for more accessible analytics, regulatory clarity, & trust in data.
It was such an amazing time at #UDC2025 last week! I got to meet and reconnect with amazing people!
Also presented part of my dissertation where I offer adopting the term “memesque” to address the commodification practices targeting memes and meme culture.
@uniondemcomm.bsky.social
Unsurprisingly, #UDC2025 was an absolute blast.
It was a huge honour to win the Brian Murphy award this year - it will forever live on my bookshelf with pride!
Already counting down the 18 months until the next one @uniondemcomm.bsky.social @miccenter.bsky.social @bellisariograded.bsky.social
Bellisario at #UDC2025! @uniondemcomm.bsky.social @iamapghfan.bsky.social @tccorrigan1.bsky.social @aaronhere.bsky.social @abbysimmerman.bsky.social @ryanlizardi.bsky.social @yaseminbeykont.bsky.social @sydneyforde.bsky.social
Smythe Lecture: we must bear the costs of not accepting AI’s inevitability. We must insist on holding open debate on what it means to make it work toward social ends & community goals Let’s not abandon the too bold and too risky the ideas of facing down corporatization of social life. #udc2025
Smythe Lecture: How ever much we are told the digital future is necessary and invisible and we can’t do anything about it, it’s a lie. We don’t need to retrofit the present for the inevitable future. Lets cooperate with each other to achieve a non-cooperation with corporate power. #udc2025
Smythe Lecture: platforms even, when we love them, produce the social for capital. If we want to change how the world is for us, its necessary to resist--head on--the corporatization of how we interact socially #udc2025
Smythe Lecture: our social world is a Leviathan in fragments from expansion of pure environmental extractivism; social extractivism from social media platforms allowed to build the wrong kind of social will; increasing role of commercial AI in capturing the forces of cognitive production #udc2025
Smythe Lecture: I don't trust oversimple recipes for change that can be read out of a rule book, but I also refuse to give up on change #udc2025
Smythe Lecture: my avoidance of oversimple links to practical politics is because while I hope for a better configuration of everything compared to where we are now, I am skeptical that the path is obvious or easily acceptable #udc2025
Smythe Lecture: effective theory is a tool for everyday life and everyday resistance. To regard the abstraction of theory with suspicion is to miss the power and practicability of theory #udc2025
At each conference, UDC confers the Dallas Smythe Award to honor a critical media scholar/activist whose work exhibits the spirit of engagement, democracy, teaching, and feistiness to which the UDC is committed. We're thrilled this year to present @couldrynick.bsky.social with that honor #udc2025
Huge congrats to @sydneyforde.bsky.social for winning UDC's 2025 Brian Murphy Student Paper Award for her paper is "The Dialectics of Broadband" #udc2025
No better way to end #udc2025 than with the Dallas Smythe Lecture from this year's awardee @couldrynick.bsky.social
Paulus: workers identify working conditions (job security, labor rights, decreased in freelance work) and collective organization (ability to fight the system that incubates sexual assault in a more systemic way) can go a long way toward protection #udc2025
Paulus: the "why" may be more understood, but the "what" has a lot of gaps and doesn't address systemic analysis or issues #udc2025
Now: Paulus on making safer work environments in German cultural and media industries. Despite progress, sexualized power is alive and well, so asking why are cultural and media industries so vulnerable to abuses of power and what can be done? #udc2025
Stoltzfus & Flores: in our current moment Amish people are seen as public health heroes - a white, hyper-reproductive, and antivaxed ideal #udc2025
Happening now: Stoltzfus & Flores on Christian Nationalist policies, eugenics, and genetic resistance, comparing how language and narratives to genetically fabricate and overdetermine two opposite groups - Amish and Mexicans #udc2025
Kidd: how do we do research that brings in issues of repro justice into the digital and mediatized spheres when digital platforms and surveillance capitalism have intensified the attacks on reproductive justice and basic social sustainability? #udc2025
Next up is Dorothy Kidd on repro rights and digital activism in the Trump era, thinking about what movement are in motion to counterattack the attack of the capacity of people around the world to sustain themselves #udc2025
Yousman: soft girl/trad wife movement primes a generation for backsliding into dangerous ideology: women only valuable if chosen by man to be wife/woman; queer communities are erased by radical embrace of heteronormativity; bodily autonomy nonexistent #udc2025
Yousman: soft girl and trad wife culture is a reaction to girlboss culture and is being validated in culture as normal because of choice feminism while superficially rejecting - but really embracing - capitalism #udc2025
Yousman: reality TV trends (Secret Lives of Mormon Wives) are reflecting and reenforcing social media trends like Trad Wives, but it's really just repackaged post-feminist and girl aesthetics #udc2025
Yousman on soft girls trad wives, and social media Stepford Wives kicks off with Ballerina Farm, can Nara Smith be far behind? #udc2025
Last panel of the day! Social Movements, Feminism, and Reproductive Rights with Lori Bindig Yousman, Isra Ali, Dorothy Kidd, Lars Stoltzfus, Joseph Flores, Aljoscha Paulus, and @tinemalz.bsky.social #udc2025
@aaronhere.bsky.social: Protocol instead of a platform has political saliency understanding that there is no good way out of this. So what happens when you build a protocol to protect the user from the protocol itself? #udc2025
@aaronhere.bsky.social: resistance and platforms - decentralization as a technology and a politics (idea of a Fediverse of promise and project). This brings us to BlueSky #udc2025
@aaronhere.bsky.social: how do we resist enshitification? End to end principle and data transferability and right of exit are two potentials - how do you deal with the core of platformification and platform decay? #udc2025
Now: @aaronhere.bsky.social and @johnnyrico.bsky.social on resistance and resolve on BlueSky (so meta) #udc2025
