@01factory
Ex-historian of social and political thought (Cambridge, Birkbeck). Ex-Amazon (Alexa and AGI). Chief scientist at Mind Mage. LRB reader. 2025 side-mission: fighting global bias on Wikidata & Wikipedia. "Only that which has no history can be defined"
The Guardian on our new study, which shows that global heating is significantly gathering speed. Our efforts to overcome our fossil fuel addiction should do the same.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Across every sphere of modern life — from politics to culture to sports — it is becoming increasingly impossible to do journalism. The economics don't support it; the oligarchs who control enormous propaganda machines don't want it; and, sadly, a large number of readers want cathartic slop instead.
Home-editing tech presumably drove the ubiquity of quick split-second edits. As with hypno-porn, there's a gesture towards some kind of sublime: trapped in a curated maelstrom of Many, yearn for impossible resolution into One. Hence the force of that final obscene shock: the White House credits.
That is awesome. Thank you very much!
Feels like there are 2 alt-right ways to read these: (1) don't know original context for any of these, but war surge just reassuringly meets my confused libinal urges; (2) knowing some original contexts makes the audacity of putting these together feel like extra war surge. Alt-right detournement.
I've got a new article out @parlhistjournal.bsky.social 💥 It's about late 19thC socialist caravan tours & the production of everyday forms of cross-cultural connection & provincial internationalisms that were vital for the development of socialist ideas in this period
Thank you for this, look forward to reading! Is it over-extrapolating to see it as corrective to crits of 'lifestyle' activism as simply post-68 pathology? (Thinking a lot about #spycops at the moment, and why the state poisoning of activist intimacies was so personally & politically destructive.)
"you're currently living through one of the largest positive technological revolutions in modern history - solar and batteries replacing fossil fuels - and you're hearing more about chatbots because the people who run our country make money selling oil" --@mtsw.bsky.social
bsky.app/profile/70sb...
Yes, this does seem extraordinarily idolatrous. I'm not a believer, but do know that some Christians place great emphasis on substitutional atonement. To my mind, that makes the casual performance of this kind of counter-substitution especially problematic.
“The geographies of the information research department”
Enjoyed this “critical geographical analysis” of British covert operations
And there’s me thinking that geography was just oxbow lakes and erosion!
rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...
Westminster Meeting House raided by Metropolitan Police again. Statement: “For Quakers, faith and action are inseparable. Peaceful protest, prayer and nonviolent action are integral parts of many Quakers' religious life. Whilst we take the planning of criminal acts very seriously, we believe that this incident is a deliberate targeting of committed young people who want to make our country a more equitable place. This raid is part of a systematic stifling of dissent. That this is the second time in a year that the police have raided our meeting house dramatically illuminates the broader trend in the UK of cracking down on those who disagree with the government. The right to protest is fundamental to our democracy. It's a key part of how people make their voices heard between elections.” – Oliver Robertson, Head of Witness and Worship Quakers in Britain, 5 March 2026
Yesterday evening, for the second time in a year, the Met Police raided Westminster Quaker Meeting House and arrested a number of young nonviolent activists.
STATEMENT: www.quaker.org.uk/news-and-eve...
hope to get to the root of the problem with my new surd2vec
No idea why you're being so rude. Blocking.
I didn't see you'd posted that too :) Not esp. sure why that would be a result of twitter breaking my mind, but peace to you x
The American neoconservative journalist Richard Grenier has a wikipedia page. Clearly a pleasant man.
Well, you have the option of clicking through to one of the Google results, e.g.
In the case of Uranus the diameter is diminished from 34,000 to about about 28,500 miles. Saturn has his diameter diminished over 1200 miles; while that of Jupiter is reduced some 300 miles.
Not so systematic, but here's a literary flourish from Scientific American, 1900, reporting on T.J.J. See's improved estimates of planetary sizes:
Saturn also male.
Scratch that. I stupidly used the Google Books year. This is March 1878 :)
Baltimore Sun Almanac (1876), page 10: The Planets Described Includes text about The Sun, Mercury, Venus, The Earth, The Moon, Mars & Jupiter
Apparently they were still at it in 1876! Here's the gendering on a page from the 1876 Baltimore Sun Almanac:
He/him: The Sun, Mars, Jupiter
She/her: nature, Venus, The Earth, The Moon
Indeterminate: Mercury
Who at @fifaclubworldcup.bsky.social could advise?
When's the next FIFA Peace Prize award due? Does it need to be brought forward?
Shill of the Americas
Do we need to give them £40K to stay there? (Do we need to crowdfund for Shabana Mahmood to head off somewhere?)
Got it! (Haha I took the bait though and went googling 'ancient greek notions of risk'. Pleased I did, though. Thanks!)
where can one learn about that?
Props to @andytattersall.bsky.social for tracking this and @sophieatrpn.bsky.social at @resprofnews.bsky.social for reporting it.
'Andy Tattersall, a research communications consultant who was previously at the University of Sheffield, has been tracking universities’ use of X since 2022—when billionaire Elon Musk acquired the platform, known then as Twitter.' @andytattersall.bsky.social 2/2
Finally getting round to a talk on these with my linguist pal Esther Asprey, at University of Birmingham next Weds. Still keen to hear any thoughts about this kind of source!
They're generally very apolitical, but occasionally a bit creeps through. I really like "Not you Mosely, sit down."
extent of capital concentration really only contingently associated with this new tech? Really-existing AI looks caught up in new state-economy formations. This mix potentially affects the labour contract itself: who may contract with whom, under what information asymmetries, etc.