Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal

SHOULD THE U.S BLOT OUT THE SUN AND USHER IN AN AGE OF ETERNAL DARKNESS? - Gallup 2/20/26-3/5/26

NO - 41%
YES - 38%
UNSURE - 21%

added some new privacy/opsec guides for organizers here (as always tell me what I am missing) are.na/rebecca-will...

Just ordered one (1) takeout dinner in the Helevetic Confederation better known as Switzerland:

Antipopulists and disinfo maximalists have been peddling an anti-Democratic, fundamentally authoritarian vision of the public for years and claiming it explains everything about the present. But it has proven itself unable to analyze this war or resist Trumpism. Le Bonism has nothing to offer.

"Populist" understandings of Trump and Trumpism are almost uniquely unsuited for understanding it. They're acting lawlessly in an arena almost uniquely insulated from democratic accountability. The problem here is emphatically not that of a captive, mob-like public marching along. Quite the opposite

The whole thing sits uncomfortably with how a lot of analysts view Trumpism. The war is deeply unpopular. The administration's meager attempts to sway the public haven't succeeded. And the war itself marks not a rupture, but something deeply continuous with 40+ years of GOP and DoD orthodoxy.

One of the more interesting things about this is how little they tried to sell it.

Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous ‘Stop Cop City’ Protester A court record reviewed by 404 Media shows privacy-focused email provider Proton Mail handed over payment data related to a Stop Cop City email account to the Swiss government, which handed it to the ...

SCOOP: Proton Mail provided Swiss authorities with payment data that the FBI then used to determine who was allegedly behind an anonymous account affiliated with the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, according to a court record reviewed by 404 Media.

It's 2028. The world is burning.

After several years of her Parisian stint as a Midwesterner who refused to integrate, she finally starts learning French because she needs to read Frantz Fanon in its original form. Meanwhile, her American boyfriend has been reading Mike Davis.

Proposal: Next season, Emily follows this American consular officer to his next posting in the Middle East and gets caught up in the war only to realize that the bourgeois life she has been living always stood atop a nightmare of unequal exchange, war, and violent extraction from Global South.

We've begun. You can still hop on!

The legal arguments and architecture for what's happening in Iran now, and were deployed in relation to Gaza, really did not come out of nowhere.

The pre-emption and targetted assassination arguments might appear spectacular, but they were the workaday archiecture of the war on terror.

This is happening today! Register @ tinyurl.com/DigitalTheory

It's interesting seeing all the take-havers having viral takes about AI that are essentially verbatim recitations of deeply researched analyses offered by AI scholars ten years ago, when they those caveats were ignored by press + the general public because the threat wasn't yet so intensely palpable

The Media, Science and Technology (MST) SIG is in Spotlight, thanks to an insightful piece by Gary Kafer and Patrick Brian Smith, explaining the relationship between the three constitutive terms, each of which as we all know can mean a lot of different things: quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/i...

the biggest brains possible

Reckoning with Everything. The Becoming-Environmental of Computing › meson press Computation must and has always had to “reckon with everything.” This volume brings together contributions that seek to describe the environmentality of computation based on selected settings.

New chapter on ocean digitalization and governance out in volume edited by Bernhard Siegert, alongside great essays by Jussi Parikka, Geoffrey Bowker, @ranjodhdhaliwal.com @jeffreykirkwood.bsky.social and others

meson.press/books/reckon...

Thanks for the kind words. Glad it was useful! :)

Something that had to be sacrificed at the altar of piece length. I was already severely over limit.

Hadn't considered | in the midst of all this, but I think you are right, that's a sharp observation.

Just Published: 'The Infrastructural Unconscious: Do Computers Dream of Carbo-Silico Pipelines?' in "Reckoning with Everything: The Becoming-Environmental of Computing" edited by Bernhard Siegert and Benedikt Merkle, and published by @mesonpress.bsky.social .

Reckoning with Everything. The Becoming-Environmental of Computing › meson press Computation must and has always had to “reckon with everything.” This volume brings together contributions that seek to describe the environmentality of computation based on selected settings.

Available open access, along with a few other great pieces in the collection, via doi.org/10.14619/2676

In this (somewhat derivative, admittedly) tribute to Fred, I talk about how 'pipelines' emerged as a computational entity (in data, instruction, and graphic pipelines), and what that tells us about assembly lines, supply chains, and the psychoanalytic entanglements of our infrastructures.

Just Published: 'The Infrastructural Unconscious: Do Computers Dream of Carbo-Silico Pipelines?' in "Reckoning with Everything: The Becoming-Environmental of Computing" edited by Bernhard Siegert and Benedikt Merkle, and published by @mesonpress.bsky.social .

Reckoning with Everything. The Becoming-Environmental of Computing › meson press Computation must and has always had to “reckon with everything.” This volume brings together contributions that seek to describe the environmentality of computation based on selected settings.

Happy to see this volume on environmental computation out where I contribute a chapter on ocean digitalization and governance, alongside great essays by Jussi Parikka, @ranjodhdhaliwal.com Geoffrey Bowker and others

meson.press/books/reckon...

Happening later today at the Whitney Humanities Center in Yale! Come hear me talk about media, infrastructure, and firewalls. events.yale.edu/event/ranjod...

Next week, I will be delivering a 2026 Franke Lecture in the Humanities at Yale titled 'Symbolic Access: On Walls, Bridges, and Roman Media Infrastructures,' in which I will explain why the OG Roman Empire might be our colloquial Roman Empire for media studies, STS, and historical materialism.