Alexandra Mateescu
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cariatida.bsky.social
Alexandra Mateescu
@cariatida.bsky.social
340 followers 310 following 49 posts
RIP Social Media. Researcher @ Data & Society, living in Boston | labor, technology, care | tetrapyloctomy | Labor & Tech newsletter: http://bit.ly/2Fv5xfX | https://acmateescu.com/
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Reposted by Alexandra Mateescu
groundwork.bsky.social
Our study, using over 400 volunteer shoppers, found that Instacart offered different prices to different shoppers on 74% of the grocery items tested.
December 9, 2025 at 5:44 PM
cariatida.bsky.social
This story just jolted a memory of being shocked reading about a similar project in Jonathan Crary’s book “24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep” and then breathing a massive sigh of relief that it was abandoned. Guess we're in the century of reviving grotesquely hellish ideas...
In the late 1990s a Russian/European space consortium announced plans to build and launch into orbit satellites that would reflect sunlight back onto earth. The scheme called for a chain of many satellites to be placed in sun-synchronized orbits at an altitude of 1700 kilometers, each one equipped with fold-out parabolic reflectors of paper-thin material. Once fully extended to 200 meters in diameter, each mirror satellite would have the capacity to illuminate a ten-square-mile area on earth with a brightness nearly 100 times greater than moonlight. The initial impetus for the project was to provide illumination for industrial and natural resource exploitation in remote geographical areas with long polar nights in Siberia and western Russia, allowing outdoor work to proceed round the clock. In any case, this ultimately unworkable enterprise is one particular instance of a contemporary imaginary in which a state of permanent illumination is inseparable from the non-stop operation of global exchange and circulation. In its entrepreneurial excess, the project is a hyperbolic expression of an institutional intolerance of whatever obscures or prevents an instrumentalized and unending condition of visibility.
October 22, 2025 at 12:52 AM