Jacob Bruggeman
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jacobbruggeman.bsky.social
Jacob Bruggeman
@jacobbruggeman.bsky.social
150 followers 160 following 25 posts
Intellectual & political historian writing on political economy, professions, technology, and hackers in the modern US | Examining the ideologies in/of Silicon Valley | Friend, Neighbor, Cat Dad & Baltimorean
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Reposted by Jacob Bruggeman
dsquareddigest.bsky.social
It's out! My review of "Abundance", my review of "Breakneck" and the slogan "rent extraction is always what the other guy does"
open.substack.com/pub/hypertex...
What happens when Chinese resolve meets American rent-seeking?
Reading "Abundance" and "Breakneck" side by side suggests that learning from one another is not enough.
open.substack.com
October 14, 2025 at 11:15 AM
Reposted by Jacob Bruggeman
profgabriele.com
Have we acclimated? 5 million people were in the streets, nationwide 3 days ago
samadams.bsky.social Sam Adams @samadams.bsky.social · Jun 17
it is genuinely insane that we have just kind of acclimated to the fact that we have masked secret police now
gwynnefitz.bsky.social Gwynne Hogan @gwynnefitz.bsky.social · Jun 17
Here's a longer video of Brad Lander's detention just now inside 26 Federal Plaza as he tried to walk a man out of immigration court, by masked federal agents.
June 17, 2025 at 4:51 PM
Reposted by Jacob Bruggeman
bsky.realhackhistory.org
These illustrations of the basic components of a home computer in Family Computing Magazine issue 4, from 1983.
Illustration showing a modem, a monitor, a disk drive, a central processing unit, a cassette deck and a printer. An illustration of a livingroom with the family computer. There is a sofa chair, a dog and a fish in a fishbowl, with the computer on a desk beside a cactus,
June 14, 2025 at 5:05 PM
Reposted by Jacob Bruggeman
archive.org
🚀 New podcast alert!

Introducing Future Knowledge—a podcast from the Internet Archive & Authors Alliance exploring how knowledge is created, shared & preserved in the digital age.

🎧 Listen and subscribe: futureknowledge.transistor.fm

#FutureKnowledge @archive.org @authorsalliance.bsky.social
Illustration for the "Future Knowledge" podcast. A surreal, retro-futuristic landscape blends past and future elements: a bust of a Roman figure, stacks of books, file cabinets, satellites, DNA strands, skyscrapers, and futuristic buildings. A cartoon mouse steers a ship’s wheel connected to a giant computer mouse. An old desktop computer displays the Authors Alliance logo, and an open file drawer shows a yellow folder labeled Internet Archive. At the bottom, bold text reads: “FUTURE KNOWLEDGE.”
June 4, 2025 at 12:02 PM
Reposted by Jacob Bruggeman
bachynski.bsky.social
“The group estimated that reducing the operating budget by $900 million, as the Trump administration wants to do, would require closing 350 of the 433 parks, monuments, historic sites and other locations overseen by the Park Service… we would be witnessing the dismantling of a century-old system”
Opinion | Is This the Beginning of the End of America’s National Parks?
www.nytimes.com
June 2, 2025 at 1:32 AM
Reposted by Jacob Bruggeman
miquai.bsky.social
@alisongopnik.bsky.social suggests that there is no such thing as general intelligence, natural or artificial. Instead, multiple intelligences trade off in salience throughout our life histories: As children, we explore. As adults, we exploit. As elders, we empower.
Alison Gopnik stands before a slide explaining that multiple intelligences trade off in human development
May 30, 2025 at 2:47 AM
Reposted by Jacob Bruggeman
hypervisible.blacksky.app
“The product will be capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk, and will be a third core device a person would put on a desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.” 🫠
Exclusive | What Sam Altman Told OpenAI About the Secret Device He’s Making With Jony Ive
The idea is a “chance to do the biggest thing we’ve ever done as a company here,” Altman told OpenAI employees Wednesday.
www.wsj.com
May 22, 2025 at 9:41 AM
Reposted by Jacob Bruggeman
kschake.bsky.social
Giving political donors “dedicated VIP experiences” with the US military is not only corrupt, it will damagingly make Americans think of our military as partisan. Congress should prevent this.
Exclusive | Donors Promised ‘VIP Experience’ at Military Events With Trump
Top donors to a committee supporting events celebrating America’s 250th birthday will receive special access to a military parade and other festivities.
www.wsj.com
May 16, 2025 at 12:07 PM
jacobbruggeman.bsky.social
Digital criminals depicted in a 1978 issue of an Ann Arbor paper
May 13, 2025 at 2:34 PM
jacobbruggeman.bsky.social
Science as Culture has a CFP for contributions to a forum on "Tech Oligarchy":
think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issu...
Science as Culture Forum on “Tech Oligarchy”
think.taylorandfrancis.com
May 11, 2025 at 1:34 PM
Reposted by Jacob Bruggeman
newseye.bsky.social
Monica Isham is the 1st woman & 1st minority to serve as a circuit court judge in Sawyer County.

In an email to all Wisconsin state judges she said: “If there is no support for us, l will refuse to hold court. If this costs me my job or gets me arrested, then at least I know I did the right thing.”
Wisconsin Judge Monica Isham Threatens Not To Hold Court Over Hannah Dugan Arrest
Wisconsin Circuit Judge Monica Isham is threatening to refuse to hold court and even raise bail on defendants because of the arrest of Milwaukee Judge Hannah
www.wisconsinrightnow.com
April 26, 2025 at 10:30 PM
Reposted by Jacob Bruggeman
publicbooks.bsky.social
New at PB, Jacob Bruggeman (@jacobbruggeman.bsky.social) interviews historian Steven Conn about his new book “Lies of the Land” (@uchicagopress.bsky.social) which interrogates the myth of the rural in American politics and culture.
America’s Pernicious Rural Myth: An Interview with Steven Conn
When you think of rural America, what comes to mind? In his new book, Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is—and Isn’t, historian Steven Conn contends that what we imagine as…
www.publicbooks.org
April 9, 2025 at 4:12 PM
Reposted by Jacob Bruggeman
krissychula.bsky.social
This is high art
April 6, 2025 at 9:37 PM
jacobbruggeman.bsky.social
More evidence that Trump 2.0/DOGE is setting the stage for unprecedented cyberattacks.

Or, as Bruce Schneier has quipped, this administration represents the most significant hack in the country’s history.

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/05/u...
Trump’s National Security Firings Come as He Weakens U.S. Cyberdefenses
The firing of the head of the National Security Agency was only the latest move that has eroded the country’s fortifications against cyberattacks, especially those targeting elections.
www.nytimes.com
April 5, 2025 at 11:59 PM
Reposted by Jacob Bruggeman
dangoodin.bsky.social
A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile removed by employer Indiana University, & had his homes raided by the FBI. No one knows why.

arstechnica.com/security/202...
FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
Indiana University quietly removes profile of tenured professor and refuses to say why.
arstechnica.com
March 30, 2025 at 8:20 PM
Reposted by Jacob Bruggeman
kschake.bsky.social
My thoughts on the Signal business: "nobody wearing an American military uniform can doubt that if they took details of an ongoing operation off a classified system and transmitted them on an unclassified commercial platform, they would be court martialled and probably go to prison."
www.aei.org
March 28, 2025 at 9:18 PM
jacobbruggeman.bsky.social
A 1980s computer surveillance cartoon to brighten up your morning...
March 27, 2025 at 1:50 PM
Reposted by Jacob Bruggeman
hiserge.bsky.social
> Every day, about 100 terabytes of material are uploaded to the Internet Archive, or about a billion URLs, with the assistance of automated crawlers.
Woah.
March 23, 2025 at 9:44 PM
Reposted by Jacob Bruggeman
lwestheuser.bsky.social
📢 CALL FOR PAPERS 📢

"Moral Economies of the Polycrisis. Conflict, Critique, and Legitimation in Critical Times"

Workshop, June 16-17
University of Hamburg

Deadline for abstracts: 07/04
Supported by the Economic Sociology section of @dgsoziologie.bsky.social

linuswestheuser.com/cfp-moral-ec...
Moral Economies of the Polycrisis Conflict, Critique and Legitimation in Critical Times International Workshop. 16-17 June 2025. University of Hamburg. Organizers: Laura Lüth (University of Hamburg), Till Hilmar (University of Vienna), and Linus Westheuser (Humboldt University Berlin). By disrupting what is taken for granted, moments of economic, political, and ecological crisis reveal the implicit modus operandi of a society. As routines get derailed and settled arrangements come under strain, institutions are forced to explicate the “implicit social contract” (Barrington Moore) underpinning power, domination, and inequality. Who deserves protection when times get rough? Whose suffering matters and whose claims are made to count? Who is blamed? And what even counts as a crisis and what is shrugged off and fades into a ‘new normal’? These questions touch on a tacit structure of social expectations commonly discussed under the heading of moral economy. Drawing on thinkers like E.P. Thompson, James C. Scott, or Marion Fourcade, the moral economy perspective examines expectations of unequal reciprocity and distributive claims in economic relations; ideas of systemic legitimacy resting on mutual obligations between dominant and dominated groups; or political priorities tied to assumptions about the (un)deservingness and moral worth of social groups. Moral economy approaches focalize the ideational and institutional architecture of capitalist societies by parsing how legitimacy and hegemony are embedded in everyday moral reasoning. In addition these approaches also often look at social practices, struggles, and forms of critique centered around the violation of moral claims. At our workshop, we want to discuss work in the moral economy paradigm that sheds light on the current “polycrisis” composed of geopolitical turmoil, economic shocks, ecological breakdown, as well as crises of care and political legitimacy. What can the moral economy perspective teach us about the way capitalist societies navigate these crises? To what extent do crises open up a space in which dominated groups can critique inequality and demand a renegotiation of the implicit social contract? How do demands and political responses informed by existing moral economies deepen inequality and domination? How do institutions like the welfare state or social and eco-social policies seek to mend rifts in the moral economy? What are moral background assumptions that make some developments (such as migration) but not others (such as poverty and extreme wealth) appear as crises? And what is the explanatory status of moral economy as a concept? For instance, are popular moral sentiments and subjective aspirations a driver of political and economic action, or are they merely a symptom of existing power relations? Is moral economy about agency or structure? And if both, how exactly? These are some of the questions we want to discuss with a group of international scholars. We invite papers taking a moral economy perspective to empirically research or theorize the current conjuncture. Papers can be at all stages of development, the event is meant to collaboratively discuss work in progress. We especially welcome submissions from doctoral and post-doctoral researchers. Limited funds are available to assist with travel and accommodation for those lacking institutional support. Please send an abstract of max. 500 words to: laura.lueth@uni-hamburg.de, till.hilmar@univie.ac.at and linus.westheuser@hu-berlin.de Deadline for abstract submissions: 7 April, 2025 The workshop is supported by the Economic Sociology Section of the German Sociological Association (DGS), the Research Unit Economic Sociology at the University of Hamburg, and the Research Unit Macrosociology at Humboldt University Berlin.
March 17, 2025 at 4:35 PM
Reposted by Jacob Bruggeman
meithemouse.bsky.social
Money quote:
Text: Liberal freedom isn’t just about finding the life that best suits you, it’s a grand experiment in us all finding the best ways we can care for one another. Arnade characterizes modern liberalism as favouring “the individual over the community”. This is wrong; liberalism values both. Its canonical texts—On Liberty for instance—are self-consciously about finding a balance between the two. In recent times, the great push for unconstrained individualism, the tearing down of structures of communal aid, and the bleak insistence that “there’s no such thing as society” have come from the political right. Liberalism has compromised too much with this vision of men reduced to want fulfillment, but never let go of the insight that freedom, choice, and pluralism are both better for individuals and better for society.
March 17, 2025 at 4:39 PM
jacobbruggeman.bsky.social
Spotted in Midtown Atlanta
March 13, 2025 at 9:52 PM
Reposted by Jacob Bruggeman
hern.bsky.social
Absolutely perfect illustration of comparative advantage here: Japan builds the bullet train but Britain provides the bullshit design agency copy about it being inspired by cherry blossom www.designboom.com/technology/j...
japan railway unveils E10 shinkansen bullet train, with design inspired by sakura flowers
www.designboom.com
March 10, 2025 at 1:58 PM
Reposted by Jacob Bruggeman
jacobbruggeman.bsky.social
Glad to be in TIME
explaining how DOGE draws on anti-bureaucracy and Clinton era New Economy thinking. It was a blast to write with my colleague and friend Casey Eilbert, & longer form work is coming soon. Thanks to @brianros1.bsky.social for edits!

time.com/7260722/atte...
What Previous Government Reform Efforts Tell us About DOGE
How Musk's DOGE efforts compare with Clinton's attempts to "reinvent government" and minimize bureaucracy in the 1990s.
time.com
March 4, 2025 at 1:04 PM
Reposted by Jacob Bruggeman
loriemerson.net
a tiny bit of reminiscing today: remembering when Alan Kay visited the @mediaarchaeology.bsky.social in 2019 and found our copy of Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines...big before-times energy
white older man with grey hair, moustache, glasses, black shirt and black pants smiles at the camera while holding up a copy of Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines. he stands in front of a hallway, surrounded by an old iMac, stacks of software, early digital literature, and a handbuilt computer from eastern Europe in the mid-1980s
February 28, 2025 at 7:53 PM
Reposted by Jacob Bruggeman
mikedawson.bsky.social
Protestors lined up outside of a Tesla dealership on Route 35 in Eatontown NJ, a town sitting inside cherry red district 4, represented by congress’s longest serving Republican, Chris Smith
March 8, 2025 at 9:59 PM