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Reposted by Zahid R Chaudhary

Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 12h

As a reminder, when Jack Posobiec was in the US Navy, they assessed his full capabilities and concluded that he was best suited to collecting samples for urinalysis

Justin Baragona @justinbaragona.bsky.social · 14h

Incredible.

Jack Posobiec references the earliest version of antifa -- the anti-fascists in the Weimar Republic who were opposed to the Nazi Party -- as the bad guys.

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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 1d

repealing the right to culture

NEH Union - AFGE L3403 @nehafge3403.bsky.social · 1d

The cuts at the National Endowment for the Humanities go far deeper than any of these agencies - almost 70% of 179 people were terminated, despite no change to the agency's budget.

There were no savings here - only idealogical destruction. #NEH

Conrad Hackett @conradhackett.bsky.social · 2d

How much smaller the federal workforce is now vs. a year ago
Ed Dept 42%
OPM 33%
HUD 31%
Treasury 29%
Defense (civilian jobs) 22%
Small Biz Admin 21%
Energy 20%
Interior 15%
HHS 14%
SSA 11%
EPA 10%
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

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Zahid R Chaudhary @zahidrc.bsky.social · 10d

Fascinating piece—worth reading

Claire Wilmot @clairelwilmot.bsky.social · 13d

I’ve been struck by how the British far right is using deepfake technology — less to deceive about specific events, more to tap into fascistic affects & desires. This is really frightening.

My dispatch from grim corners of the Internet, for @lrb.co.uk online.

www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/se...

Claire Wilmot | Fascistic Dream Machines

Part of the misunderstanding of the deepfake threat stems from the idea that it is a problem of bad information, rather...

www.lrb.co.uk

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Boston Review @bostonreview.bsky.social · 12d

Bertrand Russell once received letters from Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists, inviting him to a debate. Russell not only declined but replied quite generally that “nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.” @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social

How Can We Live Together? - Boston Review

Ezra Klein is wrong: shame is essential.

www.bostonreview.net

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Will Davies @will-davies.bsky.social · 13d

currently reading @zahidrc.bsky.social fascinating new book, which this resonates with strongly fordhampress.com/paranoid-pub...

Paranoid Publics - Zahid R. Chaudhary

Exploring the psychosocial realities of the assault on truth.

fordhampress.com

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Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 14d

The richest man on earth owns X.

The second richest man on earth is about to be a major owner of TikTok.

The third richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

The fourth richest man owns The Washington Post.

See the problem here?

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AKA Fa͍ͥ͒ͦͣ͑bi̗̼̣̦̳̊͐̏͊̇aͭn̜͕̜̠̼ͤ̐̏ Munié̼͙̭͉̫̌ͤ̑̓s͚͔̩̓̆a @provokedeconomy.bsky.social · Jun 10

'Political emotions on the far right' tank.tv/magazine/iss...

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Zahid R Chaudhary @zahidrc.bsky.social · 18d

Yes—“politics of exposure” in the journal ELH, and “paranoid publics” in the journal History of the Present

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Honorée Fanonne Jeffers @blklibrarygirl.bsky.social · 22d

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Charlie Kirk.

Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 22d

www.vanityfair.com/news/story/c...

Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause

By ignoring the rhetoric and actions of the Turning Point USA founder, pundits and politicians are sanitizing his legacy.

www.vanityfair.com

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Ken Wissoker @kwissoker.bsky.social · 22d

A smart Judith Butler response to @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social
www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Kafka-land at UC Berkeley

The 160 members of the university notified that their names were forwarded to the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights were not informed of any specific allegations against them.

www.thenation.com

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Brian Connolly @brianconnolly.bsky.social · 28d

A beautiful, moving essay on resistance from Joan Scott

www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-g...

A General Air of Anxiety - Boston Review

The Red Scare targeted my father. He taught me the meaning of resistance.

www.bostonreview.net

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Zohran Kwame Mamdani @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social · Sep 8

"How Are the Very Rich Feeling About New York’s Next Mayor?"

A Dramatic Reading of The Recent New York Times Dispatch from the Hamptons.

Presented by The Gilded Age's Morgan Spector.

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Dael Norwood @dael.bsky.social · Sep 8

I’m not a member of the AHA,
but maybe those that are could ask leadership some questions about why the organization is posting job ads for a historian in ICE’s “Human Rights Violator Law Division”?

careers.historians.org/jobs/2164421...

Historian in Washington, DC for Human Rights Violator Law Division, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Exciting opportunity in Washington, DC for Human Rights Violator Law Division, U.S. Immigration a...

careers.historians.org

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Zahid R Chaudhary @zahidrc.bsky.social · Sep 8

www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Court staff cover up Banksy image of judge beating a protester

Artist’s latest work at Royal Courts of Justice in London is thought to refer to pro-Palestine demonstrations

www.theguardian.com

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
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Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Zahid R Chaudhary @zahidrc.bsky.social · Sep 4

Published @fordhampress.bsky.social

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Sam Wang @samwang.bsky.social · Sep 4

And this is a big fat reason to join the AAUP. Faculty, postdocs, graduate students, join - and support academic freedom everywhere! www.aaup.org/join

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Hannah Zeavin @hzeavin.bsky.social · Aug 29

I'm on this search committee too-- happy to answer questions etc.

Carlos Noreña @carlosfnorena.bsky.social · Aug 28

NEW: Tenure-track position in History at UC Berkeley in the GLOBAL HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY.

We are casting a wide net here: *all* periods, places, and fields are under consideration.

I'm on the search committee, so do let me know if you have questions.

Assistant Professor – Global History of Technology - Department of History

University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

aprecruit.berkeley.edu

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Will Davies @will-davies.bsky.social · Aug 29

An intrinsically hallucinatory technology carried along by an intrinsically hallucinatory financial-media complex

Max Read @maxread.info · Aug 29

is the "a.i." "bubble" "bursting"? or, four ways to consider a vibe shift maxread.substack.com/p/is-the-ai-...

Eons ago, I wrote a piece called “The A.I. backlash backlash,” about a pendulum swing, then occurring in what I suppose we’d call “the discourse,” against a previously dominant cycle of A.I. backlash (which itself was a reaction to a dominant cycle of A.I. hype that dated back to the debut of ChatGPT). At the time, L.L.M. chatbots had improved significantly over the preceding 18 months; many people had managed to incorporate A.I. into their work in ways that seemed useful to them; and the “vibe” in Silicon Valley, as New York Times columnist Kevin Roose wrote had the time, had “shifted” to anticipate so-called “artificial general intelligence” on a short timeline. In the hothouse hubs of A.I. Discourse (X.com, Substack, Bluesky), the hype was bubbling up, and the skeptics and critics seemed to be in retreat.

But, as the man says, Want to feel old? That was March. In the five months since Ezra Klein wrote in his Times column that “person after person… has been coming to me saying… We’re about to get to artificial general intelligence,” Meta has announced efforts to reorganize and downsize its A.I. division; NVIDIA’s “tepid” revenue forecast is suggesting a wide slowdown; Sam Altman is warning that “investors as a whole are overexcited about AI”; and Gary Marcus, prince of L.L.M. haters, is on his fifth or sixth victory lap. The renewed hype has sputtered; the most fervent enthusiasts have become disillusioned; critics reign triumphant: The backlash to the backlash to the backlash has arrived.

But does this mean--as many recent headlines would have it--that the “A.I. bubble is popping”? The answer depends, annoyingly, on how you define “A.I.,” and how you define “bubble,” and, also, how you define “popping.”

Is the “A.I.” of “A.I. bubble” the entire field of machine learning? Only large language models? Only chatbots? The implementation thereof into pre-existing software? And is the “bubble” of “A.I. bubble” excessive equity valuations? Inflated expectations for or faith in L.L.M. performance? Excessive industry and management directives around A.I. use? Too many annoying guys on X.com talking too much about “A.I.”?

And, maybe most importantly, what would it mean for it to “pop”? A stock market crash and a recession? A few V.C.s losing their shirts? An “A.I. winter”? Google removing “A.I. Overview” and a reversion to the pre-L.L.M. web? Fewer annoying guys on X.com?

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Stephen McCarthy @misterjabsticks.bsky.social · Aug 27

Fascinating resource for educators who are thinking about ways to have viable assignments without AI.

Run by @annakornbluh.bsky.social and @ehayot.bsky.social

against-a-i.com

against-a-i.com

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Roland Meyer @bildoperationen.bsky.social · Aug 23

Gavin Newsom's strategy of centrist liberal «populism» seems to involve wholeheartedly embracing AI slop. However, rather than demonstrating a possible «progressive» use of generative AI, this example shows how quickly such a use can lead to the uncritical adoption of fascist aesthetics
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Screenshot from x.com
The account «Governor Newsom Press Office» retweeting an AI image of the Newsom with absurdly swelled muscles and an American flag, in the Style of a propaganda painting. The original post says «IN GAVIN WE TRUST», and the Press Office comments: «AN HONOR! THANK YOU!)

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NPR @npr.org · Aug 19

White supremacist tropes and ironic viral jokes illustrate the administration's project of redefining who belongs in the United States.

What's behind the Trump administration's immigration memes?

White supremacist tropes and ironic viral jokes illustrate the administration's project of redefining who belongs in the United States.

n.pr

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Zahid R Chaudhary @zahidrc.bsky.social · Aug 18

Pre-order here: bookshop.org/p/books/para...

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AKA Fa͍ͥ͒ͦͣ͑bi̗̼̣̦̳̊͐̏͊̇aͭn̜͕̜̠̼ͤ̐̏ Munié̼͙̭͉̫̌ͤ̑̓s͚͔̩̓̆a @provokedeconomy.bsky.social · Jun 10

'Finance, paranoia and the radicalisation of value' tank.tv/magazine/iss...

Fabian Muniesa (2025) 'Finance, paranoia and the radicalisation of value' -- a piece about the political implication of 'Paranoid Finance' (Polity Press, 2024).

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Barth Keck @keckb33.bsky.social · Aug 14

"The assumptions and conclusions of the Great Barrington Declaration were wrong in 2020 and are still wrong in 2025. When Macedo and Lee were challenged on the substance of their critiques by actual epidemiologists and clinicians in a prominent literary journal, the Boston Review, they dug in."

The Nation Magazine @thenation.com · Aug 14

The pandemic helped lift the fortunes of the new, new right—but not in the way you might think, writes @gregggonsalves.bsky.social.

Covid Contrarianism Has Crossed the Aisle

The Great Barrington Declaration, criticized by scientists and libertarians in 2020, is now a playbook for those on the right and the left.

www.thenation.com

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