Samantha Culp

our entire global financial system is currently leveraged to the hilt on the premise that it was good and right for a small cadre of US companies to steal all of the intellectual work ever produced by humanity and sell its back to us without credit or remuneration to the authors (plagiarism)

Meta is so unbelievably evil. They make a technology primarily designed to enable abuse, harassment and privacy violations, but also embed real disability aids. The tactic now is to use an entire community as human shields to defend against criticisms www.engadget.com/2236054/meta...

Here is a statement from Champagne, aka Benjamin Song, the most maligned of the Priarieland protestors. Champagne was just sentenced to 100 years for shooting and injuring a police officer who had just drawn a weapon on an unarmed, fleeing protestor. prairielanddefendants.com/defendant-wr...

you either die a hero or live long enough to see the consensus reality required to make democracy function shattered into a million algorithmically ring-fenced backrooms

We are hiring a Research Manager or Sr Research Manager at DWN! This role will play a critical role in advancing DWN’s mission to end immigration detention through research, data and policy analysis, writing, strategy development, and coalition building. www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/about/jobs-o...

I just learned that the term "carbon footprint" was developed by BP to offload responsibility for climate change onto individuals. Something like that's happening in higher ed with AI. Institutions capitulate or dodge; students are submitting; & they believe it's their individual failing. 7/

Essential scholarship

Shirley Hazzard's Transit of Venus (as screenwritten by @specktor.bsky.social , who almost was able to make this happen in the early 2000s... still wish the stars would align for it)

Data for Progress is hiring! We're looking for a Chief Operating Officer to help lead our internal operations and strengthen our impact across the progressive movement. Apply on our website 👇 www.dataforprogress.org/jobs/chief-o...

I’m at the oil shock. I’m at the super El Niño. I’m at the combination oil shock super El Niño fertilizer shortages imminent famines historic droughts over half our oxygen lost to ocean acidification AMOC collapse portending a southeastern USA heat dome + Western Europe ice age

We need more rich people with normal interests like "your movie sounds neat" instead of, like, white fertility rates.

This is an absurdly irresponsible piece filled with straight up lies, misinformation, and corporate propaganda lines straight from Anthropic. It ironically follows the form of corporate climate denial! An avalanch if misinformation on behalf of polluting corporations

lol this is your plan? @economist.com

To learn ways you can interrupt the ICE machine, see our toolkit! Updated regularly!

re: the Backrooms, something can be a silly unserious meme embraced by the young and also be a really obvious reflections of the ambient anxieties of its audience. because liminal spaces and backrooms stuff is absolutely a reflection of late capitalism in a fairly obvious and straightforward sense.

The kids are alright

New research examines Waymo's California robotaxi trips btw Aug 2023 and Dec 2025. Conclusion: 46% of miles driven involved no one inside the car. That's 40 million miles of deadheading, with Waymo vehicles using road space w/o transporting a human. doi.org/10.32866/001...

A city that spends more on guns than on its children is a failure. Tomorrow, please vote for the candidate that loves Los Angeles enough to take care of its children - not one who panders to special interests, commuter freakouts, & vilifies our unhoused neighbors.

LA's continuing budget crisis can be felt in every essential city service. This evening, my 6 year old & I sat through the summer camp orientation at the Rose Hill Rec Center. The presentation was full of apologies for all the cutbacks -a deafening reminder of @mayor.lacity.gov broken promises.

“It’s absurd. It’s absolutely impossible for people to comply when the law is written loosely enough for police on the ground to interpret it however they would like. Police are chasing people into the night. It boggles my mind. It’s so irresponsible, and it’s not keeping anyone safe.”

Scott Pelley is a hero, and it really makes you wonder: where has this spirit been? In other media figures, other executives, other people who have seen these oligarchs degrade everything of value in this country? Why is it so striking & unusual for *anyone to fight back*?

If LLMs are a "social technology" akin to a market, it might be interesting to bring Marx into the mix to think about how markets aren't just information processors but the means by which relations of social domination are organized (and mystified) knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a...

oops, I should have done my homework first. Such tests HAVE been done (!), and the A.I. methods -- as I would have suspected -- come out looking really poor in such capacities (and yes, this is an A.I. summary 🤣): www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/....

“The kids want liminal spaces!”

'It is as much an exercise of history as it is an experiment of alchemy' - Wisconsin Death Trip.

On the occasion of the Backrooms film release, reposting my 2022 essay on the phenomenon, the inherent tensions btw collective worldbuilding and surrealist art, and Kane Parsons' original web series (which I predicted even then was bound for Hollywood). borderstudies.substack.com/p/the-backro...

[steps onto soapbox] The authors of all these articles about how women are the "new" enemy of the far-right, and misogyny is "new" fuel for extremist violence, apparently just didn't consult, you know, history.

Phenomenally underrated skill in politics is to distinguish between things you find annoying or aesthetically displeasing and things that are actually a problem

11. There are similar arguments out there about AI magically perfecting markets and democracy. To figure out the important consequences of AI, and avoid disasters like DOGE, we need to move away from this kind of thinking, and very quickly too. Finis.

As we @moneyontheleft.bsky.social have long argued, austerity’s endless ‘hard choices’ about who to impoverish are structurally, rhetorically, and ideologically inseparable from heteronormativity, ableism, classism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. 1/

From their own words; the now infamous on here "I'll fight till hell freezes over and then I'll cut the ice and fight on" quote was specifically in response to seeing a slaveowner auctioning off his own barely teenaged daughter

Bc we don’t own the means of production

Feels like a missed opportunity to focus entirely on contemporary porn instead of drawing on much deeper historical scholarship about the role that racist, misogynist psychosexual fantasies *have always* played in fascism... perhaps most iconically www.upress.umn.edu/978081661449...

Louisiana has decided to cede the entire parole decision-making process to an algorithm that will decide if you die in prison or not. There will be no human input or nuance allowed. Even our parole board is sickened by this. LINK: veritenews.org/2025/04/10/t...

Something to be said about politicians and pundits taking AI developers' apocalypse preaching more seriously than decades of very good climate science

@emorwee.bsky.social: “What really makes this story remarkable is not simply that oil executives got rich from a war. It’s how perfectly legal and normal it all is, and what that legality reveals about who wins and who loses when America goes to war.” open.substack.com/pub/heated/p...

It has come to my attention that not all of you are aware that this exists. So, here it is. It exists. Dozens of channels of randomized music videos and bumpers. Choose your era and return to your childhood. Bookmark it for when you need to escape back. wantmymtv.vercel.app/player.html

We bombed an elementary school, Bret

Everyone I know with practically any knowledge of global supply chains be like:

"The US-Israel war on Iran is draining the global carbon budget faster than 84 countries combined." www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

The world energy shock is coming — it will deepen inequality in ways we've seen before. Our new @newstatesman1913.bsky.social piece argues that without urgent government action, the Strait of Hormuz crisis will ripple through our economies and rip apart our societies. Here's why. 1/

"Felix" shares, I've been a farm worker for 17 years in the Imperial Valley area. Right now I'm working as an irrigator. I'm removing dirt from the canal to clean it. It is very tiring shoveling dirt out all day." #WeFeedYou

formal proposal of a replacement for the vince mcmahon meme format