ted byfield

Top-notch observation disguised as a meme. It's not new, but it's great.

Stunning essay on Gaza by Eyal Weizman in the current LRB:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n07/eyal-weizman/all-they-will-find-is-sand

I just got my copy of @tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org’s Homocore Anthology, and you can get one too! https://fluke.bigcartel.com//product/homocore

We're almost there, and, anyway, a little extra never hurt anyone — so if you can pitch in, please do!
https://tldr.nettime.org/@nettime_mod/115649227256364783

💅🏼 “forensic dystopianism” makes me, like, the Alysa Liu of neologisms 💅🏼

Short and sharp, as you’d expect

https://rickperlstein.substack.com/p/hip-hinged-to-the-unhinged

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Richard_Littler/115388351918793362

This is a great thread

🔥🚨🔥 #Epstein Helper lets you automatically search the DOJ's Epstein files library, download matching docs, extract text (w/ OCR for scanned pages), and run comprehensive analysis using a local Ollama LLM — all through a browser-based UI and a local LLM. 🔥🚨🔥

https://github.com/artmedlar/epstein-files-analyzer/tree/main

If RFK Jr pulls this off, “big pharma” will respond strategically by moving *everything* related to vax R&D out of the US for good. Not temporarily, *permanently* — because our entire electoral system will become an existential risk to the corporations themselves. 1/2

I’m *super* chuffed at this #neologism: “speed-run dialectics”

34-second 1971 anti-war short by Clergy & Laymen, excerpted from the 11'47" compilation “ Help Unsell the War — 13 TV Spots,” available on the Internet Archive

http://archive.org/details/motionpict

This, from Shang et al., Sci. Adv. 12, eadv1908, sets a new standard for WTAFness in informational imagery. 🎩 @404mediaco@mastodon.social 👉🏼 https://www.404media.co/scientists-discover-giant-cavity-beyond-earth-that-isnt-supposed-to-exist/

I see lots of liberal noise about how Trump’s actions are illegal, but beyond that everything seems like woolly ideas somewhere between Gnome Underpants Theory (1. collect underpants, 2. ???, 3 profit!!!) and the Magic of the State. I think we should call this South Parkio–Taussigian School of Jurisprudence.

Chris Hables Gray has put together a useful spreadsheet (😹) laying out how “the 26 Top US Tech Lords​,” as he call them, measure up on various criteria: AI boomerism, capitalists fantasies, accelerationism, longevity / immortality, etc.

Brief intro here https://chrishablesgray.substack.com/p/top-26-us-tech-lords-and-their-fantasie

Spreadheet here https://chrishablesgray.com/26-top-tech-lords.html

Here‘s my deep dive into the recent geostrategic history of #Greenland, from a week shy of a year ago. Lots of interesting twists and turns, not least that Tom Cotton was all about Greenland several years ago 🧐 🤨 🤔

https://counter.ink/blg/new/2025-01-12-trump-and-greenland-a-timeline

RIP Keith Hart

< https://johnkeithhart.muchloved.com/?brid=zNuPwEY7u-01h6x57VsZ8Q >

Over the 25 years I co-moderated this list, I wrote lots of memorials. It felt like a burden, and now it’s someone else’s — or maybe no one’s. For now, it’s enough to say that Keith’s voice was profoundly important for nettime, in ways that were never fully acknowledged. Like many people whose intellect drove wide-ranging lives, he could be difficult at times. But that often reveals how difficult it is for them. In Keith’s case, his thinking was both encyclopedic and razor-sharp; and he brought that not just to traditional ways of understanding and applying anthropology, but also to less conventional fields — in particular, the relationships between memory and money or wealth or however we to accumulate. At some point he told me that as a youth he’d been at excellent at math(s), which enabled him to make a small fortune gambling; and that, in turn, had given him the freedom to study, think, travel, and live as he chose. In the course of that, he’d invested in a house near Durban, SA, I think — in part because he was pessimistic about the course the world is taking and had concluded that area would be one of the best to weather what’s coming. These days, that might sound a bit ‘preppy’ as (in in preppers), but it was more aligned to Fernand Braudel. For Keith, the challenge wasn’t just to find the world-historical in everyday details and vice versa, it was to do so in ways that enabled us to act rather than paralyze us. It was that relentlessly speculative drive that led him to nettime and kept him here for so long. This list is, as the metaphor goes, much richer for it; and though he hasn’t contributed in a long time, our imagined community is in some ways — not all — poorer for his loss.

Archived version: < https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-2511/msg00005.html >