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  Mark Zuckerberg has evidently named his own AI assistant “Agrippa,” implying of course that he himself is Augustus – founder and first imperator of the Roman Empire, who the historical Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa served as lieutenant, executor and alter ego. I don’t know what’s more profoundly cringe, that rather revealing fact, Meta’s infantilizing depiction of its agents as cuddly, marshmallow-proportioned cartoon characters or the utter banality of its proposition that agential deployment is ju...

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  I’ve detected a new note in mainstream opinion writing these past few months, in big liberal outlets like the Guardian and the New York Times, which I’d broadly characterize as “whistling past the graveyard.” You’ll notice now that columns and op-ed pieces are larded with little asides, varyingly apologetic or ha-ha funny or frankly cynical, vaguely acknowledging the terrible, terrible straits we’re in, collectively…but then the piece kind of resumes its previous direction of travel, makes some...

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  This is what, and all, it takes to be a designated terrorist organization anymore: being a “cadre of radical hackers and tech developers [that] provide a full spectrum of services – including encrypted chats and email, web hosting, secure video conferencing and streaming, anonymity shields, and a suite of other technological tools – to Marxist, anarchist, and other left-wing extremist groups in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere.” NB: That’s just about every one of us on here, is it not?...

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  I’m really proud of what everyone managed to do together these past 24 hours, and so very grateful to everyone who pitched in. These may well be dark times, but there’s no reason anyone should have to endure them alone. Taking care of each other is something we have the power to do. HAIL.

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  As someone who regularly helps elderly, low-vision, low-English-literacy & other folks who are struggling to understand them manage their phones (I know @jessamyn@glammr.us does this too), I cannot begin to explain to you the rage I feel at the designers & development organizations who foist these UI choices on a public not remotely equipped to navigate them. The controls are overwhelming, still. They’re couched in jargon, still. They’re hidden somewhere non-obvious, down the end of a f...

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  The sordid Platner undoing only underlines the point I’m always trying to make: *stop “believing in” politicians* and *stop outsourcing the work of making change*. Look, I, too, love Zohran and AOC, and will always have something of a soft spot for Bernie. But the work of making a world fit for us is not theirs to undertake. It’s ours.

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  The fundamental problem is that (a) I’m trying to write what is now *plainly* a work of philosophy that (b) reads like The Road, when (c) I am neither a philosopher nor Cormac McCarthy. Send help.

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@gwynnion/116992907972982610 122 million percent this.

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  “The British public should begin taking ‘small but important steps’ to secure and protect water, power supplies and basic phone signal in case of further severe weather emergencies, national crises or cyber-attacks, Downing Street has said.” Government can encourage people to do this at the atomized, household level, but evidently cannot countenance anything more collective? Again: the Lifehouse must be built, today and every day. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/14/britons-urged-s...

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  I will eat my hat if anyone with a coherent left-wing politics of any sort killed Ann Widdecombe. I cannot imagine anyone giving enough of a shit about Ann Widdecombe to wish her physical harm – certainly not when there are far more relevant and consequential actors one might possibly direct their anger at. (Do not understand this to be in any way an endorsement or condonation of that sort of violence.)

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  I know that I sometimes have trouble making myself understood, but that concrete examples of what I’m trying to get across help a lot. So let me just say now that, where for *years* I’ve been using the expression “the second- and third-order consequences of global heating,” *this is (part of) what I meant*: problems with infection control, with the failure of sensitive equipment, with the inability to prescribe certain otherwise-efficacious drugs because they have a dangerously diuretic effect,...

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  Approaching the juncture in life where the wisest course of action remaining available to me is to embrace irrelevance & recommit *hard* to the daily and microlocal.

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  Happy solstice everyone! I hope you don’t have to throw any elders from the top of a cliff.

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  Fuck Rick Owens for being so good. If I could wear responsibly-produced Rick Owens at Uniqlo prices, I’d do it every last day until I looked too geriatric to make a go of it, trust.

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  By artwashing the process of production, and shrouding it in spectacle, useful idiots like this do vastly more damage than the more obvious villains like Sam Altman or Dario Amodei. It’s difficult for me to convey the true depth of my disdain for the banality and tonedeafness of this work. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/arts/design/dataland-ai-museum-los-angeles-art-artificial-intelligence.html

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  I bought a typeface just so I could do a zine with it.

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  I came up out of the subway at Delancey Street straight into a massive crowd of nerds gathered to celebrate the dedication of Jack Kirby Way. The city councillor for the Lower East Side made a genuinely moving speech claiming Kirby as a son of Rivington Street and PS.20, “one of the most important artists of the 20th Century, born and raised right here.” Bless NYC forever.

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  Before the human project on this planet comes to an end, I’m going to embark on something old-fashioned: a series of urban walks intended to excavate the layers of geography, history, struggle, infrastructure, technology and everyday making-do that sediment into our experience of place. I hope you’ll join me. #walkshop #walking #psychogeography

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  I want us to consider that it is, at least, possible that Hungary under Orbán was the high water mark of something that has now begun to recede. That people have more or less sussed out “AI” all on their own, having seen what it does in their lives, and don’t particularly need to be convinced of its perniciousness. That, similarly, people everywhere have had enough of screens, apps, algos, social media in general, and the cohort of people who enriched themselves on these things. That more and...

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  It can never be said enough: all the wrong people have self-esteem.

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  I dunno, man. Those “smears” sound pretty good to me – better in most cases than the actual policy.

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  RIP Ben Morea, founding member of the Motherfuckers, ad plures ire May 2nd, 2026. This interview will give you a real taste of Ben’s Lower East Side, and all the dimensions of freedom one could explore there, now lost: https://illwill.com/the-ultimate-dilemma

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  Whoever had this sticker made up, I love you.

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  Good morning, happy May and happy May Day, beloved. Honor to labor and to laborers everywhere.

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  Does anyone have advice for how to keep a putatively autonomous, radical space from being overwhelmed by guilty white liberals & their endless need to center themselves/self-flagellate? AFAF.

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  Either this is as gorgeous and wonderful and inspiring as it facially appears to be, or one of you will come along in thirty seconds to tell me why it isn’t, and that I should be ashamed to post it. Please, please let it be the former. https://nodestar.net/

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  Here’s an irony: there is, within easy biking/public transit distance of me, a space that superficially seems to fulfill a lot of my criteria for an autonomous, convivial, noncommercial counterinstitution. This space fosters (a kind of) community. It supports the free exchange of knowledge (of a sort). It even hosts a weekly, no-cost dinner that, so far as I know, is open to all comers, and that has been running for years. You think, well, we need spaces like this, right? Both strategically and...

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  [holding my tongue, if just barely]

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  It’s difficult for me to say this, because I know it’s a practice that’s dear to a number of people who are dear to me, but in 2026 it is my *strong* sense that the discourse and practice of design fiction has failed to open up any particularly notable volume of social space in which to explore. I’m not even sure it’s proven its worth as corporate futuring. (I’d be delighted to hear of your counterexamples, but I really can’t think of any.)

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  Very, very little challenges my practice in this life so much as the concept and existence of “influencers.” I find myself, often enough, thinking objectively vile thoughts like “All influencers should die,” and very nearly giving voice to those thoughts. I think it’s worth thinking about what torques me so much about other people’s choices, when those choices are manifestly their own business. But it’s also true that I have to live in the world woven of many such choices, and I don’t particula...