Finished reading and summarizing the excellent Citizen Marx by Bruno Leipold . Review following soon!

Teaching at a public philosophy institute this afternoon on the philosophy of Frantz Fanon, but I did prepare a fun aside on Huey Newton and the infamous peacock chair as a symbol of decolonization.

“The absurd logical endpoint of inability to agree on who gets to catechise the Habermas engine, then, would be an infinite regress of Habermas engines trying to solve this disagreement.”

Pieter-Paul Verhaeghe deed onderzoek naar Airbnb in Brussel en werd daarbij al juridisch bedreigd door grote vastgoedspelers op de markt. "Ik ben nochtans niet tegen Airbnb, maar wel vóór een Airbnb dat trouw blijft aan haar oorspronkelijke deelfilosofie." sampol.be/2025/01/van-ga…

Had some relatively long car rides this weekend, but it did provide a nice opportunity to realize yet again how an amazing album Massive Attack’s Mezzanine is.

As someone who has reported on AI for 7 years and covered China tech as well, I think the biggest lesson to be drawn from DeepSeek is the huge cracks it illustrates with the current dominant paradigm of AI development. A long thread. 1/

After 4 years of teaching philosophy of culture, the time has come to discuss … Emily in Paris.

Accidentily bumped into this 2018 interview with Nick Srnicek on left accelerationism. Still an interesting read in our current age of AI volatility. versobooks.com/blogs/news/365…

Curious to know, but is anyone working on a Hyman Minsky financial crash scenario for AI? 🤔

Finished Macherey’s book on wisdom and ignorance in Spinoza. The chapter on “ingenium” is brilliant. Briefly put, it’s the fundamental affective state of an individual or social group that determines its existential orientation in the world. I’m all for Spinozist existentialism!

The Decline of Organized Labor and the Rise of Internal Corporate Social Responsibility Tamar Barkay תמר ברקאי تمار بركاي economicsociology.org/2025/02/01/the…

Started reading Yoko Ogawa’s The Diving Pool. “Mold” seems to be the best image to capture Ogawa’s writing. Her books are all reflections about inevitable decay, but formally she also writes strings of short stories that are all connected like the threads of a fungus.

We invite you to the conference "What Comes After GenAI? Exploring the Limits of One-Size-Fits-All AI for Democracy and Knowledge" at VŠE v Praze on 7-8 February, which we are organizing together with Eugenia Stamboliev and Petr Špecián . You can find the program here: llm4dem.vse.cz/dd2025-confere…

Brilliant insight from Frédéric Lordon’s Imperium: “There is only one really serious political (or political-philosophical) problem: who will take the garbage outside? In other words, the problem of the collective coordination of material necessities.”

“Every written work can be regarded as the prologue (or rather, the broken cast) of a work never penned, and destined to remain so, because later works, which in turn will be the prologues or the moulds for other absent works, represent only sketches or death masks.” — Agamben

I’ve tried for a long time to keep going on this platform, but my newsfeed has reached Facebook levels of dysfunction by now. Almost everything that used to make this website fun is gone. So sadly, I won’t be posting here anymore. You can find me where the clouds have cleared.