I have long been working under the assumption that "political economy" was a red-scare friendly way to say "Marxism" without inviting marxology debates that distract from the actual point (capitalism bad), while "critical PE" is to still assert that one's crypto marxism is the most correct marxism.

and this whole time I thought it was the spinning jenny that ruined the workplace.

How far back do you want to go? Fred Turners “Democratic Surround” (which is more Media than tech per se, but in the McLuhan vein) or even Cyberculture books might be a place to start. Maybe the epilogue to Golumbias “Cultural Logic of Computational” too.
Earlier Wark??

Turns out they're going to turn all the army bases into data centres and then let private equity plunder them?
www.ft.com/content/0e92...

absolutely.
well, that and the ways in which gerunding has been normalised

depends if you'd rather get angry notes from MR or NLR readers, but for my 2p, either way is fine. Working directly with the concept as Foster's certainly requires less expository writing in my opinion.

"idiocy of rural life" vs "isolation of rural life" on the other hand...

*I honestly can't tell if this is what ChatGPT inserts into every undergrad media theory paper, or colleagues who got PhDs 20 years ago assign a lot of Jenkins, Hall and Barthes and students try to make it work for their work without much context, but it certainly triggers my own strange nostalgia.

for reasons* I keep seeing students citing Jenkins et al on "participatory culture" and its taken me back to thinking about Larry Lessig circa 2006 and then to Aaron Swartz. The things the government hounded him to death over are now effectively standard business practices of Ai teams at big tech?

2/2 "...With the added sophistication of television and computers, it becomes even more tempting for us to cope by staying indoors, glued to the expanding cornucopia of one-dimensional learning, and to neglect further the hard evidence which lurks all around us outside the walls."
- Grady Clay, 1979

I'm hoping for an Ai generated Orson Welles voice over that turns the entire film into a nearly three hour advertisement for Coppola branded wines.

anyone reach out to poor Cameron Dixon, the civil servant at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency which apparently had to register the .gov domain?

get.gov/posts/2024-0...