Matt Gold
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mkgold.bsky.social
Matt Gold
@mkgold.bsky.social
1.7K followers 510 following 120 posts
Associate Prof of English and Digital Humanities at CUNY Graduate Center. Director @cunycommons @cunygcdi @cbox. Co-Editor @dhdebates. Co-PI @ManifoldScholar. http://mkgold.net
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mkgold.bsky.social
Definite Bush flying over Katrina vibes
Photo of Donald Trump inside a car, waving and on the phone as global markets crater in response to his tariffs
April 5, 2025 at 5:46 AM
mkgold.bsky.social
Wow.

@mkirschenbaum.bsky.social on “The US of AI” and the nightmare Musk’s DOGE has dreamed up for us
There will be no appeal, no supervisor to speak with, no human agent who can be reached by button-mashing. Everything will devolve into an ever-condensing core of deferred responsibility, the only humans in the loop a super-user class who will operate outside the system, on dark webs and crypto channels of their own devising, patching in only to tweak the code and update the model. It is dominance and mastery over the machine by a few, while the rest of us are condemned to live on the hard edges of algorithms, the vectors of a vast social management machine scoring and slicing our flesh like something out of Bosch. A portent: the horrific aviation accident over Reagan National Airport, just miles from Trump’s White House in the opening days of his administration. The real world intrudes. It comes for all of us, whether in the form of an instant and unfathomable impact or the microscopic subdivision of a rogue cell. These eruptions of the real will penetrate the system, often with lethal downstream (as we say) effects. They will also serve to reinscribe the otherness of the elite, for whom vaccines, therapies, modes of transport, and climate-controlled enclaves will be available to insulate their bodies to the fullest extent possible from the flattened mean, and meanness, of American existence. Access to such a life will be the incentive for those needed to maintain the system, as indeed it already is. Big Balls may dream of a bigger Cybertruck today, but soon enough his dreams will turn to statins, and to summer nights cool and quiet enough to sleep with the windows open.
March 1, 2025 at 4:06 AM
mkgold.bsky.social
Jalen Hurts after winning the Super Bowl
February 10, 2025 at 3:21 AM