Otters
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otterdidact.bsky.social
Otters
@otterdidact.bsky.social
140 followers 180 following 440 posts
Systems Librarian and occasional cataloger in Maine.
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otterdidact.bsky.social
WHAT IF THE DUST MAKES A SOUND
December 1, 2025 at 2:18 PM
otterdidact.bsky.social
time to take a big sip of water and find out when it was released, and whether it made any impact
December 1, 2025 at 12:10 AM
otterdidact.bsky.social
Just now realizing that the Stoppard books I bought one by one on my Subway wages were probably donated to the bookstore by one person; tip of the hat to whoever in Dover, NH got through their Stoppard phase
November 30, 2025 at 6:45 PM
Reposted by Otters
nathankhensley.bsky.social
Or @hsteffen.bsky.social, in “Adjunct,” giving a concise, bullet-pointed definition of neoliberalism that can go right onto a classroom handout or union meeting flyer — I’ll teach it next week 🙏
Heather Steffen, in “Adjunct”: 38 University Keywords Neoliberalism is a concept that recurs throughout this book because many observers name the current era in US higher education the moment of the "neoliberal university," In one basic definition, neoliberalism names the set of economic, political, social, and cultural processes through which free markets have come to serve as our dominant model for social relations and institutional organization: • Social relationships become defined primarily through their economic facets. Students are regarded by their educational institutions as customers rather than learners, and, as Childress writes, "College has become a form of indispensable employment insurance, available for purchase on the open market at protection levels from community college bronze to Ivy League platinum" (2019, 48). • Public goods and services become privatized. Formerly public enterprises are now run by for-profit entities (e.g., for-profit charter schools; private prisons; privately held patents on the results of publicly funded research). • Individuals behave like entrepreneurs, and organizations behave like businesses: we imagine ourselves as mini-enterprises trying to grow our capital in the world's marketplace (e.g., the concept of human cap. ital, resume building for high schoolers). Organizations and institutions like nonprofits, universities, government agencies, and NGOs function on the model of for-profit businesses, despite their not-for-profit tax designation. Public institutions that have not formally been privatized become neoliberalized in that they behave like businesses. • Responsibility and risk are individualized. Rather than viewing the responsibility to employ, feed, clothe, and house everyone as society's responsibility, our society views it as each person's responsibility to fend for themselves (eg, the transition from welfare to workfare, drastic wealth/income inequalities). Similarly, we expect risks to be borne by individu… Adjunct, Continued: working lives, often shifting careers several times. Employers extract cost savings through tactics like automated scheduling, keeping workers just under the number of hours needed to gain benefits, falsely defining workers as "contractors" or "consultants," outsourcing, and speed-up (being tasked with more work but not more time to do it in).
November 29, 2025 at 3:37 PM
otterdidact.bsky.social
shout out to Brazil and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead for bridging the gap
November 30, 2025 at 1:36 AM
otterdidact.bsky.social
Yeah, I guess I mean the Very LLMs, that are pushed to people who don't actually get the general structure behind them
November 30, 2025 at 1:29 AM
otterdidact.bsky.social
I'm hoping for LLMs to crash big so that we can get back to enjoying the actual cool AI stuff
November 30, 2025 at 1:18 AM