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danbrownefilm.bsky.social
Filmmaker + multimedia artist | Facilitating interdisciplinary AI research @ University of Toronto | Comcult PhD | Parent | he/him
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A rabbi asked his pupils how they could tell when the night had ended and the day was on its way back.

if you thought archives were problematic, wait till you see no archives

in 1977, the Science Council of Canada put out a report that suggested the country invest in an intentional shift from a consumer to a conserver society. report is here: www.uottawa.ca/research-inn...

Research universities are often the largest employers in their region. They are often the primary health care providers to communities. This funding shift will not only reduce US research leadership, it will put working people out of work and reduce healthcare access.

Such an honour to share some of my recent work with Ad Hoc. Huge thanks to Stephen Broomer for continuing to program great experimental films in Toronto.

Turns out 2025 is the year where I quit most of social media, become mostly vegan, and start going to bed by 10pm

Really smart and good piece by @janus.bsky.social about steps you can take during this time to build power that are not posting www.404media.co/you-cant-pos...

What a total embarrassment.

Ah, the millennial experience of “every time you get some measure of financial and career stability, the world decides to do something extraordinarily stupid again”

There hasn't actually been a serious border security problem between Canada and the US. Wanna know a good way to create one? Create incentives in the tens of billions of dollars for successful smuggling operations.

Prepping Friday's Afrofuturisms class & rereading Octavia Butler's "A Few Rules For Predicting The Future" "When I was preparing to write Parable of the Talents, I needed to think about how a country might slide into fascism–something that America does in Talents." 🧵 commongood.cc/reader/a-few...

Greg Curnoe, Map of North America (1972)

“More than just being a vehicle for indoctrination, the internet has completely warped the way everyone thinks now… We need to get out while (if?) there's still time.”

What a parade of horrors.

OpenAI right now

until things get sorted out, all law school constitutional law classes should be replaced with a psychoanalyst lecture about the death drive

I appreciate all the people recommending the Shock Doctrine. I've been thinking about what makes Trump's use of these tactics a little different. In recent decades, shock tactics were used mainly to rapidly impose neoliberal economic policies. But what Trump is doing goes way beyond that. a 🧵

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/

The cost of Donold’s first deportation flights, carrying about 80 migrants each, cost up to $852,000 per trip.

Important to realize scope of what's happening and how different it is from headlines: -Not just getting rid of post-2020 DEI practices, setting up an attack on post-1965 civil rights law and practices -Not just cracking down on illegal immigration, expelling legal immigrants and blocking refugees

Watergate is so quaint.

About 75% of immigrant farm workers did not show up for work this week in Bakersfield, California, as the threat of Trump’s immigration raids looms.

My new policy for telemarketers is to ask them to hold and then immediately play Spanish Flea by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass through my phone’s speaker.

Makes you miss the days when they were defunding only the humanities

strange subterranean commotions

*this* is the energy we are taking into 2025, folks

Amazon is shutting down its facilities in Quebec — coincidentally not long after 300 workers at one of its warehouses there formed a union. They’re the only unionized Amazon workers in Canada.

This is a good piece on qualified hope, eyes-wide-open hope, realistic hope.

They weren’t only tech billionaires, and not all tech billionaires. But yes, Trump basically is pushing accelerationism. If you don’t know about that, look it up.

NIH appears to have canceled/postponed all of its study sections—the independent review panels that approve federal grants for health research. Such grants fund the work/salaries of 300k people at more than 2,500 institutions

Musk would like people to think he's Tesla, and though it's tempting for some to assume he's really just Edison, it turns out the truth is closer to Ford. You don't make that motion twice and not know what it looks like or how it will be interpreted.

The "he's not gonna listen to her" reactions are missing many points. Lots of other people are also hearing it. Lots of people can see him hearing it, then weigh what she's said with what he'll do. Lots of people can see her refusal to surrender these ancient teachings to the latest face of empire

Today, Donald Trump doubled down on his vows to deport millions and jail his enemies. To carry out that agenda, his administration will exploit America’s digital surveillance machine. Here are some steps you can take to evade it.

RIP to a real one 😢 David Lynch 1946-2025

📣 Are you a @uoft.bsky.social graduate student whose work explores the social impacts of new technologies? Calls for 2025 Schwartz Reisman graduate fellowships are now open! 💡 Learn more and apply by February 9, 2025: uoft.me/sri-grad-fel...

NEW: Meta has quietly dismantled the system that prevented misinformation from spreading in the United States. Machine-learning classifiers that once identified viral hoaxes and limited their reach have now been switched off, Platformer has learned www.platformer.news/meta-ends-mi...

TikTok has become an endless litany of young Americans accusing their government of censoring free speech.