mattseybold.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

When I teach the financial meltdown of the 1790s, I start by asking my students to name everything they consider “money.” After which, I say, “Now, imagine none of this exists. But 100,000 people just died for a chance to try capitalism.”

submitted 8 hours ago • 0 comments

"I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time." "Spin me the yarn," said Ahab; "how was it?"

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Traveling from Exeter to Elmira was very simple. I took the GWR to Reading, Elizabeth Line to Hayes & Harlington, Heathrow Express to catch a Virgin flight to JFK. AirTran took me to Federal Circle, where I rented a car, crossed the Whitestone & G Washington Bridges, & was just 220 miles to home!

submitted 16 hours ago • 1 comment

This is a great example of how the default business across sectors has become surveillance & capta monetization. There’s no longer a question of what kinds of data or for what commercial purpose.

submitted 17 hours ago • 5 comments

Once and future Twain.

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Will be changing my profile to Phded @ Exeter once those minor corrections are out of the way. Thank you @mattseybold.bsky.social and Jason Baskin for being brilliantly insightful examiners and to @becimay.bsky.social for being such a wonderful guide along the way.

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

"Fake Work" gets a great write up in the NY Times today as "superbly committed to its own beliefs — truthful, dryly funny and often subtly moving. “To be a barnacle on the floating corpse of capital,” La Berge writes. “Was that the most I could hope for from a professional life?”

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I wrote a retrospective on futurism and the far right from 2024 for the Los Angeles Review of Books. This includes not only a review of recent scholarship but also new directions in my own work on this subject.

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Heads up San Francisco Bay, here comes the Network State again! A startup founded by a Trump supporter seeks a presidential declaration of an AI “emergency” to create a new California tech city. Yeah, it's that weird. More at the Nerd Reich: www.thenerdreich.com/startup-seek...

submitted 1 day ago • 29 comments

Buchanan: Americans have gotten too smart to accept oligarchy. Kissinger: What do we do about it? Buchanan: Close the schools. Kissinger: But many of them are already educated! Buchanan: Give them a racist loneliness robot to talk to. Kissinger: Why would they? Buchanan: Call it intelligence.

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The only thing OpenAI has proven is that it can turn power users into fleshy doorstops in a year or less. And maybe that’s what investors want?

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This is the equivalent of the guys in the fifties who thought nutrition pills would save all the time humans spent inefficiently eating delicious food.

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Emile Borel, 1915: How many monkeys with typewriters would it take to write Hamlet? Sam Altman, 2025: How much of the world’s water will it take to turn all of Shakespeare into something a monkey can read?

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In hell, we will all receive “this week in AI” newsletters entirely produced with AI.

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

We could regulate this. Keynes & Galbraith both propose metrics for tying executive/managerial compensation to rank-and-file compensation. How ‘bout this for an incentive? If you want to make >$10 million a year, run the company well enough that all your employees can make $100k.

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Paging thick-skinned Marxists. And btw, WSJ, you would get clicks!

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I can determine no moral difference between those who live on an income provided by their ancestors & those who live on the income provided by the State. - T. S. Eliot (h/t @websterij.bsky.social)

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A clear framing for a revitalized K12 and higher ed labor movement. wagingnonviolence.org/2025/06/amer...

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An American Vandal in London, haunting all the tourist traps.

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An Americanist & a Sinologist stand staring at an enormous monument in central London. Sinologist: I don’t remember seeing that on the way to the restaurant. Americanist: Me neither. Sinologist: We should probably know what it is, huh? Americanist: Residue of Empire, I suppose.

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

My favorite Twain zinger.

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The nuance in the face of such blunt forces is what makes this piece so sharp: "It isn’t that computing is antithetical to education, it’s that education is happening in many modes and many places during a student’s scholastic life, and sometimes technology can be an aid and sometimes a hindrance."

submitted 4 days ago • 2 comments

At a symposium, where I can report, what will surprise nobody, that Janice Radway is a jaw-dropping badass.

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

“OpenAI, Coursera, and many other EdTech startups, fantasize about utilizing public and not-for-profit educational infrastructure - our data repositories, labor forces, real estate, and tax havens - to transform themselves into technofeudalists.”

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I'm pouring over the details of the reconciliation bill and its potentially apocalyptic effects on higher education for a short piece - it really is a five alarm fire. They're going to overhaul the student loan infrastructure as a means of anti-intellectual, resegregationist social engineering.

submitted 4 days ago • 7 comments

“What [AI] companies…are looking for from schools is not only a reliable stream of subscription fees…, but also repositories of…monetizable data.” This is outstanding, with 6 strategies for resistance at the end. I’m going to be sharing this with colleagues, admins. @mattseybold.bsky.social

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Against Technofeudal Education - Pillars For Protecting Our "Core Infrastructure" From OpenAI theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/against-te...

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JUST IN: Judge Charles Breyer finds that President Trump exceeded the scope of his authority and violated the 10th Amendment by federalizing the California National Guard and orders him to return control to Governor Newsom. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

submitted 5 days ago • 47 comments

Clairaudience; "stickiness"; the silence of yellow; Maya Deren; James Merrill; the kitchens of elsewhere; Ouija; "five minutes" and other incoherencies. www.alinastefanescuwriter.com/blog/2025/6/...

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Very good work by John, as usual, & great to see it in IHE, which has itself been a Private Equity football for many years.

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Physical grade books! Print articles and physical books! A break from being aggressively marketed to and data-harvested from while in seminar discussion! Print is a rent strike! And the ability to articulate to students why they might opt out of technofeudal capture platforms, without requiring it

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

The irony is that what makes course readers impractical is IP. I personally would be happy to do the work of making them (and have in the past) but tighter fair use rules mean that copy shops will no longer produce them. The same laws that are waived for AI are enforced rigorously on the rest of us.

submitted 5 days ago • 2 comments

Constructive points in this thread. As I write in the essay, “This is not an exhaustive platform, so much as an invitation to start brainstorming.” Much depends on institution, discipline, course topic, class size, etc. What I want is from my fellow educators is mindfulness of the looming threat.

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Didn't know Canvas (which pretty much all universities compel us to use) was owned by KKR, which also funds settlements in occupied Palestine. (Also, this includes some great reflections on tech's tentacles in education and how to resist) theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/against-te...

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments