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

yffwl.bsky.social

Sarod, Rubab, and Viola player. Historian of music and Islam in (primarily) early modern South Asia. Interested in labour and the value-form in music, amongst other things. Musicians Union member. Work-related stuff elsewhere.

29 posts 95 followers 258 following

Posts 31 Comments 17

Imagine the Parliamentary Questions, the Times editorials, if a piece of national scientific infrastructure had been rendered inaccessible. Instead other than an honourable FT weekend piece, no one has paid any attention to the troubles continuing to beset our national library

submitted 3 days ago • 8 comments

Pollock and Appadurai expose the essentially oligarchical composition and function of US university boards (this is especially true of the ivies) www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

submitted 9 days ago • 1 comment

And so it begins...

submitted 17 days ago • 2 comments

Tenure didn’t protect anyone at Columbia. Let this be a lesson in the need for labor solidarity across all ranks in higher ed.

submitted 19 days ago • 12 comments

This needs to ring an alarm bell in all our associations.

submitted 27 days ago • 1 comment

I’ve read a lot about fascism, and one thing I think we need, as well, is a dissuasion of fascism in literature from the early 20th century to today. Here is a working syllabus on just that. Please tell me what to add @jeffsharlet.bsky.social interminablerambling.medium.com/fascism-in-l...

submitted 46 days ago • 6 comments

Social murder in a red rosette

submitted 47 days ago • 0 comments

Remembering all the times people criticized communism because the art it produced, socialist realism, was 'bad' and not 'real art'. Well, here's what capitalism produces: slop. The most horrific, aesthetically empty, soulless, literally inhuman shit imaginable. Every accusation a confession

submitted 59 days ago • 5 comments

submitted 67 days ago • 1 comment

This morning’s reading

submitted 79 days ago • 0 comments

It feels like the moment everyone agreed to call LLMs "AI"--even critics of it--something important was conceded

submitted 82 days ago • 0 comments

Bryan MacCormack, the executive director of a New York-based immigrant rights group, was pulled over by CBP with two undocumented passengers in the vehicle. He knew his rights, refused to acknowledge their "warrant", and despite CBP threatening him, the agents eventually were forced to let him go.

submitted 82 days ago • 101 comments

From Mazen Kerbaj:

submitted 84 days ago • 0 comments

“In order to shoot off one email per week for a year, ChatGPT would use up 27 liters of water, or about one-and-a-half jugs… that means if one in 10 U.S. residents—16 million people—asked ChatGPT to write an email a week, it’d cost more than 435 million liters of water.”

submitted 91 days ago • 123 comments

Message to all universities as the new semester begins

submitted 93 days ago • 1 comment

Dissolve the government for this alone

submitted 95 days ago • 0 comments

Christmas Eve walk in the Rhondda

submitted 106 days ago • 1 comment

5 authors I’ve read 5+ books by Laszlo Krasznahorkai Albert Camus William Faulkner Arundhati Roy Fyodor Dostoevsky

submitted 110 days ago • 0 comments

Excellent, if disturbing, piece "Spotify’s plot against musicians" harpers.org/archive/2025...

submitted 112 days ago • 0 comments

In 2010, anti-copyright activist Aaron Swartz hanged himself after being prosecuted to the full extent of the law for making copyrighted academic publications freely available. Today, academic publishers are insisting those copyrights be lifted to feed the corporate AI slop machine.

submitted 113 days ago • 48 comments

"Flattened History" by @mackpenner.bsky.social is the first post coming out of the “The Future of Knowledge Mobilization and Public History Online” organized by @activehist.bsky.social this past August. niche-canada.org/2024/12/17/a... #cdnhist #history #AI

submitted 113 days ago • 0 comments

Aaron Swartz died because rapacious capitalists insisted that sharing knowledge and ideas — not for profit but to enrich society — was theft. Now we have a whole Silicon Valley industry devoted to undoing artistic copyright, and for what? Fake emails and shitty advertising copy.

submitted 113 days ago • 12 comments

The most infuriating thing isn’t that Wales is treated as a non-country – it’s that we accept it | Will Hayward

submitted 131 days ago • 29 comments

Snowing in South Wales

submitted 142 days ago • 0 comments

Find out a bit more about the Rebecca movement and the new book in my piece for @nationcymru.bsky.social ! 📚👒 nation.cymru/feature/rebe...

submitted 180 days ago • 1 comment

1/IMPORTANT thread about Bluesky funding and origins. Many folks know that it was seeded by Jack Dorsey around a libertarian vision of a magical network that wouldn’t need moderation because it would be decentralized and baked into a protocol (somehow).

submitted 148 days ago • 2 comments

Twitter is, and was, almost always awful (despite its occasional usefulness). The hope is that this does not become the case with Bluesky, but most seem intent and happy to replicate its Twitter-ness. Musk was not the only problem.

submitted 144 days ago • 0 comments

Celebrating the life of Gwyn Alf Williams - the Welsh Marxist historian. Today marks the 29th anniversary since our comrade passed away, but his legacy lives on. Watch ‘The Dragon Has Two Tongues’ today! welshundergroundnetwork.com/the-dragon-h...

submitted 145 days ago • 1 comment

We may have left X, but we are still inside The Twittering Machine (@leninology.bsky.social), addicted to likes and reposts. Have we learned how to cope with this?