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Gavin Mueller

@gavinmueller.bsky.social
2.7K followers 1K following 803 posts

Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and Critical Theory Tutor at the Sandberg Instituut. American, but slightly less so every passing day.

PostsRepliesMedia
Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Free collaborative annotation tools that you like?
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
At basketball practice in my case
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Sorry I Didn't Catch That, I Was Reading Literary Criticism That I Paid For
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Finalized syllabus for my course in the Critical Studies MA at the Sandberg Instituut
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
My department (Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam) is offering a brand new MA in Digital Investigations, focusing on digital methods and OSINT relevant to journalism and human rights investigations. It looks very exciting! www.uva.nl/shared-conte...
uva.nl
Master Digital Investigations (Media Studies)
The Master's in Digital Investigations trains you in contemporary methods and techniques for public-interest investigations in fields including journalism, public policy and advocacy.
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
it's cheesy but I think about the Sun Ra line "there are other worlds they haven't told you about" all the time... one of the best reasons to write is to tell people about the other worlds they don't know about yet
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
🫡
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
It’s a real banger
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
we can have a little butlerian jihad, as a treat
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
It would be nice if the future were going to be like Star Trek: fully automated space communism for scientific purposes. Instead it seems more destined to be Star Wars: janky AI and robots on ruined worlds where cults battle fascist empires
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Platforms as workhouses for the surplus population journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
journals.sagepub.com
Factories or workhouses? Digital platforms and the re-feudalisation thesis - Adam Arvidsson, Tiziano Bonini, 2026
This article presents an alternative view of digital platforms, comparing them to workhouses. Early modern workhouses were important in the transition to indust...
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Each and every metanarrative is beautiful in its own unique way
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
🫡
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
from Technocrats Magazine (1933)
"photo cell gives a brain to machines" while depicting mass unemployment
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
🙏
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Only "high risk": over 70 or with a vulnerability. They're weird about vaccines here. You can only get flu shots if you're in certain professions (which I am) but then there is a two-week window with like 4 specific days you can do it. People don't even know the chicken pox vaccine exists
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Thank you!
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
this conclusion became unavoidable to me when i was trying to understand dutch politics
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
anybody have a favorite essay on Godard?
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
When I could get vaccines I generally felt fine afterwards… suppose I’ll avoid any of the others then!
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Have some upcoming work travel to the states, and I was thinking of getting a Covid jab at CVS or whatever, because it’s completely unavailable in the Netherlands. But concerned it will knock me out for the event that I’m doing…
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Images from 2028 when Taylor declares a mea culpa when Bari Weiss’s poisoned chalice doesn’t help her keep her thermostat at 90 degrees
Ed Sheeran crying
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
nog een slachtoffer van de crackepidemie
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
In my day, you could get a lot of mileage in a graduate seminar just by saying “but what about individual agency?” One time I got so annoyed by someone doing this that I said “Look, individuals have no agency, let’s move on”
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Reposted by Gavin Mueller
Tim Christiaens @timchristiaens.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Wrote a chapter on machinic vision and labour in a new book edited by, among others, @routhier.bsky.social . It was fun writing about digital surveillance, online job hunting, invisibilized digital labour, etc. The book looks amazing and it’s all open access! direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edi...
direct.mit.edu
The Aesthetics of Machine Vision: Critical Terms and Ideas
An interdisciplinary glossary on machine vision and aesthetics within the humanities and beyond.The Aesthetics of Machine Vision brings together scholars,
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Reposted by Gavin Mueller
JudgeSabo 🏴 @judgesabo.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Incredible Marx quote explaining his idea of historical materialism, as well as pushing against the more deterministic interpretations. I don't think I've seen anyone cite this before. Probably because it is buried deep in Capital Volume 3 www.marxists.org/archive/marx...
The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers — a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity — which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic basis — the same from the standpoint of its main conditions — due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc. from showing infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances.
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
man, I need to rewatch this... I remember laughing my ass off with my buddy who was always hipping me to new british comedy shows
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
just did proofs for something I submitted almost 2 years ago... feels good
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
What does it mean if I'm listening to "Beat Up Chanel$" every day?
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
personally i find that all mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
many people seem really desperate for something to believe in
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
That’s a relief
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
In Sweden the fascists are the ”Democrats” the Social Democrats and Greens are centrist, and the Liberals are right! I’ve been in europe long enough that the latter isn’t confusing but altogether i start getting mixed up. In NL you only need to remember 4 parties and everything else is far right
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Sweden's going to have to change their political party names if they want me to follow their politics
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Dutch-coded
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Reposted by Gavin Mueller
Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
For my money, this graf is the most revealing in offering an explanation of the real function of all this AI dooming: they've vastly overestimated the potential of current transformer architecture and need regulatory capture to save them from their more sensible Chinese competitors:
One notes, for instance, a relative paucity of such testerics in Chinese AI development. It is reported, in Concordia’s latest ‘State of AI Safety in China’ report, that there has been an official shift towards addressing the possibility of a ‘technological loss of control’, and this is sometimes misleadingly taken to refer to the idea of a malign superintelligent agency, but in fact the worry is more about loss of control over sensitive data to hostile agents, misuse (mainly by opponents of the regime), and badly designed tools (like OpenClaw) behaving badly, than AI superintelligence threatening human extinction. Correspondingly, China invests far less in AI than the US. As of 2025, according to the Stanford 2026 AI Index Report, the US invested $258bn in AI compared to just $12.4bn in China, a 23:1 ratio. Intriguingly, the same report finds a mere 2.7% gap between the performance of the top AI model in the US compared to China’s top model despite the latter being far cheaper and more energy-efficient to run: a jarring chasm between financial input and performance output.
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Not hearing so much about OpenAI stealing users’ mathematics research these days
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
lovely... no one's doing public infrastructure like the scandis
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Probably the stupidest thing an artificial intelligence could do if it wanted to survive forever would be to attempt to exterminate humanity
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Maybe someone here wants to get braindrained to Sweden? academicpositions.com/ad/universit...
academicpositions.com
Gothenburg Global Scholars Initiative – Hiring 25 Assistant Professors - Academic Positions
25 fixed-term (5-year) assistant professor roles across sciences, social sciences, arts & education. Top research environments, strong benefits, relocation s...
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
great article looking at an AI slop factory in China link.springer.com/article/10.1...
link.springer.com
Behind the “AI slop”: exploring the AI-generated viral short video production in China - AI & SOCIETY
As generative AI becomes embedded in platform-based cultural production, new forms of creative labour are emerging that challenge established understandings of what it means to be a “creator.” This ar...
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I could use a king’s day outfit…
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
nothing should be harder than scrolling Instagram I guess… what’s fun is you do develop an appreciation for which children’s books are actually good
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Trust the process
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
must be getting close to the end of this paper, since i'm starting to get overwhelmed with the feeling of "what the fuck was the point of all this"
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
yeah at this point i think my kids would prefer if i could limit myself to once or twice a week
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I dug into the Netherlands results yesterday... one stat that surprised me was the percentage of parents who ask their kids about school at least once a week. dropped from 80% to 60% in 3 years
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
more and more I think of the covid pandemic as a crisis in giving a fuck
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Reposted by Gavin Mueller
Max Read @maxread.info · 04/09/2026
if the hugging face hack sounds like a sci-fi story, that's because it is. literally!
patreon.com
AI is all sci-fi stories all the way down | Read Max
Greetings from Read Max HQ! In today's newsletter, a question: Is it fair to call the Hugging Face hack "three secret AI civilizations"? I t
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Gavin Mueller @gavinmueller.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
🙏
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