iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

My long review ("What Is Living and What Is Dead in Contemporary Vitalism?") of Benjamin Noys' Envisioning the Good Life: The Limits of Contemporary Vitalism (edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-envisio...) is out now in Theory & Event 29:4 (2026): muse.jhu.edu/issue/57673

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Penumbria 68: Infestada, containing my short story "Sustrato," is available now: www.penumbria.mx/penumbria-in...

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

"An idiot sultan could paralyze the Ottoman Empire in a way that a pope or Holy Roman emperor could never do for all of Europe."

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

New at boundary 2 online: “Warfare Modulation,” on atmospheric violence, collective sensation, sound, and survival beyond narrative from W.G. Sebald and Peter Sloterdijk to Palestinian DJ Sama’ Abdulhadi: www.boundary2.org/2026/08/mich...

boundary2.org

Michael Uhall–Warfare Modulation: Atmospheric Violence from Sebald to Sama’ Abdulhadi

Freddie Clayton and Max Butterworth. “Satellite images reveal extent of destruction in the Gaza Strip” (2025). Warfare Modulation: Atmospheric Violence from Sebald to Sama' Abdulhadi Michael Uhall Pet...

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

My second book, Theory of the Alien, is out from Routledge this fall, with an affordable paperback in 2027. It asks how the Space Age reshapes power politics, geography, strategic imagination, and, perhaps most centrally, the concept of the human: www.routledge.com/Theory-of-th...

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◉●○•° @cosmoecology.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

In the essay below, @grayskythinking.bsky.social suggests how instead of clinging to the existing paradigms as they fall apart, we can reexamine current assumptions to begin salvaging and repurposing their scattered pieces into something genuinely more adaptive. #backloop

backloop.substack.com

Generative Entropy and Gray Sky Thinking

An essay by political theorist Michael Uhall.

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

For Boyd, entropy becomes a generative engine, the very means by which the breakdown of one order supplies the materials for another: grayskythinking.substack.com/p/gray-sky-t...

grayskythinking.substack.com

Gray sky thinking: John Boyd and generative entropy

For Boyd, entropy becomes a generative engine, the very means by which the breakdown of one order supplies the materials for another.

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

"Armor yourself against the knocks of being alive, insist on 'being in control,' and you will be able to hide from the fact that you are a real, vulnerable being in a contingent universe. But you will have a trapped, shitty life, and you will export your unhappiness to other people."

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

"The Army in general lost a lot of analytical prowess due to the past 17 years of constant combat and increasing reliance on PowerPoint."

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Vault of Culture @vaultofculture.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

VoC is proud to present a new featured article by political theorist @grayskythinking.bsky.social on Alex van Warmerdam's Borgman (2013), considering the film's feral Outside irruption into late capitalist domesticity and what it means to leave yourself behind. www.vaultofculture.com/vault/featur...

vaultofculture.com

Logics of Desire in Search of an Exit: On Alex van Warmerdam’s Borgman (2013) — The Vault of Culture

Political theorist Michael Uhall offers a reading of Alex van Warmerdam's Borgman (2013) as a libidinal politics of exit, showing how the film stages the irruption of the feral Outside into late cap...

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

The start of a limited series of translations from German philosopher and intellectual historian Hans Blumenberg, writing about outer space: “Before spaceflight had even begun, it had already been conceived as a metaphor.…”: grayskythinking.substack.com/p/astronoeti...

grayskythinking.substack.com

Astronoetics: "Anticipation of Spaceflight as Metaphor"

Translation from Hans Blumenberg's Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne (1997).

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Andrew Haglington @andrewhaglington.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

View of Planet Earth from Artemis II...

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

Someone needs to tell the American people what's going on in the Pentagon, and it obviously won't be Pete Hegseth, who is at war with America's senior military officers. My latest: www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

theatlantic.com

Hegseth’s War on America’s Military

Someone needs to explain the Pentagon purges to the American people.

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Reposted by Michael Uhall

Cory of House Pants @corypants.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

The GOAT Moon Tweet

David Lynch
@DAVID... • Jun 18, 2010 V
This weekend I'm going to try to find out if I'm connected to the moon.
~ 30
3.2K
了
David Lynch
@DAVID... • Jun 21, 2010
I'm pretty sure I'm connected to the moon.
73
L>4.5K
4.3K

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Reposted by Michael Uhall

Mars Is Haunted @mars-is-haunted.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

As is tradition,

dustin Couch
@Dustinkcouch
nasa employee: oh hey u guys are back early
astronaut: moon's haunted
nasa employee: what?
astronaut: *loading a pistol and getting back on the rocket-ship* moon's haunted
10:18 PM - 29 Oct 2018

Donald @getfiscal
Follow
me: "So, Karl Marx, that's basically what the world is like in 2018. What's your analysis of the situation? Is capitalism still doomed?" Karl Marx: "Holy shit, you went to the moon?"
me: "Does communism still have a future?" Karl Marx: "The moon in the fucking sky?"
4:44 PM - 10 Apr 2018
192 Retweets 925 Likes
• 7
17 192
925

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, after the successful launch of Artemis II. A crucial image for the psychogeography of outer space.

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

"The intent of my introductory comments is, in part, to give the reader a sense of the uniqueness and independence of [Hans] Blumenberg's approach, which is attested to by its having been almost universally ignored for decades."

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Dan Martin @danmartin7.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

Just remember that there is no shortage in higher ed enrollment and more people are trying to go college than ever. The higher ed disinformation is about cutting funding, creating the illusion that no one believes in the value of college. It's bullshit. www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2026...

cavalierdaily.com

U.Va. offers admission to 10,287 students for the Class of 2030 amid application surge

The University released regular decision application decisions for the Class of 2030 Friday, completing its final admissions cycle and bringing total offers of admission across all cycles to 10,287 st...

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

Here, the environment that Sebald understands as a medium of destruction provisionally becomes, in Abdulhadi’s work, the medium through which that same destruction is refracted and held at bay, and in which catastrophe, perhaps, is survived. grayskythinking.substack.com/p/reading-ge...

grayskythinking.substack.com

Reading geopolitics: "Air War and Literature" (1999) and Sama’ Abdulhadi

On W. G. Sebald's "Air War and Literature"and Sama’ Abdulhadi.

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Schooley @schooley.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

I think the President musing about killing people "just for fun" would have resulted in every major paper demanding impeachment in the before times.

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Attractive Nuisance @midcenturymaudlin.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

“Don’t know shit about your enemy. Assume he is a stupid baby.” —Sun Tzu

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

@juhaarvidhelminen.bsky.social's photographs perform a kind of geopolitical degloving, in which the symbolic skin of power that so often clothes authority in many-colored mantles is peeled away, leaving behind only pellucid black abstraction: grayskythinking.substack.com/p/reading-ge...

grayskythinking.substack.com

Reading geopolitics: The Invisible Empire (2022)

On Juha Arvid Helminen's A Journey to the Invisible Empire.

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Richard M. Nixon @dicknixon.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

There's half a dozen things a day you've never seen before, but what I can't get over is starting a war on total lack of political credit.

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

For Augustine, the imperfection of political life becomes a kind of speculative engine, the very means of generating projects and trajectories that surpass, survive, and perhaps even transform their conditions of origination: grayskythinking.substack.com/p/gray-sky-t...

grayskythinking.substack.com

Gray sky thinking: Augustine and institutional resilience

For Augustine, the imperfection of political life becomes a kind of speculative engine, the very means of generating new projects and trajectories.

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Discussions of AI that do not engage explicitly with discourses around autonomous weapons, cognitive offloading, and corporate financial misconduct are disingenuous or fatally shortsighted.

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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

A lot of people say AI isn't very good for the world and its outputs are routinely unreliable, but these haters fail to see how it's revolutionizing how we incinerate schoolchildren.

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

On DeLillo's Point Omega (2010): "Perhaps seeing like a state means you can truly see nothing beyond the circumscribed horizons of the self, after all; perhaps only certain griefs or losses can change this": grayskythinking.substack.com/p/reading-ge...

grayskythinking.substack.com

Reading geopolitics: Point Omega (2010)

Don DeLillo's Point Omega

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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Why bomb a school? Could've been aiming at something else and missed. But it looks like this missile hit the intended target. Except the target selection—perhaps by an AI system called Maven that uses Claude—was based on outdated information. Target suggestions are one thing. But no human review?

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David Swerdlick @swerd.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

Today's gift link. "Those on the isolationist right who thought Trump shared their views made the mistake of inferring too much from his domestic policy." www.nytimes.com/2026/03/02/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | The Idea That Trump Was Antiwar Was Always Delusional

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

"It’s worth noting the degree to which experimental writing and political history are intimately, perhaps even inextricably intertwined. A single speech act can bring an entire geopolitical world of possibility into being": grayskythinking.substack.com/p/reading-ge...

grayskythinking.substack.com

Reading geopolitics: Cyclonopedia (2008)

Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

Plato uses his political philosophy to develop alternative assumptions. This is where gray sky thinking slips the shining wire of mere critique, which always sutures the critic to the object of her critique: grayskythinking.substack.com/p/gray-sky-t...

grayskythinking.substack.com

Gray sky thinking: Plato and political decay

Plato’s creation is a conceptual machine, lumbering through the underground ruins of dead and dying civilizations, seeking an exit to the surface, an egress to the Outside.

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

Brief reflections on @tim-weiner.bsky.social's The Folly and the Glory, a brisk and unsettling survey of American-Russian political warfare (1945-2020) and some of the recurring pathologies of great-power projection: grayskythinking.substack.com/p/reading-ge...

grayskythinking.substack.com

Reading geopolitics: The Folly and the Glory (2020)

Tim Weiner's The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare, 1945-2020

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

The default assumption that the future will resemble the past is dangerous. This short article introduces “gray sky thinking” as a framework for conceptualizing existential risk without continuity bias: grayskythinking.substack.com/p/introducti...

grayskythinking.substack.com

Introduction to gray sky thinking

The standard assumption about the future is that it will resemble the past.

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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

Nuclear nonproliferation was on the ballot in 2024, though most Americans didn’t realize or care. In term 1, Trump let Iran out of nuclear restrictions in exchange for nothing, accepted DPRK as a nuclear weapons state, and made US allies want their own deterrent. Now 50 years of US-Russia is done.

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Adriana Mandacaru Guerra has written a scholarly review of my first book, Noir Materialism (www.bloomsbury.com/us/noir-mate...), for the January 2026 issue of Theory and Event (29:1): muse.jhu.edu/issue/56178. It's always an honor. Currently open access: muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

muse.jhu.edu

Project MUSE - Theory & Event-Volume 29, Number 1, January 2026

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

"My personal view (not the university’s view): a university that forces philosophy professors to remove texts by Plato from their syllabi is not a serious university, it reduces itself to a political propaganda institution, just like philosophy departments in the Soviet Union": archive.ph/LiA44

archive.ph

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

Part 3 of a series on conceptual engineering and pragmatism ("The left hand of all creation: how to repurpose whole worlds") is up at Diffractions Collective. Part 3 engages with algorithms, Günther Anders, Ray Brassier, and chirality. diffractionscollective.com/2025/11/21/t...

diffractionscollective.com

THE LEFT HAND OF ALL CREATION: HOW TO REPURPOSE Whole Worlds PT. 3 // Michael Uhall

This is the third part of a 3-part series The Left Hand of All Creation: How To Repurpose Whole Worlds by Michael Uhall. In this regard, to repurpose an object of whatever sort entails an…

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

Part 2 of a series on conceptual engineering and pragmatism ("The left hand of all creation: how to repurpose whole worlds") is up at Diffractions Collective. Part 2 engages with S. Spielrein, J. Schumpeter, John Boyd, and Nick Land on creative destruction: diffractionscollective.com/2025/11/13/t...

diffractionscollective.com

THE LEFT HAND OF ALL CREATION: HOW TO REPURPOSE Whole WORLDS PT. 2 // Michael Uhall

This is the second part of a 3-part series The Left Hand of All Creation: How To Repurpose Whole Worlds by Michael Uhall. (PART 3): EXCURSUS ON CREATIVE DESTRUCTION (SPIELREIN, SCHUMPETER, BOYD, LA…

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

Part 1 of a series on conceptual engineering and pragmatism ("The left hand of all creation: how to repurpose whole worlds") is up at Diffractions Collective. Part 1 engages with C. S. Peirce, OOO (critically), and Winnicott on object use and destruction: diffractionscollective.com/2025/10/29/t....

diffractionscollective.com

THE LEFT HAND OF ALL CREATION: HOW TO REPURPOSE Whole WORLDS PT.1 // Michael Uhall

This is the first part of a 3-part series The Left Hand of All Creation: How To Repurpose Whole Worlds by Michael Uhall. “The world is an asymmetrical place full of asymmetrical beings.” – Fra…

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