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 · 25/08/2026

This isn't a foreign policy position.

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

accountability ends up being flattened into nothingness. If you (i.e., Hank here) submit, it affords you nothing, because the ask can only intensify, because the demand is malformed. So it won't afford catharsis. So the ask will just be intensified and intensified and intensified. (2/2)

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

Another interesting thing about this issue is that this kind of behavior... doesn't actually afford catharsis to the people who perform it, or anyone who is observing the interactions. I guess they think it does, or will? But there is no actual standard of satisfaction, and so even the idea of (1/2)

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

Hanna Fenichel Pitkin is one of the best writers on this, in part because her analysis of gender in Machiavelli is neither deflationary nor tendentious. An underrated classic (like everything by Pitkin). press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

press.uchicago.edu

Fortune Is a Woman

"Fortune is a woman, and if you want to keep her under, you’ve got to knock her around some."—Niccolò Machiavelli Hanna Pitkin’s provocative and enduring study of Machiavelli was the first to systemat...

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Reposted by Michael Uhall

◉●○•° @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 · 05/08/2026

This is a bizarre take that significantly misrepresents Philippa Foote's work.

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

How do you think this should change how political scientists model and characterize these politicians?

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Reposted by Michael Uhall

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 · 15/04/2026

Hey some of us like abstruse theory abstraction and think it's quite useful!

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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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Reposted by Michael Uhall

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

View of Planet Earth from Artemis II...

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Reposted by Michael Uhall

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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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

I really like this framework of "reconstruction" (as opposed to merely "resistance," etc.). It retakes initiative. There's a lot of work to do to fix what's been broken.

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

We have to be at least a little bit honest about the public's complicity in its own ignorance. The information is there; it's easy to perceive, unless you don't want to, or can't be bothered.

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

I mean, I feel like it's pretty representative of our accomplishments so far, don't you?

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

um, I think technically he would say "ZHE MÖÖN ÏN ZHE FÜCKÏNG SKŸ?!" (the interrobang is crucial here)

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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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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

He's right to outsource that and keep his nose clean.

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

It must be because Weis is delivering what the American people want so hard and so very successfully.

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

We have to stop pretending people don't know what they voted for, or that circumstance or consequence will change their commitments or comportment. They know exactly what they voted for, and they're willing to make you pay for it too. They want you to pay for it. They're willing to pay themselves.

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Michael Uhall @grayskythinking.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

The only sensible response could possibly be howling gales of savage, humorless laughter, followed by instantaneous, hopefully relentless lawfare.

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

It was, as far as I can tell, about as revolutionary as Second Life.

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

Imagine Clippy popping out of every app and service you've ever used, except he's also trying to sell you (a) more of himself, (b) CGI porn, and (c) sports gambling.

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Reposted by Michael Uhall

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

I assume we are all thinking that same thing here, namely, the parallels between this and recent claims about AI changing eVeRyThInG imminently.

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

Vastly more astonishing to me is the sheer number of elected officials, appointees, advisers, and career public servants who are just letting it happen. Basically none of them are willing to lift a finger. It's eye-opening.

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

When people (Furman) make these kinds of pronouncements, I always think of Achen and Bartels making the point that things like shark attacks can measurably affect electoral outcomes. Sorry (not sorry) to the electorial rationalists, but nobody ever went bankrupt underestimating... etc.

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