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Henry Farrell

@himself.bsky.social
38K followers 636 following 6.8K posts

Professor of democracy and international affairs. www.henryfarrell.net and newsletter at www.programmablemutter.com. Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (Holt, Penguin). www.publishersweekly.com/9781250840….

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Jenny with a Green Ribbon Around Her Neck @readingtheend.bsky.social · 3h
this looks rad as fuck
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 7h
www.programmablemutter.com/p/in-praise-... Like O'Brien, the prospect of being completely forgotten gives me hope and a sense of peace.
Striving to be a Dorothea is a noble vocation, and likely the best we can hope for in any event; sooner or later, we will all be forgotten. In the long course of time, all of our arguments and ideas will be broken down and decomposed. At best we may hope, if we are very lucky, that they will contribute in some minute way to a rich humus, from which plants that we will never see or understand might spring.
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 18h
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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 21h
the average "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" guy is close friends with a bunch of people who are e/acc, works for an AI firm, and is implacable enemies with anyone who believes that Future Claude cannot psychically negotiate with Future ChatGPT simply by imagning what it wants very intensely.
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Chris Bertram @crookedfootball.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Radical Philosophy (Winter 1979)
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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
one thing that isn't accounted for in the SuperPAC discussion is that it changes the economics for partisan media firms from "pick the ads most likely to elect your principal, donald trump" to "pick the ads which are most likely to induce further donations by your principal, elon musk"
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Drew Engelhardt @amengel.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Quite the figure from @tesler.bsky.social in this @goodauth.bsky.social piece. goodauthority.substack.com/p/republican...
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
@dsquareddigest.bsky.social and I have a @britishacademy.bsky.social paper on how the US is now somehow managing to combine gross overuse of dollar power (e.g. upcoming ICC sanctions) with genial complaisance about the use of crypto to circumvent ordinary controls
thebritishacademy.ac.uk
The US dollar system as a source of international disorder
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
My alma mater, and from talking to people it is doing just great these days.
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
"On Another Man's Wound" is one of the great books of war.
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
"Megan McArdle believes that we would all benefit from more intellectual charity in the exciting cut and thrust of the blogosphere. There is indeed a plausible case for this. What there is not a plausible case for, in my opinion, is more intellectual charity towards Megan McArdle." I stand by this.
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I was literally thinking while walking the dogs an hour ago that I hadn't heard anything about McArdle for at least a year, and reflecting on the great value of paywalls a la @dsquareddigest.bsky.social crookedtimber.org/2010/06/25/i...
crookedtimber.org
I felt a sudden disturbance in the Force, as if a rather irritating voice had screamed, and then gone silent forever — Crooked Timber
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
This is probably a good moment to say that I'll be giving a talk at this, bringing the Shalizi-Farrell version of Gopnikism to the Plain People of the Natural Language Processing Community.
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JauntyWunderKind @jauntywunderkind.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
But I really think @himself.bsky.social nailed the sequence with Philip K Dick & the invasion of the fake humans. www.bostonreview.net/articles/hen...
bostonreview.net
Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans
We live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s.
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
yay Kate!
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
put some bottle in the dottle.
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
My first take (from work with @abenewman.bsky.social on the EU-US privacy wars) is that this is likely very stupid. ECJ judges are absolutely political, but are relatively insulated from electoral politics and raison d'etat. US interference makes a strong ruling vs Musk more politically attractive.
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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The idea that people want AI oversight to happen "all of a sudden" ignores years of research, warnings, and policy efforts. The delay hasn’t been a lack of awareness; it’s been because of years of industry lobbying against regulation, political resistance, and inaction.
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
[non-linear narrative movie with Susan Collins trying to reconstruct her past and what she needs to do next through notes to herself and semi-cryptic tattoos about which bill and confirmation vote comes next and is supposed to lead to what]
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I have seen hellthreads glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Only knew him through glancing online interactions but good lord he was such a good writer.
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Dallas Trinkle @dallastrinkle.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Really great piece on AI and how we talk and think about it
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tweety fish @sifu.tweety.fish · 25/09/2026
I understand but am tickled by this definition of "genuinely brilliant" but in general this is it dead-on. It's really hard to break away from a mis-specified model if you are in a huge hurry and seem to keep seeing evidence which supports it! This fucks with erudite scientists constantly!
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Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 25/09/2026
Anthropic's new biology lab released a technical report on using AI to discover new enzymes. Experts I talked to say "discover" is doing a lot of work here. Story: nyti.ms/4xOGWI7
nyti.ms
Anthropic’s A.I. Is Teaching Itself Biology. Now It’s Made Its First Discovery. (Gift Article)
Scientists at the company announced their first finding: a group of enzymes whose function is unknown.
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Good piece that gets at something that's been nagging at me about what @himself.bsky.social terms "the Machine God metaphor": Buying into it cuts off other types of questions, lines of inquiry, and approaches to knowledge. And I can't help but notice which way of thinking empowers tech companies.
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elias isquith @eliasisquith.blog · 23/09/2026
this was a great piece. what is happening among thought leader-type elites — what has been happening among them for years — is a willing abdication of their most fundamental intellectual responsibilities.
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John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Last year I tried to make a similar point about AGI, drawing from mid-century attempts to describe a world soon to be overwhelmed by "automation." (In addition to getting in the way of diverse thinking about the future, another thing machine god discourse does is command us to ignore history!)
After much deliberation, in other words, the imminent remaking of the economy, and humanity's place in the world, was reduced to an awareness campaign. Broad-based
"automation" was just a matter of time. It wasn't the government's place to tell businesses how to handle it, and it wasn't the businesses' place to do anything but enable it to its maximum potential, just ... carefully. Automation framed the future in terms that made asking for things in the present
- marginally better terms for workers, for example - sound like a waste of energy. It was, Resnikoff suggests, an argument for abandoning work, and the workplace, as a contestable, organizable, political space. Why bother? The end of work is nigh.The AGI brand campaign has other uses with extraordinarily high stakes in the present and beyond the tech industry. DOGE is, above all, the manifestation of a right-wing dream to cripple the state and to commandeer what's left. To the extent that it looks forward, however, it's also a Musk-inflected AGI story put into action with real and current consequences. Who cares if we break the bureaucracy? Soon enough — inevitably, in fact - AI will be able to handle the messy work of governance and administration better than we can. Why isolate American industry from the rest of the world with massive tariffs? Because AGI robots will magically pick up the slack. Need to justify drastic cuts to Medicare or Medicaid? Just say "AI" and get out that bone saw. It's a matter of time until all bets are off and the concerns of regular people will be well and truly irrelevant, their relative intelligence and intrinsic value reduced to a quantity approaching zero. Why shouldn't the people in charge act like it's already true? And why should any of us bother to do anything about it?
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John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Excellent @himself.bsky.social post here, scratching at some of the overbearing tendencies — sometimes subtle and unintentional, sometimes open — in AI discourse www.programmablemutter.com/p/machine-go...
programmablemutter.com
Machine god metaphors eat your brain
There are other ways of thinking about AI
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Judah Grunstein @judah-grunstein.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
This is it in a nutshell for me, for mathematics but also more broadly: "Indeed, the mass production at faster and faster pace of 'true/false' statements could destroy fertile ground instead of breathing life into new ideas." Citation from this, by Terence Tao.
terrytao.wordpress.com
A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics
I am proud to be among the list of 25 initial signatories — all Fields Medallists — to the declaration below, which grew out of discussions between ourselves over the last week. We have…
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
the famous quote about Sinead O'Connor was that she was Bambi in bovver boots. Bambi-as-sociopath looks sort of amazing, actually.
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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 23/09/2026
Another essential piece from @himself.bsky.social
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
to the extent that this is generally true, it is an equivocal class of a compliment ...
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Curd Knüpfer @curdknupfer.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Great piece on culture, society, science, and god… In the context of using metaphors to describe AI. Highly recommend.
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
This book is an absolute banger: alternative history meets procedural detective, with propulsive plot and great, funny social observation. I urge you to buy it (and if it doesn't yet have a US deal it is a great opportunity for someone to pick up).
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Michael Hirson @hotpotwhynot.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I love that @himself.bsky.social wrote about Jervis' System Effects, a remarkable but also somewhat confounding book. Even outside of the academic sphere, would highly endorse more imaginative ways to think about feedback effects in discussions of foreign policy and geopolitics.
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nestor guillen @birdsnfrogs.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
To reuse the old line: we are all atheists about most of the machine gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go _one machine god_ further!
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
it's very very good
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Æðelwułf @iamdarkink.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
The EU needs to look at this and think "it could be done to EU ministers or even EU member countries." The best thing to do is to move off US infrastructure and software. Regulate US infrastructure companies. Tax their profits to keep more of it in the EU.
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Lily Mason @lilymasonphd.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Apply for @snfagora.bsky.social 's Postdoctoral Fellowship by November 5. See details here! snfagora.jhu.edu/fellowships-...
snfagora.jhu.edu
Postdoctoral Fellows Program
Postdoctoral Fellows Program SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University
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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
something has gone very, very wrong with the UK
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Brad DeLong @braddelong.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Land may now be the two most influential intellectuals in America's AI debate—and that tells you how badly the conversation has gone wrong. When "machine god: good or evil?" is the only question on the table, every question actually worth asking gets thrown away... 1/
braddelong.substack.com
CROSSPOST: HENRY FARRELL: Machine God Metaphors Eat Your Brain
Henry’s subheadling: “There are other ways of thinking about AI”; socio-cultural technology, normal Schumpeterian creative-destruction, new windows into the real ASI of human knowledge for three...
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David Moles @chronodm.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
"If you start… from the perspective that AI does not inevitably replace humans in the dissemination and discovery of knowledge… then you begin to start asking questions that are systematically obscured by Machine God Thought." www.programmablemutter.com/p/machine-go...
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Absolutely fucking amazing. Mike Harrison is on the Booker shortlist.
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Richard K Morgan @quellist1.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Written by a genius - and that's just the introduction........😈
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
From a note to a friend a couple of weeks ago "imo the reason text elemental is so good is because it captures the notion of something that is animate, but not conscious so much as an expression of the fundamental nature of the substance of which it is composed."
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Christian Odendahl @codendahl.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
This here, by @himself.bsky.social, is very good on the EU and Canada. www.programmablemutter.com/p/canada-is-...
programmablemutter.com
Canada is cosying up to Europe
What can they give each other?
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Matt ”read the syllabus” L @matt18l.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social has the sensible questions we should be asking about AI without the theology of the Machine God Messiah.
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
yup. things are getting crazy.
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Agathe Demarais @agathedemarais.com · 22/09/2026
In 1995-2013 uranium from 20,000 Soviet nuclear weapons supplied 10% of US electricity. Despite a 2024 import ban, Russia remains America's top supplier of nuclear fuel - for @foreignpolicy.com I explore how the ban is theatre and where Moscow's leverage really lies foreignpolicy.com/2026/09/21/u...
foreignpolicy.com
Nuclear Energy Is the Kremlin’s Latest Leverage Over Washington
The United States has done little to end its dependence on Russia for enriched uranium.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 22/09/2026
"We are in a moment where you could plausibly argue that Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Land are the most influential policy intellectuals in the US conversation. Just look at the state of the two of them. This is not a good thing." www.programmablemutter.com/p/machine-go...
programmablemutter.com
Machine god metaphors eat your brain
There are other ways of thinking about AI
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