iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Michael Macher @michael-macher.bsky.social · 07/03/2026

"The question I keep returning to is whether you can hold the desire for a political system’s end and grief for its victims at the same time. I think you have to. I think the people who can’t, on either side, are telling you something about what they’ve had to shut off in themselves to survive this"

nymag.com

Hard Feelings

The Iranian diaspora is fracturing in real time, across dinner tables, on WhatsApp, and in the silence of blocked numbers.

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London Review of Books @lrb.co.uk · 14/02/2026

‘Military service is one of the strongest predictors for becoming a mass shooter in the US.’ @lalehkhalili.bsky.social on the symbiosis of drugs and war. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

lrb.co.uk

Laleh Khalili · Guns, Money and Opium

There is an undeniable symmetry between surges in drug use in the US and the country’s covert operations overseas. The...

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Stuart Schrader @stschrader1.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

How and why police actually support the federal invasions—I have been working on this article for ~6 months, trying to make sense of Trump’s nationwide surge of DHS officers, how it has evolved, what brought us here, and what will remain after it ends.

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Michael Macher @michael-macher.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

"Epstein’s victims experienced the rule of master and servant not just as economic but sexual violence. They were the first to name and resist our emergent political order." A sharp and devastating piece from @melindacooper.bsky.social on the patriarchal household economy as political model.

equator.org

Epstein Family Values • EQUATOR

The billionaire patriarchs of the American far-right want to rule an economy of masters and servants

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Benjamin Braun @benbraun.social · 11/02/2026

On the hellish detention and deportation system built by EU countries. With quotes from the current and the former German chancellors expressing their commitment to the inhumane cruelty of this apparatus, described here in forensic detail.

nytimes.com

Inside a Detention Site at the Heart of Europe’s Harsh New Approach to Immigration

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herman mark schwartz @thunen.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

Or, a different metric, the 2026 ICE+CBP roughly equals the 2024 appropriation for the Housing & Urban development dept. choices meme.

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Michael Macher @michael-macher.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

Population transfer. Ethnic cleansing. Transactional forced migration. Whatever you want to call it, it's happening.

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Moira Donegan @moiradonegan.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

Need a word for the Soon-to Previn and Ghislane Maxwell types—women who build their identities around their sexual appeal to men and have to make more and more ostentatious rejections of feminist sex politics as they age out of those men’s sexual desire.

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Boston Review @bostonreview.bsky.social · 11/01/2026

“Scandal came for the company last year when Italian authorities reportedly used Paragon’s spyware to surveil prominent journalists and human rights activists. For the Trump administration, it might have been a proof of concept.” On the surveillance tools now in the hands of ICE:

bostonreview.net

The Strongman’s Surveillance State

The Trump administration has unfrozen a Biden-era hold on powerful Israeli-made spyware, now in the hands of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

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Greg Sargent @gregsargent.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

If media is going to claim a "pivot," let's stipulate some threshold questions: Is ICE still treating US cities like occupied territory? Will there be serious governmental investigations into ICE killings? Any accountability for them? If not, nothing is changing. 2/ newrepublic.com/article/2057...

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Phenomenal World @phenomenalworld.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

"The crackdown has done nothing to address the origins of the upheaval, which lie in the country’s political economy." NEW @kayhanvaladbaygi.bsky.social on the crisis in Iran www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/ira...

phenomenalworld.org

Iran in Revolt | Kayhan Valadbaygi

Deep political-economic transformations are causing recurrent waves of unrest, with no long-term solution in sight.

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gazelle emami @gazelleemami.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

"A white man points both his middle fingers and releases a teeth-baring yell, and it seems as if he were drawing a current from the pavement straight out of his mouth" @kerryhowley.bsky.social, putting words to feelings like only she can nymag.com/intelligence...

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Michael Macher @michael-macher.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

"The impulse to drive hostile invaders from your home lives in your body in a place too deep to name. I finally bought a gas mask. You should get one too."

nymag.com

The People vs. ICE

Renee Good’s death galvanized a city eager to push back against Trump’s invasion.

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Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

Today's factoid from the history of US fascism: the guy who hatched the idea to publish Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative in 1960 (the ur-text of US conservatism) was Leo Reardon. In the 1930s Reardon was Father Coughlin's manager & he'd traveled to Nazi Germany as Coughlin's representative.

Reardon arrived in Germany in the second week of January 1939 and made appointments to see both Goebbels and Hitler's Foreign Office head, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Reardon was initially received by a deputy official, Richard Sallet, who had served several years in the German embassy in Washington and was very familiar with U.S. politics.
According to the official German Foreign Office memorandum, included among documents captured at the end of the war, it was Sallet's task "10 entertain Reardon and talk to him about German problems." According te the report made by State Secretary Ernst Woermann, "Reardon talked against President Roosevelt and against the Jews, and conveyed Cough-lin's suggestion that Hitler personally make some sort of statement that the Nazis were supporters of Christian religion." Woermann noted that
"after spending a few days with Sallet, Reardon saw Ribbentrop. To Ribbentrop he repeated the things he had told Sallet." Ribbentrop replied in vague terms that "they would do the best they could on it. At the close

of the interview, Ribbentrop said: 'Give my regards to Father Coughlin. I have a high regard for him.' »57
On January 21, Goebbels personally replied to criticisms of German treatment of Jews coming from across the Atlantic. In a speech entitled
"What Does America Actually Want?" he decried the "distorted picture of Germany that was given by a Jewish-dominated press which did not represent the true views of Americans."58 His diary for January 24
records:
The manager of Father Coughlin, the anti-Semitic radio priest in America, tells us that America is basically more anti-Semitic than we give it credit for. He would like us to take a more positive attitude toward Christianity.
I tell the Führer about this. He intends to touch on the question in his speech to the Reichstag. He intends to put out feelings to the Americans and give an outline of Germany's general posi-tion. I believe that this speech will be very important. 59
On the testimony of Joseph Goebbels, it would appear that Reardon not only encouraged a theme in a speech by Adolf Hitler but had potentially encouraged "feelers" of growing anti-Semitism in the United States. 60

Human Events Played a Part
In the spring of 1958, at one of book ever written by a political figure
Human Events'
periodic staff meetings
who had not yet become President
with political leaders, James L. Wick,
Following publication of the book,
executive editor of Human Events, said a youth movement for Goldwater-now to Barry Goldwater: "We would like called "Young Americans For Free to see
States ,you President of the United
dom"-sprang up over the country.
By the thousands-spontaneously—
The senator, then in his first term,
they travelled to the 1960 convention
replied: "Oh no! Nothing like that can in Chicago and started a presidential happen. It will be a long time before boom. But Goldwater withdrew his the nation will elect a President with name and insisted that conservatives a Jewish name like Goldwater."
support the Nixon-Lodge ticket.
In its July 1, 1959 issue, Human
In his speech to the convention,
Events definitely proposed Goldwater
he said:
for President, adding that: "...Nomi
"Let's
grow
up, conservatives.
nation of candidates from small-popu-lation states (with only a limited num-
Let's, if we want to, take this party back-and I think we can someday.
ber of delegates to the convention) are
Let's get to work."
unprecedented-
-but these are times of
realignment of parties, political flux
After Kennedy's victory in the No
and crumbling of party traditions. In vember election,
Goldwater took his
thebe skange times, precedent may well
own advice. He "went to work." He spent a large part of his time building
Soon after, Leo Reardon, represent-
up the conservative strength.
ing the obscure Victor Publishing Co.
He became the biggest drawing card
of Shepherdsville, Ky., persuaded the at college and university assemblies. senator to write a book expressing his views. Aided by Brent Bozell, the sena-
He was the principal speaker at four
tor rewrote his speeches,
Human Events Political Action Con-
releases and
statements of the previous five years.
ferences. He…

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Michael Macher @michael-macher.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

Like the University of Austin, I too experience internal divisions over ideological demands.

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Simulated Chollas @simulatedchollas.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

Atlantic publishes piece calling reality pedantic

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Jewish Currents @jewishcurrents.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

What, if anything, does Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme have to say about American Jewishness in 1952 and now? Editor-in-chief Arielle Angel, senior editor Nathan Goldman, contributing editor @davidklion.bsky.social, and contributing writer Mitch Abidor discuss:

jewishcurrents.org

What Makes Marty Run?

Jewish Currents discusses Josh Safdie’s new film, Marty Supreme , and its vision of mid-century American Jewishness.

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Michael Macher @michael-macher.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

"As the organizing progressed, we learned that the boss’s kids were involved in Lower Manhattan’s lightly fascist film scene." I'm late to the party but this by @grendan.bsky.social is great.

longhaulmag.com

The Rise and Fall of Barboncino Workers United | Long-Haul Mag

FALL 2025 ISSUE 04

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Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

"If we have Venezuela’s people (which we shouldn’t have), they have our oil (which they shouldn’t have)... Trump's latest regime reimagines and remakes the borders of American state power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic in a single domain of impunity: call it ‘Homeland Empire’."

Trump has dispensed with the old legitimation strategies that were characterised by a dual commitment to rule-bound international order (with exceptions) and equal protection inside US national boundaries. Instead, he conflates immigrants, drugs and free trade as sources of weakness coming from outside, “poisoning the blood of our country”. At the same time, he inverts settled conceptions of external and internal: if we have Venezuela’s people (which we shouldn’t have), they have our oil (which they shouldn’t have). In turn, his administration invokes emergency war powers at home, to arrest and remove unauthorised immigrants – and discretionary police powers abroad, to arrest foreign leaders (and seize foreign assets) under US law.

Trump’s real innovation has been to marry the archaic geopolitics of a settler empire to the modern legal frameworks devised by his liberal predecessors. What distinguishes his latest regime is its effort to reimagine and remake the borders of American state power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic in a single domain of impunity: call it ‘Homeland Empire’.

The Trump administration envisions “reshoring” national security in a lasting way, drawing on the dubious norms and legalities of the War on Terror and the rancid infrastructures and policing capacities of America’s domestic penal complex. If George W. Bush helped invent the concept of ‘homeland security’ in order to “fight the terrorists over there” rather than here, Trump seeks to bring the war to “OUR hemisphere”. From Caracas to Minneapolis, legal authority and institutional power are being redirected toward an overriding end: governing populations as subjects rather than citizens.

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Michael Macher @michael-macher.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

"The United States will be a source of chaos and volatility for the next several years."

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katya schwenk @katyaschwenk.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

while ICE has slashed training requirements for new recruits, it's also bringing in sketchy private security firms to train its elite tactical units (like the one Jonathan Ross is a member of) on "advanced techniques once exclusive to military protection units" www.levernews.com/shadow-contr...

levernews.com

Shadow Contractors Are Training ICE’s Attack Teams

ICE is spending big on firearms, munitions, and politically connected weapons training firms to further militarize its forces.

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404 Media @404media.co · 15/01/2026

SCOOP: Internal ICE material and testimony from an official obtained by 404 Media provides the clearest link yet between the technological infrastructure Palantir is building for ICE and the agency’s activities on the ground. Inside the app called ELITE—what ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid.

404media.co

‘ELITE’: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid

Internal ICE material and testimony from an official obtained by 404 Media provides the clearest link yet between the technological infrastructure Palantir is building for ICE and the agency’s activit...

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Michael Macher @michael-macher.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

"What is being put into question now is the ‘delicate fiction’ that the sovereignty of people living within the US affords them inviolable civil and political rights."

Text excerpt: "One question we cannot seem to leave behind is whether Donald Trump has perversely realised longstanding trends in American history and culture, or fundamentally overturned basic US values and norms. The reason this has been unsatisfying is that it was never a binary choice. To the extent to which aggression can be used to engender public submission – and it is not at all clear that it will work – it is linked to plausible accounts of the US past. And yet, despite this, Trump has gone a long way towards dismantling the legitimating framework for postwar US power."

Text excerpt: "We have a tendency to keep asking whether a threshold of no return has finally been crossed. The answer is yes – but not because Trump is operating outside of historical precedents for US racism and imperialism, which are not hard to find. In 1950 – tellingly, in musings about Venezuela’s oil riches – George Kennan, a key architect of Cold War strategy, lamented what he viewed as the main compromise of America’s postwar liberal imperium: that unprepared, “debauched” people had been allowed to cast “the delicate fiction of sovereignty” over the resources of the Earth. The Homeland Empire marks a kind of reemergence of Kennan’s morbid disquiet – with mass deportation at its core. What is being put into question now is the ‘delicate fiction’ that the sovereignty of people living within the US affords them inviolable civil and political rights."

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Picnic Magazine @picnic-mag.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

btw the explicit and official editorial positions of Picnic Magazine are Fuck ICE, Free Palestine, and All of Our Struggles Are Connected

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Michael Macher @michael-macher.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

Resurfacing two excellent pieces on ICE/BP's labor unions that tease out the relationship between immigration enforcement, incipient fascism, and labor rights. newrepublic.com/article/1549... by @kimkelly.bsky.social inthesetimes.com/article/dona... by @sarahlazare.bsky.social + Michael Arria

newrepublic.com

Abolish ICE’s Union

The labor movement needs to take a stronger stand against agents of Trump's barbarous immigration policies.

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John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

I wrote about YouTube's perpetual apocalypse: the recurring spectacle of creators declaring the platform dead or dying as it grows into something bigger than anyone ever imagined nymag.com/intelligence...

Sebastian, who has a staff of around 100 people, took the
"viewpocalypse" as an opportunity to riff on broader themes of decline. He wondered if recent turbulence was related to a "statistically significant uptick" in non-renewals to his subscription product that were attributed to "insufficient funds," indicating his viewers could be struggling with money. He pulled up a chart of the rising Google trend for "help with mortgage," and considered whether he and his YouTuber peers, some of whom had reported not just lower viewership but worse "conversion" rates from sponsorships and product sales, were "canaries' in the North American economic coal mine. Echoing gloomy mainstream economic discourse, and perhaps speaking as the business owner and reluctant boss that he is, he mused about whether, in difficult times, the creator economy might soon have a "K-shape" to it, with the "top creators" surviving while the other 98 percent that were
"just barely scraping by on the platform" dealing with the most pain.

But, again, by most available metrics, the rise of Shorts has been a success. Platform engagement is growing overall, and Shorts are a major part of that growth. The feature used to be full of ripped clips and pilfered TikToks, but now creators are putting in the effort to make things users actually want to watch. (Shorts are also, it should be said, the main vector for the influx of mass-generated AI video into YouTube, which the platform has struggled to mitigate.) It may be the case that some of the sour vibes among established YouTubers, and their audiences, come from a sense of looming generational change in a platform large enough, old enough, and self-contained enough to feel like a sector unto itself, the sort of environment - like
"the film business" or "music" - where changes to the marketplace, and consumer trends, are met with fear and merged with concerns about exploitation, manipulation, and obsolescence, all heightened by the fact of a single company at the center of it all (and, perhaps, the important and abundance of metrics). As YouTube's creator liaison, Rene Ritchie, a tech YouTuber himself, put it, "Now, YouTube creators are experiencing it like an industry."

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Michael Macher @michael-macher.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

Important and nuanced thread on the organizational differences between ICE and BP. The admin is massively expanding ICE while attempting to generalize the culture of BP.

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herman mark schwartz @thunen.bsky.social · 10/01/2026

Here’s the better long form on the “interiorization” of the border regime and the coercive side of the US empire: www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/enf...

phenomenalworld.org

Enforcement Regime | Michael Macher

Trump's immigration crackdown marks a dramatic change in the domestic security apparatus, yet its origins lie in a longstanding bipartisan consensus.

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Joseph Cox @josephcox.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

New: we've obtained material explaining how an ICE surveillance system, called Webloc, works. Draw shape on a map, see all phones available there, follow them home. All without warrant “This is a very dangerous tool in the hands of an out-of-control agency.” www.404media.co/inside-ices-...

404media.co

Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods

404 Media has obtained material that explains how Tangles and Webloc, two surveillance systems ICE recently purchased, work. Webloc can track phones without a warrant and follow their owners home or t...

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Ken Klippenstein @kenklippenstein.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

ICE's killing of unarmed American citizen Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis today has NSPM-7 written all over it, as well as a related Pam Bondi memo ordering feds to see any interference of ICE agents as a terrorist threat: www.kenklippenstein.com/p/ice-kills-...

kenklippenstein.com

ICE Kills American Woman in Minneapolis

Trump decries “radical left;” homeland security screams “domestic terror”

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Michael Macher @michael-macher.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

Why would NY Mag have to "disclose" they edited the photo when a) the reason for the edit is *in* the piece and b) the change was made before the piece was published? What is the point of this "scoop" other than to mislead readers into believing something underhanded occurred?

A New York Times headline that reads: "New York Magazine Put Mamdani’s Team on Its Cover. One Aide Was Erased.

Catherine Almonte Da Costa was part of a photo shoot on the mayor-elect’s inner circle. The next day she resigned amid an uproar over antisemitic statements she had posted on social media years earlier."

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Michael Macher @michael-macher.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

I suspect we're about to see a new era of brand management, with corporations injecting huge amounts of cash to shape information flows - especially during a crisis. The value proposition will only increase as AI continues to eat the open web as a source of news. Grim stuff.

futurism.com

OpenAI Reportedly Planning to Make ChatGPT "Prioritize" Advertisers in Conversation

OpenAI employees working on ChatGPT report plans to unleash sponsored advertisements above organic results.

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Phenomenal World @phenomenalworld.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

We are extremely thrilled to announce two new monthly newsletter columns: MERIDIONAL, by Fernando Rugitsky, will cover the political economy of Latin America— LABOR & LOGISTICS, by Benjamin Fong, will look at the sprawling US logistics industry, and the workers that populate its supply chains—

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Cengiz Yar @cengizyar.com · 22/12/2025

CBS didn't run the 60 Minutes segment on CECOT, but over here at @propublica.org we've been working on the story since March, including finding out who each and every man sent to that maximum security prison was. You can see our reporting here: www.propublica.org/series/depor...

propublica.org

Deported and Imprisoned Archives

A case-by-case investigation that examines the Trump administration’s claims that these immigrants are all “sick criminals” and “terrorists” and that shows what they suffered during months in one of t...

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Michael Macher @michael-macher.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

If I'm being honest I do think Erika Kirk's facial expressions advanced that story.

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Michael Macher @michael-macher.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

The media industry summed up in one image.

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Michael Macher @michael-macher.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

"...post-neoliberalism today is not engaged in a war of ideas or an insurgency against institutions, but is instead doing the status-quo stabilization work that think tanks have performed for decades."

lpeproject.org

Post-Neoliberalism is the New Centrism

At a recent convening devoted to the death of neoliberalism, what emerged was less a rupture with the past than a centrist project of status-quo stabilization.

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Michael Macher @michael-macher.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

It should go without saying that boosting white supremacist and anti-semitic critics of Israel is a colossal strategic and moral error that will delegitimize the movement and alienate potential allies.

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Michael Macher @michael-macher.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

A piece full of thoughtful observations - including this one, not made often enough. www.bostonreview.net/articles/tai...

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Michael Macher @michael-macher.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

The "born this way" framework truly is the definition of a "low ceiling high floor" approach to human freedom.

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Michael Macher @michael-macher.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

"There is no rational end, no norm however correct, no program however exemplary, no social ideal however beautiful, and no legitimacy or legality that could justify Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse." - Carl Schmitt

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