iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

why do people say "precariat" but never "reserve army of labor"

Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

saw someone describe the psychology of settler colonialism as including the idea of "settling" i.e., "giving up," and I'm trying to unpack whether there is actually anything there beyond surface-level wordplay

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

infrastructure is the best

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Michael Lobel @mlobelart.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

Deborah Kass, Six Blue Barbras, 1992 collections.thejewishmuseum.org/collection/2...

Six repeated silkscreened images of Barbra Streisand, in blue

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

between cops consulting chatbots and the presence of Rob Schneider, this has become a rich text

youtu.be

Demolition Man ATM Scene

YouTube video by The Last Millennials 1994-1999

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

I had a half-second where I thought the trending Duffy might be the Welsh soul singer as opposed to Real World Boston over here

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 20/11/2025

contradicting myself right now, clearly, but not posting makes me feel noble, superior, and powerful

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

do what @onthemedia.bsky.social says, please and thank you; information pollution has real effects

Breaking News Consumer's Handbook

1. In the immediate aftermath, news outlets will get it wrong.
2. Don't trust anonymous sources.
3. Don't trust stories that cite another news outlet as the source of the information.
4. There's almost never a second shooter.
5. Pay attention to the language the media uses.
-"We are getting reports"...could mean anything
-"We are seeking confirmation"...means they don't have it.
-"[News outlet] has learned"...means it has a scoop or is going out on a limb.
6. Look for news outlets close to the incident.
7. Compare multiple sources.
8. Big news brings out the fakers. And photoshoppers.
9. Beware reflexive retweeting. Some of this is on you.

On the Media

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

Stuart Hall in the 80s, sounding familiar

Question
Could you say something about what you think the Left needs to be doing. Can the New Right be defeated?
Hall
If I knew that, I would be in business. But I *do* think one can begin to identify some weak spots, some contradictions, places where the discourses don't match up, or where there is a disparity between the promises and the delivery. There are lots of contradictions there, but they don't easily break in our direction or offer us big political opportunities; they require the constitution of an equally powerful, equally convincing alternative, all the way across the political terrain. The more hegemonic the Thatcherite alternative becomes, the more the Left must generate a whole alternative philosophy or conception of life or it will collapse. Otherwise: It simply can't match what the Right is offering, which is a hegemonic vision of life from birth to death. There is a Thatcherite way of being born, of rearing children, of going to hospitals, of being prosperous in business; there is an image for everyone and everything: how to bring up babies, how to teach, what you should wear to stand in front of the classroom. It's a hodgepodge of all kinds of different discourses; nevertheless, it does offer a set of positive social positionalities, which condense and connote one another. And the thing about the Left is that there is no such coherent alternative set. There is no way of being a teacher, to counter the Thatcherite style of being a teaching. All the Left has is a disarrayed, dispersed series of positionalities. Mounting a counteroffensIve involves offering and setting in place alternative and equally powerful frames for life in the twenty-first century. I don't know whether the Labour party can be made to see that as its historical task.

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 15/07/2025

I'm going to turn this into an archive of era-defining terms, starting with: "the bleach community"

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

The challenge, I guess, is to be just deluded enough to be able to keep going without retreating into full individualistic denial of horror

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

AI worship feels a little too on the nose vis-a-vis reification

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

"Men with good or bad intentions enter into structures they have not revolutionized—and are tamed by them. They take over the structures of exploitation and power: they internalize the beliefs, the justifications, the rationalizations, the motivations of power and privilege..."

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their consultants

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

i probably would be more sympathetic than the average bsky user to the idea that there's a time and place for totally unrestricted intellectual inquiry, to let ideas go wherever inferences might take us. but anyone who thinks that that time and place is the front page of the newspaper is delusional

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

reveal the random phrase that runs through your head regularly

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

while plenty of them clearly do not believe me, I enjoy telling students that using ChatGPT in research is a mistake

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

Chronological feeds privilege posting volume, so rather than screaming loudly to get attention, you have just keep screaming at a moderate volume for a long time

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

Put differently, if concept creep and debasement is inevitable, I wonder what "rebasement" practices would look like?

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

Latour has that article "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?" and I think in an era of "do your own research," we can now firmly ask "Why Has 'Critical Thinking' Run Out of Steam?"

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

microblogging that should've been macroblogging

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

this led me to think about public history and the importance of the radical archive, but before that I had to pick my face up off the floor please make sure you keep watching past 4:18 too

youtube.com

Sylvester | You Make Me Feel | Live 1978

YouTube video by Black Music Archive LIVE!

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will -- it still lands

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

make sure you spell "fascist" correctly

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

@bigmolly.bsky.social "raw water" has leveled up to "no water"

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

Every time you see what sounds like a wild claim about woke research, you can assume a) it will fall apart under the most basic of inspection, b) the person making the claim will never be held accountable for lying, and c) it is a cover to gut useful research that we benefit from.

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Anna Merlan @annamerlan.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

I don't really use the term "propaganda" lightly, but I think we should outline what's happening at the White House and elsewhere: the rise of a new state media. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

motherjones.com

Meet the new state media

How the second Trump administration grants access and status to conspiracy theorists, propagandists, and far-right influencers.

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Puff the Magic Hater @mskellymhayes.bsky.social · 23/02/2025

This. I'm not defending Musk's intelligence (which is hugely overblown), but we must understand that he doesn't believe the things he says. His statements do not reflect his *analysis* or actual understanding of anything. He doesn't want to weaponize facts; he wants to make them irrelevant.

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Andi Zeisler @andizeisler.bsky.social · 22/02/2025

Elon and Thiel and Vance and the other SV bros have jock software running on dork hardware. They can’t stop competing even when they’ve won. Their brainpower got them this far; shouldn’t that be infinitely transferable to any situation, any sphere?

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

saving to return to later / exhibit A if anyone thinks social media shouldn't be a part of the scholarly ecosystem

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Michael Lobel @mlobelart.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

Roy De Forest, Country Dog Gentlemen, 1972

Painting of lots and lots of dogs, quasi-hallucinatory, with brightly colored eyes

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

Very lucid thread here re: the administrative coup

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 03/02/2025

I didn't anticipate the ways that cultivating an anti-conspiracy-theory mindset would make it challenging to adequately process current events

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

my best posts in previous social media were sentence fragments

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

I'm continuing to work on making a comprehensive mapping of the media ecosystem, but I'm also still thinking about how hot dogs, soft pretzels, and other stadium food should not be allowed at rock shows because I believe they impede musical transcendence

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

I know Seeing Like a State is the one that gets the most attention now, but this one has always been the most fun monoskop.org/images/0/0f/...

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

I said it as a joke but now I'm seriously considering writing a poem called My Propaganda Essay

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 25/01/2025

Useful thread for conceptual frameworks and a look at practical opposition

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

There's a species of post that I write that I didn't realize until now is in the cadence of Jenny Holzer

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

Teaching logos/ethos/pathos starting in 1st grade wouldn't save us but it wouldn't be the worst

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

This thread does a better job of saying what I was trying to say in the previous post + additional useful things

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

It's not that the salute and the intention behind it (or lack thereof) don't matter, but perhaps its most important effect is as disorienting propaganda. There'll be debate and outrage and fear, but what it leads to is emotional exhaustion, and to exhaust is the ultimate goal. This isn't a new...

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Nicoloff @nicoloff.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

I was deeply annoyed by folks laughing at the "wrong" times at Nosferatu, but I was also deeply annoyed by my own policing of "high art." Because Nosferatu *is* camp, and I get why people would laugh at those parts, but I also wonder...

dailydot.com

'Nosferatu' fans are crashing out over teens 'laughing at poignant scenes'

"People can't take anything seriously anymore."

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