iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 7h

And it's true that I stole your lighter And it's also true that I lost the map But when you said I wasn't worth talking to I had to take your word on that

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In Medias Malone @professormusgrave.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

You’re right to push back. That was a set of red balloons, not a Soviet first strike. Should I order some ambulances?

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Just want to praise this because quote tweets are so rarely any good (e.g. this one, by me)

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

In Brazil, Lula (just ahead of an election) signed an executive order banning online betting, and made criticism of the "bets" a prominent theme on the campaign trail. A few years ago I remember reading that 20% of his signature cash transfer program was going to bets www.reuters.com/world/americ...

reuters.com

Brazil's Lula bans online betting, unveils debt relief plan as reelection race tightens

Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Friday announced a ban on online betting operations in Latin ‌America's largest economy and unveiled a new debt relief program aimed at households, the ...

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The first ep of Experts in a Dying Field, a culture and politics podcast with me, @zunguzungu.bsky.social & @lililoofbourow.bsky.social, is up. We talk 100 Years of Solitude's Netflix adaptation and why no one is talking about it until we perish of self-contradiction www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLyj...

youtube.com

Netflix's One Hundred Years of Solitude | Ep. 1 Experts in a Dying Field

YouTube video by Experts InADyingField

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

The thing I hated most about South Bay culture when I went there to be a student in 1999 was that it was full of people with enormous entitlement, no sense of social responsibility, and too much money. The problem has only gotten worse www.nytimes.com/2026/09/21/t...

nytimes.com

The A.I. Party House Where Networking Has a Dark Side

Group tech houses have proliferated across the San Francisco Bay Area in the artificial intelligence boom. One of the most prominent has also racked up an extensive police record.

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Quinn Slobodian @quinnslobodian.com · 21/09/2026

Perhaps the best piece I've read yet on this emergent politics ⬇️

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Ken Jennings @kenjennings.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I don’t usually meddle on the writing side of Jeopardy!, but tonight I called in a favor for our Bluesky viewers.

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Quinn Slobodian @quinnslobodian.com · 18/09/2026

postfordist emojis

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The logical next step is skepticism of indoor plumbing. Have you seen how much a plumber charges just to visit your house? Isn’t there lead in those pipes anyway? What about the dangers of snakes swimming out of toilets? What if we went back to shitting in pots and throwing it out the window

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

"Five intellectuals in close proximity to power can do a lot of damage." Really fascinating @briankgoodman.bsky.social piece on the post-liberal scene (and pseudo-scene) in Hungary www.thedriftmag.com/the-last-day...

thedriftmag.com

The Last Days of the Danube Institute | A Report from Postliberal Budapest

By Brian Goodman. In the wake of Viktor Orbán’s defeat, Budapest’s postliberals face end times.

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I don't want to romanticize the billionaires of the past but I do think it is remarkable how callow many of today's are. Perhaps there is a structural component in that today's are making money through tech rather than managing large enterprises; the latter just takes more time and life experience

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Dennis Hogan @dennismhogan.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

In @dissentmag.bsky.social, I look at years of patient organizing around labor and housing that reshaped politics in Providence, feeding into the campaigns that lifted @davidmoralespvd.bsky.social and council allies like Miguel Youngs to victory last week. dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

dissentmagazine.org

The Socialist Wave Hits Rhode Island - Dissent Magazine

The sweep by democratic socialist David Morales and other progressive primary candidates in Providence is a testament to years of organizing and coalition-building in the Ocean State.

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Lot of people with more information than I have seem to think we will all be dead within ten years

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I'm fielding requests from prospective Ph.D. students, and maybe you are too. Over the summer, I wrote this guide for students in History: including 1) don't do it; 2) if you must do it, this is how the process works and how to prepare your application patrickiber.org/2026/06/24/a...

patrickiber.org

A guide to preparing a Ph.D. application in History

Applying to graduate school is something that likely only happens once in a lifetime, and so almost no one doing it has experience in the process. The goal of this post is to help demystify the pro…

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Noam Scheiber @noamscheiber.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

If you're lucky, someone will eventually review your book in a way that almost makes you jealous of their insights into the material. It's fair to say that the historian Gabe Winant has just published that review of my book. dissentmagazine.org/article/muti...

dissentmagazine.org

The Party of Baristas - Dissent Magazine

Noam Scheiber’s Mutiny shows that the labor organizing of the radicalized PMC is far more than a fit of whimsical proletarian roleplay.

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Gabriel Winant @gabrielwinant.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

If someone says to you "but isn't DSA all professionals and gentrifiers" feel free to just send them this piece by me dissentmagazine.org/article/muti...

dissentmagazine.org

The Party of Baristas - Dissent Magazine

Noam Scheiber’s Mutiny shows that the labor organizing of the radicalized PMC is far more than a fit of whimsical proletarian roleplay.

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Dissent's fall issue is out today and it is just wall-to-wall bangers. The special section on tech and the left begins with this killer essay by @simontorracinta.bsky.social and the lose-lose situation we face in the US economy dissentmagazine.org/article/arti...

If the most wide-eyed estimates of labor market disruption made by the likes of Amodei turn out to be correct-and it is precisely these sorts of predictions that undergird the forecasted demand for computational power that the hyperscalers are racing to meet-then, absent any compensatory job growth, the scale and speed of social dislocation will make the slow-motion disaster of Rust Belt deindustrialization look quaint. Conversely, in the likely event the demand turns out to be lower than predicted, it will lead to a sharp pullback in investment and financing. Given the opaque cat's cradle of financial ties between hyperscalers, Al labs, chipmakers, and financial institutions, a recent report by the Bank for International Settlements has predicted that such a bust could cascade down the Al supply chain and strike at the foundations of the U.S. economy, inducing major recession. As if that wasn't enough, given recent changes in Nasdag rules, should a series of planned IPOs of Al firms go ahead, index funds in the retirement portfolios of tens of millions of U.S. households will be directly exposed to a potential crash in a historically unprecedented fashion. Either way, the shockwaves will be extreme. Yet on both
sides of the wager, it seems, the house wins.

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Nothings Monstered @nothingsmonstrd.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

Asparagus Picker — Narsiso Martinez, 2025 ink, charcoal and gouache on strawberry boxes

Stack of boxes for strawberries cardboard boxes along the sides of which is a black and white depiction of a person covered head to toe for protection while harvesting. sunglasses, billed cap, a hood pulled up over the cap, long pants, jacket with long sleeves. in one hand there's a tool that looks to me like what's apparently called a weeder — you know a hand tool with sort of fork at the end — and a bundle of asparagus held in the other hand

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I really loved this book, it’s marketed as a queer book and sure it is that, but straight folks shouldn’t miss out by thinking it’s not for them. It’s a great work of literature

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Friends I’m happy to announce that I’m starting a podcast like it’s 2008

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

can't believe the Emily Wilson discourse didn't produce a piece called Xenia Warrior Princess

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

You try to talk to one tankie and you get swarmed by a mob calling you a social fascist and extolling the virtues of the glorious USSR, which actually illustrates quite well the problem of why so many people decided they couldn't work in coalitions with them

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Audra Wolfe @audrajwolfe.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

See this helpful thread, which also explains Steinem's unlikely cameo in my book, FREEDOM'S LAB, which dealt with a lot of orgs whose members may or may not have realized they were being bankrolled by the CIA

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Today you're going to see a lot of tributes and assessments of Gloria Steinem (I thought this one very good: www.thecut.com/article/glor...). You'll also see some people raising her involvement with the CIA, and others ignore it. (That obit doesn't even mentioned it.) What was that about?

thecut.com

Gloria Steinem Loved Women

The feminist icon, who has died at the age of 92, epitomized the contradictions and hopes of the women’s liberation movement.

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

My book which is partly about the Ford Foundation is out in November and that is 100% true. Ford had little interest in charity, he wanted a tax sheltered place for shares after he died

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

just got an "invitation" from a Murdoch-owned radio station in which I pay $200 for them to do an interview with me about my forthcoming book, let me think about it for a second: how about no

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Official issue launch is next week Tuesday, but paper copies are arriving in mailboxes. The special section is on tech and the left. Quite possibly the best issue we've done since I became co-editor, and the closest we've come to my "intellectual resources for an effective democratic left" program

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I mean, absolutely not, he has never been on a farm, but I assume this is because he is always calling cities (((DIRTY))), with whatever values he needs to assign to the parentheses at a given moment

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

I haven't been this impressed by a public figure's unexpected use of a vocabulary word since Shakira used "lycanthropy" in both the English and Spanish versions of her song

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

I really resent it that there is no way to stop the fundraising spam from the Democratic Party with messages that employ the same manipulative techniques as a guy on the subway who needs $47.25 of gas money

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

The only serious threat to Canadian sovereignty is the United States

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Something about this Harp story doesn’t add up, I suspect she may actually be a Lyre

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

My most reactionary opinion is that kids’ dietary preferences are accommodated way too much in this generation (I don’t mean allergies or vegetarianism, I mean things like “he doesn’t eat tomatoes or anything containing the letter q”)

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The Drift @thedriftmag.com · 19/08/2026

Andrew Baker was also a “token black professor” at Bates College. But his perspective on the events Tyler Austin Harper recounts in his Atlantic cover story is very different. Read Baker’s side of the story online today. newsletter.thedriftmag.com/p/racism-and...

newsletter.thedriftmag.com

Racism and labor at Bates: the other side of the story

Andrew Baker responds to Tyler Austin Harper

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Donald Trump busy building a FIFA World Heritage site

A photo of the East Wing of the White House in a state of destruction/construction/mess

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Did you know that no one called it Woke 1 when it was happening? People referred to it as The Great Woke or The Woke to end all Wokes

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Dave Zirin wrote a new biography of Howard Zinn, and reading it (along with Martin Duberman's not-particularly-old biography) led me to a new Grand Unified Theory of Zinn newrepublic.com/article/2137...

Zinn's historical analysis resembles this populist frame rather than, say, the class politics of Karl Marx. Writing in A People's History more than 40 years after he read the Ny Committee's reports, Zinn explains World War I as having arisen from the fact that "American capitalism needed international rivalry-and periodic war--to create an artificial community of interest between rich and poor, supplanting the genuine community of interest among the poor that showed itself in sporadic movements." A conspiracy of elites. A dishonest government led to catastrophe by business interests seeking profit. The victims: common people, who otherwise are in broad agreement about how the world could be made better. That is the core of Zinn's historical model, and Nye would
have recognized it.

That same pattern of analysis, shoehorned in again and again, is responsible for what is probably the worst passage in A People's History: his account of the U.S. Civil War. Zinn calls the Civil War "not a clash of peoples ... but of elites." It was "not over slavery as a moral institution ... the northern elite wanted economic expansion ... the slave interests opposed all this; they saw Lincoln and the Republicans as making continuation of their pleasant and prosperous way of life impossible in the future." There are elements of truth here, of course. The North was also racist, it had businessmen with interests, it was not merely waging a war of righteous emancipation. But, again, Zinn is too reductive. There was moral and political outrage about slavery in the North. Troops, Northern and Southern, understood what the war was about. The Thirteenth Wisconsin Infantry, in 1862, declared that it was "as plain as the noon-day sun" that the South's "infamous rebellion" was "a war of, by, and for Slavery," and a Confederate Brigade agreed: "any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks ... is either a fool or a liar." There are times when Zinn should have
listened more to "the people."

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

I worry that part of the problem here is that the institutional Democratic party is afraid of the people who would do this kind of work, so it doesn’t get funded. When I met some of the Biden people after working on Bernie 2020 they though I was going to be Code Pink or something

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Dr. Lisa Corrigan @drlisacorrigan.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Don makes an important point here about the dismantling of the administrative state. The institutional damage is to: 1.) destruction of *expertise,* honed by credentialing, research, experience, and *tenure* in job

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

I’m in England at the moment and the depths of this drought are really astonishing; London’s only rainless July in recorded history; farmers’ fields were harvested weeks ago to salvage what they could www.theguardian.com/environment/...

A picture from the train window showing some thickets of dry grass by the track, a brown dry field and a blue nearly cloudless sky

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