iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

...and you can go no contact with your boomer parents without danger of being an un-dialectical, (petty) bourgeois individualist! Came up in my office hours and I thought I'd share here. 6/6 Receipts: www.marxists.org/archive/marx... www.marxists.org/deutsch/arch... www.marxists.org/deutsch/arch...

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...CANNOT come from Engels' version, which only mentions criticize+transform. It is clearly from Marx' manuscript (published in the 1930s in Moscow). However, the splitting of theory and practice, with two different verbs, is clearly taken from Engels. So Marx' view is family abolition 5/...

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praktisch umgewälzt", i.e. "criticized theoretically and transformed [or 'turned upside down', 'recycled'] practically". Engels turned a family-abolitionist call into a family-reformist call! And the English translator clearly knew both versions. How can we tell? Well, the "destroy" in English 4/

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...annihilated"! A far cry from "destroyed in theory and transformed in practice" in the English translation! Why are there two verbs instead of one? Well, the first published version was in German, but edited by Engels. He changed it into a call for the family to be "theoretisch kritisiert und...3/

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...an 'abstract negation' of the existing relation to your parents, instead of an active struggle to transform it for the better. But what did Marx write in the German manuscript? He called for the earthly family to be "theoretisch und praktisch vernichtet", i.e. "theoretically and practically... 2/

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Is going no-contact with your parents Marxist praxis or bourgeois individualism? Some might say the latter, and it looks as though the 4th thesis on Feuerbach lends some support. After all, in order to transform it, there still has to be some family relation. Going no-contact might seem like 1/...

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no one involved in the decision to make the rapists write essays, or upstream of the decision in the institutional hierarchy, should ever be allowed to work in academia (or frankly any job where they make decisions that affect other people) again.

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I don't think it's just that, no

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freecialis @freecialis.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

the argument that LLMs are conscious appears to be just repeating “but how do you know theyre not” over and over. maybe convincing to some but i have a 3 year old so I am used to these convos

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

my wife said me leaving all the cabinet doors open was an ADHD thing, so I had to explain to her that I am going to close them when I'm done putting away dishes, I am just currently doing 5-7 things on my laptop that I thought of while telling an anecdote, so I think I'm beating the allegations.

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

🤘always interesting to see someone play lefty this way, too

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

they aren't children either! They are some cursed third thing...

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Brandon Sheffield @brandon.insertcredit.com · 01/10/2026

only use was four days of Hinge in my mid 30s, went on a date less than 24h after installing the app and stopped swiping after 4 days when I took a convo off the app into texts.

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Several weeks ago, Phil Tippett's legendary animation studio in Berkeley, CA closed. An anonymous hero noticed a folder of CDs. This turned out to be hundreds of unseen hi-res images and videos from Star Wars, Robocop, Jurassic Park, etc. ~90 isos for you to browse: archive.org/details/tipp...

A casual Star Wars alien fella at the cantina, in a sun faded, reddish photo. Someone will be mad at me for not knowing who this is.

Phil, a balding Caucasian man, poses a model of the garthok, an antagonist from the Coneheads movie.

Phil, a balding caucasian man, points at some CG on a CRT computer monitor, as a younger man looks on. The screen shows a model of a dinosaur attacking a jeep, while there's an actual physical model of that event in the foreground for reference.

an isolated shot of a star wars vehicle. Sorry, I don't know star wars lol

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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

"Fittingly, the artistic + allegorical integrity of these films entails the concomitant disintegration of Cincinnati." Cincinnati as generi-city: cinematic gentrification in Anomalisa, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Carol Kirk Boyle New Review of Film+Television Studies doi.org/10.1080/1740...

This article analyzes how three Cincinnati-based indie films from the 2010s
illustrate the hidden costs of effacing the referential city in the pursuit of
abstraction. Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa (2015), Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing
of a Sacred Deer (2017), and Todd Haynes’ Carol (2015) aspire to abstraction in
their theatrical style, genre, themes, and settings to critique the alienation and
subsequent anomie of capitalist society, but their narrative focalization on the
malaise of cosmopolitan elites, which surfaces in confrontations with lower-
class counterparts, ignores the more profound alienations of urban renewal as
a capital spatial fix. Fittingly, the artistic and allegorical integrity of these films
entails the concomitant disintegration of Cincinnati. While Kaufman’s animated
film reduces Cincinnati to nothing more than a comic signifier of a boring,
standardized city, Cincinnati turns itself into a series of nondescript signifiers for
Lanthimos’ and Haynes’ live action films. Unnamed despite its skyline being on
full display in The Killing of a Sacred Deer and doubling as mid-century New York
with its historical architecture on exhibit in Carol, Cincinnati trades its identity to
play a generic metropolis – Generi-City. In disregarding Cincinnati as a particular
urban place, specifically in terms of gentrification and race, these auteur pro-
ductions unwittingly replicate the city’s own embrace of urban renewal. Even if
their intentions are noble, e.g. to satirize capitalism in the case of the auteur or
to generate local economic activity in the case of the city, the result is the same:
a generic cosmopolitanism mired in neoliberal gentrification.

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Michael Lobel @mlobelart.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

absolutely savage😭 www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/u...

Dr. Schnell told The Dartmouth in a statement that he used A.I. “for language refinement, copyediting, improving clarity and organization and making writing processes more efficient.” The newspaper then ran Dr. Schnell’s statement on his A.I. use through an A.I. detector, which flagged the statement itself as apparently written by A.I.

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Duhem-Quine for the bite-shy

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the exponential option suggests that with 0 bites you are already 1 shy... implying that being shy doesn't actually prevent being bitten!!

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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Convincing journals their website needs a "pdf reading environment" was the greatest trick the devil ever pulled... just let me download the file bro

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it's cool that Bill Gates' own wife thought the Epstein Files stuff was bad enough that she divorced him, but for the Thought Leaders he's still a guy in perfectly good standing

screenshot of thumbnail for the ezra klein show with guest bill gates

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I gotta start putting the event and the date on my title slides, purely so I can remember later where the slide decks came from and what they were for...

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Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

CFP: Generative Digital Humanities, a volume on AI and DH in the long-running Minnesota Debates in DH book series. To be co-edited by @zentralwerkstatt.org, @laurenfklein.bsky.social, @lnakamura.bsky.social, and myself. Deadline Nov. 1. Please share widely! dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/page/cfp-gen...

dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu

CFP: Generative Digital Humanities | Debates in the Digital Humanities

Transforming scholarly publications into living digital works

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I really hope Cornell undergoes the "Goldman Sachs" brand transformation, where you become primarily known for being supremely evil and only secondarily an institution among others in your class (financial/educational).

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Jon Phillips @jowiph.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

This shit is wild

The atoms of the constituent were scattered in the grass, in the rivers, in the air, in the ground. A woman gathered the atoms; she drank and ate and inhaled; and the woman assembled the constituent, in her body, which later required a birth certificate.
And the constituent awoke, from the warm, dark world of its mother's body, into the long dream, which issued a Social Security number.

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

2FA is largely an attack on the users and depreciating a form of 2FA often just means that users can't access the platform anymore.

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they really are just like us

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honestly not even convinced that parents who choose not to send their kids to free daycare are in need of support. Some of them may be, but I think there's some criterion hidden in there that's the actual reason, not the fact that they choose to be at home with their kids.

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How family work arrangements have changed over time

only 23-28% of different-sex couples with kids in the US have one parent who is not employed, the appeal to the 'voter at large' feels disingenuous. (www.pewresearch.org/social-trend...)

pewresearch.org

Work arrangements of moms and dads have changed considerably since 1975.

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