iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

Obviously I understand the no sick day struggle, but this is still very much an ethos when people have some agency.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

Working while sick is something I’ll never understand, I’ll never be Protestant enough for that work ethic

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

One of *my extras, not sure where that extra word came from.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

My favorite part was when he said he’d put one on, started rummaging through his bag, didn’t have one, AND THEN refused one when I offered one of my friends extras. All that for what?

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

Half a decade into COVID plus a swirling matrix of other highly communicable illnesses and masking in crowded public spaces for some is still contingent upon whether people are symptomatic or know/believe themselves to be ill.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

An unmasked man sat next to me (masked) and said “are you feeling okay or just preventing illness?” To which I replied “I feel fine but what difference does it make if you’re not wearing a mask?” He said he’d throw one on if I said I was unwell (he didn’t have one), this rationale is lost on me.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

If they also push harder for these mask bans…

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

Eyebrows are thick as hell but that boy is immaculately groomed and clean shaven. They’re not slick AT ALL

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

Galleanisti is back and so is the attendant sub-whiteness of the 19th/early 20th century Italian in the U.S.!

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

I can’t get sew ins because I would turn into an absolute my little pony menace with that hair

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

Of course I absolutely will, thank you so much for your warmth and encouragement. It’s felt and deeply appreciated.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

Saw the IG post of someone who went to a museum of Danish resistance. Their last slide was about how, in the election immediately after WWII, most Danes voted the way they had before the war. Because of course they did.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

We’re figuring out next steps for collective action, but perhaps consider sending an email to ACSA board leadership, which they even suggested in their statement (which was released without informing the journal editorial board) www.acsa-arch.org/acsa-message...

Text that reads: “Please direct any questions to President Cathi Ho Schar (president@acsa-arch.org) or Executive Director Michael Monti (mmonti@acsa-arch.org).”

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

It’s a disappointing cancellation, they always are. The ACSA board has been patronizing & awful to us as issue editors from before our CfP went live. And they’ve trampled on the dignity and academic freedoms of the journal board who endured awful treatment because they deeply believed in the issue.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

We make constant historical references to terrifying authoritarian times, but persistently refuse the lesson that the glimpse of violent illiberalism is the moment to double down on protecting our collective freedoms. Useful, I guess, to remember some people have never had skin in any game, ever.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

I’m unsurprised but astounded by the eagerness with which universities have dispensed of diversity and inclusion “commitments” and their belief that abandoning brief attention to racial justice will make their jobs easier. The Venn diagram overlap of cowardice and monstrosity in times like these.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

The Journal for Architectural Education’s Palestine issue — for which I was an issue co-editor — was cancelled by the board of Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture citing risks and “new actions by the U.S. presidential administration” 😐 www.archpaper.com/2025/02/acsa...

archpaper.com

ACSA cancels Fall 2025 Journal of Architectural Education issue about Palestine and fires its interim executive editor

ACSA announced this afternoon it has cancelled a forthcoming JAE edition about Palestine. The Fall 2025 issue was planned to be edited by Cruz Garcia, Nora Akawi, Omar Jabary Salamanca, Zoé Samudzi, a...

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

Mnangagwa doesn’t have the same energy for lip service to Palestine as Mugabe’s performances of revolutionary discourse. This diplomatic move would effectively be full normalization. No more state investment in the patriotic histories of struggle (though compensating whites would’ve told you that).

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

Superficially, the African Union has called for an end to normalization with and prosecution of Israel because of its genocidal violence in Gaza and withdrew observer status AT THE SAME TIME that too many of these states maintain strategic relations with Israel www.aljazeera.com/amp/features...

aljazeera.com

Israel-Gaza war: Why is Africa divided on supporting Palestine?

Israel has made deep inroads into a continent traditionally sympathetic to Palestine. But its gains have limits too.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

It supported Rhodesian and apartheid South African militaries with both tactics and weaponry, further alienating it from the continent because of support for liberation struggles AND decolonization era solidarities with the Palestinian struggle.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

I was writing abt Israel’s pariah statecraft during Nigerian Civil War in its support for the Federal Republic *and* Biafra. After its alienation of African & the Middle Eastern states after the 6-Day War — Biafra War began a month after Israel attacked Egypt — it pivoted towards apartheid regimes.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

Being immiserated by sanctions and climate change-induced drought hasn’t been bad enough: now the state is opening our lands to the same country that sold weapons to the Rhodesians when we fought for our independence. I’m so beyond unbelievably sad and angry about this.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

This is a photo from the Twitter of Ronny Levi Musan, the Zim ambassador to Israel. I can safely assume he supports whatever Trump is doing with the Afrikaners, meaning a dispositional opposition to land reform — a support to keep paying back white farmers whose land was taken and reverse gains made

AI-generated image of Trump holding an American flag

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

Collaborations in mining, tourism, and agriculture make me most nervous because of how this will undoubtedly facilitate state and corporate/private access to extractive industries & land grabs: we saw what it looked like when Dan Gertler was running around Congo DR news.mongabay.com/2023/05/ngos...

news.mongabay.com

NGOs urge continued sanctions against DRC mining giant Dan Gertler

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

On one hand, I saw this coming because our neoliberal president is desperate to get out from under US/EU sanctions and attract foreign capital and Israel is very busy remaking inroads in Africa. On the other, the Israeli state after our land and minerals is beyond. www.zbcnews.co.zw/zim-and-isra...

zbcnews.co.zw

Zim and Israel forge new path for collaboration in tourism and agriculture - ZBC NEWS

Story by Peter Chivhima ZIMBABWE and Israel are set to embark on a collaborative initiative designed to strengthen cooperation in the fields of tourism and agriculture. During the launch of the Zim-Is...

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Join us for this webinar with Hannah Al-Taher and Anna Younes about the suppression of Palestine both in Germany and within German Studies It’s this Sunday March 2nd @ 9am PST/12pm EST/6pm CET/8pm AST You can register here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Poster with red/green/black flags representing Palestine also has an image of German police with their backs to the camera revealing the words POLIZEI on their uniforms.

The event poster says “Censorship and Suppression: Solidarity with Palestine in Germany and German Studies, a webinar with Hanna Al-Taher and Anna Younes” on March 2, 9am PST/12pm EST/6pm CET/8pm AST

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Grateful for Esmat Elhalaby writing on the inability of genocide studies (vis-à-vis Omer Bartov) — with the Shoah at its core — to contend w settler coloniality and/in Palestine & the bare concessions many scholars are making over a year into this genocide www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/nak...

parapraxismagazine.com

Nakba Denial — Parapraxis

On the politics of history and genocide Esmat Elhalaby

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

An only logical application of Zionism’s zero-sum rationale: that any presence of Palestinians anywhere — in our scholarship, on a map, in our cookbooks, in Palestine or it diasporic geographies — is an altogether negation of Israeli existence.

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Heba Gowayed هبة جويد @hebagowayed.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

A new McCarthy era is upon us. Stupid, depressing, and dangerous as ever. I wonder whose name will carry the dunce cap in the history books. Too many are complicit. I’ll need to find upset and action, but for now I’m feeling grief at the dehumanization inherent to all this.

Gov Hochul orders CUNY remove Hunter college Palestine studies job posting calls for probe into ‘antisemitic theories’

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

I don’t think it’s an accelerant to fascism? I think that if you’re inclined to understand yourself and the world in a particular way and ketamine is further encouraging these psychic shifts in knowing yourself and the world, then we get to where we are in capitalists believing K helps them “tap in”

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

I used the wrong language: ketamine-complemented. I don’t believe it’s causing him to be this way at all, and I think there’s something about what’s opened and enabled that has made him worse.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

It’s not a comment about drug use in itself, rather a particular social and political economic culture and its relationship to a drug with *dissociative* qualities that can literally change your conception of reality. The diff between them and your K-using buddy is your buddy isn’t unduly powerful.

“If, as I have claimed, ketamine and its unconcealing effect is a part of this picture, and Elon Musk’s fantasies are exposed and affirmed again and again through his use, driving what appears like an imperative in cases like his, this combination with the economic capacity to run after those desires, then Musk’s use and behavior takes on a new tenor. If this fantasy of the primitive and the predator is the secret gazed upon by Musk in his k-hole—and evidence for this lives on his Twitter timeline—then what one in his position is willing to do to achieve this imperative fantasy can be seen in the drive to leverage and over-leverage, to forget the future.”

“Yet with Musk, driven by the fantasy of techno-optimism and the imperative shaped by ketamine conjoined with this logic of debt with capacity, the future is not just forgotten and the future is not alone in this sacrifice. It is the so-called primitive that is pledged, made into what must be sacrificed to the creditor-god and the wheel of debt that drives accumulation as the proof positive that the fantasy is being achieved. At the same time, the accumulation is what can be repurposed into investment and into technological innovation that further hunts the so-called primitive. The so-called primitive, carrying all his racial baggage for the white techno-optimist, living at the edges of the k-hole, becomes the prey of the predator and his bottled lightning.”

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Anyway, inb4 I’m further accused of stigmatizing drug use, I have no problems with ketamine. And, when you have a culture of diabolically ambitious and cruel people as in today’s Silicon Valley, the relationship to psychoactives and their probably desired self-knowing outcomes aren’t gonna be great.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

It’s a response about him and I also mean they because there’s been decades long associations between SV and psychedelic and psychoactive drugs. Obviously the ethos has changed some since the ‘60s counterculture www.vox.com/2024/2/14/24...

vox.com

A brief history of Silicon Valley’s fascination with drugs

Sure, Elon Musk’s into ketamine and Peter Thiel has his doping Olympics, but drugs and tech are nothing new.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

He’s a racist megalomaniac with too many resources and has been for a long time. And a steady supply of drugs nurturing that particular way of understanding one’s self in & entitlement to the world doesn’t help. It isn’t stigmatizing drugs to say that, I think ketamine can be great and therapeutic.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

It’s not “pinning” on drug use, it’s an excavation of a relationship between psychosocial & political ethos of a tech capitalist set and a drug that can be used for specific means. They’d be horrible people without it, that goes without saying.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Relatedly, at @parapraxismag.bsky.social we published a great piece by Taija Mars McDougall about the drug-fueled impulses of Silicon Valley techno-optimism: how ketamine amplifies the Social Darwinist and eugenicist fantasies of the white and powerful www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/kin...

parapraxismagazine.com

King Ketamine — Parapraxis

Elon Musk’s drugged out techno-optimism Taija Mars McDougall

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

I don’t know if I’m feeling an urgency in collecting stories because I’m terrifiedly forecasting the people we’re going to lose, and I know that’s not healthy or political useful. But if you’re not making for intergenerational engagement, I think you’re really missing out politically.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

So many of the best people I’ve encountered have done horrifying things — robs banks, join armed struggles, whatever — and done it absolutely shit scared in far more dire conditions. I think fear is an evolutionarily solid protective mechanism and being cavalier is untrustworthy masculinism.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

I keep seeing empirically informed (ie written by researchers) “how to fight authoritarianism” and a few too many times I’ve seen encouragement to not be scared. I think that’s nonsense, fear doesn’t preclude decisive action: their residence together is where whatever we’d call humanity lies.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

There’s an affective thing in talking to elders when they’re being honest: they’ll tell you the worst story you’ve ever heard and they’ll be morose and reflective, and moments later laughing about something else. And it’s a rollercoaster of fullness that usefully frames traumatic history.

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 24/02/2025

I absolutely agree with this. The casual cruelty of the bored and comfortable should be discussed more often.

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katherine mckittrick @demonicgrounds.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

replicating racial-Malthusian inequities, gives that system fuel and reinforces the myth that gathering more money and more things is a form of freedom-making.

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katherine mckittrick @demonicgrounds.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

capitalism is therefore often depersonalized: that is, we often (not everyone of course!) blame “capitalism” without thinking through the who of capitalism. this is because it’s presented to us as a magical nobody, a divine (biocentric, in fact) socio-spatial structure.

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katherine mckittrick @demonicgrounds.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

one of the many important things I learned from Sylvia Wynter is that capitalism (specifically dispossession by accumulation) is a belief system (not just, say, a social-economic system). it is deified and worshipped. dig this: it’s a religion, faith, theology. we follow it.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

“We’re falling in line because we’re getting death threats” and? People are dying and going to die en masse, we are THREE weeks into Trump’s term you absolute fucking babies. Turns out the political stakes are higher are than intended in your post-election plan to do fuck all whilst in office.

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Z Samudzi @zsamudzi.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

For all the critiques made about Jill Stein parachuting into presidential elections & being absent otherwise, the behavior of the actually ELECTED Democrats, the literal opposition party, is almost indistinguishable. Fumbling elections, begging for money, crying it’s scary outside: jobless behavior.

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