Tootfinder

Sources: Rupert Murdoch forced the $3.3B succession deal through sheer will, placing enormous pressure on his adult children during negotiations over months (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/cca18dc3-92a6-420e-a5ce-534c0b6a48fa

Girlhood Feminism as Soft Resistance: Affective Counterpublics and Algorithmic Negotiation on RedNote
Meng Liang, Xiaoyue Zhang, Linqi Ye
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07059

Girlhood Feminism as Soft Resistance: Affective Counterpublics and Algorithmic Negotiation on RedNote
This article explores how Chinese female users tactically mobilise platform features and hashtag practices to construct vernacular forms and an exclusive space of feminist resistance under algorithmic and cultural constraints. Focusing on the reappropriation of the hashtag Baby Supplementary Food (BSF), a female-dominated lifestyle app with over 300 million users, we analyse how users create a female-centered counterpublic through self-infantilisation, algorithmic play, and aesthetic withdrawal…

A Node on the Constellation: The Role of Feminist Makerspaces in Building and Sustaining Alternative Cultures of Technology Production
Erin Gatz, Yasmine Kotturi, Andrea Afua Kwamya, Sarah Fox
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22329

A Node on the Constellation: The Role of Feminist Makerspaces in Building and Sustaining Alternative Cultures of Technology Production
Feminist makerspaces offer community led alternatives to dominant tech cultures by centering care, mutual aid, and collective knowledge production. While prior CSCW research has explored their inclusive practices, less is known about how these spaces sustain themselves over time. Drawing on interviews with 18 founders and members across 8 U.S. feminist makerspaces as well as autoethnographic reflection, we examine the organizational and relational practices that support long-term endurance. We …

Social Dynamics of DAOs: Power, Onboarding, and Inclusivity
Victoria Kozlova, Ben Biedermann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06163 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.06…

Social Dynamics of DAOs: Power, Onboarding, and Inclusivity
This report explores the often-overlooked cultural and social dynamics shaping participation and power in DAOs. Drawing on qualitative interviews and ethnographic observations, it shows how factors such as financial privilege, informal gatekeeping, visibility bias, and onboarding structures create barriers to meaningful inclusion. While DAOs are frequently framed as permissionless and egalitarian, the lived experiences of contributors reveal a more complex reality, one in which soft power and i…

Source: David Ellison plans to "bring back a performance-based culture" to CBS, "Not quotas. Not ideology. Just objective journalism" (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/b0771100-9180-4a73-adb4-38595aa8c15c

AI, AGI, and learning efficiency
My 4-month-old kid is not DDoSing Wikipedia right now, nor will they ever do so before learning to speak, read, or write. Their entire "training corpus" will not top even 100 million "tokens" before they can speak & understand language, and do so with real intentionally.
Just to emphasize that point: 100 words-per-minute times 60 minutes-per-hour times 12 hours-per-day times 365 days-per-year times 4 years is a mere 105,120,000 words. That's a ludicrously *high* estimate of words-per-minute and hours-per-day, and 4 years old (the age of my other kid) is well after basic speech capabilities are developed in many children, etc. More likely the available "training data" is at least 1 or 2 orders of magnitude less than this.
The point here is that large language models, trained as they are on multiple *billions* of tokens, are not developing their behavioral capabilities in a way that's remotely similar to humans, even if you believe those capabilities are similar (they are by certain very biased ways of measurement; they very much aren't by others). This idea that humans must be naturally good at acquiring language is an old one (see e.g. #AI #LLM #AGI

A profile of Brett Cooper, a conservative YouTuber who uses celebrity news to argue against feminism and abortion rights, as she becomes a Fox News contributor (Jessica Testa/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.c…

Brett Cooper Is Spreading Conservatism, One Celebrity Drama at a Time
The YouTuber set out to reach young conservatives who felt alienated by mainstream culture. Now she is the newest face at Fox News, though dreaming of her own Goop.

Major US brands like Bud Light have shifted advertising strategies away from DEI themes, sources say due to fears of a Trump administration backlash (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/88949dbf-7be3-47ed-a6e2-48064bd3fa26

How the culture war is remaking advertising
Brands are diluting or scrapping campaigns with social purpose as the movement against DEI intensifies

"England’s rewilding movement is gaining steam, Ben Goldsmith says"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #Rewilding #Nature

England’s rewilding movement is gaining steam, Ben Goldsmith says
Rewilding advocate, financier and host of the popular podcast Rewilding the World, Ben Goldsmith, joins Mongabay’s podcast to discuss nature restoration in his home country of England, where a significant cultural change is taking hold toward reviving biodiversity, such as beavers. Once seen as a nuisance there, many farmers and planners now embrace the rebound […]