Jac Lewis

Philosophy PhD: Žižek, Trauma, Ideology, and the Nostalgia Disease
Independent film and filmmaking
Writer with Aeon and Wales Arts Review

[Jac Lewis @JacsaLewis]

I have finally submitted my thesis!

[Erika Guevara Rosas @ErikaGuevaraR]

Generative AI doesn’t run on magic. It runs on massive data pipelines built on privacy violations by design.

Our new @Amnesty report exposes how big tech’s AI systems are powered by surveillance, data extraction, and abuse of people’s rights, at scale.

We researched the models powering some of the most popular publicly available standalone generative AI tools, including GPT 3 by Open AI, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, DeepSeek and tools by Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.

This is not innovation at any cost. It comes at a high price: our human rights.

Read the report: https://t.co/MGRonqai7o

[Jac Lewis @JacsaLewis]

Pleasure to speak at Warwick's Midlands Conference in Critical Thought on the political economy of the late capitalist far-right, tracing fascist nostalgia to the acceleration of financialised capital

[Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof]

This is a hard article to read, but I hope you'll do so. I've spent some time reporting on widespread rape and other sexual violence of Palestinian male and female prisoners by Israeli authorities, and the article is now published. The assault victims were warned not to give speak of what they endured -- they were sometimes told they would be killed or raped if they gave interviews -- but they found the courage to do so. One man described being raped three times in a single day in Israeli prison, the third time after he tried to protest. A young woman said the guards would come in at the beginning of each shift and strip her naked and abuse her. Another reported that she was shown photos of herself being raped and warned they would be released unless she cooperated with Israeli intelligence. Even three children who had been detained told me they had been sexually abused. Look, whatever our position on the Middle East, we should be able to agree on being anti-rape. Sexual assaults were horrific when Israeli women were targeted on Oct. 7, and they're equally horrific when Israeli authorities use them against Palestinians day after day after day. We should be able to find common ground in opposing rape. Here's a gift link to the article: https://t.co/aMMHId49OO

[Jac Lewis @JacsaLewis]

Slavoj Žižek. Revolutionised ideology theory. But it also turns you into a conservative melancholic

[Richard of the secular realm @LatFilosof]

Name a philosopher you consider genuinely brilliant — even a genius — but whose views you strongly disagree with. I'll go first!

Thomas Aquinas.

[Owen Davies @odavies9]

So, my university is wiping out all Humanities teaching.

[Jac Lewis @JacsaLewis]

Those who have seen Pascal Plante's RED ROOMS can hear this image

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

The horror scene that still lives rent free in your head.

[࣪☪︎ ࣪𝔅𝔢𝔩𝔩𝔞࣪𖤐𝔖𝔱𝔯𝔢𝔤𝔞 ࣪☪︎ ࣪ @bellastrega999]

Isabelle Adjani jumping rope along the Berlin Wall while filming Possession (Andrzej Żuławski, 1981)

[Neşe Devenot, PhD 🍉 (@NeseLSD.bsky.social) @NeseLSD]

Right wingers/MAHA will try to develop psychedelic-assisted "conversion therapy" for neurodivergence as well as for LGBT identities. It's all the "woke mind virus" to them.

Psychedelic fascism is an inherently revanchist movement that's fixated on "curing" non-normative identity

[Jac Lewis @JacsaLewis]

Cardiff alumnus here. So they need to destroy the humanities, downsize, and cut staff because of budgetary restrictions but they can spare a few hundred thousand to spy on students for Israel. Completely insane

[Neena Jha @DrNeenaJha]

🚨 12 British universities have paid a security firm £440,000 to monitor students & academics’ social media inc those who have expressed solidarity for Palestine

The unis:
• UCL
• Imperial
• KCL
• Oxford
• Sheffield
• Leicester
• Nottingham
• LSE
• Manchester
• Cardiff

[Neşe Devenot, PhD 🍉 (@NeseLSD.bsky.social) @NeseLSD]

Trump embracing psychedelics should clue the left into the fact that there are things going on in this industry that aren't in workers' interests or good news for public health.

When the consequences of elites' control of psychedelic medicine become clearer, come find @Psymposia

[Financial Times @FT]

The coming global food crisis https://t.co/qN85ZnAoLD

[Ruchi Gupta @guptar]

The lopsided balance of power between capital and labour: the workers have no ability to refuse to wear the cameras which are training systems which will eventually replace the workers themselves

[Byline Times @BylineTimes]

🔴 The Neo-Nazi Enforcer Who Helped Build Peter Thiel’s Online Influence Empire

New Epstein-linked revelations show how neo-Nazi operative Andrew Auernheimer became a crucial link between Peter Thiel and the online far-right subcultures waging ‘memetic warfare’ against their enemies

https://t.co/GbZYEGIKQZ

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

A worker died at an Amazon warehouse in Oregon last week.

For more than an hour, workers in the facility were instructed to continue working as the man lay dead.

One worker wanted to help, but a manager told them to “Just turn around and not look. Let’s get back to work," according to The Western Edge.

Link: https://t.co/xLqvaDTE5G.

[Jac Lewis @JacsaLewis]

Barthes died from being run over by a laundry van after meeting François Mitterand for lunch

[luitzen egbertus jan brouwer @brouwercilik]

foucault aids yüzünden öldü
derrida kanser ameliyatında öldü
lyotard seminer vermek üzereyken ani gelişen lösemi yüzünden öldü
guattari sevgilisiyle buluşacağı günün gecesi kalp krizinden öldü
deleuze kitap yazacakken kendini camdan atarak öldü

[Jac Lewis @JacsaLewis]

AVIGNON PAPACY INVOKED. RECONVENE THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE.

[Christopher Hale @ChristopherHale]

In January, behind closed doors at the Pentagon, Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre — Pope Leo XIV’s then-ambassador to the United States — and delivered a lecture.

America, Colby and his colleagues told the cardinal, has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.

As tempers rose, one U.S. official reached for a fourteenth-century weapon and invoked the Avignon Papacy, the period when the French Crown used military force to bend the bishop of Rome to its will.

That scene, broken this week by Mattia Ferraresi in an extraordinary piece of journalism for The Free Press, may be the most remarkable moment in the long and knotted history of the American republic’s relationship with the Catholic Church. https://t.co/vI9t09alPg

[Jac Lewis @JacsaLewis]

At the same time that humanities departments are being shut down all across the US and further downsized in the UK. They are proud to be vultures.

[The American Conservative @amconmag]

"Imagine a humanoid named Plato."

Melania Trump says humanoid educators will offer "instantaneous" access to the classical studies for students and help create a "more complete person."

[Jac Lewis @JacsaLewis]

When you watch @ThanatoFilms Thanatomorphose you start seeing it everywhere

[Jac Lewis @JacsaLewis]

I'm particularly critical of Zizek's notions of melancholia, death drive and jouissance as applied to ideology. The history of nostalgia can help tell us why!

[Jac Lewis @JacsaLewis]

Based on my PhD research, this is my critique of ideology theory through a history of the nostalgia disease, held in the belly of the Zizekian beast in Prague

https://t.co/VyqgGTdcmk