Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

accelerated academy acceleration agency AI Algorithmic Authoritarianism and Digital Repression archer Archive Archiving artificial intelligence automation Becoming Who We Are Between Post-Capitalism and Techno-Fascism big data blogging capitalism ChatGPT claude Cognitive Triage: Practice, Culture and Strategies Communicative Escalation and Cultural Abundance: How Do We Cope? Corporate Culture, Elites and Their Self-Understandings craft creativity critical realism data science Defensive Elites Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science Digital Distraction, Personal Agency and The Reflexive Imperative Digital Elections, Party Politics and Diplomacy digital elites Digital Inequalities Digital Social Science Digital Sociology digital sociology Digital Universities elites Fragile Movements and Their Politics Cultures generative AI higher education Interested labour Lacan Listening LLMs margaret archer Organising personal morphogenesis Philosophy of Technology platform capitalism platforms populism Post-Democracy, Depoliticisation and Technocracy post-truth psychoanalysis public engagement public sociology publishing Reading realism reflexivity scholarship sexuality Shadow Mobilization, Astroturfing and Manipulation Social Media Social Media for Academics social media for academics social ontology social theory sociology technology The Content Ecosystem The Intensification of Work The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek

The Liberal Imagination of Barack Obama

What messages can we take from this speech? It’s Obama at his most self-consciously inspirational, addressing ‘young people’ pursuing social change. I think it can also be taken as an attempt to outline a worldview in the broadest terms. Here’s some suggestion about the content of what I’ve come to think of as the ‘liberal imagination’:

  • Social decay and fragmentation are partly perceptual. We should understand why people appear to see these trends but we should reject their putative reality.
  • The idea we are “gripped by forces we can’t control” is a reflection of an underlying pessimism, rather than an objective assessment of a challenge.
  • Things are always improving. Now is the best time to be alive.
  • Our capacity to shape the world is unmatched: tools, freedoms, knowledge.
  • We must always reject pessimism and cynicism. Progressive is not inevitable and these things are the foremost obstacle to it.
  • Pessimism often reflects, at least in part, a failure of generational imagination: just because we can’t see the change doesn’t mean future generations won’t enjoy it.
, , , , , ,