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

Knowing when to end projects

This interesting observation from Robin Sloan (HT The Convivial Society) left me thinking about the duration of projects:

For my part, re: craft and theory, I think giving a newsletter some temporal boundaries can be healthy and (weirdly?) productive. Start it up, but decide ahead of time when it will end, and call that a “season,” the way I did with my old Primes newsletter. TV tells us: a season can be short, or a season can be long. TV tells us: a season can end and be followed very quickly by a new one, or a season can end and be followed by an interminable multi-year gap.

I’ve often found it hard to do this, in the sense that my default assumption is that a project will run indefinitely. My impression is I’m not unusual in this respect and I suspect it says something interesting about chronoreflexivity. It’s an issue that I’ve never seen raised in familiar guidance about ‘saying no in academic life’ (etc) and I suspect this is a real problem, particularly as digital media means the range of academic projects we engage in becomes more varied.

,