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 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 theory The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek

Blogging, reading and idea debt

I just saw Benjamin Bratton use this phrase on Substack and it really resonated:

I have spend the last month deep in the revised version of The Terraforming, an essay first published in 2019 and now out of print, as I turn it into a 100k word proper book for the Antikythera series with MIT Press. The arguments hold up well and the core thesis around the “paradox of intelligence” works better today than then. It is, however, painful to revisit ideas from so long ago. I feel as though I have years of “idea debt” (provisionally articulated but not properly published concepts) to pay down. To those of you who know the essay, what aspects do you think are most important to foreground in the new version?

I feel this so acutely. 16 years of blogging creates an astonishing amount of ideas debt. Part of my ambivalence about Platform and Agency was that I finally finished it with the intention of paying off some of the idea debt. There was something missing from it as a result. Whereas Generative AI for Academics for all its flaws was real time thinking rather than grappling with the emotional weight of idea debt.

I wondered recently if I’m reading too much. The thought was sparked by the realisation that I’m letting more instances of the ‘feel of an idea’ (the light bulb moment when reading that there’s something I have to say about this, if only I grasp it) pass without acting on them. Does this contribute to idea debt? Or does it avoid it by not doing what Bratton calls the ‘provisional articulation’ which then calls for a more extensive response?

Either way if my developing understanding of the unconscious is accurate then these instances don’t go away. They just metabolise in a different register. I don’t feel my impulse to articulate is compulsive exactly, but it’s constrained a subtle way which I’ve only recently begun to understand. There’s a release in not articulating I’m realising, though obviously I am here articulating that sense of release.

, , , ,
, ,