• 📣 Join the AI Commons

• 📖 Things I’ve read in 2026

• 🌕 You are the music while the music lasts

• the politics of discretionary effort 

• here we go, happy holidays

• the backstory to creative work

• workshop and symposium: the question of the human in social theory and social research

• the hostage taking capacity of banks 

• reasons for the commitment of capital to the european project

• how to normalise ubiquitous surveillance 

• another must read special issue: social media & society

• over-reach by unelected technocrats

• aesop waits – tom shall pass (aesop rock vs tom waits)

• welcome to nerd rap

• the cruel optimism of the nine to fivers anthem

• interrogating internships: unpaid work, creative industries, and higher education

• fiction and the social imaginary

• surviving life in the accelerated academy: prospects and problems for digital scholarship

• the capture of the political class 

• the distracted people and fragile movements of digital capitalism

• call for papers: qualitative methods and data in digital societies

• things I’ve been reading recently #13

• register for the accelerated academy

• digital social science essay competition

• Digital footprints

• good cafes in manchester to work in

• the sociology of the camp

• if I can’t stick around here and fight them, I’ll take my last fucking breath to my grave just to spite them

• registration now open: power, acceleration and metrics in academic life

• Felix & Adelita

• the astroturfing industry 

• on fragile movements

• the agonistic politics of anonymous 

• the pervasive cottage industry on the borders of academia 

• ‘The UK is finished’: Owen Jones meets Peter Hitchens

• things I’ve been reading recently #12

• the intensification of work in the creative industries

• upwards over the mountain

• The fiction future of faculty: September 16th in Manchester

• the ecology of content 

• the horatio alger myth

• the origins of digital capitalism 

• this is not a pipe

• the disruption of finance 

• the necessity of digital sociology

• social media and the promise of never again being alone 

• the threats of financial elites 

• the threats of financial elites 

• the totally weird subculture of 1980s mortgage traders 

• the masters of the universe and their delusions

• the meaning of scrounging in conservative britain 

• post-democratic political culture: how good leaders go bad

• the post-democratic judicial system

• spotify’s ultra-creepy new privacy policy

• “drag coefficient”: the creepiest human resources concept ever?