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  • I am older now and we did it when we were young

  • Too much Zoom in the post-pandemic university

    After the longest holiday I’ve had for years, I’ve started to feel seriously depressed about the quantity of Zoom meetings in my calendar over the coming weeks. I’m currently at an intensive workshop with long term collaborators where we’ve spent all day/evening talking to each other. It’s enjoyable to immerse yourself in interaction with others…

  • Irvine Welsh on angst, addiction and writing

    After spending the last couple of months rereading Irvine Welsh novels, as well as reading the few I’d never touched, it struck me that I’d never heard him talk. Nor did I know anything about him. I was unsurprised to find out he was born in Leith and had been addicted to heroin there for…

  • Post-truth as liberal populism: revisiting Cambridge Analytica

    I’ve argued in a few places in recent years (such as this paper) that the notion of ‘post-truth’ has often constituted a form of liberal populism. I mean this in Laclau’s sense of an empty signifier which symbolically structures the social environment. It imagines that a formally harmonious environment was undermined by the intrusion of…

  • The increasingly hierarchical character of academic social media in 2023

    I remember when it was possible to fill an event by just tweeting about it a few times from a highly visible account. It made organising events so easy and so much more fun as a result. Whereas now you need to share across countless social platforms and mailing lists. This is what happens when…

  • Why do computational methods matter for education? Jan 18th at 4pm GMT

    In an infamous article from 2008 the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine argued that ‘big data’ made the scientific method obsolete. While hype about the data deluge has become more nuanced since then, it is undeniable that digital data has led to profound transformations in social scientific methodology. Disciplines and fields such as Data Science, Computational…

  • Blog Maggot

  • ChatGPT’s limerick about Nietzsche’s depressiveness

    There once was a man named Nietzsche Whose thoughts were quite miserable and dreary He believed in no meaning Life was just a sickening So he spent all his time feeling teary Instigated by Steve Watson.

  • Going on Strike from the Internet: A Plea for Disconnection

    I spent the first two days of the recent strike disconnected from the internet. I unplugged my router and let my phone run out of battery before placing them both in a locked filing cabinet. I then put the key in the back of a cupboard for good measure, intending to put as much cognitive…

  • The ladder of abstraction

    Over the last few years I’ve often found myself using the phrase ‘ladder of abstraction’ to describe my own movement from philosophy to social theory to qualitative sociology and on to education. It reflects two bifurcations in my experience which have bothered me intensely at different points in my career: the split between activism and…

  • Ontological questions about the metaverse

    In preparation for the workshop I’m going to next week, I thought it would be useful to map out some of the ontological questions about the metaverse which I’ve been thinking about intermittently over the last year: More thoughts here: https://markcarrigan.wordpress.com/2022/01/30/the-social-ontology-of-the-metaverse/

  • I am large, I contain multitudes

    Walt Whitman – Songs of Myself, 51 The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them. And proceed to fill my next fold of the future. Listener up there! what have you to confide to me? Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening, (Talk honestly, no one else hears you,…

  • What is trauma?

    I’m currently reading a remarkable book by the physician Gabor Maté. In the Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing In A Toxic Culture he argues that trauma is ubiquitous within contemporary society; a reality which is obscured by the tendency to exceptionalize trauma as a categorical affliction of a subset of poor souls in…

  • The romance of the ascent of the humanity

    It’s an idea he is being critical of but this is beautifully put by Roberto Unger in The Religion of the Future: Humanity rises. Its rise is not inevitable, not at least in the more guarded and realistic versions of the romance of ascent, but it is possible. (Auguste Comte and Karl Marx, two philosophers…

  • John Stuart Mill on libidinal collapse: some thoughts on socialisation and human purpose

    I’ve intended for years to read the autobiography of the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill. As an undergraduate philosophy student being introduced to utilitarianism, the lecturer briefly explained Mill’s peculiar biographical trajectory as an aside to explaining his mature philosophy. He was raised by his father James Mill, close collaborator of Jeremy Bentham, with the…

  • The only thing that’s left to do is live

  • How to enjoy reading social theory

    I wrote recently about my route into theory after reflecting on why some people enjoy reading theory while others don’t. Taking inspiration from The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction I thought it would be worthwhile to share a little about how I navigate theoretical literature, some of which I’ve learned from others…

  • Year’s End

    Now winter downs the dying of the year, And night is all a settlement of snow; From the soft street the rooms of houses show A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere, Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin And still allows some stirring down within. I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake The…

  • The eye-on-the-object look

    I was delighted by this from Auden’s Horae Canonicae series. The ‘eye-on-object look’ in which we ‘ignore the appetitive goddesses’: You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk…

  • Why do some people enjoy social theory while others don’t?

    It occurred to me recently that I’ve been reading theory on a regular basis for over two decades now. I first encountered philosophy as an A Level Student in Religious Studies (post-secondary education aged 16-17) through Buddhist philosophy and Christian arguments for the existence of God. The first full work of philosophy I ever read…

  • The pleasure of returning to novels

    I’ve spent the last month rereading most of Irvine Welsh’s novels. In the late summer I read Jonathan Franzen’s novels again, after his most recent book reminded me of my love for his work. I feel a vague sense of guilt when I read books again. In part it’s awareness that the constraints of the…

  • Why we need a post-digital approach to the platform university

    One of the virtues of a postdigital approach to technology within higher education is that it helps us unpick two seemingly contradictory stances: marginalisation and the shock of the new. There is a tendency to see technology as a contingent part of the research process which is peripheral to its core operations. For example the…

  • Choose life: some notes on Lacan’s death drive

    I found this lecture from the excellent Derek Hook extremely helpful for understanding how Lacan reconceived the classical Freudian sense of the death drive, which it should be noted was originally proposed by Sabina Spielrein. I’m interested in this topic for a number of reasons, not least of all the compulsive elements of digital agency…

  • Next year’s going to be better than this

    I’d like to take this opportunity and toast to me For being exactly who I’m supposed to be ‘Cause life is gonna do what life does I don’t wanna look back and regret who I was Let go of the expectations and then fire one Forget the tally sheet before all my time’s up And…

  • I miss my old house

    I’ve written recently about how much of a wrench it was to leave my old life in Cambridge. However as much as I valued that life I never felt entirely uncomfortable with where I was living, much as as my clear sense of what ‘home’ looked like created a problem in the 2010s in a…

  • The time a bus went boom outside a conference I was organising

    I was looking for something else in my e-mail archives and I just came across this blast from the past. During my time at the Warwick Business School’s Data Science Lab I led the organisation of an international conference with 50 speakers and 300 delegates. It was a deeply stressful few days which became much…

  • I’ve been taking some time to be distant

    Hi Ren… I’ve been taking some time to be distant I’ve been taking some time to be still I’ve been taking some time to be by myself and I’ve spent half my life ill But just as sure as the tide starts turning Just as sure as the night has dawn Just as sure as…

  • But then why do you write? Nietzsche on the necessity of getting rid of your thoughts

    I’ve been dipping back into The Gay Science today which alongside Ecce Homo was my gateway into Nietzsche in my mid-20s. Whenever I’ve returned to them I’ve found new passages which resonate, as with this account (pg 90) of why writing for Nietzsche was a necessity: But then why do you write? – A: I…

  • What I’ll be working on over the next five years

    This post is a professional/intellectual counterpart to this reflection. It’s been deeply therapeutic to write these after an exhausting year and it affirms why I’ve kept a personal blog over the last 12 years. Here’s an extract from chapter 7 of Platform and Agency: Becoming Who We Are In A Digital World which conveys the…

  • If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim

    If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being…

  • How will universities cope with ChatGPT?

    I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT over the last few days and the quality of the responses is really unsettling. I imagine there would be a certain set of skills needed to use this effectively to cheat on assignments, given the truncated character of the answers. But its capacity to offer coherent responses to relatively…

  • I’m going to make it through this year if it kills me

  • Jouissance: Enjoying in the margins

  • I’m a lifeless face that you’ll soon forget

    Well, I’ve lost it all, I’m just a silhouette I’m a lifeless face that you’ll soon forget My eyes are damp from the words you left Ringing in my head, when you broke my chest Ringing in my head, when you broke my chest And if you’re in love, then you are the lucky one…

  • The death drive as a will to create from zero, to begin again

    I found this incredibly thought provoking from Richard Seymour as a reflection on the possibility of hope in a time of crisis. It suggests we need to move through despair because there is no way around it, but that on the other side we can find a hope grounded in a coming to terms with…

  • Why has social media become so grim?

  • The lights are out, the phones are dead

    The lights are out, the phones are dead And I’m the only thing that’s running in this city Except for the clouds and man, they’re coming down If I knew my way around, I wouldn’t feel so dizzy

  • Who should we trust when the apocalypse comes? Some thoughts on post-horror

    I’m currently working on a project with Milan Stürmer exploring how post-horror films both pre-figured pandemic imaginaries (2016-2019) and responded to them (2020-2022). It emerged from conversations in pub beer gardens in Cambridge during the summer of 2021 at a point when some vestiges of normal life had returned but things nonetheless felt extremely strange.…

  • Hope is optimism with a broken heart

    I wrote when leaving Cambridge in August 2021 how “Prior to the pandemic I was rapidly getting institutionalised into the university, pottering around the city over the course of the day between my office, college canteens, green spaces, coffee shops, college gardens and cinemas”. It was the first time in my life I had experienced…

  • What would happen if every human suddenly disappeared?

    Building on this extremely interesting looking book: On a similar theme, though I haven’t watched it yet:

  • There’s no guilty party

    I say your name I say I’m sorry I’m the one doing this, there’s no other way It’s nobody’s fault No guilty party I just got nothing, nothing else to say

  • On metronormativity

    I was introduced to the concept of ‘metronormativity’ (Jack Halberstam) earlier today and I’m rather taken with it. This is the Wikipedia article which summarises it: Jack Halberstam relates queer metronormativity to the dominant “story of migration from ‘country’ to ‘town’… a spatial narrative within which the subject moves to a place of tolerance after enduring…

  • What would a ‘social crash’ within higher education mean for the discovery function within the knowledge system

    I’ve written recently about the possibility that we may be in the early stages of seeing a ‘social crash’ within higher education, in which the social capital lodged within Twitter dissipates because the service dies (or dwindles into Myspace-esque triviality) without those networks being reproduced in another forum. This might be because they get reproduced…

  • Digital scholarship: from the soft problem of citation to the hard problem of authoriality

    I’ve been convinced that podcasts have enormous pedagogical value for a long time. I’ve produced podcasts with students on a number of occasions, as well as using them in my teaching as a resource. However a concern I have relates to audio more widely and the scholarly habits required to work with it in a…

  • This place was a shelter

  • Peter Sloterdijk on the difficulty of saying what is missing

    In the first volume of his Spheres trilogy Peter Sloterdijk suggests the air constitutes our “first partner in the outside world”. It is a transition from floating in amniotic fluid (freely in our undisturbed balance) to being mediated by the air, offering “the incipient subject a first chance at self-activity in respiratory autonomy” without being…

  • Rise like Lions after slumber

    ‘Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you – Ye are many – they are few.’ – Percy Bysshe Shelley

  • Have a vegan Christmas

    While I’m not yet a vegan (occasional eggs and cheese are the remaining obstacle) this wonderful advert at the cinema got me thinking about it again:

  • Habermas on colonisation of the lifeworld

    I am surprised to find myself coming back to this for making sense of the role of social media in the lifeworld, through the gateway drug of thinking about algorithmic isomorphism plays out in everyday life. I must say I wasn’t expecting that my thought might take a Habermasian turn and I feel a bit…

  • You’re doing pretty well given the circumstances

  • I think I thought I saw you try

    I thought that I heard you laughing I thought that I heard you sing I think I thought I saw you try But that was just a dream Try, cry, fly, try That was just a dream Just a dream Just a dream, dream

  • Recovering critique in an age of datafication

    Notes on Couldry, N. (2020). Recovering critique in an age of datafication. New Media & Society, 22(7), 1135-1151 This thought provoking paper reflects on how “the now utterly banal embedding of digital interfaces of many sorts into our working and resting lives, and the emergence across those platforms of new forms of power” has become an object…

  • Music is the weapon

  • Publishing a compendium of chapters or going for the magnum opus

    Over the last couple of months, I’ve suddenly been able to make progress on the book project I’ve been working on in various forms since 2008. From 2008 to 2014 this took the form of my PhD thesis which was embarrassingly riddled with typographical errors which I should have been made to correct, as well…

  • Litany of Blooming, by Nick Cave and Nicholas Lens

    From this wonderful album.

  • Capitalism is tearing us apart

    How have I heard this countless times without listening to the lyrics? I have to work late I’m sorry that the food’s gone cold We’ll fight when I get home (Capitalism’s tearing us apart) Just strangers passing in the dark Dreams sold to stay afloat Pulled by the undertow (Capitalism’s tearing us apart)

  • Rilke on living the questions rather than demanding the answers

    You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do…

  • A theory of learning for the future: the realist concept of reflexivity and the pragmatist concept of experience

    I was interested to discover how pragmatism is being used within education to develop a “theory of learning for the future”. The point of such a theory, argues Bente Elkjaer in this chapter, rests in its “teaching of a preparedness to respond in a creative way to difference and otherness” including how “to act imaginatively…

  • Why was the industrial revolution so slow and the digital revolution so fast?

    I think this is a fascinating question by Margaret Archer, even if it’s important to stress the ‘digital revolution’ is far from over: Why was the first industrial revolution so slow (taking, say, 250 years from its first beginnings) and the digital revolution of the last 25 years so fast? Somehow, the question gets lost by calling…

  • Nick Cave on creating on the edge of disaster

    I thought this was a powerful statement of faith in the creative process. It followed his description of improvisation earlier in Faith, Hope and Carnage in which he explains how the elements of his work choose their final form. But letting this choice unfold necessitates trusting in the creative process, believing it will come together…

  • Cultivating a relationship of gratitude towards the world

    This short post by the always thought-provoking L. M. Sacasas captured something I’ve tried to articulate a few times recently. How do we approach our existence in a way which is open to it rather than seeking to exercise control over it? The more difficult that control becomes to exercise due to circumstances which precede…

  • The lavender has stained my skin and made me strange

    People ask me how I’ve changed I say it is a singular road And the lavender has stained my skin And made me strange The lavender is tall and reaches Beyond the heavenly cover I plough through this furious world Of which I’m truly over There is in the world only one way, on which…

  • David Hume on escaping an overheated brain

    I’ve mentioned this passage from A Treatise of Human Nature to a couple of people recently. I encountered it as an undergraduate philosophy student and it has always stayed with me, as an insight into Hume the author and as a commendably honest reflection on the strange nature of philosophical reasoning. In it Hume reflects on how…

  • Nick Cave on the terrible devastating opportunities that bring transformation

    I wrote recently about how Nick Cave talks about the relationship between suffering, loss and renewal in Faith, Hope and Carnage. He expands on this later in his conversation with Sean O’Hagan, who I only just discovered is an accomplished musician rather than the high brow music journalist I’d assumed. Reflecting on his last record…

  • Georg Simmel and Critical Realism

    I was struck recently by an unexpected resonance with critical realism when reading Georg Simmel’s The View of Life, a late series of four essays which offer a broad philosophical perspective on the nature of life itself. In fact I should be more specific than critical realism insofar as the parallel is with Margaret Archer’s…

  • Why (material) things matter to people

    I’ve been thinking about this question while clearing out the vast quantity of unused possessions which I’ve accumulated in recent years. The title is a play on Andrew Sayer’s wonderful book Why Things Matter To People in which he explores how we relate to the world through our concerns; his interest is not in the…

  • Requiem for a Tweet – Is there a future for the academic social capital held on the platform?

    Originally posted on the LSE Impact Blog In the early days of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, I imagined the worst-case scenario to be that a platform already rife with troubling behaviour would become something even darker and more problematic. What I didn’t expect was a potentially existential doom loop in which advertisers already spooked by the…

  • My favourite lyrics from Nick Cave’s Ghosteen filtered through an AI art generator

    Well there goes your moony man With his suitcase in his hand Every road is lined with animals That rise from their blood and walk Well the moon won’t get a wink of sleep If I stay all night and talk, if I stay all night and talk The bright horses have broken free from…

  • Inventing our lives

    “All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people.” Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on…

  • Nick Cave on loss and improvisation

    I wrote earlier in the week about my deep fascination with Ghosteen, the album released by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in late 2019. It’s a haunting work which spoke deeply to me during a strange transitional year in my life, filled with drawn out endings and incipient new beginnings. I was fascinated to…

  • Haligh, Haligh, a Lie, Haligh

    But now we speak with ruined tongues And the words we say aren’t meant for anyone It’s just a mumbled sentence to a passing acquaintance But there was once you

  • Should I rejoin Twitter?

    In about 4 days my Twitter account will be deleted forever if I don’t login to the system. The widely reported failures afflicting the service as Musk guts the organisation mean I should probably log in before that if I want to ensure I have access. I was pretty sure I wanted to leave the…

  • Nick Cave on suffering, loss and renewal

    I spent much of the summer thinking about the relationship between cruel optimism and renewal; the sense that what makes optimism cruel might be our mode of relating to the object, rather than the object itself, raising the possibility of renewal in which we find a non-cruel way of (re)establishing that relation. I took inspiration…

  • What happens if Twitter fails? A few provisional suggestions

    For the last few days I’ve been preoccupied by the prospect that Twitter will fail and what this means for higher education. There are two forms I could imagine this taking: a hard fail in which the platform does go bankrupt as a consequence of the doom loop it now seems to be stuck within,…

  • What Microsoft Teams is and what it could be

    I’ve spent a great deal of time using Microsoft Teams over the last few years. The University of Cambridge accelerated the rollout of the platform in the early months of the pandemic, reflecting the obvious practical need it served during those difficult times. I was immediately enthralled by it, imagining how it could confirm internal…

  • Dragonfly Eyes (2017)

    The mind-blowing debut feature of renowned Chinese artist Xu Bing is a fictional feature created entirely from surveillance-camera recordings, about a young woman whose life takes a series of unexpected turns after she leaves the Buddhist temple where she has lived most of her adult life.

  • Being open to the world

    There’s a strange passage in Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life which left me ruminating on the expression ‘look before you leap’ which I heard endlessly as a child growing up in north-west England in the 80s and 90s. He talks about “a schizoid scaling of heights that do not stand in any productive…

  • The comfort of ideas

    I’ve spent much of this year thinking about the difference between people who search for meaning in projects and people who seek to escape the search through meaning through projects. The former look for answers to prior questions through the creative work they commit themselves to, whereas the latter seek release from a hyper self-interrogatory…

  • The chasm at the heart of our agency

    In every house, in the heart of each maiden and of each boy, in the soul of the soaring saint, this chasm is found, between the largest promise of ideal power, and the shabby experience. – Ralph Waldo Emerson In my slightly bleak exploration of finding joy on a dying planet, I’ve thought a lot…

  • Why do we tweet?

    This thoughtful reflection from Rob Horning resonated with me as someone who deactivated Twitter after the Musk takeover, unsure about whether I will return. He describes the strangeness which results from being jolted out of your digital habits, newly aware of what has become second nature and prone to question why we ever did it…

  • Coaxing the sight and sound back to your life

    In the first volume of Life of the Mind Hannah Arendt reflects on the “almost infinite diversity” of the appearances we find in the world, “the sheer entertainment value of its views, sounds, and smells” (pg 20) which philosophers have tended to overlook. This immediately reminded me of a letter C Wright Mills wrote to…

  • New Paper: Is it Paranoia? A Critical Approach to Platform Literacy

    Social media platforms have received increasingly bad press coverage over the course of the last decade for everything from problematic uses of algorithms to the ability of authoritarian regimes to leverage them as a way to impact elections. Unfortunately, this emphasis on critique, though justified, has led to a paranoid form of thinking in which…

  • To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield

    There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail: There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me— That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old; Old age hath yet his honour…

  • The growing infrastructural dominance of big tech within education. What is to be done?

    Notes on Williamson, B., Gulson, K. N., Perrotta, C., & Witzenberger, K. (2022). Amazon and the new global connective architectures of education governance. Harvard Educational Review, 92(2), 231-256. This path-breaking paper opens up a new agenda for critical studies of digital education which shakes off the comforting bromides which too often characterise critical approaches in order to…

  • Critical Realism & Technology Reading Group, Friday October 28th 1pm-2pm

    How do critical realists make sense of technology? What are the major themes, challenges and debates concerning technology within critical realist social theory? The purpose of this reading group is to explore these questions through monthly meetings to discuss relevant works on technology and critical realism. We meet from 1pm to 2pm on the final Friday…

  • CfP: Public Knowledge – the Academy and Beyond

    Public Knowledge: the Academy and Beyond A special issue of New Formations: A journal of culture / power / politics  Now in its fifth decade of publication, New Formations maintains an international reputation for publishing rigorous peer-reviewed scholarship in the critical humanities and social sciences. The journal accepts contributions within a wide range of disciplines, while specialising as…

  • What does it mean to live a good life in a broken world? Some post-pandemic thoughts on Charles Taylor’s philosophy

    I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the existential challenges created by a world which is cascading towards systems failure. My assumption is that, as Charles Taylor puts it in A Secular Age, “Every person, and ever society, lives with or by some conception(s) of what human flourishing is” involving questions such as what makes…

  • The temporal ontology of modernity

    I’m currently reading Mike Savage’s The Return of Inequality as I belatedly develop my PhD thesis into a book. His concept of epochal theorising shaped how I approach the work of Anthony Giddens on late modernity which I took as the foil for my thesis. It was encountering thinkers like Bauman, Beck and Giddens which…

  • Webinar: is an environmentally sustainable digital education possible?

    October 19th, 7pm GMT Digital technology is often presented as a solution to social and educational problems. It is imagined that if we find the right technology and deploy it in effective ways then previously intractable challenges might soon become a thing of the past. But what if digital education is part of the problem?…

  • The unconscious fluency of writing

    This thoughtful piece from Richard Seymour captures something which fascinates me about the writing process. He describes this as an unconscious fluency which enables writing to work, even if writing is simultaneously a deliberate and purposive activity: I doubt anyone begins a piece of writing with the rules in mind. Writing is a conscious, effortful…

  • I built a room for you in the back of my mind

    I built a room for youIn the back of my mindWhere the ravenous wolvesAnd the ghosts I know reside You were amazingYou were always on my mind We were secrets to keepAnd crows buried side by side But we tasted a kissThat was sent from belowIt was cool in the nightI was old as a…

  • Are you looking for a teaching role in digital education?

    Are you looking for a teaching role in digital education? The Manchester Institute for Education is hiring three Senior Tutors to support a range of programmes, one of which is the MA Digital Technologies, Communication and Education. This is a rapidly growing area of the department with a recently launched research group and a range…

  • This Place is a Shelter

  • Toni Morrison on fascism

    Fascism only talks ideology but it really is just marketing, marketing for power. It’s recognizable by its need to purge, the strategies it uses to purge and its terror of truly democratic goals. It changes citizens into taxpayers so individuals become rife with anger at the notion of the public good. It changes citizens into…

  • Disrupting the post-pandemic university: an audio experiment

    By Milan Stürmer and Mark Carrigan It has been widely observed that the pandemic led to an enforced digitalisation in higher education. Familiar modes of interaction like meetings, seminars and conferences came to feel strange to most as mediation through video conferencing platforms like Zoom became the norm. Reflection on this phenomenon tends to imply…

  • The meaning of civics as the new world struggles to be born

    I’ve blogged regularly over the last few years about what I’ve termed post-neoliberal civics and post-pandemic civics. These terms are conscious placeholders intended to designate a significant change underway in which, to Gramsci put it, “the new world struggles to be born”. It reflects an interest in the significance of education during the transition as…

  • Finding joy on a dying planet: failing to act as psychic self-defence and how to overcome it

    I’ve been reluctant to write this blog post for some time. This reflects a certain unwillingness on my part to self-disclose past a certain limit; I’m happy to share my thought online but I rarely share my life. There’s also a certain unwillingness to grapple with the underlying question I intend to address here. In…

  • The highly evolved, politicised, social industry-based apparatus of personal destruction

    This is a disturbing and insightful piece from Richard Seymour. Highly recommend you subscribe to his Patreon if you haven’t already. He closes with the warning that it’s only “matter of historical contingency, lets say of the vagaries of uneven and combined development, that we do not yet have such a highly evolved, politicised, social…

  • Clive Lawson’s Technology & Isolation (ch 1-3)

    What is technology? I often use the term overly loosely to refer to devices, as well as the distributed systems in which they are embedded. In Technology & Isolation Clive Lawson observes how the term is “frequently portrayed as knowledge, as artefacts, as ways of doing things, as any means to an end, as a…

  • Podcasting in higher education

    Podcasts have come to feel ubiquitous following the pandemic, with periods of confinement to the home for significant swathes of the population creating a hunger for engaging digital content. Their popularity had been growing for years before this, with many crediting the Serial true crime podcast in 2014 for helping the medium break into the…