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  • Who are the super-rich and what do they want?

    My notes on Davies, W. (2017). Elites without hierarchies: Intermediaries,‘agency’and the super-rich. In Cities and the super-rich (pp. 19-38). Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Who are the super-rich, and what do they want? This is the question which a thought provoking paper by Will Davies begins with and it’s one which has preoccupied me in recent years.…

  • Are you interested in sociological fiction?

    Are you interested in sociological fiction? Did you know there’s a new online home for it at The Sociological Review, edited by Ashleigh Watson? The first few pieces in our new section are online: Who Are Your Friends? Smiling Gives You Wrinkles Oil on canvas See here for guidance about how to contribute to. We…

  • Everything’s connected, right? Everything’s connected

    You’re with me all the time I think I know you better than I did when we were hanging out together What’s it like where you’ve gone? Well, I can feel it, it’s ok, I know you can’t say But you’ve been with me all day, I have to tell you When it happened, I…

  • How does one become a competitive Rubiks cube player?

    My sociological question after discovering the world of competitive Rubiks cube: how does one become a competitive Rubiks cube player? Is there an identifiable moral career in Goffman’s sense? There’s a vast internet subculture relating to this and I’m curious about the role it has play in enabling the competitive Rubiks cube world to coalesce. Here’s…

  • A few questions about Marvel’s Secret Wars

    If you’re here for the social theory or social media, please ignore this massively nerdy post. I’ve now read Marvel’s Secret Wars twice and there’s a few things I’m mystified by. Have I missed a big chunk of the storytelling? Or were these Chekhov’s rifles gone wrong: elements introduced into a vastly complex plot which…

  • Are you interested in blogging about social science methodology?

    The International Journal of Social Research Methodology has a new blog and we’re seeking contributions. We’re hoping it can be a vibrant space in which emerging methodological debates can unfold, tentative ideas voiced for the first time and professional discussions held in a public forum. This recent post on complexity and health inequalities gives a…

  • Why doesn’t technocrat have an antonym?

    My notes on Hudson, M. (2018). Ending technocracy with a neologism? Avivocracy as a conceptual tool. Technology in Society, 55, 136-139. What does it mean to call someone technocratic? In this intriguing paper, Marc Hudson observes that the term is “thrown about as a term of abuse, but without a clear alternative other than ritual(istic) invocations of…

  • Towards a neo-Khaldunian digital sociology: @morteza_hm on the Bedouins of Silicon Valley

    My notes on Hashemi, M. (2019). Bedouins of Silicon Valley: A neo-Khaldunian approach to sociology of technology. The Sociological Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026118822823  This hugely original paper seeks to counteract what Morteza Hashemi sees as an excessive focus on technological development in accounts of Silicon Valley, looking beyond this macro-social (often Schumpeterian) approach to “the evolution of Silicon Valley…

  • What happens when you meet a troll?

    This is one of the most engaging things I’ve ever seen on YouTube. I’d enthusiastically watch an entire web series built around this premise. There’s a whole research agenda waiting to be undertaken exploring the troll’s claim that he needed to be abusive in order to get noticed by Owen Jones.

  • The media must take responsibility for recent far right attacks on left wing journalists

  • Why have generic, popular services proved so enticing for digital academics? From 2011 to 2019

    My notes on Rowlands, I., Nicholas, D., Russell, B., Canty, N., & Watkinson, A. (2011). Social media use in the research workflow. Learned Publishing, 24(3), 183-195. I was fascinated to stumble across this paper from 2011 which I’d somehow managed to miss in the past, reporting on a project funded by Emerald investigating social media use…

  • Call for Papers: Academics, Professionals and Publics: Changes in the Ecologies of Knowledge Work

    Kicking myself I can’t make the date for this conference organised by Eric Lybeck: Call for Papers (LINK) Academics, Professionals and Publics: Changes in the Ecologies of Knowledge Work 4 April 2019 University of Manchester, UK Organiser: Eric Lybeck, Manchester Institute of Education Contact: eric.lybeck@manchester.ac.uk Keynote speakers: Andrew Abbott, University of Chicago Vivienne Baumfield, University…

  • The intellectual legacy of Charles Taylor: securing the vantage point of (historical) philosophical anthropology

    My notes on MacIntyre, A. (2018). Charles Taylor and dramatic narrative: Argument and genre. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 44(7), 761-763. This short reflection by Alasdair MacIntyre, one of my favourite philosophers, concerns the intellectual legacy of Charles Taylor, undoubtedly my favourite. He stresses how the reputation of Taylor would have been ensured by his earlier work, establishing himself as…

  • When sociology becomes a source of legitimation rather than critique: the case of Anthony Giddens

    My notes on Skeggs, B. (2019). The forces that shape us: The entangled vine of gender, race and class. The Sociological Review, 67(1), 28-35. How do we make sense of the influence of Antony Giddens? The first page of his Google Scholar profile shows 149,243 citations with many more to be expected if one were inclined to dig…

  • Social volatility and the shrinking time horizons of political life: the case of the Remain campaign’s war book

    There’s an interesting account in Tim Shipman’s Brexit book of how the Remain campaign constructed their war book. This contained the core message of the campaign, anticipated their opponent’s strategies and distilled the findings of their research. It was written over a number of months by the two lead strategists, condensing the outcomes of activity undertaken over…

  • I hate to think I’ll make it to 70, potentially 75, and realise I’ve never been alive

    I try new things, I shoot films on my phone And I play them back when I’m alone, did that happen? I walk around, trying to understand every sound Trying to make my feet connect with every inch of ground The sky flattens my cap, battens me down Everything’s in its category, packaged in self flattering…

  • Call for Papers: Lies, Bullshit and Fake News Online: Should We Be Worried?

    Thanks to Filip Vostal for pointing me towards this superb cfP: Special Issue of Postdigital Science and Education Call for Papers: Lies, Bullshit and Fake News Online: Should We Be Worried? Link to Call for Papers Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and the alleged interference of Russia in that election, there have…

  • Critical Pedagogy HE Teaching Practice (CPHETP) Lab

    Organised by Dyi Huijg at London South Bank University: The Critical Pedagogy HE Teaching Practice (CPHETP) Lab is intended for all of those who teach in Higher Education (from professors to graduate teaching assistants) and who seek to practically develop their HE teaching practice and, grounded in critical pedagogy principles, expand their teaching tools (e.g for…

  • What does it mean to talk about work as dehumanising? A critical realist perspective

    My notes on Al-Amoudi, I. (2018). Management and dehumanisation in Late Modernity. In Realist Responses to Post-Human Society: Ex Machina (pp. 182-194). Routledge. What does it mean to talk about work as dehumanising? In this insightful paper, Ismael Al-Amoudi identifies a number of senses in which management practices can be dehumanising: The “oppression or denial of human flourishing” such…

  • Margaret Archer: The Catholic Church as a Social Movement

  • An introduction to Emmanuel Lazega’s neo-structuralism

    My notes on Lazega, E. (2005). A Theory of Collegiality and its Relevance for Understanding Professions and knowledge-intensive Organizations. In Organisation und profession (pp. 221-251). VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. I came to know Emmanuel Lazega over the last five years through my involvement with the Centre for Social Ontology. I initially found his approach difficult to follow, simply…

  • Data Power 2019: anyone interested in putting together a digital universities panel?

    Call for Papers Deadline for submissions: January 31, 2019 DATA POWER: global in/securities A two-day, international conference Date: Thursday 12th and Friday 13th SEPTEMBER 2019 Venue: University of Bremen, Germany With increasingly globalized digital infrastructures and a global digital political economy, we face new concentrations of power, leading to new inequalities and insecurities with respect to data…

  • ‘Free speech’ as the unifying principle of a resurgent right

    I find this suggestion by James Smith deeply plausible, echoing a point made by Will Davies last year that ‘free speech’ is becoming the unifying principle of a right-wing in the process of recomposition: a successor conservative movement to Trumpism with appeal to many nominal centrists would be one that retains Donald Trump’s break with political…

  • Analogue and digital chronopower: the example of Trump university

    I’ve been dwelling on this passage from Trump University’s sales manual, republished on loc 980 of this insider account of the ill-fated ‘university’, which it should be added had a MOOC system (in its first phase) and a recruitment strategy (in its second phase) which were extreme manifestations of what can be found in US…

  • Overcoming the micro/macro divide

    From Margaret Archer’s Social Origins of Educational Systems (1979), pg 37. I thought this was a remarkably apt summary of what her next seven books actually did, even if her  trajectory as a whole is constantly misread as a turn away from the macro. The whole point of it was building a theoretical framework adequate for the interface…

  • Digital labour in the university: understanding the transformations of academic work in the UK

    My notes on Woodcock, J. (2018). Digital labour in the university: understanding the transformations of academic work in the UK. TripleC, 16(1), 129-142. This important paper by Jamie Woodcock sees to rectify the lack of application of ways of analysing work to the work conducted within the university. His main focus is on the introduction of…

  • The mundane reality of neo-fascism

    There’s a really powerful piece by Pedro Rocha de Oliveira in Red Pepper placing Jair Bolsonaro’s rise to power in Brazil in socio-political context: There have been hints of fresh horrors ahead during the presidential campaign. A young woman in Porto Alegre was punched and held by a group of men while one cut a swastika…

  • Cambridge as a platform city

    My notes on Philip Cooke (2018) Generative growth with ‘thin’ globalization: Cambridge’s crossover model of innovation, European Planning Studies, 26:9, 1815-1834, DOI: 10.1080/09654313.2017.1421908 Since moving to Cambridge in July 2017, I’ve become fascinated by the transformation underway within the city and what it reveals about the political economy of the UK. This paper by Philip Cooke…

  • 🐈 The Skiathos Cats 🐈

  • I bomb atomically, Socrates’ philosophies

    I bomb atomically, Socrates’ philosophies And hypotheses can’t define how I be droppin’ these Mockeries, lyrically perform armed robbery Flee with the lottery, possibly they spotted me Battle-scarred shogun, explosion when my pen hits Tremendous, ultra-violet shine blind forensics I inspect view through the future see millennium Killa Beez sold fifty gold sixty platinum Shackling…

  • What the fuck!? The great question of our age

    I really liked this piece David Roberts on Vox, summarising Ezra Klein on the transformation of journalism. This is the context in which there’s a great unexplored potential for public sociology, as I’ve tried to argue: The internet changed all that. There are no longer supply constraints — it is trivially cheap and easy to publish something on…

  • A few videos on quantum computing and the physics of time I want to come back to later

  • The social ontology of trans-human life

    My notes on Maccarini, A. M. (2018). Trans-human (life-) time: Emergent biographies and the ‘deep change’in personal reflexivity. In Realist Responses to Post-Human Society: Ex Machina (pp. 138-164). Routledge. One of the interesting features of the recent Centre for Social Ontology project on defending the human has been the realisation that many in the group are entirely open to the…

  • Against spontaneous sociology: Michael Burawoy’s attempt to rescue Bourdieu from Matthew Desmond and what it means for public sociology

    My notes on Burawoy, M. (2017). On Desmond: the limits of spontaneous sociology. Theory and Society, 46(4), 261-284. The work of Matthew Desmond has won enormous acclaim in recent years, with Evicted being a book I recommend to anyone keen to understand the relevance of contemporary sociology. While recognising his talents as an ethnographer and writer,…

  • Look at me now 

    I am transforming I am vibrating I am glowing I am flying Look at me now

  • Programming as practice

    My notes on Yuill, S. (2005) Programming as Practice in J. Gibbons and K. Winwood, eds., Hothaus Papers: perspectives and paradigms in media arts, Birmingham: ARTicle Press. What does it mean to program? In this intriguing paper Simon Yuill takes issue with responses to this question which reduce programming to a technical practice, reduced to…

  • Sally Rooney on Theory Anxiety

    There are many reasons to like Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends but the one I hadn’t expected was her depiction of theory anxiety: I concluded that some kinds of reality have an unrealistic effect, which made me think of the theorist Jean Baudrillard, though I had never read his books and these were probably not the…

  • Cultural studies of data mining

    My notes on Andrejevic, M., Hearn, A., & Kennedy, H. (2015). Cultural studies of data mining: Introduction, European Journal of Cultural Studies 18(4-5), 379-394 In this introduction to an important special issue, Mark Andrejevic, Alison Hearn and Helen Kennedy that the ubiquity of data infrastructure in everyday life means that “we cannot afford to limit our thinking about data…

  • Liberalism and neoliberalism in communications research

    My notes on Phelan, S., & Dawes, S.  (2018, February 26). Liberalism and Neoliberalism. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Ed.   Retrieved 18 Dec. 2018, from http://oxfordre.com/communication/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228613-e-176. Liberalism and neoliberalism are nebulous categories, used in different ways to identify and disassociate from other identities. Liberalism has long been the hegemonic common sense of communications research while also being the explicit…

  • The Flat Earth phenomenon and what it reveals about YouTube

    My notes on Paolillo, J. C. (2018). The Flat Earth phenomenon on YouTube. First Monday, 23(12). Even if the resurgent belief in a flat earth remains a marginal phenomenon, it is fascinating for what it reveals about YouTube. In this paper John C. Paolillo documents the emergence of this YouTube community and the issues which preoccupy…

  • Beyond fast and slow: temporal ontology in critical higher education scholarship

    My notes on The Shifting Rhythms of Academic Work. On Education. Journal for Research and Debate, 1(3) In this short paper Fabian Cannizzo takes issue with an assumption he (plausibly) suggests underlies the vast majority of critical higher education literature, namely that “broad social transformations to the policy and organisational infrastructure of global academia have a…

  • Social Media and Doing a PhD: what do you need to know?

    I organised a Sociological Review workshop at the weekend with Jenny Thatcher, Pat Thomson and Inger Mewburn. I’m sufficiently snowed under at the moment that I don’t have the time/energy to reflect on it properly but here’s a sneak preview of the graphic produced by Julia Hayes (below), links to live blogging by Tyler Shores…

  • a machine that’ll speak for me

    This is a sickness that embraces me warmly Something obscene, a machine that’ll speak for me It makes me nervous

  • Debates about the nature of education

    From Margaret Archer’s Social Origins of Educational Systems pg 4: There is nothing more pointless than the debates which have now lasted for centuries about the ideal nature of education. The only function they serve is in helping individuals and groups to clarify their educational goals, to recognize the implications of their chosen aims, and…

  • The origins of the micro/macro divide

    From Margaret Archer’s The Social Origins of Educational Systems pg 6: Historically the origins of the discipline are synonymous with the origins of macro-sociology –most of the early founding fathers asked big questions to which they gave equally big answers. Yet initially there was not thought to be anything distinctive or difficult about, for example,…

  • The social origins of educational systems 

    I’m finally reading Margaret Archer’s Social Origins of Educational Systems, the one major work of hers I hadn’t read which also happens to be the longest. It’s ironic that I’m coming to this now, as someone trained to be a social theorist who is in the process of becoming an (accidental) educationalist. This book was…

  • the school in the sky, the school between the cracks

    I’m finally reading the immensely powerful Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich and I’m gripped by the sense he conveys of the “nonschooled learning” (pg 10) which  institutionalised schooling precludes. From pg 8: School appropriates the money, men, and good will available for education and in addition discourages other institutions from assuming educational tasks. Work, leisure, politics,…

  • Nigel Farage the YouTube star 

    This was completely new to me. How much of the audience for these right-wing speaking tours are coming through YouTube? Is there a left wing equivalent? It’s not until I sit through An Entertaining Evening With Nigel Farage in Melbourne that I realise he’s not just a seven-times failed UK parliamentary candidate, but a bona…

  • Masterclass: An Introduction to Machine Learning

    Tuesday December 4th 12pm Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge Everyone welcome! It’s a short journey from Cambridge train station We hear a lot about the coming ‘automation revolution’, but what might developments in machine learning and AI mean for researchers in the social sciences and humanities? In our next masterclass, Associate Professor Inger Mewburn…

  • A really interesting cfp on media and time

    This looks excellent! CALL FOR PROPOSALS Special Issue of Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies Back to the Future: Telling and Taming Anticipatory Media Visions and Technologies Guest editors: Christian Pentzold (University of Bremen, Germany), Anne Kaun (Södertörn University, Sweden), and Christine Lohmeier (University of Salzburg, Austria) Digital media, networked services,…

  • The Corporate Fortresses of Digital Capitalism

    I find it hard to read this excellent piece by Alfie Brown and not speculate about long term trends… how easy is it to imagine a world in a state of ecological collapse dominated by a few corporate city states fortified against the wastelands at their walls, as well as the millions of migrants fleeing…

  • Where is the agency which will reign in big tech?

    A really interesting Vanity Fair piece exploring the assumption amongst American law makers and financiers that outrage against big tech will be limited because there is no constituency liable to be organised against it. In the absence of a collective agency pushing for political action to be taken, diffuse outrage is unlikely to lead to political…

  • Who’s a Bully? Civility, Authoritarianism, and Power in the Contemporary Academy

    This is the most enticing call for papers I’ve seen in ages. My promise to focus exclusively on my (still horribly unfinished) books for the foreseeable future is getting severely tested: Who’s a Bully? Civility, Authoritarianism, and Power in the Contemporary Academy For its next volume, scheduled for publication in fall 2019, the AAUP’s Journal of…

  • Thinking with your feet 

    In the last few years, I’ve noticed a pattern when I see photos of myself in front of an audience. I  am invariably tilting one foot forward as I talk, as in the attached photo from Andrew  Crane. Yet I have no awareness of doing it. Is this some strange adaptation to one leg being…

  • Trying to exist in superposition

      I don’t need to see I disrespect them gleefully and eat the pain, rage and guilt I keep it deep in me Release my fist When my ashes hit the pacific and I’m infinitely swimming in the ether Where the teachers be- Waves Thumbs up Sunglasses emoji Peace Tryna exist in superposition Tryna exist in…

  • From gated communities to moated communities

    From Oliver Bullough’s Moneyland pg 225-226. It’s hard not to see intimations of Elysium in developments like this: Take Indian Creek, for example. It is a village in Miami-Dade County, Florida, which you approach through a quiet and pleasant residential neighbourhood, all groomed lawns and bungalows; where the streets lack sidewalks, but where there is…

  • Off shore capital and the great inflation

    There’s a powerful extract in Oliver Bollough’s (superb) Moneyland talking about about the role offshore capital in inflating assets such as wine, art, cars, yachts and most of all real estate, with the latter then used to house these inflated assets. In the process it empowers a new class of fixers, helping manage this wealth…

  • What will it mean when blogs are decades old?

    Reading the philosopher Daniel Little’s reflection on eleven years of Understanding Society, I found myself wondering how blogging will be seen when we are surrounded by personal blogs which are decades old? The blog you are reading is eight years old this month, superseding a sequence of blogs which covered a further seven years before…

  • The Sociology of Escalation Effects

    I’ve been thinking a lot recently about escalation effects, by which I mean the tendency of some courses of action to escalate beyond our initial expectations or capacity to control. My favourite examples involve information overload. An active reader will often follow up references from books they are reading, with an interesting book usually yielding at…

  • Social media and the (im)possibility of tolerance as an epistemic virtue

    In the last public interview with Paulo Freire, he talks about tolerance as the means through which we realise the “the rich possibility of doing things and learning different things with different people”. Social media can provoke the curiosity Freire talks about, exposing us to a universe of difference but it also often generates irritation in the…

  • An accessible introduction to the (post-capitalist) future of scholarly publishing – Thursday afternoon in Cambridge

    If you’re anywhere near Cambridge this week, consider coming to this masterclass I’m organising: register here. What I find so inspiring about Gary Hall is the relationship between his theoretical work and his institutional interventions. He’s been a key figure in an enormous range of projects which have pushed the boundaries of scholarly publishing and helped…

  • Digital Futures? The #BSADigital Presidential Event

    This was an exciting day for Digital Sociology, as an esteemed group of speakers gathered in the august surroundings of the Churchill Room in the Treasury to discuss sociology’s contribution to understanding and defining our digital future. As BSA President Susan Halford explained in her introduction, the event is intended to pool the expertise of…

  • Iain Sinclair on the self-importance of Cambridge

    This weekend I saw Iain Sinclair in conversation with Richard Sennett at the Cambridge Literary Festival. The highlight was Sinclair’s response to a question from the audience about his view of Cambridge. Vividly describing the antipathy he felt for a place in which one perpetually encounters “doors within doors” and “secrets within secrets“, Sinclair ended…

  • The Sociology of Awkwardness: Being (very) human in a digital age

    What is awkwardness? It’s something we recognise. It’s something which is everywhere. Yet when we do think about it, it’s often seen as something trivial and mundane, representing an interruption of decorum or a warp in the texture of micro-social interaction. It’s something that can be intensely felt but is soon forgotten and, where it is not, we see…

  • Harvey Specter: a study in late modern sociopathy

    Over the holidays I stumbled across Suits and found myself weirdly hooked by it. It tells the story of Mike Ross, a gifted stoner whose life has been going nowhere, bumbling into an interview for new associates at a prestigious law firm while trying to escape the police after a drug deal gone wrong. He…

  • #BSADigital Live Blog: Session 3 – Data Futures

    The final session is kicking off with Ben Williamson (University of Edinburgh) talking about how digital data is transforming the university. These institutions are increasingly imagined as ‘smart’ organisations built around data infrastructure, with a whole range of innovations being pushed by a diverse array of actors. This has included the Department for Education commissioning…

  • #BSADigital Live Blog: Session 2 – Work Futures

    Our next session starts with Phil Brown from Cardiff University talking about the reality underlying the rhetoric of automation. Claims about the impending reality of mass unemployment driven by automation circulate widely, with a significant risk of exaggeration. Nonetheless, the general direction of travel is clear and there will be a declining demand for labour, posing problems…

  • #BSADigital Live Blog: Session 1 – Youth Futures

    The first speaker is Sonia Livingstone from the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Reflecting Phil Howard’s claim that sociology is bridging the quantitative/qualitative divide, Livingstone’s work draws on qualitative and quantitative data to elucidate what digital technology means for parents and childhoods. Parents seek to equip their children for what they imagine will…

  • #BSADigital Live Blog: Introducing Digital Futures

    I’m writing this blog from the remarkably grand Churchill Room in the Department for Media, Culture and Sport where the first session of the British Sociological Association’s President Event Digital Futures is due to start, co-organised with the Open Innovations Team in government. I’ll be doing my best to live blog throughout the day, updating…

  • Repoliticising tech mythology

    On the subject of the collapse of the tech mythology, a wonderful Slate headline succinctly conveys the significance of what is taking place: Facebook is a normal sleazy company now.  As Siva Vaidhyanathan puts it, “Facebook is now just another normal sleazy American company run by normal sleazy executives, engaged in normal sleazy lobbying and…

  • Digital technology and facilitating corruption

    I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the relationship between digital technology and contemporary finance, including the vast off-shore facets of its existence and the shadow markets which (as I understand them) traverse onshore and offshore, even breaking down the distinction between the two. An interesting example of this concerns the logistical challenge involved in creating the byzantine corporate…

  • An industry for creating dynasties

    From Moneyland by Oliver Bullough pg 101. As he points out, the logical end result of this is the creation of dynasties so that privilege persists and grows, as opposed to slowly diminishing over generations. Wealth-X, a consulting company that maps the movements of the super-rich as if they are wildebeest, calculates that in 2016 there were…

  • A masterclass in post-capitalist publishing with Gary Hall

    I’m so excited about this event I’m organising with Gary Hall on November 29th. Register here if you’d like to attend. Everyone is welcome and the Faculty of Education is really easy to get to. It’s a short walk from Cambridge train station and there are regular trains from London Kings Cross and London Liverpool…

  • “They ruined the world”

    I watched this incredible documentary last night and I can’t get it out of my head. It tells the story of four Syrian families going through a resettlement program in suburban Baltimore. At one point some of the children are playing on the first day at their new school and using a war plane to…

  • From political engagement to asset protection

    From Moneyland by Oliver Bullough pg 51: Nevis prospers by renting its sovereignty to rich people who believe America is over-litigious, that women get too much money in divorce settlements, and that lawyers lie in wait for the successful. These beliefs are widespread among the rich, and Moneyland has given them the power to do…

  • The collapse of the tech mythology

    There’s a wonderful piece in the Atlantic talking about the accumulating scandals through which “the tech industry has gone from bright young star to death star”, with increasing public knowledge leading to a recognition that “Silicon Valley companies turned out to be roughly as dirty in their corporate maneuvering as any old oil company or…

  • The singular new risks of organisational IT projects

    This short article by Bent Flyvbjerg and Alexander Budzier makes a powerful case that “IT projects are now so big, and they touch so many aspects of an organization, that they pose a singular new risk”. It reports on a project they undertook analysing 1,471 projects,  comparing their expected budget and performance benefits to the…

  • The Vertigo of (Accelerated) Corruption

    I’m utterly gripped by Oliver Bullough’s Moneyland and its account of the meta-country being built through the ability of global elites to escape national jurisdictions, facilitated by an army of lawyers, accountants and wealth managers. One of the most incisive themes concerns the acceleration of this corruption and the difficulty which it creates for public or private investigators…

  • How corruption makes history  

    From Moneyland, by Oliver Bullough, pg 7: It may seem like this question is specific to Ukraine and its former Soviet neighbours. In fact, it has a far wider significance. The kind of industrial-scale corruption that enriched Yanukovich and undermined his country has driven anger and unrest in a great arc stretching from the Philippines…

  • The political economy of viral stars 

    There’s a lucid account in Crystal Abidin’s Internet Celebrity of how eyewitness viral stars, briefly famous for their recorded reactions to an event, generate money for a whole range of unconnected actors. From 772-792: Eyewitness viral stars present an interesting form of internet celebrity in that at every stage of their fame cycle, several actors…

  • My imposter syndrome

    I’ve intended to write about imposter syndrome for a number of years. Since my PhD, it has become less frequent yet somehow more acute when it occurs, possibly reflecting my transition from an academic identity as ‘social theorist’ to a para-academic identity as ‘digital sociologist’. Here’s what goes through my mind when I feel like…

  • Socialising children into digital agency: why it’s not the same as reading, writing and arithmetic

    I found this comparison by Robin Wilton extremely thought-provoking. It’s correct as a statement about why we should treat these skills as fundamental to education. However it glosses over a number of differences and we should be cautious about the comparison: While there are corporate interests involved in reading, writing and arithmetic they exercise less power in…

  • The ideas industry and funding the new right

    While Tommy Robinson has been denied a visa for his planned Washington visit, it seems he’s off to Australia for a speaking tour with Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes: Robinson is set to visit Australia in December for a five-city speaking tour with the Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes. The pair call themselves The Deplorables, a reference to…

  • Is this what techno-fascism will look like?

    In recent months, there has been increasing media coverage of the terrifying network of reeducation camps in which the Chinese government has interned hundreds of thousands of the Uighur people. This is only one part of a broader system of social control in which what Timothy Grose calls a ‘virtual custody’ has been constructed through the proliferation…

  • a DDoS attack on the human will  

    This is the provocative phrase which James Williams uses to describe the attention economy on pg 87 of Stand Out of Our Light: Uncritical deployment of the human-as-computer metaphor is today the well of a vast swamp of irrelevant prognostications about the human future. If people were computers, however, the appropriate description of the digital…

  • Losing yourself in Westeros

    There are some wonderful reflections in this Guardian interview with George RR Martin on the writing process, the power of fiction and losing yourself in your work: When he’s really on a roll with his writing, “there are days when I sit down in the morning with my cup of coffee, I fall through the page and…