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  • 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…

  • Reconciling the psychoanalytical and the reflexive 

    How can we reconcile the psychoanalytical and the reflexive? One way is to deny there’s a tension and the work of someone like Ian Craib illustrates how this can be so, excavating reflexivity as a site of fantasy that is itself acted on reflexively. We find the image of a powerful and boundless self intoxicating…

  • Donald Trump as spectacle and fetish

    I’ve always been ambivalent about Slavoj Žižek, not least of all with the alt-right turn seemingly underway in his new book. Nonetheless, I think he gets to the point in his analysis of how Trump has been elevated into a fetish object within the liberal establishment, his garish buffoonery standing in the way of an…

  • Outflanking platitudes #1: Looking Forwards and Backwards

    The first edition of my newsletter. You can subscribe here for very occasional rambling reflections like the one below.   Archives have always seemed romantic to me. It’s only recently I’ve discovered that they’re less romantic yet far more fascinating than I realised. I’ve spent some time in two archives, The Foundations of British Sociology archive at Keele…

  • Stafford Beer, Reflexive Poise and Human Flourishing

    I came across the following extract in the Stafford Beer archive at Liverpool John Moores University. It is from a letter which Beer writes to his children, offering insights into the character of existence as a Christmas present to them. His use of the term poise caught my attention. I first used the term poise in a masters dissertation  investigating the…

  • The worldly intellectualism of Stafford Beer

    Earlier today I visited the Stafford Beer archive at Liverpool John Moores University. I had been curious about it for some time after talking to Mark Johnson who has been exploring the archive for a number of years. For those unfamiliar with him, I should start by pointing out how Beer was a fascinating and…

  • Fascism and the liberal imagination

    There’s a provocative argument on pg 81-82 of Žižek’s Like a Thief in Broad Daylight concerning the role of fascism in the contemporary liberal imagination. The invocation of the epochal enemy emerging from outside the political sphere allows the antagonism within it to be suppressed: The demonized image of a fascist threat clearly serves as a new political…

  • Developing platform literacy from the ground up can be a bulwark against corporate power

    There’s an interesting piece by Alastair Creelman in Elm Magazine on platform literacy and the collaborations which will be necessary to develop it as an agenda. While transnational initiatives have their value, their efficacy is likely to be dependent upon their mediation by professional stakeholders: There are excellent guidelines and initiatives from the EU Commission…

  • Provincialising disruption

    The robots are coming! The robots are coming! After watching More Human Than Human, I’ve woken up preoccupied by the rise of the robots narrative and how inadequate it is for making sense of the cultural politics and political economy of automation. The film is an engaging exploration of artificial intelligence and its social significance. While its…

  • The meaning of Jair Bolsonaro

    This is a insightful reflection from Glenn Greenwald on the meaning of Jair Bolsonaro. He takes issue with the notion that Bolsonaro is Brazil’s Trump for three reasons: he explicitly advocates military dictatorship, he is subject to weak constitutional constraints and he is from an older far right rather than the contemporary alt-right movement. A huge portion of his vote…

  • Mining resonance to the point of exhaustion, or, why does this sound so shit to me now?

    On Friday night I was travelling home after a few days in Zurich. Waiting for my plane in Zurich airport, Bats by Uncluded came up on the random playlist I was listening to. I hadn’t realised Aesop Rock and Kimya Dawson had collaborated. I was immediately gripped as what had been background listening suddenly grabbed my full attention,…

  • Capitalism, Social Science and the Platform University

    December 13th-14th, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge In recent discussions of capitalism, the notion of the ‘platform’ has come to play a prominent role in conceptualising our present circumstances and imagining our potential futures. There are criticisms which can be raised of the platform-as-metaphor, however we believe it provides a useful hook through which to…

  • The cultural sociology of defensive elites

    Why do expressions of wealth through social media attract such attention? How does something like rich kids of instagram provoke such morbid fascination in so many? In Uneasy Street: Anxieties of Affluence Rachel Sherman offers a penetrating account of the moral universe which wealthy New Yorkers have constructed for themselves, unpicking the ambivalence they feel concerning their…

  • Détournement and social media

    I was struck when reading this description of Donna Haraway’s work in Razmig Keucheyan’s Left Hemisphere of how useful the notion of détournement could be in navigating the contemporary politics of social media. As he writes on loc 4454: Like a number of contemporary critical thinkers, Haraway subscribes to the strategic paradigm of détournement. Its origins go…

  • The weaponisation of epistemology: strategy and tactics

    I spent this afternoon at the Cambridge film festival, watching two films which couldn’t seem more different yet spoke to our current moment in oddly similar ways. All the President’s Men was released in 1976, telling the story of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s investigation of the Watergate scandal. The Waldheim Waltz was released this year yet…

  • An introduction to social media for academics

    I’m currently in Zurich preparing for a panel on social media, organised by the CareerElixier group. I was sent some questions in advance and I’m writing up responses in order to gather my thoughts.  Why is social media a subject for academics? Social media is a subject for academics because it is a subject for…

  • Trump administration seeking permission to destroy massive amounts of existing and future records

    There’s a full explanation of this on Russ Kick’s blog. If I understand correctly, there a formal process in which federal agencies coordinate with the national archive to determine the status of public records. These requests are usually green lit by the National Archives & Records Administration, though they theoretically have the power to refuse…

  • The challenge of being ready to think

    In a wonderful London Review of Books piece, the composer Nico Muhly reflects on the challenge of being ready to think. If our work is embedded in a particular environment, scaffolded by the equipment we have within an office, it can be difficult to think when on the move. But even if we can take…

  • The everyday life of platform capitalism’s elites

    I’m currently reading Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence by Rachel Sherman. It’s a fascinating investigation of how wealthy New Yorkers (with household incomes greater than $250,000, placing them in the top 5% of the city) experience their own privilege. Sherman’s focus is on parents in their thirties and forties engaged in home renovation, exploring how this undertaking leaves…

  • The rightward drift of Slavoj Žižek

    I’ve picked up a Slavoj Žižek book for the first time in a while and found the characteristics which led me to take a break from his writing have only grown over time. He links Me Too to victimhood early in Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Humanity. From pg 6: As…

  • Against poststructuralism

    I thought these reflections by Mariano Zukerfeld on pg 4 of his Knowledge in the Age of Digital Capitalism were absolutely spot on. It would unfair to present this as a characteristic of poststructuralism as such, but there can be a dogmatism to poststructuralist thinkers which is all the more frustrating for their own obliviousness to it: On…

  • The vulnerability of human experience to abbreviation

    This expression used by Alain de Botton in his How Proust Can Change Your Life (pg 42) stood out to me. He uses it in relation to the morning news, reflecting on how reporting inevitably strips away from the reality of what is reported on. This is an example of a broader tendency for human experience to “be…

  • The generational politics of critical theory

    This observation from loc 785 of The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Contemporary Theory by Razmig Keucheyan caught my eye. His concern is with the intellectual implications of a generation’s dominance within critical thought: The new critical theories have not been developed by ‘new’ theorists, if by that is meant biologically young intellectuals. There are, of course, young…

  • SRA Annual Conference 2018: Adapting to change – where next for social research?

    As the SRA turns 40 we take stock and look ahead.  With the advent of innovative techniques, tools and technology, social research has transformed in recent decades. But with advancement has come data misuse, and widespread public scepticism – so the profession faces continuing rapid change and rising uncertainty. The conference will explore how researchers…

  • CfP: Post-H(uman) index? Politics, metrics, and agency in the accelerated academy

    November 29th and 30th Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge Organised by Jana Bacevic, Mark Carrigan and Filip Vostal  Keynote: Liberalism Must Be Defeated: The Obsolescence of Bourgeois Theory in the Anthropocene by Gary Hall, Director of Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, UK. The conference seeks to conceptualise change in contemporary knowledge production in…

  • The Foundations of British Sociology

    This one-day event intends to raise awareness of the Foundations of British Sociology archive maintained by Keele University. This remarkable resource collects a diverse array of materials from the 1880s to the 1950s, gifted to the university when the Institute of Sociology was dissolved in 1955. ‘Members of the societies founded The Sociological Review, contributed to early…

  • Films I’ve seen recently

    Since I keep forgetting which films I’ve seen, here’s a list for my own purposes, starting in late July 2018: Hotel Artemis Generation Wealth Annihilation Under the Tree Ant Man and the Wasp The Escape The Heiresses Mad to be Normal Moneyball BlackKklansman Apostasy Cold War Searching American Animals A Simple Favour The Big Lebowski…

  • Books I’ve been reading

    A list of the books I’ve finished since August 20th 2018, replacing my older blog posts. I’m increasingly using these lists as a way to jog my memory and the fragmented blog posts aren’t very useful for that. Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class And How They Got There by David Brooks Frenemies: The Epic…

  • Social ontology amidst the wreckage of techno-progressive orthodoxy

    I found this review of Trump and the Media by Nicholas Carr in the LA Review of Books immensely thought-provoking. His focus is on the book’s historical contribution, contextualising the enthusiasm with which social media was greeted in terms of long term concerns about the centralisation of mass media. We can’t understand the ideal of…

  • Will I survive a nine mile walk and make it home to Molly?

    On September 8th I’m going to walk nine miles from the top of my street in Cambridge to Chittering in Cambridgeshire. Will I survive walking without an experienced navigator or a reliable 3G signal? Will I slip out of exhaustion and fall into the Cam? Will I ever make it home to Molly? The only way…

  • Workshop: The Foundations of British Sociology

    This one-day event intends to raise awareness of the Foundations of British Sociology archive maintained by Keele University. This remarkable resource collects a diverse array of materials from the 1880s to the 1950s, gifted to the university when the Institute of Sociology was dissolved in 1955. ‘Members of the societies founded The Sociological Review, contributed to early…

  • I’m slightly embarrassed to admit how much I think I would enjoy this job

    From loc 1171-1189 of Frenemies, Ken Auletta’s new book about the declining fortunes of the advertising industry: Then as vice chair heading Business Innovations, Comstock became the company’s chief futurist, attending digital confabs, planting herself in Silicon Valley, scouting and making it her business to know cutting-edge agencies and entrepreneurs, seeking out partners for unusual ways to…

  • When the populists inspire the ad men

    I came across this extract on loc 1342-1360 of Frenemies, Ken Auletta’s new book about the declining fortunes of the advertising industry, detailing an intervention made by thought leader extraordinaire Rishad Tobaccowala, chief strategist at  Publicis groupe. It was in the context of a meeting between executives from a range of agencies and Bank of America to…

  • What I want to do in the next few years and how I plan to do it

    In the last week, I’ve realised that I’ve made a fundamental error in how I’ve approached using Omnifocus over the last few years. What has always appealed to me is the flexibility it affords, enabling me to disentangle what I have to do from where and how I do it. If your working life consists…

  • The (creepy) spirit of digital capitalism

    This is an accusation which Jaron Lanier makes strongly on pg 134 of his recent Ten Reasons To Delete Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Coming from someone who was less of an insider, it might seem like a rather shrill and slightly paranoid reading of the culture of digital elites. However I find it…

  • The disjointed temporality of political life

    I’ve long been drawn to accounts of the everyday lives of politicians. This isn’t so much a matter of biographical curiosity, as much as a preoccupation with temporality. It is not that the temporal character of our lives moulds us but rather that the things which do are always inflected through temporality. I’m convinced you…

  • The intellectual sclerosis of the superstar intellectual

    There’s a fascinating and honest account in Daniel Drezner’s The Ideas Industry, reflecting on his own growing celebrity and the lethal challenges which have come with it. This is something I’ve often wondered about, particularly in relation to how widely one reads and the circle of people one engages with. From pg 247: Furthermore, there…

  • The claustrophobia of imminence

    I woke up with this phrase stuck in my mind recently, after a strange and vivid dream. It involved a landscape somewhere between Deep Space Nine and Snowpiercer, dark corners filled with metallic pools and steam hissing across braying crowds. I can’t remember the narrative of the dream but a crucial idea from it remains…

  • The incredible shrinking scope of the celebrity intellectual

    What is it like to be an celebrity intellectual? I thought this was an admirably honest answer by Yuval Noah Harari to the question of how fame has changed his life. It seems obvious he would be far from alone in this experience, suggesting we could reflect on it as symptomatic of knowledge production by celebrity intellectuals…

  • The Labour leadership’s embrace of social media outriders

    Even if I wasn’t a supporter, I’d have been fascinated by Labour’s use of social media in the last election and how this built upon prior successes in successive leadership elections. The new book by Steve Howell, deputy director of strategy and communications during the election, contains many fascinating snippets about this that I hadn’t…

  • What is it like to be a stray dog in a city?

    An artistic answer by Andrea Luka Zimmerman to a question I have found myself reflecting on with disturbing frequency:

  • Hybrid formats for communicating theory

    For the next edition of Social Media for Academics, I’ve been thinking a lot about hybrid formats for presenting theoretical ideas through social media. A really powerful example of this is the video essay Camera Ludica by marco de mutiis which explores photography in video games through a three-part essay combining in game footage, plain…

  • The Face in the Crowd

    I saw a wonderful exhibition this weekend, collecting work by Alex Prager combining photography and film in intricately staged hyper-real scenes. The collection that has been playing on mind since seeing it is Face In The Crowd. If you click on the screenshot below, it will take you to the website where you can see the…

  • The Sociological Review and the History of the Discipline

    This one-day event intends to raise awareness of the Foundations of British Sociology archive maintained by Keele University. This remarkable resource collects a diverse array of materials from the 1880s to the 1950s, gifted to the university when the Institute of Sociology was dissolved in 1955. ‘Members of the societies founded The Sociological Review, contributed to early…

  • The Sociology of Stupid Assumptions

    A few months ago, I recounted to a collaborator the details of a foolish mistake I made when planning a special occasion. Assuming the cake would be the easiest item on a long to do list, I left this till last, failing to recognise that cakes of this sort would require a lot of notice.…

  • The epochal tetchiness of Anglo-American centrists

    In his wonderful October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, China Miéville uses the phrase ‘epochal tetchiness’ to describe the political contribution of Russian liberals prior to 1917. Their angry, disjointed responses to events failed to influence the changes which provoked their outrage, leaving them acting frantically without consequence as they were superseded by history.…

  • Nietzsche on the narrow chamber of human consciousness

    From the Third Treatise: What Do Ascetic Ideals Means of On The Genealogy of Morality: Much more frequent than this sort of hypnotic general suppression of sensitivity, of susceptibility to pain – which presupposes even rarer forces, above all courage, contempt of opinions, “intellectual stoicism” – is the attempt at a different kind of training against conditions of…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #42

    The Party by Elizabeth Day The Power by Naomi Alderman The Secret History by Donna Tart The Space Barons by Christian Davenport Machine Platform Crowd by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee Alt-Right by Mike Wendlin The People vs Tech by Jamie Bartlett Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier Bean Counters by Richard Brooks The…

  • What does the case of Jeffery Sachs tell us about the accelerated academy?

    The Idealist by Nina Monk, cited by Daniel Drezner in the Ideas Industry, presents a vivid account of the frantic pace at which the economist Jeffery Sachs has tended to work. This intensified work, fitting as much action as possible into each day, will appear to his detractors as a desperate lust for influence. His…

  • From the Ivory Tower to the Glass Tower

    I just realised this keynote I did in Nottingham last year is available online as a videocast: https://mediaspace.nottingham.ac.uk/media/UoNSMart+KeynoteA+Mark+Carrigan+-+The+Glass+Tower/1_qwp6r8ah