Blog

markcarrigan.net/

Profile

markcarrigan.net/author/street

Homepage

markcarrigan.net/

  • The Good Intentions of Engineers

    This important contrast is outlined powerfully by danah boyd: From the outside, companies like Facebook and Google seem pretty evil to many people. They’re situated in a capitalist logic that many advocates and progressives despise. They’re opaque and they don’t engage the public in their decision-making processes, even when those decisions have huge implications for…

  • An STS approach to ‘post-truth’

    This 4S panel looks fascinating: I’d like to invite you to consider submitting a paper abstract to the panel I’m co-convening for 4S in Boston this year. Abstracts are due March 1. It would be great to have critical internet/digital media studies folks working with STS to speak to the themes of this panel. Rich,…

  • Managing ‘us’ to preserve the myth

    In his Uberworked and Underpaid, Trebor Scholz draws out an important parallel between the platform capitalism of YouTube and the near universally praised Wikipedia: Unsurprisingly, YouTube hires countless consultants to better understand how to trigger the participation of the crowd. They wonder how they can get unpaid producers to create value. But equally, on the…

  • Platform capitalism or sharing economy?

    From Uberworked and Underpaid, by Trebor Scholz, loc 1290: I am using the term “platform capitalism,” introduced by Sascha Lobo77 and Martin Kenney, to bypass the fraudulent togetherness of terms like “peer,” “sharing,” and “economy.” How can we talk about genuine sharing or innovation when a third party immediately monetizes your every interaction for the…

  • Platform capitalism or sharing economy?

    From Uberworked and Underpaid, by Trebor Scholz, loc 1290: I am using the term “platform capitalism,” introduced by Sascha Lobo77 and Martin Kenney, to bypass the fraudulent togetherness of terms like “peer,” “sharing,” and “economy.” How can we talk about genuine sharing or innovation when a third party immediately monetizes your every interaction for the…

  • The embedded digital economy 

    One of the things that I liked about Platform Capitalism, by Nick Srineck, was its concern to avoid analysing the tech sector as sui generis. By situating it in social and economic history, we are left with a much richer account of where it came from, why it is the way it is and where…

  • The Politics of #MeetUp

    This is interesting. I’m instinctively sceptical of it for a number of reasons but I’m very interested to see how it unfolds: Meetup has always served as an organizing platform for a wide range of political views, welcoming everyone from the Howard Deaniacs to the Tea Party. Meetup will always welcome people with different beliefs. But after the…

  • The duality of the platform: users and workers

    There’s an interesting passage in Uberworked and Underpaid, by Trebor Scholz, in which he discusses the contrasting experience of Amazon Mechanical Turk by users and workers. From loc 719: While AMT is profiting robustly, 11 it has –following the observations of several workers –not made significant updates to its user interfaces since its inception, and…

  • From the crowd-as-threat to crowd-as-resource 

    From Uberworked and Underpaid, by Trebor Scholz, loc 685-704: “Users happily do for free what companies would otherwise have to pay employees to do,” says former Wired editor turned drone manufacturer, Chris Anderson. It’s a capitalist’s dream come true. “It’s not outsourcing, it’s crowdsourcing. Collectively, customers have virtually unlimited time and energy; only peer production…

  • The knowledge economy and imagined freedom from material constraint 

    A speech by Ronald Reagan at Moscow State University on May 31st 1988. Reprinted in One Market Under God, by Thomas Frank, Loc 7341-7365: “Like a chrysalis, we’re emerging from the economy of the Industrail Revolution—an economy confined to and limited by the Earth’s physical resources—into, as one economist titled his book, The Economy in…

  • Social media and populism 

    This excellent essay by Jan-Werner Müller in the London Review of Books raises an important issue about the forms of political mobilisation facilitated by social media: Trump has called himself the Hemingway of the 140 characters. He has ‘the best words’. He loves Twitter, he says, because it’s like having one’s own newspaper, but without…

  • An Introduction to the Accelerated Academy: by me and @Filvos

    Our opening talk at the second Accelerated Academy conference in Leiden in December: Some two years ago the two of us started discussing Hartmut Rosa’s theory of social acceleration and how it manifests in the present condition. Though we found his theory fascinating and provocative we also noted important conceptual and empirical problems with his…

  • Fighting for ‘political correctness’ in an age of Trump

    I’ve recently found myself thinking back to an argument which Jeff Weeks makes in The World We Have Won. From pg 7: The real achievement is that inequality has lost all its moral justification, and this has profoundly shifted the debate. Inequality now has to be justified in ways it never had to be before.…

  • CfP: Digital Netizens at the crossroads of sharing and privatising

    I’ve helped organise this session at IS4S 2017, see here for full application details: DIGITAL NETIZENS AT THE CROSSROADS OF SHARING AND PRIVATISING Organizers SIG Emergent Systems, Information and Society (supported by the Leibniz-Sozietät der Wissenschaften zu Berlin and the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science) and the Institut für Design Science München…

  • What is platform cooperativism?

    An admirably concise definition by Trebor Scholz on loc 432 of Uberworked and Underpaid: This term can be briefly described as follows: First, it is about cloning the technological heart of Uber, Task Rabbit, Airbnb, or UpWork. Platform cooperativism creatively embraces, adapts, or reshapes technologies of the sharing economy, putting them to work with different…

  • Mobilising a sharing economy revolution

    One of the most interesting things about so-called sharing economy companies is their mobilisation of users in defence of their political objectives. This is something which can prove uniquely urgent because of the sheer number of municipalities in which they operate, leaving them exposed to regulatory backlash particularly given their tendency to self-righteously disregard laws…

  • Charles Taylor: Ways Democracy Can Slip Away

    https://livestream.com/accounts/565635/events/6452335/videos/139152910/player?width=640&height=360&enableInfo=true&defaultDrawer=&autoPlay=true&mute=false

  • God View

    All the biggest platforms have it, only Uber is honest enough (or careless) enough to name it accurately. From loc 3962-3979 of Brad Stone’s The Upstarts: God View was an internal service that Uber made available to all of its employees, and it was one reason the company had grown so quickly. All of the…

  • The Political Economy of Attention

    I love this concise formulation by Trebor Scholz in Uberworked and Underpaid. From loc 338: Every day, one billion people in advanced economies have between two billion and six billion spare hours among them. 13 Capturing and monetizing those hours is the goal of platform capitalism.

  • Building the cult of airbnb

    From The Upstarts, by Brad Stone, loc 3490: In January 2013, Chesky hired a new head of community who shared his devotion to the cause —Douglas Atkin, a former advertising agency executive who had written a 2005 book, The Culting of Brands: Turn Your Customers into True Believers, that drew business lessons from devotional sects…

  • Performing your faith in the great disruptive project

    I liked this snippet in The Upstarts, by Brad Stone, describing how Belinda Jones went from consultant to being airbnb’s first in-house attorney. From loc 3212: She then won Chesky’s trust, in part by enthusiastically embracing the company’s sense of its own virtue, its near religious certainty of its position in the vanguard of a…

  • Airbnb and the Myth of ‘Us’

    Reading this section in Brad Stone’s The Upstarts, it occurred to me this faith* displayed by the airbnb founders is an interesting example of what Nick Couldry describes as ‘the myth of us’. From loc 2171: EJ had also raised fundamental questions about the safety of users on its site and Airbnb’s role as an…

  • Uber’s first experiment in mobilising their users

    This was back in 2012. There have been many more since and will be many more in future. From The Upstarts, by Brad Stone, loc 2871-2887: But Uber was going to need more than Tweets to sway the DC city council. First, colleagues remember, Kalanick sought the backing of the DC tech community and tried…

  • Technology, regulation and disruption

    One recurring theme in Brad Stone’s excellent The Upstarts is how technological assumptions encoded into legislation become focal points for conflicts with ‘disruptive’ companies. For instance, as loc 2348 illustrates, the novel dispatch system used by Uber complicated the distinction between taxis and livery cars: Stressing that Uber cars were not hailed or even electronically hailed…

  • What does techno-fascism look like?

    The emerging ideology of the tech-lords: A subculture within the industry that brought you Angry Birds is forming: the techlord. Techlords are the special subset of the nouveau riche who see themselves above the petty restrictions that apply to lesser people. They might feel that they possess an identity which is singled out for hate crimes by virtue of existing,…

  • Educational technology in an age of Trump: a risk to students?

    I find this suggestion by Audrey Watters extremely plausible. Full interview here. I think that education data should be a top priority under the new Trump regime. Schools are wildly obsessed with collecting data. They have been for a very long time, but new digital technologies have compelled them to collect even more, all with…

  • Removing Statute 24 constitutes a seismic shift in job security for all Warwick university employees

    An e-mail from UCU which everyone at Warwick needs to read: Removing Statute 24 constitutes a seismic shift in job security for all university employees What is at stake? Job Security for All Employees Abolishing all but one paragraph of Statute 24 will make it much easier and quicker to dismiss/discipline academic staff. If they…

  • Liberating discretionary effort by robbing your staff of a personal life

    There’s an interesting extract in The Upstarts, by Brad Stone, concerning discretionary effort: what could your employees do if they were properly motivated? I’m fascinated by this concept because of its open-ended character. Once one begins to think like this, it’s always possible to imagine your employees doing more. The full actualisation of discretionary effort is a vanishing point and this…

  • Uber as a moral project

    When the Uber co-founders recount the story of their project, they stress the importance of the consumer to it. This might seem like familiar rhetoric but I want to suggest it reflects a deep (and problematic) commitment. In The Upstarts, by Brad Stone, we see how the early idea for Uber came to Garrett Camp when he…

  • The Workation

    I just came across this term in The Upstarts, by Brad Stone, loc 1828: Enjoying a modicum of momentum, Kalanick leased a new office in San Francisco but had a month before he could move in. Instead of waiting, he took the whole company to Thailand, where they worked eighteen-hour days out of cafés and…

  • The Internet Beyond Numbers

    This looks like a great conference. I long for a travel budget: Conference website: http://internetbeyond.net/en/ Key questions – The history of the internet: the development of the networks, local cases of technology adoption – The alternative networks, intranet, Fidonet as well as local small networks – Anthropological and ethnographic studies of the internet: how to…

  • Micro-tasking political activism

    This is disturbing, though unsurprising. How widespread could it get? Normative pressure is enough to lead to a removal at present but that seems unlikely to be a viable long-term counter-strategy: Someone out there really wants President Donald Trump’s polarizing nominee for secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, to get the job — so much so…

  • The spammy origins of Airbnb 

    From The Upstarts, by Brad Stone, Loc 1519-1533: In late 2009, a few months after it had graduated from YC, Airbnb appeared to create a mechanism that automatically sent an e-mail to anyone who posted a property for rent on Craigslist, even if that person had specified that he did not want to receive unsolicited…

  • The ‘injustice’ that motivated Uber

    From The Upstarts, by Brad Stone, loc 771-786: On a separate night in Paris, the group went for drinks on the Champs-Élysées and then to an elegant late-night dinner that included wine and foie gras. At 2: 00 a.m., somewhat intoxicated after a night of revelry, they hailed a cab on the street. Apparently they…

  • The cultural lure of Silicon Valley

    Upstarts, by Brad Stone, loc 337-353 describes Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky’s preoccupation with Silicon Valley as a dissatisfied recent graduate of design school:  At the time he was obsessively following the story of the fantastically successful founders of the video-sharing site YouTube; he was spending hours on the site as well as watching Steve Jobs’s…

  • The most absurd television adverts of the dot-com boom

    Any suggestions of ones I should add to this list?  

  • What does it mean to be a public sociologist in the era of @realDonaldTrump?

    Abstract for my keynote at Public sociology and the role of the researcher: engagement, communication and academic activism In the summer of 2011, David Cameron’s response to the English riots was to declare that “this is criminality pure and simple”.  In the summer of 2013, then Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper proclaimed that “this is not a…

  • DIGITAL EXISTENCE II: Precarious Media Life – Call for contributions

    Call for contributions “DIGITAL EXISTENCE II: Precarious Media Life” Conference October 30-November 1, 2017, at the Sigtuna Foundation, Sweden Digital media have the power to transform our existence, raising particular questions and vulnerabilities as part of the experience of being human in the digital age. Big data and hyperconnectivity, tracking and trolling, digital life and…

  • CfP: Digital Inequalities and Discrimination in the Big Data Era

    *DIGITAL INEQUALITIES AND DISCRIMINATION IN THE BIG DATA ERA* *Preconference of the International Communication Association ’17* May 25, 2017, San Diego Hilton Bayfront, San Diego, California (USA) Co-sponsored by the Pacific ICTD Collaborative, the School of Communications (University of Hawaii at Manoa), and the Institute for Information Policy (Penn State University) *Abstracts due: February 10,…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #31

    Books I’ve read recently: Men Explain Things To Me And Other Essays by Rebecca Solnit This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things by Whitney Phillips The Monsters of Educational Technology by Audrey Watters Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek Working The Phones by Jamie Woodcock Conflict In The Academy by Marcus Morgan and Patrick Baert…

  • Epochal theorising and business bullshit

    I’ve always had an ambivalent relationship to the idea of late modernity. It was the work of Bauman, Beck and Giddens which drew me into Sociology, presenting a till then cynical philosophy student with the possibility that one could meaningfully engage with the world and diagnose the times in a philosophical register. But coming to recognise the…

  • The marketing case for radical university leadership, or at least the pretence thereof

    From One Market Under God, by Thomas Frank, loc 4896: Asserting that mankind had entered a new era in which the value of brands mattered far more than any material factors, Dru argued that successful brands would have to invent some high-profile scheme for identifying themselves with liberation; they would have to identify and attack…

  • Cultural representations of finance 

    From One Market Under God, by Thomas Frank, loc 2230: For all the revulsion expressed by books like Liar’s Poker and Barbarians at the Gate, the dominant note was starstruck wonderment at these “masters of the universe,” at their millions and their manses, at their Gulfstream jets and Mercedes cars, at the high quality of…

  • Cartoons about the impact agenda 

    Source: http://www.europeanmovement.ie/ymip-conference-on-responsible-research-and-innovation/ Source: New Scientist

  • What does it mean to be an intellectual in an age of social media?

    In Zygmunt Bauman’s Legislators and Interpreters, he identifies two different contexts in which the role of the ‘intellectual’ is performed and two different strategies which develop in response to them: The legislator makes “authoritative statements” which “arbitrate in controversies of opinions and which selects those opinions which, having been selected, become correct and binding”. The…

  • “Open, good. Closed, bad. Tattoo it on your forehead”: Placing the technology sector in social and economic history

    I’m currently reading Thomas Frank’s One Market Under God, a remarkably prescient book published in 2000 which has a lot of insight into contemporary cultures of technological evangelism. The book is concerned with what Frank sees as a transition in American life from a form of populism predicated on cultural reaction to one grounded in…

  • On Social Acceleration

    Earlier on this month, Hartmut Rosa gave a fascinating lecture at the LSE, marking the launch of this new book on the Sociology of Speed. It’s a great overview of his theory of acceleration, but it also included some things I hadn’t encountered before: His intellectual trajectory was shaped by encountering Charles Taylor’s work while…

  • The Importance of Business Culture

    From One Market Under God, by Thomas Frank, loc 1787: It is worth examining the way business talk about itself, the fantasies it spins, the role it writes for itself in our lives. It is important to pay attention when CEOs tell the world they would rather surf than pray, show up at work in…

  • The Banal Bullshit of Thomas Friedman

    From One Market Under God, by Thomas Frank, loc 1395: Friedman was in some ways the very embodiment of market populism at flood tide. As the intellectual life of the decade came to resemble a race among popular financial commentators to win for themselves, through a sort of cosmic optimism about all things dotcom, the…

  • Denial and the Antinomies of (Post)Truth

    Rarely can a film have been as timely as Denial. It tells the story of the libel action the holocaust denying historian David Irving took against Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, alleging that she had damaged his professional reputation as a historian by claiming he had wilfully distorted evidence. The film recounts the events leading up to the trial,…

  • The Sociology of Predatory Publishing

    In a recent article on Derivace, Luděk Brož, Tereza Stöckelová and Filip Vostal reflect on the case of Wadim Strielkowski, whose over-enthusiastic game playing was the subject of extensive debate within the Czech academy. There are many factors which have, as a whole, led his prolific rate of publication to be regarded with deep suspicion, such as…

  • CfP: Public sociology and the role of the researcher

    Very pleased to be keynoting this fantastic BSA PhD conference in a couple of months: What is the role of the researcher outside the academy? This event invites Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers to innovate and critically reflect on three related areas of public sociology: academic activism, public engagement, and participation and co-production. It encourages researchers…

  • pirate philosophy in (and for) the digital university

    Some notes on Gary Hall’s Pirate Philosophy, a book I found more thought-provoking than any I’d read in some time. The podcast above is an interview I recorded with him a couple of months ago.  The forgetfulness of technology which critics like Stiegler argue afflicts contemporary thought also applies to the narrower world in which such…

  • Out trolling the trolls

    I’ve just finished reading the excellent This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things by Whitney Phillips. It offers fascinating insights into the evolution of ‘trolling’ as a practice, leading from its original form of sub-cultural self-identification to the diffusion of the label across the entire spectrum of online activities deemed to be anti-social. Her…

  • The Launch of the Digital Geographies Group

    I’m very excited that the Digital Geographies working group of the Royal Geographical Society is now up and running. Find out more on their website here. Our aims are to: Provide a platform and intellectual community for geographers to engage in discussions of the digital and geography Help stimulate and deepen critical engagement and conceptualisation…

  • trying to write when you’re triaging

    In the last couple of weeks, I’ve started blogging again at a rate I haven’t in a number of years. The reason for this is to try and abate a growing problem with my writing. In the last year or so, I’ve found myself feeling increasingly overloaded and lacking mental bandwidth to a degree I…

  • Eric Schmidt’s Predictions for the Next Decade

  • some thoughts on the poetics of impact

    In the last couple of months, I’ve been thinking a lot about the poetics of impact. I’ve always been somewhat ambivalent about the impact agenda, initially suspecting that it might open up opportunities for valuable activity to be recognised within the increasingly restrictive confines of the accelerated academy. I wasn’t alone in this. This is how…

  • Pascalian Meditations on the Digital University

    Does the situation of skholḗ still obtain in the accelerated academy? This is what Bourdieu described as “the free time, freed from the urgencies of the world, that allows a free and liberated relation to those urgencies and to the world” (p. 1). This condition was always unevenly distributed, its ubiquity apparent only relative to one’s own elite status…

  • Social media for academics and the increasing toxicity of the online ecology

    In the last few months, I’ve begun to seriously plan a much more sophisticated follow-up to Social Media for Academics, investigating the implications of social media for academic labour. A crucial aspect of this, which seems likely to become much more so with each passing year, concerns the toxicity of many of the online environments in…

  • “Scholar? Nah, I’m a grants factory…”

    From The Research Impact Handbook, by Mark Reed, loc 1575: Andrew Derrington, in The Research Funding Toolkit , tries to help by conceiving of research as a “grants factory”, in which researchers churn out proposals dispassionately on a production line, starting work on the next proposal as soon as the last one is submitted, and…

  • Writing prompts for a PhD journal

    I’m a big advocate of the research journal as a key part of doing a PhD. I think blogs are wonderful for this but I realise this might not be for everyone. The important thing is uniting reflection and engagement as an habitual part of the research process. Patter has some great ideas here about topics…

  • The MOOC as a trojan horse

    I’ve long had an ambivalent relationship to MOOCs. In principle, I don’t see anything wrong with the idea of distance learning of this sort and they are something that I’ve personally enjoyed in the past. This is far from a ringing endorsement, in fact MOOCs leave me lukewarm in many respects, but I think it’s important…

  • Social Media For Academics: Things To Try

    https://twitter.com/i/moments/823131942279331840

  • The epistemology of democracy’s death

    In the last few weeks, I’ve written a few times about the epistemological questions posed by post-democracy. This notion put forward by Colin Crouch sees transitions within mature democracies as involving a hollowing out of democratic  structures rather than a dramatic shift to non-democracy. As he described it in a recent interview I did with…

  • Online Harassment

    In the last few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about online harassment. Even writing that sentence, I come face-to-face with my own privilege, as ‘online harassment’ is something I’m able to elect to think about rather than an unavoidable feature of my use of the internet. But the evidence is clear that online harassment…

  • Moral Responsibility in an Age of Distraction

    What’s the moral status of ‘thoughtlessness’? It can be invoked as a defence, used to claim that an action was less morally problematic because it expressed a lack of consideration rather than a deliberate intention. But as the wise Jim Gordon once pointed out, such actions can actually be worse in a way, reflecting a wilful…

  • Against ‘openness’

    From The Monsters of Educational Technology, by Audrey Watters, loc 1530: We act at our peril as if “open” is politically neutral, let alone politically good or progressive. Indeed, we sometimes use the word to stand in place of a politics of participatory democracy. We presume that, because something is “open” that it necessarily contains…

  • The forward-facing ideology of technology: erasing history and context 

    From The Monsters of Educational Technology, by Audrey Watters, loc 611: I think that’s something for you to keep in mind as you work your way through this course. It’s something to think about when we start to imagine and to build “education at scale.” What happens to context? What happens to local, regional education…

  • How universities shape the technology developed for them

    From The Monsters of Educational Technology, by Audrey Watters, loc 563: Why are we building learning management systems? Why are we building computer-assisted instructional tech? Current computing technologies demand neither. Open practices don’t either. Rather, it’s a certain institutional culture and a certain set of business interests that do. What alternatives can we build? What…

  • Social media for academics and the dangers of a “content delivery” mindset

    In her superb The Monsters of Educational Technology, Audrey Watters makes a convincing case that innovation in educational technology has been dominated by the trope of ‘content delivery’. New technologies are seen to improve content delivery in a variety of ways: scale, speed, cost etc. But this is a limited and limiting conception of education,…

  • The Banal Reality of Democracy’s Death

    There are two issues which have long fascinated me that seem more salient with each passing day. Our struggle to conceptualise long term social change from within (particularly the possibility of civilisational collapse) and the transition away from democratic government. Cinematic spectacle dominates the imaginary through we conceive of either, whether this is our imagery of what a collapsed…

  • Deadline soon! @TheSocReview ECR Essay Competition

    We invite essays exploring the future of sociology in its relationships with other cognate disciplines such as anthropology and geography. Echoing The Sociological Review’s Manifesto, we seek to encourage reflections on ‘what could be thought differently, and how that creates possibilities for what could and should be done next’. We are particularly interested in contributions…

  • ‘Disruption’ as the last refuge of the Third Way

    A couple of months ago, The New Statesman carried an interview with Tony Blair for the first time in a long time. Leaving aside how haunted the man looked in the portrait accompanying it, what stood out to me about it was how readily he had incorporated techno-speak into the language of the third way. Here are some…

  • Quit social media

    A provocative argument put forward by someone who’s built a high-profile secondary career through blogging:

  • Some recent videos of Harmut Rosa talking about social acceleration

  • Two Visions of our Automated Retail Future

    In the last month, I’ve seen two scenes of automated retail which I wish I could have taken a photograph of. In the first scene, people were queuing up for the automated checkouts at Marks & Spencer in Euston station while multiple cashiers were left redundant at their station. It’s a shop I use a lot and I…

  • Notes on Platform Capitalism

    In Platform Capitalism, Nick Srnicek seeks to address what he sees as a profound oversight in the existing literature on digital capitalism. One set of contributions focuses on emerging technologies and their implications for privacy and surveillance but ignores the economic analysis of ownership and profitability. Another set critically analyses the values embodied in corporate behaviour but…

  • The Digital Everyday: Exploration or Alienation?

    The Digital Everyday: Exploration or Alienation? This international conference aims at exploring the digital everyday, understood as the transformation of everyday life practices brought about by digital technology. From how we buy, walk around, get a cab, love, break up, go to bed, meet new people and sexual partners to the way we rate services,…

  • CfP: The Future Between Progress and Regression

    By the beginning of the twenty-first century, it has become “second nature” of sorts for social theorists to be reluctant to address explicitly the future of western societies, capitalism, modern democracy, and human civilization. After postmodernist critics in the social sciences and the humanities, had highlighted the affinity between utopianism and forms of totalitarianism, social…

  • The (un)productive chaos of disciplines

    An interesting extract from Conflict In The Academy, by Marcus Morgan and Patrick Baert. From loc 556-569: As Wyn Grant has noted in reference to the history of the discipline of Political Science in the United Kingdom, ‘intellectual openness and tolerance of eclecticism has its merits, but if it is allowed to become too uncontrolled…

  • Some thoughts on platform capitalism, cash hoarding, innovation and ideology

    There’s an excellent discussion in Nick Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism of the immense cash reserves that technology companies have built up in recent years. As he notes, the headline figures don’t tell the whole story because these reserves don’t take into account the other debts and liabilities of these corporations. But the broader financial context is one in…

  • South Park’s theory of trolling: Trevor’s Axiom

  • The Distraction of the Networked Writer

  • Discipline and innovate 

    I really like this overview in Conflict in the Academy, by Marcus Morgan and Patrick Baert, concerning the conflicting pressures towards discipline and innovation which afflict all disciplines. From loc 408-421: We would like to suggest that the story of the MacCabe controversy ought to be placed within a broader account of disciplinary professionalisation, one…

  • It looks like you’re trying to write a digital detox piece

    Fabulous chart from @ordinal:

  • The self-importance of researchers

    This interesting aside in Jamie Woodcock’s superb Working The Phones is worthy of further discussion. From loc 2698: Researchers often attribute a level of importance to their own research that is not shared by others, assuming that because they spend so much time on it others will want to know all about it too. How does…

  • Academic exceptionalism and the black-boxing of academic labour

    This introduction to Conflict in the Academy, by Marcus Morgan and Patrick Baert, nicely captures something I’ve been preoccupied by recently. From loc 63: we would like to suggest that tired clichés of ‘ivory towers’ and ‘dreaming spires’, or even more self-complementary myths of universities as platonic institutions directed towards disinterested enlightenment lead to an…

  • What did I do in 2016?

    Spurred on by this post from Mark Johnson, who I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time this year and co-authoring a paper with, here’s a round up of what I did in 2016: Wrote a paper for the Centre for Social Ontology book series about the digitalisation of the archive. Co-wrote a…