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The affinity between enlightened technocrats and digital elites
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The class politics of innovation and the new digital elite
In his remarkably prescient Listen Liberal, Thomas Frank describes the rapid capture of the Democratic Party by the professional class which took place during those decades when economic transition left them ascendent within the country as a whole. This was originally a predominance of financiers within the party but, with a transition marked by the…
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things I’ve been reading recently #29
Work’s Intimacy by Melissa Gregg The Uberfication of the University by Gary Hall Pirate Philosophy by Gary Hall Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened To The Party Of The People? by Thomas Frank Graphic Novels: Invisible Republic vol 1 by Gabriel Hardman, Corinna Bechko and Jordan Boyd Invisible Republic vol 2 by Gabriel Hardman, Corinna Bechko and Jordan Boyd Kick Ass…
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Digital Sociology vs STS
A joint Digital Sociology Study Group and STS Study Group Event at the Oxford Internet Institute Wednesday 13 December 2016, 13:00 The Oxford Internet Institute 1st Giles Oxford, OX1 3JS The concept of Digital Sociology has been in circulation for around five years now. But if the British Sociological Association’s annual conference is anything to…
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The pace of critique in a world of accelerating upheaval
There’s a pervasive idea that social critique must be slow, necessitating withdrawl from the world in order to carefully pierce through the veil of appearances. There’s a kernel of truth in this, in so far as that hasty analysis risks both superficiality and the reproduction of dominant frames of reference. A whole sequence of events…
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“we need more post-ideological, budget-balancing, technocratic centrism!”
As Thomas Frank points out in his Listen Liberal, loc 811-828, calls for more centrism have long followed the defeat of Democrat centrists: Democrats would run for the presidency on a professional-friendly platform of high-minded post-partisanship and be rejected by the electorate—and then, in the aftermath, those same Democrats would be ritually denounced by Washington’s…
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Donald Trump’s Words of Power
In an old essay about Heidegger’s conception of language, the philosopher Charles Taylor invokes the notion of ‘words of power’ to explain the power of Hitler’s rhetoric. Once we move away from a sense of language as an expression of individual meanings and purposes, we find ourselves somewhere entirely differently: The silence is where there…
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The Sociology of Trump: An Initial Reading List
Obviously I’m intellectualising in the hope of avoiding despair. Here’s my first go at a provisional Sociology of Trump reading list, incorporating books I’ve read, books I own and now prioritise reading and those I’ve bought this morning. I’ve deliberately cast the net as widely as possible: Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the…
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Four year post doc in #digitalsociology
The Technical University Berlin seeks a: Research Associate (Post-Doc) – Salary Grade 13 TV-L Berliner Hochschulen Part-time employment may be possible. The Institute for Sociology is starting a research group on „Entrepreneurial Group Dynamics“, that is funded in the Freigeist-Programme by VolkswagenFoundation (www.entrepreneurialgroups.org). A subproject will build a multi-level dataset through crowdsourcing that allows to…
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The Relative Autonomy of Symbolic Mediation
A quick note on the Wacquant workshop. We’ve turned to habitus and he’s offered the unproblematic claim that we always encounter the physical world through the prism of symbols. Social relations generate symbolic relations which are deposited in the body, shaping action in ways which serve to reproduce or transform social relations. It would be impossible to dispute this. However there’s…
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The Philosophical Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu
I’m at an interesting workshop being given by Loic Wacquant on the practical application of Bourdieu’s social theory. An aspect that has really stood out to me so far is Wacquant’s presentation of Bourdieu’s work as a philosophical sociology. The point is partly biographical, with Bourdieu’s transition into social research being a response to his national…
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Upcoming @BalanceNetwork events
An update on forthcoming events from this fascinating interdisciplinary research network: THREE CAFÉS: EXPERIENTIAL ARTISTIC RESEARCH EXPLORING INTER-RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND WELLBEING – 23 November & 28 November, Cambridge Anglia Ruskin University’s Marina Velez, Davide Natalini, and Debby Lauder are leading a trio of experimental interventions, designed to open up discursive spaces for interactive…
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The Place That Sends You Mad
Thanks to James Duggan for introducing me to this:
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How the Pentagon imagines the future of cities
This is absolutely fascinating:
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Digitalisation and the elimination of latency
From Work’s Intimacy, by Melissa Gregg, loc 3594-3609: Describing the impact of the BlackBerry in 2006 –just before the iPhone changed mobile computing for keeps –Research in Motion’s John Balsillie explained his bestselling devices as “latency eliminators.” According to this logic, Balsillie argued, “successful companies have hearts … and intrinsic force that makes the whole…
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What would the European Union look like in an American context?
This is a great analogy offered by Yanis Varoufakis in So The Weak Suffer What They Must? on loc 1016: The equivalent in the United States would have been a Washington bureaucracy, operating without a Senate or a House of Representatives to keep the bureaucrats in check, able to overrule state governments on almost anything…
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The Consolations of Gaming in Digital Capitalism
From How The World Changed Social Media, by Danny Miller et al, loc 1203 The stand-out figure here is from industrial China. This is probably the site where people’s working day involves the most unremitting labour in factories. It is therefore not all that surprising to note that they use gaming as a means to…
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things I’ve been reading recently #28
Books: Purity by Jonathan Franzen Trump and Me by Mark Singer OccupyMedia! by Christian Fuchs Strangers In Their Own Land by Arlie Hochschild And The Weak Suffer What They Must? by Yanis Varoufakis Graphic Novels: Injection vol 1 by Warren Ellis Injection vol 2 by Warren Ellis Moon Knight: From The Dead by Warren Ellis Kick Ass by Mark Millar Black…
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A Trump Presidency and the Militarisation of America
There are many reasons not to take Trump seriously. But given the real possibility he might win the election, we need to think through the stated consequence of his policies, particularly given the evident inability of the Republican establishment to restrain him before he holds political office, let alone when he has it. To take one example:…
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External economic relations and the norm of imbalance
From And The Weak Suffer What They Must? By Yanis Varoufakis, loc 353-368: What this means is that a closed, autarkic (meaning self-sufficient) economy, like that of Robinson Crusoe in literature or perhaps North Korea today, may be poor, solitary and undemocratic, but at least it is free of problems caused by other economies, by…
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The concept of ‘social editor’
I like the concept of ‘social editor’, though think it has to be treated carefully: In an earlier post for this blog, we argued that Facebook has crossed the line from being a mere host of user-created content to functioning as an editor of (professional) media content, at least for certain parts of its website,…
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10 facts about the changing digital news landscape
A really useful starting point for Pew research on this, saved here for future use: Digital news continues to evolve, pushed by a variety of innovations in recent years, from groundbreaking new technologies like virtual reality and automated reporting to experiments on social platforms that have altered campaign coverage. As journalists and media practitioners gather…
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Call for Abstracts: Minconference on Digital Sociology
Mini-Conference on Digital Sociology Call for Abstracts Eastern Sociological Society 2017 Annual Meeting, Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown Philadelphia, PA, February 23-26 The Eastern Sociological Society’s theme of “The End of the World as We Know It?,” references the rise of digital sociology in the following: “Technology is revolutionizing everyday life: powerful hand-held computers are ubiquitous, communications are…
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The political economy of podcasting
Saving this five part series to come back to properly later: Money is chasing money. Podcast advertising expanded at a 48 percent rate last year, and it’s forecast to grow about 25 percent a year through 2020. By that point, it would be approaching half a billion dollars in annual ad revenue. That growth is…
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The monopoly bias in the sharing economy
This struck me as an interesting case that reveals a broader truth about the sharing economy. A description of the very early merger of two companies offering city wide access to unused capacity in fitness classes, from Sweat Equity, by Jason Kelly, loc 1343: “When you look at quality fitness inventory in each city, there aren’t…
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Collapsing the parameters of our worlds
For many years I’ve been interested in the phenomenology of endurance sport. Or rather the phenomenology of the training required by endurance sport. How does this give order to life? What pleasures are derived from the training regime? What’s foreclosed by the strict management of self and how does this add to the appeal? I thought…
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Algorithmic Guerrilla Warfare
This documentary is worth watching for many reasons but there’s a particularly fascinating section in which the presenter goes undercover at a digital activism training course. The facilitator describes how he spends half an hour a day finding liberal books on Amazon and giving one star reviews, before explaining how this practice needs to be…
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Three weeks, four requests and still no ballot paper
I just got off the phone to Labour for the third time in three weeks, punctuated by a hopeful online request as well. When I last spoke to them, I was told my ballot paper would arrive by midnight yesterday. Now I’m told it will arrive by midnight on Monday. Given it’s already too late…
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The moralisation of insecurity and exploitation
From Strangers In Their Own Land, by Arlie Hochschild, loc 2587-2603: Not claiming to be a victim, accommodating the downside of loose regulations out of a loyalty to free enterprise—this was a tacit form of heroism, hidden to incurious liberals. Sometimes you had to endure bad news, Janice felt, for a higher good, such as…
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The poor white American abject
From Strangers In Their Own Land, by Arlie Hochschild, loc 2422: “Crazy redneck.” “White trash.” “Ignorant Southern Bible-thumper.” You realize that’s you they’re talking about. You hear these terms on the radio, on television, read them on blogs. The gall. You’re offended. You’re angry. And you really hate the endless parade of complainers encouraged by…
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The “least resistant personality profile”
A really disturbing extract from Arlie Hochschild’s new book, Strangers In Their Own Land. On loc 1445 she shares the profile of the “least resistant personality” offered by a consultancy firm in 1984, hired to advise on locating waste-to-energy plants in areas likely to provoke little resistance from the local community: – Longtime residents of small…
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Liberation and coercion
There should be a catchy phrase for this phenomenon. It’s important to understand in its own terms but contrasting emphasis on each pole tend to divert scholarly debates into tedious dichotomies that obscure the underlying reality. From loc 3411 of The Data Revolution by Rob Kitchin: Often seemingly opposing outcomes are bound together so that…
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things I’ve been reading recently #28
My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki Riots and Political Protest by Simon Winlow, Steve Hall, Daniel Briggs and James Treadwell The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis The Myth of Meritocracy by James Bloodworth Social Physics by Alex Petland The Data Revolution by Rob Kitchin
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Practical Sociology: Agenda for Action
BSA Sociologists outside Academia, in collaboration with Sage Publishing Ltd and the Sociological Imagination Practical Sociology: Agenda for Action A half-day workshop British Psychological Society meeting rooms, Tabernacle St London EC2A 4UE Monday 17 October 2016, 12.30 – 4.30pm How come – at least in the UK –you don’t come across people with ‘sociologist’ in…
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Social Movements and Pseudo-Activity
From Riots and Political Protest, by Simon Winlow, Steve Hall, Daniel Briggs and James Treadwell, pg 195: A great deal of contemporary radical politics is dominated by pseudo-activity: activity that covers up a deeper inactivity. Waving placards and moaning about the government are all well and good, but, if no benefit accrues, if policy doesn’t…
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Varoufakis on the monopoly power of platforms
An excellent footnote in The Global Minotour. From loc 3865: Once all your music, films, applications, addresses, etc. are on iTunes and readily accessible by any Apple product (iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc.), the opportunity cost of buying a Nokia or a Sony device is huge (even if these companies bring a better device to market)…
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Symposium: Anxiety and Work in the Accelerated Academy
Friday September 23rd at the University of Warwick, 9:30am to 6:00pm The culture and organisation of knowledge production are undergoing dramatic transformations. Neo-managerialist models for the management of research and teaching, the expansion of audit and academic rankings, and the recasting of universities as service providers and students as consumers are just several of the…
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CfP: Social Media and Social Futures – a special issue of @DiscoverSoc
Co-edited by Mark Carrigan and William Housley Social media is conventionally located within a commercial narrative that theorises an array of emerging ‘disruptive technologies’ that includes big data, additive manufacture and robotics. These and related technologies are underpinned by computational developments that are networked, distributed, digital and data driven. It has been argued that these…
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Yanis Varoufakis on the Parallax Challenge
From loc 460-477 of his The Global Minotaur: The parallax challenge A stick half submerged in a river looks bent. As one moves around it, the angle changes and every different location yields a different perspective. If, in addition, the river’s flow gently moves the stick around, both the ‘reality’ of the ‘bent’ stick and our…
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Practical Sociology: Agenda for Action
BSA Sociologists outside Academia, in collaboration with Sage Publishing Ltd and the Sociological Imagination Practical Sociology: Agenda for Action A half-day workshop British Psychological Society meeting rooms, Tabernacle St London EC2A 4UE Monday 17 October 2016, 12.30 – 4.30pm How come – at least in the UK –you don’t come across people with ‘sociologist’ in…
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The acceleration of politics and the impossibility of theory
I love this passage by Paul Mason in the introduction to The Global Minotaur: Most politicians cannot be theorists. First, because they are rarely thinkers; second, because the frenetic lifestyle they impose on themselves leaves no time for big ideas. But most of all because to be a theorist you have to admit the possibility of…
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things I’ve been reading recently #27
This is London by Ben Judah Rise of the Right by Simon Winlow, Steve Hall and James Treadwell Rethinking Social Exclusion by Simon Winlow and Steve Hall The Flicker Men by Ted Kosmatka Distraction by Damon Young Graphic Novels: Hawkeye: Rio Bravo by Matt Fraction The Immortal Iron Fist by Matt Fraction and Eb Brubaker The Fuse: The Russia…
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The necessity of selection
This is a really nice account in Damon Young’s Distraction of what Margaret Archer calls the necessity of selection. From pg 2: Psychological blockages are part of a much larger set of limitations: those of mortal life itself. There are only so many professions, sexual partners, houses, entertainments and amusements available; and we only have so…
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The otherness of animals
How do human beings and animals relate to each other? One way to answer this question is to empty the putative relation of substantive content: human beings project onto animals while animals are materially dependent on human beings. My own approach would be to contextualise this projection in terms of real relationality, arguing that it represents…
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Ethical consumerism as self-exclusion
Another really provocative idea from Rethinking Social Exclusion by Simon Winlow and Steve Hall. From pg 126: This supposedly ethical process of distancing oneself from vulgar commercialism is a variant of self-exclusion from the social; like it or not, these non-places come closest to representing the actuality of contemporary British life. There is no more ‘reality’ or…
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The evacuation of the social by elites
From Rethinking Social Exclusion, by Simon Winlow and Steve Hall, pg 116: One of these is the apparent desire of the rich to retreat into private enclaves free from the malignancies of the real world. They want to encounter only those judged safe, subservient or ‘like them’ –and even then only in sufferance –and to…
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Against the notion of ‘craft’: thoughts on the cultural politics of romanticising exploitation
On pg 106 of their Rethinking Social Exclusion: The End of the Social? Simon Winlow and Steve Hall describe the changing realities of work, as more and more jobs become “non-unionised, low paid, short-term, insecure and part time”: We should also note that few of these jobs enable workers to construct and maintain an image…
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The vexatious fact of society
From Realist Social Theory by Margaret Archer: What is it that depends on human intentionality but never conforms to anyone’s intentions? What is it that relies upon people’s concepts but which they never fully know? What is it that depends upon human activity but never corresponds to the actions of even the most powerful? What…
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The Individualisation of Utopia
From Riots and Political Protest, by Simon Winlow, Steve Hall, Daniel Briggs and James Treadwell, pg 42: Utopianism did not disappear, but it came to address the libidinal dreams of the individual rather than the political dreams of the collective. Utopia was an individual space in which we were free from the encroachments of authority,…
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Digital capitalism and concentration of ownership
There’s an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about the threat index funds are increasingly seen to pose to the global economy. I’d like to understand this more than I do because I’m intrigued by the technological preconditions for this form of investing and the competitive advantage this use of technology offers: And a group of researchers…
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Images of the end of capitalism
In various posts over the last few years, I’ve written about my fascination with images of civilisational collapse. Reading Riots and Political Protest, by Steve Hall, Simon Winlow, Daniel Briggs and James Treadwell, I find myself wondering if this fascination is in large part because of how ‘civilisational collapse’ and the ‘end of capitalism’ tend…
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The hollowness of cultural politics
In complete agreement with this. From Riots and Political Protest, by Simon Winlow, Steve Hall, Daniel Briggs and James Treadwell, pg 7: The idea that constantly challenging what are often incautiously deemed to be aspects of cultural hegemony is a political act in itself, insofar as it will clear away ideological obfuscation and allow latent…
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Jeremy Corbyn as the mirror image of Margaret Thatcher
I initially dismissed this suggestion by David Runciman, contained in this LRB essay, but it’s been reverberating in my mind since reading it: The contemporary politician who is most present in these pages is Jeremy Corbyn, despite the fact that his name never comes up. Corbyn first got elected to the Commons in 1983 and…
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Three reasons why I believe in Jeremy Corbyn (and some doubts)
I continue to find Owen Smith profoundly unconvincing. The potential force of the ‘electability’ critique is severely blunted by the fact the supposedly ‘electable’ alternative is in actual fact a compromise candidate, markedly inferior even in the narrow centrist terms bound into the discourse of electability. He’s demonstrably untested, widely unknown and his frequent missteps during a…
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The Dispositions of the Metricised
In our discussion of metrics systems, it’s easy to treat subjectivity as a cipher, regarding people as passively moulded by algorithms or blindly governed by the incentives that operate through the institutionalisation of the metrics. My objection to the former is not the claim that people are shaped by metrics, but rather the assumption that this process is…
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The Antinomies of ‘Intelligence’
On this week’s Any Answers, there was a call so fascinatingly stupid that I’ve been intermittently thinking back to it for the last few days. In a discussion about the possible reintroduction of grammar schools, a couple who had been to grammar schools but were ‘forced’ to send their children to a comprehensive, explained how…
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Tony Benn on the Labour Party in 1991
From pg 17 of his 1991-2001 diaries. Interesting to read this in light of the upcoming leadership election – is this what Owen Smith understands himself to be doing? On the one hand, you have got all these people who are simply concerned with power; and on the other hand, you’ve got sectarians who are…
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The Lean Revolution in Higher Education
Growing a culture of continuous improvement predicated on the importance of customers? It sounds like a form of market Maoism, beyond anything we’ve seen yet.
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things I’ve been reading recently #26
Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio García Martínez Why Vote Leave by Daniel Hannan Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond The Outsourced Self: What Happens When We Pay Others To Live Our Lives for Us by Arlie Russell Hochschild Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without…
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Donald Trump explaining intelligence
I’d love it if anyone has suggestions they could add to this list! My favourite one, read in the voice of Futarama’s Zapp Brannigan: https://mobile.twitter.com/TheBillyWest/status/763839080308150272
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The emotional dimension of chronopolitics
A really interesting suggestion from pg 169 of Arlie Hochschild’s Outsourced: Could it be, I wondered, that we are dividing the world into emotional types—order-barking, fast-paced entrepreneurs at the top, and emotionally attuned, human-paced mediators at the bottom? Talking one’s way past the protective layers of a top executive, teaching a child to tie her…
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Mark Carrigan 