Blog

markcarrigan.net/

Profile

markcarrigan.net/author/street

Homepage

markcarrigan.net/

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • The limitations of digital technology for repoliticising the depoliticised

    From Riots and Political Protest by Simon Winlow, Steve Hall, Daniel Briggs and James Treadwell pg 157: Many on the left believe the Internet can fill the gaps left by the disintegration of modern political organisations, but online discussion forums and the like simply do not work in the same way. This is not to…

  • The Joys of Weak Ties

    I love this description by Damon Young on pg 154 of his Distraction: Online friendships afford a similar bounty: instantaneous, often hilarious adventures in debate, discussion, dialogue. The ties are strong enough to sate the social urge, but their gossamer threads never bind us tightly, rarely ask for the commitments and cohabitations of our closest…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Another review of Social Media For Academics

    Another really generous review of Social Media for Academics. I particularly liked this bit: So, there is a whole bunch of good ideas here, and I’ve tended to read this as an ideas prompt, suggesting things I’d not really thought of and while sensibly not telling how I might do those things, it challenges me to…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Social democracy is not post-capitalism, it’s past capitalism

    From Riots and Political Protest, by Simon Winlow, Steve Hall, Daniels Briggs and James Treadwell. From pg 101: The hope of the majority of those on the left these days is to see the return of genuine social democracy, but to us this drive to return to the past seems both naïve and strangely defeatist. This…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • The Pseudo-Catharsis of Social Media

    From Rethinking Social Exclusion, by Simon Winlow and Steve Hall, pg 73: Political protests these days are taken not as an indication that something is going wrong and that a significant number of the population are dissatisfied with the nation’s political leadership. Rather, they seem to indicate that a healthy and vibrant democracy is in…

  • The difference between philosophy and talk about philosophy

    A distinction I find rather tenuous, invoked by Ray Brassier in his attack on the self-importance of the speculative realist blogging community: What is peculiar to them is the claim that this is the first philosophy movement to have been generated and facilitated by the internet: a presumption rooted in the inability to distinguish philosophy from…

  • The components of social democracy 

    From pg 12-13 of Colin Crouch’s The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism: These then were the principal ingredients of the socioeconomic order that came eventually to be called social democratic, without initial capital letters:  1 – Keynesian demand management in which government action, far from trying to destroy markets, sought to sustain them at levels avoiding…

  • A Guide to Instagram Marketing

    This is a really useful resource put together by Buffer. I’ve been running an Instagram account for the last few months for The Sociological Review. At first I found it much less intuitive than I have other social media platforms, but it’s starting to feel familiar at this point. Over the next few months, I’m planning…

  • The Epistemological Obstacles to Understanding Social Movements

    A really fascinating post on Lenin’s Tomb, saved here because I’ll want to come back to this for a second and probably third reading: One of the most interesting theories of reification came from Gaston Bachelard who, in his Psychoanalysis of Fire, proposed that there sometimes exist “epistemological obstacles” built into the phenomena themselves, which…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Are journalists personally afraid of a Trump presidency?

    Are journalists personally afraid of a Trump presidency? That’s the suggestion of this Vox article: In my experience, it goes yet deeper than this. Quietly, privately, political reporters wonder if Trump is a threat to them personally — if he were president, would he use the powers of the office to retaliate against them personally…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 3 dystopian visions of the future of gaming (and capitalism)

    In a near future America, the world is locked into an inglorious decline while the majority of its population is locked into an intoxicatingly expansive virtual world. Ecological crisis and economic ruin operate hand-in-hand to leave the 99% living in sprawling slums, consisting of endless stacks of trailer parks, around the periphery of the surviving…

  • 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…

  • 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. 

  • 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…

  • 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  

  • 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…

  • An Open Access Series of Books on Why We Post

    I’ve just started working my way through this series of books produced by UCL’s massive Why We Post project. The past work of the project team is fantastic and I’m hopeful this will prove to be an important series of books, breaking new anthropological ground in our understanding of how and why people use social…

  • The sobered modernist perspective

    An interesting formulation from Eva Illouz in Why Love Hurts. I’m certainly a ‘sobered modernist’ in this sense. From loc 375-393: While my analysis of love in the conditions of modernity is critical , it is critical from the standpoint of a sobered modernist perspective: that is, a perspective which recognizes that while Western modernity…

  • The digital avoidance of difference

    A few months ago, I was surprised to see an advert for a Christian dating website on the tube. I just discovered, reading Arlie Hochschild’s The Outsourced Self, quite how widespread this is. From pg 38: Given the profits to be made, it comes as no surprise to see the current explosion of online dating…

  • Structural limits to self-control

    Myself and Tom Brock are currently working on a paper in which we analyse the discourse of ‘intelligence’ in terms of the individualisation of structural advantage: a whole range of factors are wrapped up into the descriptor of someone as ‘intelligent’ which explains a complex outcome in terms of a somewhat mysterious and inevitably overloaded…

  • The fetishisation of the event 

    From Inventing the Future, by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, loc 3468: Generic demands to experiment, create and prefigure are commonplace, but concrete proposals are all too often met with a wave of criticism outlining every possible point at which things might go wrong. In light of this dual tendency –for novelty, but against the…

  • 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…

  • The colonisation of life by work

    From Inventing the Future, by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, loc 2429: Work has become central to our very self-conception –so much so that when presented with the idea of doing less work, many people ask, ‘But what would I do?’ The fact that so many people find it impossible to imagine a meaningful life…

  • Trump is masculinising poverty

    An absolutely fascinating article from Arlie Hochschild, whose new book on the American right sounds like a must read: Traditional Tea Party supporters wanted to cut both the practice of cutting in line, and government rewards for doing so. Followers of Donald Trump, on the other hand, wanted to keep government benefits and remove shame…

  • A wonderful example of how universities can use YouTube

    There’s a background to this hugely succesful engagement project here:

  • Well now everything dies baby that’s a fact

    Well they blew up the chicken man in Philly last night Now they blew up his house too Down on the boardwalk they’re gettin’ ready For a fight gonna see what them racket boys can do Now there’s trouble busin’ in from outta state And the D.A. can’t get no relief Gonna be a rumble…

  • The political significance of the zombie horde

    A really interesting suggestion from a report on the Republican convention in the London Review of Books: What’s new with Trump – though reminiscent of the anti-immigrant rhetoric at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th – is the replacement of the image of the dark-skinned freeloader with that of a…

  • Home ownership as a psychological rather than economic reality 

    From the wonderful Evicted, by Matthew Desmond, loc 654-669: When Pam and Ned arrived at College Mobile Home Park, Tobin and Lenny offered them the “Handyman Special,” a free mobile home. Under this arrangement, tenants owned the trailers, and Tobin owned the ground underneath them. He charged the owners “lot rent,” which was equivalent to…

  • The future of labour in digital capitalism

    Bleak but plausible predictions from Nick Srniceck and Alex Williams in their Inventing the Future. From loc 2020-2035: 1. The precarity of the developed economies’ working class will intensify due to the surplus global labour supply (resulting from both globalisation and automation).  2. Jobless recoveries will continue to deepen and lengthen, predominantly affecting those whose…

  • The fragility of the occupy movement

    From Inventing the Future, by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Loc 674-694: Without the central focus of the occupied spaces, the movement dispersed and fragmented. Ultimately, the organisational form of these movements could not overcome the problems of scalability and construct a form of persistent power capable of effectively resisting the inevitable reaction from the…

  • What do you do when people you like act offensively online?

    I’ve been planning how to address this issue much more comprehensively in a second edition of Social Media for Academics. But then Vox helpfully shared this flow chart and I’m not sure I have anything further to add:  

  • Fragile movements and their political cultures 

    From Inventing the Future, by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, loc 85-94: From the alter-globalisation struggles of the late 1990s, through the antiwar and ecological coalitions of the early 2000s, and into the new student uprisings and Occupy movements since 2008, a common pattern emerges: resistance struggles rise rapidly, mobilise increasingly large numbers of people,…

  • From Platform Capitalism to Protocol Communism

    A really interesting suggestion from loc 3681-3691 from Douglas Rushkoff’s Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: In terms of fully decentralized commerce, these platform cooperatives are still just steps along the way to digital distributism. As long as there’s a central platform—a Web site or other hub to maintain—there will always be a need for central…

  • The coming army of American demagogues

    There’s an interesting extract in this Guardian article about the growing civil war in the Republican party, concerning the adoption of Trump’s tactics by aspirant politicians within the party: Trump’s refusal to support McCain and Ryan comes exactly one week before Ryan faces a primary challenge from the businessman Paul Nehlen, a candidate who has…

  • The Geographical Dynamics of Winner-Takes-Most

    An interesting move by the takeaway firm Just-Eat who have sold off their business in national markets where they don’t have clear leadership. This highlights an interesting question: how does the much discussed winner-takes-most dynamic of digital markets, in which the rewards overwhelmingly go to the leader within a field, manifest itself in spatial terms?

  • When did optimism become a characteristic possessed by the right and lacked by the left?

    Why did the only positive vision of Britain’s future come from right-wing Brexit advocates? That’s the question I’m preoccupied by having read Why Vote Leave by Daniel Hannan. Take this for example, from loc 1903-1917: It’s 2020, and the UK is flourishing outside of the EU. The rump Union, now a united bloc, continues its…

  • Post-democratic decision making in the EU

    From Why Vote Leave, by Dan Hannan, loc 739: Lobbyists love the EU, intuiting from the moment they arrive that it was designed by and for people like them. There are some 25,000 lobbyists in Brussels, some in-house, some working for several clients, some representing pressure groups or regions, most representing big business. Figure Five…

  • Academic video blogs: 5 tips for getting started

    A really useful resource produced by jobs.ac.uk:

  • Constraining the dreams of (aspiring) #digitalelites

    From Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, by Douglas Rushkoff, loc 3167: So they accept the hypergrowth logic of the startup economy as if it really were the religion of technology development. They listen to their new mentors and accept their teachings as gifts of wisdom. These folks already gave me millions of dollars; of…

  • The economic limitations of the attention economy

    From Douglas Rushkoff’s Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, loc 2256: Besides, consumer research is all about winning some portion of a fixed number of purchases. It doesn’t create more consumption. If anything, technological solutions tend to make markets smaller and less likely to spawn associated industries in shipping, resource management, and labor services. Digital…

  • Something has ended and everyone can feel it

    From pg 31 of Joshua Clover’s Riot. Strike. Riot. Something has ended, or should have ended; everyone can feel it. It is a sort of interregnum. A miserable lull, backlit everywhere by the sense of declension and fires flaring across the planetary terrain of struggle. The songs on the radio are the same—awful, astonishing. They…

  • What is a ‘strike’ and what is a ‘riot’?

    From Joshua Clover’s Riot. Strike. Riot. pg 15: The strike is the form of collective action that  1) struggles to set the price of labor power (or the conditions of labor, which is much the same thing: the amount of misery that can be purchased by the pound);  2) features workers appearing in their role…

  • 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…

  • The Return of the Riot

    From Joshua Clover’s Riot. Strike. Riot pg 2. He argues that the return of the riot reverses a long term trend observed by Charles Tilley, in which the riot had given way to the strike as the foremost tactic in socially available repertoires of contention: As the overdeveloped nations have entered into sustained, if uneven,…

  • I Could’a Been A Contender

    I’m broke and I’m hungry, I’m hard up and I’m lonely I’ve been dancing on this killing floor for years And of the few things I am certain, I’m the captain of my burden I’m sorry doll, I could never stop the rain Once you said I was your hero You would dance with me…

  • The future of digital corporate personhood

    This is the second time I’ve encountered this idea recently. How plausible is it? From Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, by Douglas Rushkoff, loc 1384: Digital technology, though, might finally give corporations the autonomy they need to make decisions without us, and even the bodies they need to execute their choices in the real…

  • The coordinates of the austerity consensus are disintegrating

    From Corbyn: Against All Odds, by Richard Seymour, pg 22. There’s a huge opportunity for the Labour left but also a huge risk, as momentum has built for an anti-austerity platform that might no longer be relevant: “It is not clear what will happen to the debt/speculation economy, or the ‘property-owning democracy’ where large numbers…

  • The limitations on learning to code as a labour market strategy

    In the last few months I’ve become very interested in the status accorded to coding as a labour market strategy. It’s held up as both individually rational and a viable strategy for governments seeking to grow the human capital of their citizens. However, as Douglas Rushkoff observes in his Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus,…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #25

    So Sad Today by Melissa Broder Palo Alto by James Franco Alibaba’s World: How One Remarkable Chinese Company is Revolutionising Global Business by Porter Erisman Digital Gold: The Untold Story of Bitcoin by Nathaniel Popper The Frontman: Bono (In the Name of Power) by Harry Browne Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics by Richard Seymour Pity the Billionaire: The Unlikely…

  • The end game of the American free-market right 

    From Pity the Billionaire, by Thomas Frank, loc 2881-2896: As the nation clambers down through the sulfurous fumes into the pit called utopia, the thinking of the market-minded will continue to evolve. Before long they will have discovered that certain once-uncontroversial arms of the state must be amputated immediately. One fine day in the near…

  • Understanding the rage of the Labour right

    From Corbyn: Against All Odds, by Richard Seymour, pg 15: Adam Phillips suggests that our rages disclose what it is we think we are entitled to. We become infuriated when the world doesn’t live up to our largely unconscious assumptions about how it should be for us. What might the fury of Labour’s right-wingers, as…

  • The tragically incompetent elites of the centre left

    This critique by Thomas Frank, on loc 2729 of his Pity the Billionaire, applies as well to proponents of the ‘third way’ within the Labour Party as it does to the leaders of the Democratic Party in relation to whom they originally articulated the notion: Sometimes when I watch the Washington Democrats in action, my…

  • The radicalisation of reactionaries

    An interesting analysis from Pity the Billionaire, by Thomas Frank, loc 1746-1759: And so, over the years, the movement came to affect a revolutionary posture toward the state that it might have borrowed from Karl Marx or Jean-Paul Sartre. It imitated the protest culture of the sixties, right down to a feigned reverence for anticommunist…

  • The fantasistic political ontologies which emerge under post-democracy

    From Pity the Billionaire, by Thomas Frank, loc 1380. This is a summary of the populist right’s understanding of the structure of society: America is made up of two classes, roughly speaking, “ordinary people” and “intellectuals.” According to this way of thinking, as we see again and again, either you’re a productive citizen, or you’re…

  • The Myth of Elite Cosmopolitanism

    A rapidly developing discourse which contrasts elite cosmopolitanism with insular populism should be treated more critically than is being done so at present. This interesting article by Ross Douthat takes issue with this supposed cosmpolitanism: Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires comfort with real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one’s…

  • Stories of the River Irwell

    Interesting short film made by someone I met yesterday:

  • Rhetorical rapture-races and contemporary fragile movements 

    I love the phrase ‘rhetorical rapture-race’ used by Thomas Frank to describe the mobilising dynamics of the far-right resurgence in the U.S. From his Pity the Billionaire loc 960: Conspiracy theorists have always been with us. But Glenn Beck brought them into the mainstream. And so began one of the most distinctive features of the…

  • Reviews of Social Media for Academics

    Alex’s Archives The LSE Review of Books Simply Sociology The Tyee Inside Higher Ed Good Reads Amazon Reviews (UK) Amazon Reviews (US) Doctoral Writing SIG Hannah Čulík-Baird Higher Education Journal of Learning and Teaching Joanne Broder Sumerson (Psych Critiques) South African Journal of Science The BPS Journal Good Reads Other media coverage: Social media tools academics may find useful (University…

  • The (American) dreams of defensive elites

    An interesting extract from The Frontman: Bono (In the Name of Power), by Harry Browne, loc 2967: What is intriguing about Bono’s rhapsody is the part of the history lesson that really excited him: not democracy, but the ability of a group of rich men to bring about dramatic change, and to do so in…

  • The expert-celebrity axis and the legitimation of technocracy 

    From The Frontman: Bono (in the name of power), by Harry Browne, from loc 1655-1676: Celebrity humanitarianism is one component of this. Yrjölä and other scholars locate its rise within a wider shift in global governance in the neoliberal period, one ‘that brings northern governments, NGOs and global celebrities together’. Celebrity politics, other scholars conclude,…

  • The defensive elites of the cultural industries 

    In my search for ‘defensive elites’, which is to say high-net worth individuals exhibiting insecurity and defensiveness about their position within society, I’ve tended to focus on the business world. But this fabulously readable book by Harry Browne, The Frontman: Bono (in the Name of Power), suggests I’ve cast the net too narrowly. From loc…

  • An interview with Inside Higher Ed about Social Media for Academics

    An interview with Carl Straumsheim from Inside Higher Education, due to be published later this week.  Q: In the book, you grapple with the idea of writing about a topic that “will be out of date by the book is read, let alone a year or two later.” But you argue that while platforms may go…

  • Designing platforms to mitigate power law effects

    From Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, by Douglas Rushkoff, loc 504: For instance, Bandcamp, a music streaming and download service much like iTunes or Spotify, distinguishes itself by intentionally working against power-law dynamics. It caters to less-established underground and alternative artists, charging less than half the sales commission of its competitors. Unlike the “Top…

  • How digitalisation reduces cultural variety 

    Much of the most recent paper I’ve written is concerned with this process & how a focus on personal reflexivity can help us understand it. From Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, by Douglas Rushkoff, loc 482-496: The overwhelming variety of possibilities leads us to gravitate to machine-winnowed lists, if for no other reason than…

  • A fantastic podcast discussion about social media for academics

    This is one of the best discussions about social media for academics I’ve heard: Episode 58 of This Week In Health Law. Fresh from ASLME’s Health Law Professors’ Conference in Boston: a special TWIHL! Pharmalot’s Ed Silverman joins a cavalcade of past show guests (Rachel Sachs, Ross Silverman, and Nicholas Bagley) for a conversation about social…

  • Social media: singular or plural?

    It’s hard to write at length about social media without pondering this question seriously. This post offers the most articulate answer to this question I’ve come across: use the plural when you’re talking about a collection of social media channels and their characteristics, use the singular when you’re talking about the cumulative effects of social media as a…

  • The Intensified Work of Start-Ups

    I like this description by Porter Erisman, reflecting on loc 1923 of Alibaba’s World about his experience as head of PR for the company up until soon after its IPO: WORKING IN A fast-growing start-up is a bit like running a marathon. It’s an endurance test, filled with highs and lows. At times you want…

  • The Importance of Disappointment

    There’s a lovely passage by Olivia Lang, quoted in this review of her recent book, which reminds me of what Ian Craib called the importance of disappointment: There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the…

  • An infopolitical critique of lazy applications of ‘panopticism’

    This is really interesting. I’ll definitely read some of his work:

  • Against craft capitalism 

    An important reminder by Douglas Rushkoff in Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. From loc 198-212: For many of us, the current system, however convoluted, is better than nothing, and changing to one in which we must create real value is frightening. Most people are not cultural creatives capable of launching a business on Etsy,…

  • The Idiots Who Make History

    Until recently I scoffed at the idea of history being shaped by ‘great men’. Such a notion seems obviously ahistorical to me, abstracting from the messy reality of how change occurs and imputing the complex array of causal powers involved to a small group of unusually prominent individuals. But since the referendum I find myself…

  • Biographical Approaches to Studying Digital Capitalism

    In the early pages of Douglas Rushkoff’s Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, he offers a cogent analysis of how initial public offerings lock tech companies into a growth imperative which ultimately proves destructive of the value they create. As he puts it on loc 169, “Having taken in this much new capital, however, Twitter now needs…

  • The Lived Reality of Work in Tech Firms

    From Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, by Douglas Rushkoff, loc 72-86: A few weeks later, there was nothing to smile about. Protesters in Oakland were now throwing rocks at Google’s buses and broke a window, terrifying employees. Sure, I was as concerned about the company’s practices as anyone, and frustrated by the way Silicon…