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  • four days left to register for the accelerated academy! deadline nov 20th

    Power, Acceleration and Metrics in Academic Life 2nd-4th December 2015, Prague (Vila Lanna) Organised by the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences and supported by the Strategy AV21. Register here There is little doubt that science and knowledge production are presently undergoing dramatic and multi-layered transformations accompanied by new imperatives reflecting broader socio-economic and…

  • a sociological podcast about culture

    I’ve just finished the first instalment of what I hope will be a semi-regular podcast about culture for The Sociological Review. For the first one, I spoke to the fabulous Bird la Bird about queer history, invisibility and playing in the archive. I’ll be tweeting from her V&A event this Sunday on the @thesocreview account. See here for…

  • “we know you’re a cheat and you should kill yourself” 2.0

    This great lecture by Frank Pasquale (podcast) references this note, the text of which is the title to this post, sent to Martin Luther King by the FBI. As Pasquale notes, King was under constant surveillance that both facilitated and motivated this horrendous intervention. Can we imagine a data-driven generalisation of this condition and the…

  • it goes boom boom boom

    God, is it on? Is it beyond basic? Does it ice-grill you? Or is every song faceless? Does it have a title? If it didn’t would you name it? Does it babble about nothing like a drunk atheist?

  • the stupidity of auto-correction in the new OS X

    No, Apple, when I’m writing “Filip Vostal” I don’t mean “Flip Postal”. The fact your operating system automatically changes the former to the latter is remarkably stupid. The excellent Rex Troumbley calls this coercive ergonomics and it’s one of those concepts that you see examples of everywhere once you’re acquainted with it.

  • an accelerated academy reading list

    A work in progress. Feel free to make suggestions! The SLOW University – Work, Time and Well-Being by Maggie O’Neill Should academics adopt an ethic of slowness or ninja-like productivity? In search of scholarly time by Filip Vostal Life in the Accelerated Academy by Mark Carrigan Surviving Life in the Accelerated Academy: Problems and Prospects for…

  • academia is killing my friends

    After spending the week thinking about how Filip Vostal and I could incorporate a function to allow people to post anonymous first person essays on the Accelerated Academy website, I just noticed that the depressing and important site Academia is Killing My Friends has started posting new content again. I’d encourage anyone interested in the…

  • the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #15

    Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance InfoGlut by Mark Andrejevic Gates by Stephen Mane and Paul Andrews The Boy Kings by Katherine Losse The Girl in the Spider’s Web by David Lagercrantz

  • expedia and communicative escalation 

    Expedia just emailed me for the sixth time this week, with the majority of the emails containing attention grabbing emojis in the subject lines, in a way I had never seen before:  I’m not sure what happened this week. Does Expedia have a new marketing strategy? Have I been algorithmically marked as a customer they’re…

  • fear of failure and the coding skills bubble

    I just saw this poster in Euston station. See here for background to this post:  

  • a dystopian vision of where the infoglut is leading us 

    This really resonates with my recent speculative thinking on techno-fascism. From InfoGlut, by Mark Andrejevic, loc 3646: At its most dystopian, the resulting information landscape is one in which those with access to the database can derive practical, if probabilistic (“post- comprehension”), knowledge about how best to influence populations while members of these population are…

  • further communicative escalation from expedia (yay!)

    They’ve gone from exclamation marks to emojis and smileys in a matter of days:   

  • I only leave the territory, when there’s nothing left to be said

  • digital capitalism and the bestiary of the imagination 

    From InfoGlut, by Mark Andrejevic, loc 3148: the deadlock of representation doesn’t simply foreclose the purchase of shared social representations, it simultaneously frees up the field for the proliferation of imagined narratives and counter- narratives. The result is a kind of bestiary of the imaginary: a familiarly disturbing world in which claims once relegated to…

  • the affective basis of techno-fascism?

    From InfoGlut, by Mark Andrejevic, loc 2580: As Zizek puts it, the paradox of the decline of symbolic efficiency results in a version of what he calls a resurgent fundamentalism: “what is foreclosed in the symbolic (belief) returns in the Real (of a direct knowledge). A fundamentalist does not believe, he knows directly.” This formulation…

  • digital capitalism, fetishistic disavowal and faux-collectives 

    From InfoGlut, by Mark Andrejevic, loc 1384: One start- up sentiment mining application, for example, claims to “understand how the web feels ” via a “vibology meter.” 56 This version of prosopopoeia – attributing an imagined and unified voice to a dispersed and invisible aggregate that cannot speak for itself – enacts the fetishistic disavowal…

  • dealing with ‘detractors’

    An interesting snippet in Infoglut, by Mark Andrejevic, Loc 1404 describes how sentiment analysis is being deployed to deal with ‘detractors’: The goal is not to describe but to affect and effect – to stimulate word of mouth, to promote engagement and, in some cases, to thwart it. One sentiment analysis company, for example, promises,…

  • ten post docs (!) on temporality 

    ht Su Oman. Wish I could apply for this. Shared in the hope others can. ERRANS, in Time ICI Fellowships for 2016-18  The ICI Berlin announces ten post-doctoral fellowships for the Academic Years 2016-18  Conceptions of time and varied modes of temporal experience seem more at odds now than ever. Hamlet’s hunch – that ‘the…

  • your attention please! digital capitalism and communicative escalation  

    I’ve received these two emails from Expedia in a matter of days:    What stands out to me is their use of emojis in subject lines to differentiate  themselves within what can be presumed to be an overcrowded inbox. It seems likely this has been tested, tracking a potential increase in engagement rate when the…

  • more spam directed at international event organisers

    This time trying to sell something rather than asking for money on behalf of presumably fictitious delegates: Hi Mark I hope this email finds you well. Are you in charge of organizing Conference on Power, Acceleration and Metrics in Academic Life? I am not sure if you’re the right person to speak with. I was…

  • are any other event organisers getting emails like this?

    I seem to be getting increasing amounts of stuff like this: : RE: INTEREST TO PARTICIPATE IN YOUR COMING 2015 CONFERENCE EVENT…. REQUEST FOR ADVICE, INVOICE AND INVITATION LETTERS FOR ADMINISTRATIVE PURPOSES GENTLE REMINDER VERY URGENT On 27 October 2015 11:06:33 -08:00, Joseph Babadi-Johns wrote: On 9 October 2015 09:26:52 -07:00, Joseph Babadi-Johns <joseph.johns@opad.eu> wrote:…

  • distinct digital-advertising landscapes are increasingly drawn on socioeconomic lines

    Useful account of the role of ‘lead generators’ in generating ‘distinct digital-advertising landscapes’ with significant socio-economic ramifications. The filter bubble isn’t just a matter of cultural constraint: As the big piles of data online continue to grow, these issues will become more pronounced. Information filters that control what version of the Internet a person sees…

  • the ‘soft coup’ currently taking place in portugal 

    A really interesting article about the current political turmoil taking place in Portugal and its implications for democracy within Europe: If this “soft coup” stands, taxes, interest rates, public ownership, investments, and economic strategies to control inflation and unemployment—long the battleground for conflicting ideologies—will no longer be issues to be decided democratically. Unelected bodies, like…

  • the ‘religion’ of digital elites 

    There’s a really fascinating article on Tech Crunch describing the political views of start-up founders in Silicon Valley. It makes the point that there’s a communitarian streak, albeit a very strange one, underpinning the politics of digital elites. To describe them as libertarian misses the ideological specificity of a cohesive current of opinion that has…

  • from corporation to social movement: the future of lobbying in the sharing economy 

    After so narrowly defeating the San Francisco ballot calling for restrictions on short term letting, Airbnb intend to step up their mobilisation of hosts and users to help defeat legislative obsticles to their expansion: But when Airbnb’s executives look out at the world, they don’t see a fragmented puzzle of local politics and planning codes.…

  • a working group to create a realist sociology of flourishing

    Trying to decide whether I should apply for this myself but sharing it here on the assumption that it will be of interest to many of those who read my theory posts: Human Flourishing, Social Solidarity, and Critical Realism Working Group 2016 – 2017 Organizers: William (Beau) Weston (Van Winkle Professor of Sociology, Centre College), Brandon Vaidyanathan…

  • what would techno-fascist public space be like?

    I imagine it would be an only slightly more extreme version of what’s being sought for the garden bridge in London: Visitors to the garden bridge in London will be tracked by their mobile phone signals and supervised by staff with powers to take people’s names and addresses and confiscate and destroy banned items, including…

  • using the national gallery for public order policing

    My friend Holly Falconer and I stumbled across this when walking through Trafalger Square on Thursday night: So sinister.#millionmasks @mark_carrigan pic.twitter.com/sKYq4kFkCX — Holly Falconer (@holly_falconer) November 5, 2015 I don’t recall ever seeing the Met do this before. Is it a new tactic?

  • the irresistible temptation for algorithmic function creep 

    From Infoglut, by Mark Andrejevic, loc 622: From the perspective of the statistician, the step from target marketing to terrorism- tracking is all but non- existent. As McCue puts it, “The same tools and techniques that are used to determine credit risk, discover fraud, and identify which consumers are likely to switch cell- phone providers…

  • big data and the politics of austerity 

    From Infoglut, by Mark Andrejevic, loc 607. The context to digital innovation in public services:  What emerges is a kind of actuarial model of crime: one that lends itself to aggregate considerations regarding how best to allocate resources under conditions of scarcity – a set of concerns that fits neatly with the conjunction of generalized…

  • the big data divide 

    From InfoGlut, by Mark Andrejevic, loc 464: The dystopian version of information glut anticipates a world in which control over the tremendous amount of information generated by interactive devices is concentrated in the hands of the few who use it to sort, manage, and manipulate. Those without access to the database are left with the…

  • the micro-sociology of algorithmic authority 

    From InfoGlut, by Mark Andrejevic, loc 601: The fictional portrayals envision a contradictory world in which individual actions can be predicted with certainty and effectively thwarted. They weave oracular fantasies about perfect foresight. Predictive analytics, by contrast, posits a world in which probabilities can be measured and resources allocated accordingly. Because forecasts are probabilistic, they…

  • the perverse statism of those seeking to create a market in higher education

    An excellent, though rather depressing, analysis of the TEF on Wonk HE: There is a remarkable contradiction in all of this. The government is proposing a substantial apparatus of scrutiny, surveillance, intervention and interpolation, which will occupy untold hours of academic staff time. It involves delegating new powers to the minister and to BIS and…

  • Centre for Contemporary Philosophy of Technology Seminars

    This looks interesting: Hello all, This is to mention both the start of a new research group at the University of Birmingham, called the Centre for Contemporary Philosophy of Technology, and the first event, which is a talk by Ross Abbinnett (details below). An official launch event is planned for the Spring.  ‘The Politics of…

  • how the digital elites do festivals 

    From Elon Musk, by Ashlee Vance, loc 5351: Musk had made a number of art cars over the years at Burning Man, including an electric one shaped like a rocket. In 2011, he also received a lot of grief from the Wall Street Journal for having a high- end camp. “Elon Musk, chief executive of…

  • did bill gates predict the smart phone?

    From Gates, by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, loc 10748: At a February 1993 lecture at the University of Washington, Gates took the “Information at Your Fingertips” concept a step farther by describing a wallet PC that would include everything from a global positioning system to a wireless data transceiver and would serve as key,…

  • The Collective Subject as Enemy: The Public between Legal Fiction and Political Potentiality

    Wish I could make this! Will follow up the references at a later date: Please join us for the next in the Warwick Sociology Seminar Series on Wednesday 11th November at 5pm in room S0.11, Social Sciences Building. “The Collective Subject as Enemy: The Public between Legal Fiction and Political Potentiality” Dr Nina Power, University…

  • cfp: social media: connected cultures (via @hl_robertson)

    Social Media: Connected Cultures Call for Participation 2016 The Social Media Project: 1st Global Conference Sunday 8th May – Tuesday 10th May 2016 Prague, Czech Republic This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary project seeks to start a dialogue about the global impact, development, role and functions of social media in the life of individuals, groups and nations.…

  • the chronopolitics of commitment in higher education

    This is well intentioned but ultimately hugely problematic: Inter-Disciplinary.Net believes it is a mark of personal courtesy and professional respect to your colleagues that all delegates should attend for the full duration of the meeting. If you are unable to make this commitment, please do not submit an abstract for presentation

  • southpark on the self-appointed digital elite of yelp

  • digital escapology: the consultancy growth sector of the 2020s?

    I spent this afternoon trying to regain access to a Twitter account for which I had lost the associated e-mail address. In their infinite wisdom, Twitter have now decreed that an e-mail address may be necessary to access an account, over and above the traditional requirement for a username and password. This becomes a problem…

  • post-capitalism: envisaging a shared future

  • international journal of social research methodology: ask the editors @ijsrm! december 1st at 11am

    In my capacity as social media associate editor of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology, I’m arranging an ask the editors session on Twitter. It will take place on Tuesday 1st December, 11.00—12.00. We’ll definitely have Ros Edwards and Christina Hughes. We’ll possibly have Malcolm Williams participating as well. We’ll use the hashtag #IJSRM for the…

  • call for contributions: the politics of data

    I’m curating a series on the politics of data for the LSE Impact Blog. Would you like to contribute? Get in touch if so. Here’s an overview of the project: Our latest series delves into the politics of data. Data has become an increasingly complex force, influencing more and more aspects of social life. This series…

  • The good old days

    If Queen Boadicea is long dead and gone Still then the spirit In her children’s children’s children It lives on If you’ve lost your faith in love and music Oh the end won’t be long Because if it’s gone for you then I too may lose it And that would be wrong You know I’ve…

  • Manchester Social Movements Conference – Call for Papers

    I went to this for the first time this year and it was excellent: SOCIAL MOVEMENTS CONFERENCE  – CALL FOR PAPERS From 1995 to 2015, Manchester Metropolitan University hosted a series of very successful annual international conferences on ‘ALTERNATIVE FUTURES and POPULAR PROTEST’. We’re very happy to announce that the Twenty First AF&PP Conference will…

  • call for papers: IPP2016 “the platform society” (via @claudiakincaid)

    Location: Thursday 22 – Friday 23 September 2016, University of Oxford. Convenors: Helen Margetts (OII), Vili Lehdonvirta (OII), Jonathan Bright (OII), David Sutcliffe (OII), Andrea Calderaro (EUI / ECPR). Abstract deadline: 14 March 2016. Contact: policyandinternet@oii.ox.ac.uk This conference is convened by the Oxford Internet Institute for the OII-edited academic journalPolicy and Internet, in collaboration with the European Consortium of Political…

  • call for contributions to the @sociowarwick centre for women and gender blog 

    An initiative from the Centre for Women and Gender in Sociology at Warwick, where the centre for social ontology is also based: A reminder that we are now accepting submissions to the CSWG blog. This academic focussed blog aims to promote the work of academics and students conducting research around topics relating to women and…

  • call for contributions: digital sociology and the future of the discipline

    In recent years Digital Sociology has emerged as an increasingly prominent trend within the discipline at an international level. But it remains unclear precisely what this tendency represents, provoking enthusiasm and skepticism in equal measure. In this special section for The Sociological Review’s website, we invite short blog posts (1500 words or less) addressing digital sociology and the questions…

  • seminar on digital action repertoires 

    Really wish I could make this. It’s the first time I’ve heard of this concept and I immediately find it extremely appealing:   

  • critical realism book launch, 8th december 

      

  • the sociologists outside of academia group tenth anniversary meeting

    Probably of interest to some of the people who read this blog: There´s a week to go until the SOA 10th anniversary meeting in London on 9 November (flyer attached). So if you´d like to join us for what should be great day, please book at http://portal.britsoc.co.uk/public/event/eventBooking.aspx?id=EVT10441 Our speaker will be SOA founder member Keith…

  • the manchester ethnography network seminar series

    These look fantastic. I’ve just this week been thinking that I need to start engaging with ethnographies of organisational life for the new book. But I had no idea where to start beyond the minute amount of tech literature like this I’m familiar with. But now I stumble across exactly what I was looking for,…

  • the restructuring of the humanities

    I just saw a reference to the Environmental Humanities. In recent years, I’ve begun to encounter the Medical Humanities and Digital Humanities with great frequency as part of my normal working life. I assume there are other X Humanities which I haven’t encountered yet. As someone fascinated by the tendency towards X Studies and the proliferation of Turns within the social sciences, I’d…

  • the intensification of work and the notion of work/life balance

    An interesting blog post by Nick Osbaldiston, reflecting on a study they undertook into the working lives of academics. The original focus was quantitative, with some of the findings detailed in the post: • Academics in our study (n=155) reported working on average 9 hours per day • However, Full-Time Ongoing Academics reported an average…

  • a film about (a)sexuality I was in

    Produced by Sam Broadley. It was fun! It provoked one of my now periodic bouts of “wow, I’d forgotten how totally fascinating sexuality is”. I really must go back to sexuality studies at some point.

  • why the metrolink is a bit crap

    One of the things I looked forward to most about moving back to Manchester was the quality of the public transport. I grew up with the Metrolink and rarely used the Bus. Subsequently living in London left me with a sense of how convenient and reliable a bus network could be. So it was a…

  • mark zuckerberg’s philosophy of techno-fascism

    From The Boy Kings, by Katherine Losse, pg 201. Losse was asked to write blog posts about Mark Zuckerberg’s philosophy, something which he outlined to her in general terms: “It means that the best thing to do now, if you want to change the world, is to start a company. It’s the best model for…

  • loyalty to the facebook mission 

    From The Boy Kings, by Katherine Losse, pg 200: Most employees I talked with seemed not to be particularly bothered by the company’s decision to forcibly adjust people’s expectations of privacy, preferring instead to focus on the light and almost childlike- sounding goals of sharing and connecting people. “She just doesn’t get it,” a user…

  • transparency and opacity in digital capitalism

    One final snippet from The Boy Kings, by Katherine Losse, that I can’t resist posting. It seems that Mark Zuckerberg has a secret back room in his private Facebook office, allowing him to retreat into opacity while sustaining the glass fronted and open plan layout of the corporate offices: Mark’s office sat adjacent to our…

  • the gift economy of the digital elite 

    From The Boy Kings, by Katherine Losse, pg 194: The floor around Sheryl’s desk was piled with the endless gifts that she received from business contacts in lofty positions at Fortune 500 companies. People sent her Louboutin heels and Frette candles the diameter of dinner plates, which she unpacked while on speakerphone with some CEO…

  • the emergency as a tool of labour discipline 

    From The Boy Kings, by Katherine Losse, pg 191. It’s interesting to compare accounts of working life in social media companies to those of early tech giants like Microsoft. What were once exceptional states, in which people devoted themselves 24/7 to work in order to ensure the success of a product launch, now come to…

  • the motivational challenge of corporate success in tech

    From The Boy Kings, by Katherine Losse, pg 191-193: The catch for Facebook was that the more successful we became (and we were still, despite all the competition, dominant), the more likely employees were to be distracted by money and the new pastimes it enabled: fine dining, bar hopping, five- star vacations, expensive cars. In…

  • structure, culture and agency: selected papers of margaret archer

    The Amazon page just went live for this book I’m editing with Tom Brock and Graham Scambler. As well as the titular selected papers, it will include an interview with Archer, an annotated bibliography, a foreword by Doug Porpora and an extended introduction to her work. This edited collection of papers seeks to celebrate the…

  • digital capitalism and the acceleration of bullshit

    This is a slightly crude attempt to thematise something which I’ve been struggling to express for a while: has there been an acceleration of the rate at which bullshit emerges in the digital economy? Here’s an example of what I have in mind. I’ve been looking through Amazon for business books about the newer social…

  • the extremely disturbing dreams of mark zuckerberg 

    From The Boy Kings, by Katherine Losse, pg 166: Later on, when I was working directly for Mark and charged with the task of interpreting his thoughts for the world, Mark told me that his dream for Facebook was something like this, to make us all cells in a single organism, communicating automatically in spite…

  • the turn away from contract labour in the sharing economy 

    This is an interesting development: there’s clearly an interest served by the announcement but the potential success of this positioning could prove influential if legal challenges to contract labour gain some traction: Shift, an on-demand startup that helps people buy and sell cars, is looking to make employees out of its contract-based labor force. Almost…

  • the multiple time regimes within facebook

    From The Boys, by Katherine Losse, pg 146: My career upgrade from dungeon department to quasi- technical role meant, along with a better salary and more respect from the technical echelon of the company, that I was now on engineering time. This meant that while I could come to work later, as late as lunchtime,…

  • you are always being ranked and it’s your job to perform 

    A fascinating snippet from The Boy Kings, by Katherine Losse, describing the approach of a new operations director joining Facebook in 2007. From pg 144: The next week, Chamath asked me and my management colleagues in customer support to do an evaluation exercise in which we ranked everyone on the Customer Support Team from highest…

  • the rituals of tech bros 

    From The Boy Kings, by Katherine Losse, pg 134: That Sunday, after I’d slept off our long night, I logged in to Facebook to see an endless stream of videos that the boys had filmed at the club. In them, the boys were not chatting up or kissing girls they had met, as I had…

  • the creepy rituals of the facebook office

    From The Boy Kings, by Katherine Losse, pg 25: For example, on Mark’s birthday, in May 2006, I received an email from his administrative assistant telling me that it would be my job that day, along with all the other women in the office, to wear a T- shirt with Mark’s picture on it. Wait,…

  • mark zuckerberg: domination or revolution!

    From The Boy Kings, by Katherine Losse, pg 13: I liked to listen to Mark’s discussion of the product philosophy and goals at these meetings, which were to me the most fascinating part of the job: what were we trying to do, with this fledgling Internet identity registration system? “I just want to create information…

  • the centre for social ontology book series

    We’re now up to book number 4. This is the first one I’ve contributed to personally & it’s due to be published in early 2016. These are the first three volumes in the series: Here’s the coverage of the books that I know of. Please do let me know if you come across something else!…

  • please tell early career scholars: the isrf social media essay competition

    The Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) and Big Data & Society (BD&S) intend to award a prize of CHF 1,000 for the best essay on the topic ‘Influence and Power’. This is a topic, not a title. Accordingly, authors are free to choose an essay title within this field. The winner will also be invited…

  • still places left for tomorrow: sociological careers outside of academia

    A few places have opened up for tomorrow’s event The Sociological Review’s Early Career Researchers Event: Working Outside of Academia Organised by The Sociological Review Early Career Researcher team For those with a background in social science, career paths do not always followed a straight forward traditional academic trajectory. With the current shortage of entry-level…

  • deadline tomorrow! the question of the human in social theory & social research

    25th November 2015, 11:00 to 17:00 WT0.05, University of Warwick  This workshop and symposium will explore the, mostly implicit, conceptions of the human, humanity and human nature that underpin various contemporary conceptions of social life. In the context of much-publicised post-human futures, this is an invitation to reconsider the idea that social life itself is predicated…

  • social media and the noise it injects into daily life 

    From The Boy Kings, by Katherine Losse, loc 184: The interjection of distant voices on friends’ walls was always vaguely unreadable, unpredictable, illicit. “Let’s play this weekend,” a girl would post on the wall of a guy I knew, suggestively, and it felt weird to read, not because I didn’t think girls liked him but…

  • the eugenecist temptation for digital elites 

    It’s perhaps slightly unfair to use the term ‘eugenecist’ in relation to these remarks. But I’m interested in how the the notion of being ‘smart’ is constructed amongst digital elites, as well as how this might develop into  something much nastier as the broader political climate changes. From Elon Musk, by Ashlee Vance, pg 357:…

  • how many dancing billionaires are there at burning man?

    From Elon Musk, by Ashlee Vance, pg 318: After arriving at Burning Man, Musk, a regular at the event, and his family went through their standard routines. They set up camp and prepped their art car for a drive. This year, they had cut the roof off a small car, elevated the steering wheel, shifted…

  • a perpetual-motion machine that runs on a weird mix of dissatisfaction and eternal hope

    What a glorious way to describe the life of an organisation. I wonder which other organisations this might be an apt description for? What’s it like to work  under these conditions? From Elon Musk, by Ashlee Vance, pg 258 (my emphasis): Just as it did in the early days, SpaceX continues to experiment with these…

  • acronyms seriously suck 

    An email sent to the entirety of SpaceX by Elon Musk, as quoted in Ashlee Vance’s book about him, pg 238-239: There is a creeping tendency to use made up acronyms at SpaceX. Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication and keeping communication good as we grow is incredibly important.…

  • the hiring rituals of tech companies 

    From Elon Musk, by Ashlee Vance, pg 220-222: Like many tech companies, SpaceX subjects potential hires to a gauntlet of interviews and tests. Some of the interviews are easygoing chats in which both parties get to feel each other out; others are filled with quizzes that can be quite hard. Engineers tend to face the…

  • the performativity of bins

  • interview with the founder and ceo of palantir

    Interview with Alex Karp, Founder and CEO of Palantir:

  • the pleasures of intensified work

    From Elon Musk, by Ashlee Vance, pg 125: Some members of the Texas crew honed their skills to the point that they could build a test- worthy engine in three days. These same people were required to be adept at software. They’d pull an all- nighter building a turbo pump for the engine and then…

  • does your monograph not deserve a trailer?

    The idea of a trailer for an academic monograph might seem rather strange at first sight. But it’s a potentially extremely effective way of promoting a book which, as social media for academics continues to institutionalise, will only become more potent. Here’s the most recent example I’ve seen, produced by a video editor specialising in academic…

  • the paypal mafia

    This Wikipedia page makes for interesting reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia “PayPal Mafia” is a term used to indicate a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and developed additional technology companies[1] such as Tesla Motors, LinkedIn, Matterport, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer.[2] Most of the members attended Stanford University or University…

  • the expanding ambitions of digital elites 

    From Elon Musk, by Ashlee Vance, pg 16. I think a sociological analysis of contemporary digital elites needs to treat these ambitions seriously, while nonetheless recognising how these cultural formulations intersect with material interests. While the “putting man on Mars” talk can strike some people as loopy, it gave Musk a unique rallying cry for…

  • the first gold rush of digital capitalism 

    From Elon Musk, by Ashlee Vance, pg 10-11. I think this understates the degree to which ‘playing hard’ was driven by a potent mix of fear and aspiration. But it’s a nice overview of circumstances which intruige me: And, in 2000, San Francisco had been over- taken by the boom of all booms and consumed…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #14

    Whiskey Tango Foxtrot by David Shafer Straight To Hell by John LeFere Swimming With Sharks by Joris Luyendijk Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow Call Me Dave by Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart Graphic Novels: Judge Dredd: The Chief Judge’s Man Revival Volume 5 C.O.W.L Volume 2 Criminal:…

  • one month left : the @ijsrm seminar competition

    The Board of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology (IJSRM) is pleased to announce the launch of our new Seminar Competition. Our aim is to support the development of critical and innovative approaches to on-going and emerging methodological debates across a range of approaches, both qualitative and quantitative, and including mixed and comparative methods, as these…