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  • Felix & Adelita

    She called him Felix Which meant ‘lucky’ to her He was a middle-distance runner She didn’t take him seriously But shifted in her seat when he walked by He thought her plain But sensual in some way She licked the corner of her mouth thoughtfully Wore her skirts above the knee He told her a…

  • the astroturfing industry 

    From Edward Walker’s Grassroots For Hire pg 6-7: Today, more and more advocacy is being driven not by the local organizing of autonomous citizens, but by the efforts of paid consultants that organizations like these for- profit colleges hire to help them activate receptive members of the public on their behalf. Grassroots for Hire reveals…

  • on fragile movements

    The notion of fragile movements is an integral part of my new project. I’ve tried to explain it at various points on the blog, as well as in a book chapter which will be published as part of the Centre for Social Ontology’s annual Social Morphogenesis series. But I just encountered a really apt description of the…

  • the agonistic politics of anonymous 

    I’ve recently been writing about the fragility of many contemporary movements: the organisational weakness that can emerge from digitally mediated assembly because the logistical labour formerly necessary to bring people together provided an important foundation for collective reflexivity. Collective projects become harder to sustain without regular face-to-face meetings, shared practical challenges and other forms of…

  • ‘The UK is finished’: Owen Jones meets Peter Hitchens

  • things I’ve been reading recently #12

    The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff Big Short by Michael Lewis Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich by Chrystia Freeland The Super-Rich Shall Inherit the Earth by Stephen Armstrong Post-Capitalism: A Guide To Our Future by Paul Mason Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester Future by…

  • the intensification of work in the creative industries

    In a recent monograph published by The Sociological Review, Bridget Conor, Rosalind Gill and Stephanie Taylor edited a collection of papers looking at the significance of gender in the labour relations of the contemporary creative industries. I’m interested in this as part of my Digital Capitalism project because a phenomenon that’s central to my analysis,…

  • upwards over the mountain

    Mother don’t worry, I killed the last snake that lived in the creek bed Mother don’t worry, I’ve got some money I saved for the weekend Mother remember being so stern with that girl who was with me Mother remember the blink of an eye when I breathed through your body So may the sunrise…

  • The fiction future of faculty: September 16th in Manchester

    I’m organising a design fiction event in Manchester on September 16th, with James Duggan and Joseph Lindley. It’ll be great. You can register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-fiction-future-of-faculty-an-afternoon-of-sociological-design-fiction-tickets-18169546603 The ability of storytelling to help us envision and discuss a gamut of plausible futures, from dystopian visions to everyday utopias, is increasingly being harnessed using the nascent practice of ‘design…

  • the ecology of content 

    From Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, pg 19: There are thousands of bloggers scouring the web looking for things to write about. They must write several times each day. They search Twitter, Facebook, comments sections, press releases, rival blogs, and other sources to develop their material. Above them are hundreds of…

  • the horatio alger myth

    This fascinating feature of American cultural history was entirely unknown to me, until The New Prophets of Capital, loc 1051. I wonder how Alger would have faired in an environment saturated by social media? Horatio Alger, a sensitive Harvard alum, was horrified by the ills of industrial capitalism in New York City during the late…

  • the origins of digital capitalism 

    From The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff, loc 730-744: At the same time, society’s greatest inventions and innovations of the past two hundred years— rockets to the moon, penicillin, computers, the internet— were not bestowed upon us by lone entrepreneurs and firms operating in free markets under conditions of healthy competition. They were…

  • this is not a pipe

    This is not a chair That is not a table This is not a cup That is not a kettle It is not raining My shoe is not untied I have not been unhappy my whole life This is not a wall That is not a ceiling This is not a scrape I don’t know…

  • the disruption of finance 

    From The Big Short by Michael Lewis, pg 172. This is a part of the story of the financial crisis which has received too little attention: ‘innovations’ in finance were driven by the ‘disruption’ the established figures in the industry were subject to as a result of new online competitors: One of the reasons Wall…

  • social media and the promise of never again being alone 

    From Liquid Surveillance: a conversation by Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon, pg 22-23. I heard Bauman make these arguments at re:publica earlier this year and was rather impressed. As ever with him, it’s immensely impressionistic but I think he identifies something important that has been substantiated by other work, most obviously Alice Marwick’s ethnography of…

  • the threats of financial elites 

    From Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis, pg 302-303 One of the managing directors from London, who happened to be in New York, actually took me aside to practise an argument he planned to put to the Bank of England. He had calculated the sum of the losses of the banks underwriting BP to be 700…

  • the threats of financial elites 

    From Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis, pg 302-303 One of the managing directors from London, who happened to be in New York, actually took me aside to practise an argument he planned to put to the Bank of England. He had calculated the sum of the losses of the banks underwriting BP to be 700…

  • the totally weird subculture of 1980s mortgage traders 

    From Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis, pg 149: Their culture was based on food, and as strange as that sounds, it was stranger still to those who watched mortgage traders eat. “You don’t diet on Christmas Day,” says a former trader, “and you didn’t diet in the mortgage department. Every day was a holiday. We…

  • the masters of the universe and their delusions

    From Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis, pg 301: It was striking how little control we had of events, particularly in view of how assiduously we cultivated the appearance of being in charge by smoking big cigars and saying fuck all the time.

  • the meaning of scrounging in conservative britain 

    HT Nadine Muller   

  • post-democratic political culture: how good leaders go bad

    Absolutely fascinating comments offered by Varoufakis in response to unfolding events in Greece: In the wake of Tsipras’s unexpected move on Thursday to call early elections, Varoufakis said: “Tsipras made a decision on that night of the referendum not only to surrender to the troika but also to implement the terms of surrender on the…

  • the post-democratic judicial system

    Superb and worrying article in the LRB. I’d like to know more about international parallels to this trend in the UK, as it strikes me this is a very important dimension to the emergence of post-democracy: Unlike most other litigation costs, these fees must be paid up front; if you can’t pay, your claim won’t…

  • spotify’s ultra-creepy new privacy policy

    As the article suggests, this initiative may be the result of the threat posed by Apple music. What interests me is how totally open-ended this is: how do we perceive and evaluate risks when policies take such a form? Sections 3.3 and 3.4 of Spotify’s privacy policy say that the app will now collected much more data…

  • “drag coefficient”: the creepiest human resources concept ever?

    HT to Marcus Gilroy-Ware for telling me about this disturbing concept. This description by Arlie Hochschild is quoted in Bauman’s Consuming Life on pg 9: Since 1997, a new term – ‘zero drag’ – has begun quietly circulating in Silicon Valley, the heartland of the computer revolution in America. Originally it meant the frictionless movement…

  • the social expectations of the super-rich

    From Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich pg 57-58. I’m very interested in how social expectations are generated amongst elites, how these in turn shape competitive pressures and the implications these have for how they orientate themselves towards non-elites. I’ve been looking through journalistic sources for examples of the super-rich complaining about their…

  • the self-congratulation of digital elites 

    From Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich pg 54-55: Carnegie asserted that knights of capitalism like himself “ and the law of competition between these” were “not only beneficial, but essential to the future progress of the race.” No one would talk like that today, but our champions of capital do like to…

  • markets are a machine for destroying the ego

    Another remarkably revealing statement from a man who once likened himself to a giant digestive tract, taking in money at one end and expelling it at the other. From Plutocrats: the Rise of the New Global Super-Rich pg 53: George Soros told the gathered academics that “the markets are a machine for destroying the ego.”…

  • pride and pleasure in acceleration 

    From Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich pg 52-53: One badge of membership in the super- elite is jet lag. Novelist Scott Turow calls this the “flying class” and describes its members as “the orphans of capital” for whom it is a “badge of status to be away from home four nights a…

  • data fetishism and the elites of digital capitalism 

    From Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich pg 46: Carlos Slim, who studied engineering in college and taught algebra and linear programming as an undergraduate, attributes his fortune to his facility with numbers. So does Steve Schwarzman, who told me he owed his success to his “ability to see patterns that other people…

  • the culture of the ‘working rich’

    Following on from my previous post, I’m really interested in how this trend shapes how contemporary elites seek to make sense of their actions and circumstances in moral terms. From Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich pg 44: Forbes classifies 840 of the 1,226 people on its 2012 billionaire ranking as self- made.…

  • digital capitalism, the great levelling and the moral agency of elites

    I’ve been thinking recently about forms of moral self-understanding amongst elites and how they change over time. I’m particularly interested in how those in the tech sector make sense of their own actions. But there’s a broader background here, in which ‘globalisation’ is seen and justified in explicitly moral terms. For instance, this passage from Plutocrats:…

  • we are all equal before Google

    This snippet from an interview with the new Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, intrigued me: Pichai has said that he’s attracted to computing because of its ability to do cheaply things that are useful to everyone, irrespective of class or background. “The thing which attracted me to Google and to the internet in general is that it’s…

  • the moral discourse of the ‘reasonable technocrat’

    An excellent piece on Democrat Audit looking at the role of the ‘reasonable technocrat’ in the unfolding of the crisis in Europe. It’s important to analyse the moral underpinnings of technocratic discourse, looking at what makes it plausible and important to those who see the world in this way: a self-congragulatory pragmatism, regarding oneself as…

  • viral media and unionisation

    I’ve been interested in Upworthy for a long time. It was founded by Eli Pariser, author of the Filter Bubble and key figure in MoveOn.org, in order to leverage the dynamics of viral media to promote ‘meaningful’ and progressive content. But a few years on, with a change in Facebook’s algorithms having brought about a…

  • what to do when a political party you instinctively support shows nothing but contempt for the things you believe?

    My early political memories all relate to the Labour party. My dad was a Labour activist, as was my Granddad. My first involvement in politics was helping them deliver leaflets in the area of north Manchester I grew up in. Even as I began to drift into anarchist politics as a teenager, it was always something…

  • The fiction future of faculty: an afternoon of sociological design fiction

    I’m organising a design fiction event in Manchester on September 16th, with James Duggan and Joseph Lindley. It’ll be great. You can register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-fiction-future-of-faculty-an-afternoon-of-sociological-design-fiction-tickets-18169546603 The ability of storytelling to help us envision and discuss a gamut of plausible futures, from dystopian visions to everyday utopias, is increasingly being harnessed using the nascent practice of…

  • attribution in live tweeting

    I’m in the process of taking a carving knife to Social Media for Academics so expect more snippets to follow:  As Deborah Lupton has observed in her Digital Sociology, “Some academics are concerned that if their conference papers are live-tweeted at conferences, audio- or videotaped, blogged abut, or otherwise shared on social media by others their new and original…

  • the circular tendency in digital capitalism

    From this fascinating Jacobin piece. This observation is key to what I’m planning on focusing on over the next few years: One of the features of recent digital capitalism is the tendency for firms to build companies that appear to skirt around the spirit, and perhaps the letter, of the law regarding vertical monopolies (for…

  • blogging as an outboard brain

    This superb post by Cory Doctorow offers a philosophy of blogging extremely similar to what I’ve described as continuous publishing: As a committed infovore, I need to eat roughly six times my weight in information every day or my brain starts to starve and atrophy. I gather information from many sources: print, radio, television, conversation, the Web,…

  • on digital distraction

    From The Distraction Addiction by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang: It amazes me how often during a single (admittedly rather trivial) thought my mind wants to veer off onto these other paths, pick up this idea and that one, answer this or that question – and how easy the web lets me satisfy that curiosity. What makes the Web…

  • negative solidarity is here to stay: the ‘greedy’ tube workers

    As I too often find myself doing in these situations, I’ve been browsing hashtags and newspaper comments about the tube strike. The most obvious recurring theme concerns the putative comfort of the striking tube workers: how do they justify striking when they’re already so well off? In actuality, salaries of tube workers range between £24,000…

  • reflections on preparing to finish a book

    The final stages of Social Media for Academics are giving me flashbacks to the end of my PhD. I’ve drunk so much coffee that I can barely sit down, I have Forces of Victory on repeat and I’m alternating between thinking the nearly finished work is brilliant and concluding that it’s utterly shit. Over the weekend, I…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #11

    The Everything Store by Brad Stone Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting In a Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger To Save Everything Click Here by Evgeny Morozov The Googlization of Everything by Siva Vaidhyanathan Graphic novels: The rest of Ex Machina. It’s brilliant. 

  • social media and academic freedom

    An overview of the things that I’ve been reading this morning. I’ve been focusing on this today because I think this section of the book is a little weak, despite it being one of the most important and interesting issues I cover. A useful essay reflecting on the David Guth case, in which a professor’s…

  • music I find inexplicably conducive to writing (#19)

    And I cannot help but hold on to a handful of times when what was spoken was a revolution in itself, and what we were doing was the only thing that mattered And how good it felt to kill the memory of nights spent holding your shirt for the smell I heard you used to…

  • the best of bezos: the vitriolic putdowns of the amazon ceo

    From The Everything Story by Brad Stone: “I don’t know if you guys don’t have high standards or if you just don’t know what you’re doing” “If that’s our plan, I don’t like our plan” “Are you lazy or just incompetent?” “Does it surprise you that you don’t know the answer to that question?” “Why are you…

  • the question no one seems willing to answer about university branding

    From SymOmega here: Our previous but now-outdated motto was “Achieve International Excellence” which is pretty clunky but at least the intent is clear. Even earlier we had a much more succinct motto with which surely no-one can disagree  – “Seek Wisdom” – and to which I think we should return, if we really think a…

  • using big data to transform the classroom from the 19th century to the 21st

    Bookmarking this so I can come back to it later. If I pursue this thread, Social Media For Academics is never going to get finished: Reflecting their student populations, universities have long been bastions of oodles of consumer technology. We are awash in mobile phones, laptops, tablets, gaming consoles, and the like. If one combines mobile consumer…

  • the ethos of openness

    We have to be critical of ‘openness’ as a concept. But nonetheless I think there’s a reality to openness as an ethos that we shouldn’t forget. This is my favourite articulation of it: When my daughter was born, I became keenly aware of how much stock we mammals put into the copies we make of ourselves (yes,…

  • music I find inexplicably conducive to writing (#18)

    Within ten minutes of putting the album on, I was struck by the overwhelming sense of Social Media for Academics being on the verge of completion. Thanks Radiohead, I needed that.

  • music I find inexplicably conducive to writing (#17)

  • the pleasures of knowing where you stand 

    From page 75 of Brad Stone’s excellent book The Everything Store: In early 1998, Bezos was closely involved with a department called Personalization and Community, which was geared toward helping customers discover books, music, and movies they might find interesting. That May, he surveyed what was then Amazon’s Hot 100 bestseller list and had an…

  • when people falsely impute research to you

    This is just weird. I can only assume that the EastLovesWest company hires underpaid freelancers to produce content for their blog, who have in turn typed keywords into Google and written an article without ever clicking on any of the links: It seems likely to me that this will become a more common occurrence with…

  • blogging your fieldwork

    Pat Thompson has written a fascinating post reflecting on her use of blogging to record field notes during an ethnographic project at the Tate summer school. She stresses the ethical challenges of such an activity – particularly the need to negotiate consent with participants, including around photos, as well as the need for a framework…

  • social media and solidarity in higher education

    There’s a great article on the THE, in which Caroline Magennis reflects on the success of the conversation she started recently about being an academic from a less privileged background: What are the challenges of being an academic from a less privileged background? Questions of ‘fitting in’ but also practical issues? — Caroline Magennis (@DrMagennis) July 19,…

  • the coming copyright wars on twitter

    This is a very interesting trend, though one I suspect could lead in some unfortunate directions: Ever been the victim of plagiarism on Twitter—or, dare we say, the shameful purveyor of it? The social network seems to be putting an end to those pirated tweets by cracking down on users who steal jokes to inflate their…

  • using snapchat in higher education

    I’ve struggled to see how Snapchat could be used within higher education. I could imagine why academics might end up using it in an entirely personal capacity, but I found it difficult to imagine how it could be used by them professionally. So it was really interesting to read this interview with Newcastle University’s Social Media…

  • how to evaluate your web page for accessibility

    This is an extremely useful post on ProfHacker, with links to many resources. It’s also reassuring to read “this can often seem like an overwhelming topic to beginners” because I wasn’t sure if I was the only one who felt that way.

  • what would a curricula for Networked Scholarship look like?

    That’s the intriguing question which George Veletsianos addresses in this post. He suggest an approach centred around issues and tools: Networked scholarship curricula will need to balance a focus on tools and issues. The teaching of tools could instill future scholars with the abilities to use networked technologies productively. For instance, networked scholars might employ the services…

  • Closing an open letter

    Around a year and a half ago, I got very upset with the British Sociological Association when I couldn’t afford to attend a conference for which I’d given a great deal of free labour. I was a month away from handing in my then still very much unfinished PhD thesis, I’d started two new jobs (one…

  • #TwitterGate: the ethics of live tweeting

    Some useful resources: A storify of the hashtag If you don’t have social media, you are no one: How social media enriches conferences for some but risks isolating other The Academic Twitterazzi An idea is a dangerous thing to quarantine Tweeting out loud: ethics, knowledge and social media in academe Some live tweeting policies and…

  • the creepy treehouse problem

    In their enthusiasm for the pedagogical uses to which social media can be put, academics sometimes don’t stop to question whether students actually want to interact with them on social media. This is sometimes referred to as ‘the creepy treehouse problem’: requiring students to interact with you on what they perceive as a private platform, or…

  • imagining post-capitalism and techno-fascism

    Last week Paul Mason posted a provocative Guardian essay suggesting that the end of capitalism has begun. It’s a precursor to his upcoming book PostCapitalism: A Guide To Our Future which is released in a few days time. I’m looking forward to the book, not least of all because it’s an optimistic counterpoint to the gloomy thought…

  • the politics of noise in historical perspective

    I blogged last week about the micro-politics of noise. I didn’t put a great deal of thought into the use of the qualifier ‘micro’: I recognised a legal framework within which noise is regulated (or not), a structural context which shapes working routines, technological changes which create capacities and tendencies towards noise generation and a…

  • the antinomies of blairism

    Earlier today Tony Blair gave a speech in which he finally took the gloves off. As someone with a growing interest in theorising post-democracy, I found it oddly intriguing. To anyone acquainted with the writing Anthony Giddens was spewing out in the 1990s, it was familiar stuff. Despite the fact his politics would long since have placed him…

  • but on the day I die, I’ll say at least I fucking tried, that’s the only eulogy I need

  • things I’ve been reading recently #10

    Blogging – Jill Rettberg The Internet Is Not The Answer – Andrew Keen [astonishingly he had a whole team of research assistants for this yet used few, if any, sources which weren’t from the internet] Homeland – Cory Doctorow Status Update – Alice Marwick [brilliant!] Graphic Novels:  Ex Machina [best thing Brian Vaughan has ever written]…

  • I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel, that’s all, I don’t even think of you that often.

  • the cognitive costs of escaping the filter bubble

    Yesterday saw the news that ‘Infidelity site’ Ashley Madison had been hacked, with the attackers claiming 37 million records had been stolen. The site is an online forum for infidelity, a dating site explicitly designed to facilitate affairs, something which potentially provoked the ire of the hackers. Or it could be the fact that users are…

  • The @_ISRF @DigitalSocSci and @BigDataSoc Essay Competition

    An exciting new project I’ve helped launch: a collaboration between the ISRF’s Digital Social Science Forum and the journal Big Data & Society. See here for full details: 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…

  • the synchronised society

    I went to see an excellent exhibition about children’s television yesterday afternoon, intended to explore “how the magical programmes of our childhood have created memories and nostalgia in adults and children alike”. The possibility of such explanation presupposes some degree of collectivity. The exhibition was ambiguous at points but there was a clear undercurrent of…

  • the war on radicalisation and where it might lead

    In this chilling interview, Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander Europe of Nato and one time favourite of Michael Moore for the Democratic Presidential nomination, rather aggressively floats the idea of interning those who are disloyal to the United States for the duration of the ‘war on terror’: If we look at this in terms…

  • and the evilest of nine’s guaranteed to shoot crooked

  • freedom from self-imposed metrified tyranny: some thoughts on the moral psychology of self-tracking

    A couple of years ago I purchased a Nike Fuel Band, partly out of a curiosity driven by my nascent interest in self-tracking and partly out of a desire to rationalise not going to the gym. If I was planning to conduct research on self-tracking practices then it seemed important to me to actually try…

  • memes are born free, but everywhere they are in chains

    From To Save Everything, Click Here by Evgeny Morozov: Contrary to what most Internet cheerleaders think, virality is hardly ever self- generated and self- sustaining. Memes are born free, but everywhere they are in chains— those of PR agencies and freelancing solo artists. Both have perfectly adapted to this new digital world and found ways…

  • surviving life in the accelerated academy: prospects and problems for digital scholarship

    It’s been ages since I last wrote an abstract and immediately found myself thinking “wow, I can’t wait to write this paper”: Surviving Life in the Accelerated Academy: The Potential and Pitfalls of Digital Scholarship  In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to the stress and anxiety of academic life. This developing discourse has an ambivalent…

  • fitter, happier, more productive

    I came across a reference to this earlier today and was struck by how ahead of its time it was. It’s so much more resonant in a world of activity trackers, life hacking and executive mindfulness than it was originally.

  • social engineers have never had so many options at their disposal

    From To Save Everything, Click Here by Evgeny Morozov. For a talk about dystopias I’m doing next month, I’m trying to consider the implications of this technology at the level of social ontology. What does it mean to see sinister possibilities inherent in ‘innovations’ like this? Is there anything we can say in the abstract…

  • the micro-politics of noise and the challenge of being-with-others

    Sometimes the noise other people make bothers me. I mean really pisses me off. The kind of irritation which makes it impossible to ignore the noise, leaving your attention locked in and your perceptual field narrowed until there is only you and that noise. On those occasions where I talk myself out of it, I…

  • I should’ve found a way out, so everyone can find a way out

    I guess I am a scout So I should find a way out So everyone can find a way out They keep us in To pull us out I’m rising up Wish I was sinking down And it’s not like There was warning We were happy And it’s not like There was mourning In the…

  • Relational Flourishing

    It’s very easy for the idea of human flourishing to become individualistic. If it’s being advocated as an alternative to subjective well-being, its status as an opposition encourages what Andrew Sayer calls a PoMo flip: a problematic conceptual structure is retained while dichotomies are reversed. In this case, ‘well-being’ as a subjective fact about the…

  • Normal service has been resumed: I will never trying closing my personal blog again

    Around two months ago I reluctantly came to the conclusion that I no longer had time to maintain two blogs. I won’t go into the reasons here, but the case seemed pretty unanswerable. So I closed down this blog and decided I would focus on Sociological Imagination. Since then I’ve felt the quality of my…

  • Things I’ve been reading recently #9

    The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro The Children Act – Ian McEwan Meatball Sundae – Seth Godin (slightly embarrassed to admit this) The Psychopath Test – Jon Ronson It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens – dana boyd Seeing Ourselves Through Technology – Jill Rettberg Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free –…

  • Towards a Digital Social Ontology: Free Day Symposium in London on July 8th

    The Social Ontology of Digital Data & Digital Technology Wednesday, July 8, 2015 from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM This innovative symposium brings together leading figures from a variety of fields which address issues of digital technology and digital data. We’ve invited speakers with a range of intellectual perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds who engage with…

  • Are you a PhD student or early career researcher interested in social ontology?

    Centre for Social Ontology PhD/ECR Conference June 23rd, University of Warwick, 10am – 4pm Social ontology is integral to the study of society. It is impossible to inquire into the social world without some understanding, at least tacitly, concerning the entities which make up that world and their properties and powers. However social ontology remains…

  • Music I find inexplicably conducive to write (#16)

  • Things I’ve been reading recently #8

    Difficult Men: Behind The Scenes of a Creative Revolution by Brett Martin That Option No Longer Exists: Britain 1974-76 by John Medhurst Them: Adventures With Extremists by Jon Ronson Boomerang: The Biggest Bust by Michael Lewis Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years by Sue Townsend Graphic Novels: Southern Basterds Volume 2

  • Music I find inexplicably conducive to writing (#15)

    I’ve had this on repeat for days now. One of those rare albums that gets better the more you listen to it:

  • Things I’ve been reading recently #7

    It’s been a while since I last did one of these: The Happiness Industry by William Davies – superb and I’m interviewing him about it next week A Decent Ride by Irvine Welsh – far from his best but immensely readable nonetheless Warwick University LTD by E.P. Thompson and others – I chose an eerily…

  • CfP: The Politics of Data (Science)

    The Politics of Data (Science) This special issue of Discover Society will explore the political implications of ‘big data’ and the systems of expertise emerging around it, including though not limited to Data Science. In doing so it will aim to bridge the gap between the methodological discourse surrounding data science and the political discourse…

  • An introduction to Design Fiction for Sociologists, May 13th at Goldsmiths

    Design fiction is a term first coined by Julian Bleecker and popularized by SF author Bruce Sterling, who describes it as “the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.” and that it “attacks the status quo and suggests clear ways in which life might become different.” Design fiction isn’t science fiction, it’s…

  • Dear England

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSjAI3KMS2I Whoa, give me the words, give me the words That tell me nothing Dear England, Whoa, give me the words, give me the words That tell me nothing They say God save the queen, Britannia rules the waves, Britannia’s in my genes But Britannia called us slaves Britannia made the borders Cause Britannia’s forces…

  • Music I find inexplicably conducive to write (#14)

  • CfP: The Politics of Data (Science)

    The Politics of Data (Science) This special issue of Discover Society will explore the political implications of ‘big data’ and the systems of expertise emerging around it, including though not limited to Data Science. In doing so it will aim to bridge the gap between the methodological discourse surrounding data science and the political discourse…

  • An introduction to Design Fiction for Sociologists, May 13th at Goldsmiths

    Design fiction is a term first coined by Julian Bleecker and popularized by SF author Bruce Sterling, who describes it as “the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.” and that it “attacks the status quo and suggests clear ways in which life might become different.” Design fiction isn’t science fiction, it’s…

  • Call for papers: Centre for Social Ontology PhD/ECR Conference (deadline TOMORROW)

    Centre for Social Ontology PhD/ECR Conference June 23rd, University of Warwick, 10am – 4pm Social ontology is integral to the study of society. It is impossible to inquire into the social world without some understanding, at least tacitly, concerning the entities which make up that world and their properties and powers. However social ontology remains…