In the last year, I’ve been preoccupied by the relationship between periods of political flux and public intellectualism. These aren’t longer term processes, in which the coordinates of an established consensus begin to disintegrate, but rather short term periods of intense public… Read More ›
Tag Archive for ‘capitalism’
Politico-environmental crisis
In Naomi Klein’s new book No Is Not Enough, there’s a lucid overview of the intersection between political and environmental crisis. The role of drought in fermenting the conditions for the Syrian civil war was something which Marc Hudson first explained… Read More ›
An interview with Jamie Woodcock about Working the Phones
Find out more about the book here How did call centre emerge and proliferate? Would it be a mistake to see this as solely a matter of technological feasibility? The growth of call centres in the UK is a result… Read More ›
Towards a sociology of Pikettyville
From this fascinating paper by Roger Burrows, Richard Webber and Rowland Atkinson: To talk of ‘Pikettyville’ is then to conjure up an image of an urban system that has become hardwired to adopting, channelling and inviting excesses of social and economic… Read More ›
Wolfgang Streeck on The Five Disorders of Capitalism
In this talk at Goldsmith PERC, Wolfgang Streeck discusses ‘How Will Capitalism End?’:
Evgeny Morozov & David Harvey on the end of neoliberalism
A fantastic discussion, via Stuart Elden:
CfP: Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: ACADEMIC LABOUR, DIGITAL MEDIA AND CAPITALISM SPECIAL ISSUE OF TRIPLEC: COMMUNICATION, CAPITALISM & CRITIQUE http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/announcement/view/27 GUEST EDITORS: Thomas Allmer and Ergin Bulut Modern universities have always been part of and embedded into capitalism in political, economic and… Read More ›
When YouTube bought Google
A fascinating snippet of tech history. The founders of YouTube talk about their recent sale to Google, back in 2006, back when each were seen as something other than the slightly menacing giants they are today:
From TINA to TATIANA
A great rebuttal of the neoliberal insistence that There Is No Alternative, from loc 3840 of the recent book by Yanis Varoufakis: We were not naive enough to think that our blueprint would be implemented on the strength of its rationality…. Read More ›
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… Read More ›
Why I’m not Afraid or Ashamed of Cosmopolitanism
This piece is another one of my several articles inspired by Brexit. Here I bring together two issues that Brexit has placed in harsh juxtaposition: Cosmopolitanism as a distinct ideology – whose ‘elitism’ Peter Mandler and Ross Douthat have recently cast… Read More ›
Varoufakis on contemporary capitalism’s preposterous reversal of the truth
This isn’t a new idea but I’ve rarely encountered it expressed so concisely: The idea that individuals create wealth and that all governments do is come along and tax them is what Varoufakis calls “a preposterous reversal of the truth”…. Read More ›
Na Labutenah: Russian Society in 6 minutes
by Lisa Gaufman The video clip “Eksponat” (showpiece) released by the Russian rock group ‘Leningrad’ became a viral sensation within days. A catchy tune with Leningrad’s trademark obscene language tells the story of a woman who is going to various… Read More ›
David Harvey on the power of ideas
A fascinating panel discuss structured around David Harvey. He reflects on the power of ideas, how Marx changed over his career, the limitations of economics and the possibility of radical political change:
Milton Friedman vs. Frances Fox Piven on Free Enterprise
A fascinating exchange between one of the US’s most accomplished Sociologists and the intellectual hero of the American right:
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… Read More ›
Humanity on a Budget, or the ‘Value-Added’ of Being Human
This piece is dedicated to Stefan Stern, who picked up on – and ran with – a remark I made at this year’s Brain Bar Budapest, concerning the need for a ‘value-added’ account of being ‘human’ in a world in… Read More ›
Is Socialism Really Different from Capitalism or Simply a Theory about It?
One problem that we have as teachers of sociology and social theory is that we are so quick to assert our authority that we end up inhibiting the honest and probing questions from our supposedly ignorant students. Nevertheless, these questions… Read More ›
The cognitive costs of escaping the filter bubble
I recently 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… Read More ›
The pseudo-normalisation of flying
Most people I know travel frequently. I realised on an intellectual level that there are various factors which mean my friends, family and acquaintances probably travel more than average. But I didn’t realise quite how much more. This Guardian article… Read More ›
The Sadistic Irrational Bastards fallacy (SID)
On a couple of occasions I’ve heard Graham Scambler discuss what he calls the ‘greedy bastards hypothesis’ (GBH): This asserted that health inequalities in Britain were first and foremost an unintended consequence of the ‘strategic’ behaviours at the core of… Read More ›
The Iron Cage in Binary Code
This superb post by Tressie McMillan Cottom considers the algorithmic shaping of life chances under digital capitalism: Whether or not i know these ads are scams is entirely up to my individual cultural capital. Basically, do I know better? And… Read More ›
The Future of Social Critique – Collaborative Seminar, at Loughborough University on 2 June 2015
This Day event will take place in the James France Building, room CC021, from 10.30-4.30pm – 2 June 2015, and will focus on the Future of Social Critique. The event was organised to celebrate the careers of two renowned colleagues… Read More ›
The Tyranny of the Forced Smile
An interesting article in the New York Times discusses the mandated enthusiasm which increasingly characterises labour. This can be seen most emphatically in service jobs (e.g. the training required by Pret A Manger and its subsequent monitoring) but it’s also a feature… Read More ›
CfP: Thinking Beyond Capitalism, Belgrade, June 24-26, 2015
International Conference Thinking Beyond Capitalism, Belgrade, June 24-26, 2015 Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory How is it at all possible to make sound statements about contemporary capitalism? How does one adequately diagnose the current state of the economy? Clearly… Read More ›
The Sociology of Living and Dying Optimally: Towards a Transhuman Necropolitics
[This post is inspired by a twitter exchange with Mark Carrigan over this post, which reveals Foucault’s latent neo-liberal sympathies. Emilie Whitaker and I then had an exchange over this exchange, in which she coined ‘transhuman necropolitics’, capturing what I’m… Read More ›
Nightcrawler: or, the possibility of a vocation in late capitalism
Lou Bloom is a petty thief, prowling Los Angeles by night while seeking some purpose in his life. He exists on the fringes of society, stealing to survive while also offering himself as an employee prepared to work under any… Read More ›
Thomas Piketty: New thoughts on capital in the twenty-first century
TED have come to the rescue of those who, like me, only got 50 pages into Piketty’s Capital before getting distracted: French economist Thomas Piketty caused a sensation in early 2014 with his book on a simple, brutal formula explaining economic inequality:… Read More ›