Author: PGR
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“Deviant and non-average practices” — Fam, Lahiri-Dutt & Sofoulis (2015), Scaling Down: Researching Household Water Practices
Fam, D., Lahiri-Dutt, K., & Sofoulis, Z. (2015). Scaling Down: Researching Household Water Practices. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 14(3), 639-651. [link] # (A timely rediscovery that echoes with Carson’s digs at Accelerationism… ) This is the introductory editorial piece from a special issue devoted to qualitative demand-side approaches to water consumption research; while the…
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There is no meaningfully superhuman way to install a ceiling fan
In the history of both technology and religion, you find a tension between two competing priorities that lead to two different patterns of problem selection: establishing the technology versus establishing a narrative about the technology. In proselytizing, you have to manage the tension between converting people and helping them with their daily problems. In establishing…
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Fully-automated luxury scale-tipping
… like others I have encountered who share their unconscious technological assumptions, [Srnicek and Williams] throw the phrase [“scaling up”] around without making it at all clear what they mean by it. For example, in an argument with an apologist for industrial agriculture I pointed to the superior productivity of soil-intensive horticulture in terms of output…
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The problem of being anyone at all
Those who disparage authors for practicing auto-fiction tend to believe character is a steady state that can be adequately represented on the page and thus see the autobiographical as an easy option, a copout. What they want instead is a determined effort of the unbridled imagination representing many different characters, all stable and well-defined, interacting…
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“A model of how to be and how to behave”: Szeman (2015), Entrepreneurship as the New Common Sense
Szeman, I. (2015). Entrepreneurship as the new common sense. South Atlantic Quarterly, 114(3), 471-490. [link] # Via a Wired article on the start-up Boomtrain, Szeman introduces the increasingly ubiquitous entrepreneurial story, “narratives that make it seem as if financial and social success is, in the main, inevitable in the new world of the devices and gadgets that increasingly…