Category: Social Theory
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the theology of capital
The primary product sold by all management consultants – both software developers and strategic organisers – is the theology of capital. This holds that workers are expendable. They can be replaced by machines, or by harder-working employees grateful they weren’t let go in the last round of redundancies. Managers are necessary to the functioning of…
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intellectual fracking / notes toward the declaration of the Butlerian jihad
Friend-of-the-show Jay Springett talks a lot about “cultural fracking”, and is back on that beat this weekend. I’m feeling it; the big cultural events I’ve seen discussed this morning in the various feeds I follow have included another Star Wars prequel, another Indiana Jones movie, a “dark” Pinocchio remake. (Lest you think I’m pretending not…
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cultural currency exchange
Cat & Girl is another of the webcomics that I’ve been following for what seems like forever. It’s always good, albeit increasingly bleak and acid in recent years, but today’s strip in particular achieved a bridging of the structural and individual so deft that I simply couldn’t stand myself outside of it; a belly-laugh and…
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the dulling sameness of a world of infinite but meaningless variety
Via Andrew Curry’s ever-reliable Just Two Things newsletter—where does he find the time?!—here’s Annie Dorsen on AI “art” at [checks notes]… ah, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists? When people’s imaginative energy is replaced by the drop-down menu “creativity” of big tech platforms, on a mass scale, we are facing a particularly dire form of…
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platforms shape desire through the frustration that they deliver
Some typically nuanced and insightful thinking from Rob Horning, on the matter of social media, a topic whose omnipresence this last week has been much easier to bear thanks to not actually being present on any social media, and particularly not That One Site. But Horning’s point is that one need not be on social…