Category: Social Theory
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models that might help us grasp how movements grow and shift
Clipping a short reply from (of all places) LinkedIn, because I feel like I made a point here that I’m going to want to be able to find and repeat. So, in discussion of the talk I’m giving tomorrow: To be clear, it’s not that politics *is* fandom; it’s that they work in strongly analogous…
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preludes to enantiodromia
I’m seeing enough of them, now, and discussing the concept with enough people online and off, that I think it’s time to start clipping examples of people pointing at harbingers of enantiodromia—the sudden inversion of a paradigm into its complete opposite. Here’s yer man Dougald Hine—a far better-known and more widely read Brit-who-fled-to-Sweden—in a longer…
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in the process of throwing it away for something we know is worse
If—as seems to be the case—I am to join the ranks of middle-aged men yelling at clouds, I guess I can bear it if Adam Kotsko is in the vanguard: Print was a perfected technology, an unsurpassable way of sharing information and ideas and stories — and we are all in the process of throwing…
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a mixture of Vatican clergy and the Wizard of Oz: on hype, strategy, and postmodernity
Don’t tell my mother I said this*, but as time goes by I’ve really come to appreciate the value of paying attention to the experience of old hands. Exhibit A comes with what I will gladly concede is a hefty slice of self-aggrandisement. Rodney Brooks has been working with robots and autonomous vehicles for almost…
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our experience as slaves to the everything machine can be changed
Lots of chewy goodies in this thoughtful long thing from Christopher Butler. I need to sit with it for longer, perhaps, before I can get the best of it—it is very much a designer’s view of things, and while Some Of My Best Friends Are DesignersTM, it’s a perspective which, in order to see properly…