Rigorous self-critique
"The desire to feel like an individual is a false need instigated by capitalism to make us productive in the social factory and to make us consume more in pursuit of a reified authenticity."
Value-seeking surveillance and The Hunger Games
Vicariousness as a system of control in The Hunger Games -- both the novel and the zeitgeisty phenomenon
Social graph vs. social class
Thinking about society as a network makes it harder to conceive of social change
Meritocracy and measurement myths
A quantified self is not a self better understood but a self reduced to fit the yardstick.
“To ‘blow one’s mind’ means to become more aware.”
Charles Reich's 1970 defense of youth culture illustrates the problems with the politics of self-liberation.
The master-smartphone dialectic
The strange idea that the smartphones themselves, and not bosses, are responsible for workers' compulsive smartphone use
Pinterest and the acquisitive gaze
Pinterest indulges the fantasy that we can nail down a thing's meaning by "buying" it when we are actually destabilizing it further
Advertising and the health of the internet
Is it too late to imagine an internet without advertising? Is advertising the inevitable end point and meaning of any information that circulates?
Northanger Abbey and antisocial pleasure
Northanger Abbey wants to condemn consumerism and champion the right kind of novel reading, but it can find no stable premises for the distinction
Predictive analytics and information camouflage
Marketers are mining our data trails to predict what we want and who we should be
Precarity and “affective resistance”
Does precarity lead to resistance and political action, or simply more desperate and exploitable survival strategies?
Mansfield Park is melting in the dark
Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and the perils of attention seeking
Selflessness and self-absorption
The space in which we can experience ourselves just being ourselves is disappearing. Here's what an old book about 18th century French painting can tell us about this
Facebook division of labor and the rewired society
I’m reading through the summary of findings of this Pew survey of Facebook users. (It is based on phone polling, so caveat emptor.) The point…
Notes on the “data self”
1. Identity is fundamentally multiple, incomplete, provisional, cyborg, contextually contingent, etc. Deleuze et al. are right about that. (See Turkle’s “Multiple Subjectivity and Virtual Community…
Consultancy Rock
The appeal of Rush, however, is that being a Rush fan seems to exempt one from such constraints and anxieties, from feeling required to validate tastes by advertising them. No matter how counterintuitive or ironic things become, throwing on a Grace Under Pressure tour shirt or air-drumming to “YYZ” isn’t likely to impress anyone. How