The Epistemology of Civilizational Collapse
There was an interesting report earlier this week on a Nasa-funded study modelling the dynamics of civilizational collapse. I definitely intend to look at the study when it’s released, though I’m...
View ArticleThe Myth of Human Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies
This relates to the issues I was rambling about here. I’ve posted about Chris Hedges in the past. I’m a big fan of his work. He’s also a very interesting man.
View ArticleThe Sociology of Civilizational Collapse
How do we envisage our future? To ask this question usually invites reflections upon personal biography. More rarely does it address ‘our’ in a civilizational sense – I use the term loosely here to...
View ArticleWhat will post-democracy look like?
As anyone who reads my blog regularly might have noticed, I’m a fan of Colin Crouch’s notion of post-democracy. I’ve interviewed him about it a couple of times: once in 2010 and again in 2013. Whereas...
View ArticleWhat constitutes a civilisational collapse?
What constitutes collapse? This is the important question which Phil BC asks in response to my post on the sociology of civilisational collapse. If I mean the notion as anything other than a fleeting...
View ArticleThe place of sociology in the Second Machine Age
We’ve recently seen an emerging discourse of the ‘second machine age’ considering the potential implications of advances in robots and computational technologies for employment. In a recent London...
View ArticleWho could object to a project that seeks to stop killer robots?
Who could object to a project that seeks to stop killer robots? The UK government apparently: The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, an alliance of human rights groups and concerned scientists, is calling...
View Articlesocial engineers have never had so many options at their disposal
From To Save Everything, Click Here by Evgeny Morozov. For a talk about dystopias I’m doing next month, I’m trying to consider the implications of this technology at the level of social ontology. What...
View ArticleImages 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...
View ArticleThe Banal Reality of Democracy’s Death
There are two issues which have long fascinated me that seem more salient with each passing day. Our struggle to conceptualise long term social change from within (particularly the possibility of...
View ArticleThe Eschatology of Technology
In the last couple of days, I’ve been reading this book of talks by the ed-tech writer Audrey Watters. There are many things to recommend about it but the one that interests me most is its focus on the...
View ArticleElites preparing for disaster
There’s a disturbing snippet in Naomi Klein’s latest book, No Is Not Enough, discussing the growing market for disaster-preparation amongst well-heeled elites. While it’s possible there’s a large...
View ArticleThe epistemology of apocalypse
From Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything pg 105: The word “apocalypse” derives from the Greek apokalypsis, which means “something uncovered” or revealed. Besides the need for a dramatically better...
View ArticleThe rich have much to lose, the poor do not
I found this passage from Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement pg 147 deeply unsettling to read in the context of the current crisis. The comparative aspect applies slightly less to Covid than it does...
View ArticleThe patterns of life that modernity engenders can only be practiced by a...
From Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement pg 91: What we have learned from this experiment is that the patterns of life that modernity engenders can only be practiced by a small minority of the world’s...
View ArticlePopular Culture and Pandemic Imaginaries
It was clear that Songbird was a dreadful film, with atrocious script and terrible politics. However it was impossible to resist as a cultural expression of the ideas about society and the pandemic...
View ArticleWhy do we spend so little time analysing the socio-economic catastrophes...
I like Peter Fleming’s idea of speculative negativity: haunting of present by those “dystopic and grisly futures that have not yet materialised … only faintly detectible in the signs which drift by on...
View ArticleWe are already living in the collapse
I thought this was a really important point by James Meadway which captures something I’ve been trying to articulate across a series of gloomy blogposts: There is a difficulty for left political...
View ArticleWhat does it mean to live a good life in a broken world? Some post-pandemic...
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the existential challenges created by a world which is cascading towards systems failure. My assumption is that, as Charles Taylor puts it in A Secular Age,...
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