Contemporary social movements in the West either forget past achievements made in their name or hold them in outright contempt. That is damaging to their ability to identify and work towards concrete goals. It leads to the maximalist trend in current debate where no solution is satisfactory and potential allies are discarded because of a lack of purity. In recent years policing and prison reform have been replaced in the imaginary with defunding the police and abolishing prisons. The scrubbing of history covers over that fact that we have had several prison abolition movements over the years. Prisons were effectively abolished in the 19th century and replaced with something else, reformatories. Another problem with the current progressive stance is it ignores backsliding. Because the current situation is so unreformable, it does not recognise that things can get worse. For example, prisons were partly de-abolished in the early 21st century, with the development of a network of CIA-run torture sites and the effective suspension of habeus corpus.

There is a serious argument about prison design, what gets defined as a crime, and why some people end up in prison and not others which current social movements can contribute to. There is no answer to the question though about what to do with people who refuse restorative justice, or transformative justice. You either coerce or ostracise. Which is sort of like… prison.

Recent years have seen two linked movements or policy positions come to the fore: defund the police, and prison abolition/anti-carceral politics. Both gained prominence as an arm of Black Lives Matter though they go much further back. Both also had a tendency not to mean what they said. Many ‘defund the police’ arguments ended up saying that of course they did not want to defund the police as such, just direct funding to better, less coercive solutions where possible. Many prison abolition arguments said that yes, we still need prisons (or something that looks like them) but we need to lock fewer people up and make more use of alternative routes. As in, we need to reform it.

These motte and bailey arguments are difficult to get to grips with because it becomes unclear what people actually want to happen. The argument type consists of making a strong, all encompassing, hard to defend statement (the bailey) but when challenged retreat to an easier to defend but largely bland and common sense statement (the motte). A fewer number of voices were prepared to stick to the bailey and argue that yes, society would be much better if we just got rid of both tomorrow. A criticism of the motte and bailey critique is that these are just clarifications. If so, political movements work best when they have defined aims, because then you know when you have got there, and they speak for themselves – and to the reality of people’s lives.

A problem underlies that tendency. It is the systematic forgetting that it promotes. A frustrating feature of several current social movements is their constant forgetting, rejection or devaluing of their own history. Occupy exemplified this and the situation has become more damaging since. These year zero type statements reflect the need to be the first ones to do this or that, and also to avoid any solutions that might have to be fought for and applied in the messy real world. It often involves setting fire to one’s predecessors, and often explicitly denigrating past feminist, civil rights and labour movement generations. It also minimises past achievements. The aims of many of these movements would be easier to achieve if they were linked into those traditions. So: ‘antiwork’ is just updated trade unionism. ‘Decarceral’ politics is just good old prison reform. ‘Defund’ the police is just police democratisation. These are venerable traditions stretching back tens and hundreds of years, but you would not know it to listen to their proponents. That matters when it comes to institutionalising their achievements and not backsliding from them.

One of the strangest defences of defund the police policy was to say that it was ‘just a slogan’. This was followed by someone saying that you were an idiot to think that defund the police meant defund the police. Actually we were told defund the police means a rallying point to argue for reform, better training for officers, funding of mental health services so that the police aren’t dealing with what are essentially psychiatric or welfare problems. Things are very hard to argue with and very reasonable. Likewise prison abolition for some people putting the slogan forward actually just means prison reform. This type of argument has been well criticised and it is kind of frustrating. When people campaign against the poll tax we wanted to abolish the tax so our slogan was ‘axe the tax’.

What I’m saying in this post is a bit different it is the active and has a tendency to shift the goalposts to ensure that their actual aim is never achieved. For example some environmental campaigners now it looks like the UK has a decent chance of achieving that zero switching to say ‘well you can’t have environmental justice without jutsice for Gaza’. Justice for Gaza might be a nice thing but it isn’t anything to do with co2 emissions.  There is a tendency for activist to deliberately make their own demands unattainable. If you never know what defund the police really means you can buy different definition never really say that you’ve obtained the objective.

It also draws on a harmful tendency in social theory. The worst thing to happen to the prison reform movement was the popularisation of a basic version of Foucault’s claim that all reform is really the opposite of reform. Every improvement in prison organisation, or the establishment of a welfare state or any kind of positive political change is, he argued, just another thread in the web of power that we are stuck to. No it is not. The radical chic rhetoric of these movements stops actual reform happening. They fail to recognise change that has happened and refuse to learn from the experience of others. They also have nothing to say when society degrades, when rights are lost, because to them progress itself means nothing. Being rendered, being held without any due process, are identifiable harms which should have been prevented. You cannot campaign against that or prison privatisation if you also think that reform is just another move in the carceral power game.

An insight of the sociology of consumer society from Veblen onwards is the way modern societies turn free time into a zone of performance, status and economic activity. Digital platforms put rockets on that. Our eyeballs become commodities. That might be part of the explanation for the current political polarisation and tendency to flay moral transgressors alive. Destroying people for a misplaced tweet is not incidental to our core status activity. For those who see status as coming from demonstrating their virtue online, it is a key activity. We should stop treating these processes as a secondary issue to the real deal of economic production. Public shaming is as much a part of politics as who gets what.

The economic context is central to this. There was since the 1980s a coherent effort to shift the UK economy to one focused around leisure consumption. That involved the development of large scale integrated leisure companies. Established breweries and their tied pubs were bought out and refashioned. New alcohol products were launched, focused on the female market and on at-home consumption. Something similar happened to football. Football clubs became the entertainment centrepiece for new television channels which increasingly treated the match and the players as a product to be sold and re-sold – sometimes to those same pubcos that were reshaping drinking time. Intoxication changes as a result. It is pulled  out of a localised, tangible context where norms help regulate both consumption levels and behaviour.

There is a symbiosis between the development of integrated alcohol corporations which have reworked traditional pub culture into high consumption leisure spaces, involving high levels of at-home alcohol consumption; and the same process in football which has commodified it and also changed the context of supporter cultures, making it more of a leisure industry. Despite that, localised working class cultures still matter to the game, just as traditional pub culture persists and has echoes in contemporary British alcohol culture.  There is also another tradition, of self developed autonomous intoxication cultures, around the 1980s rave scene, and later autonomous festivals and psychedelic contexts. Currently the same risk is apparent as psychedelics approach something like mainstream recognition and attract the interest of venture capital. We may see another round of commodification and its logics: standardisation and regulation, in which localised tangible cultures are turned into abstracted products.

‘For all they did cast in of their abundance; but she of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living‘ Mark, 12: 44, KJV.

It’s not about the money, but then again, it really, really is.

At my old church the tradition was to pass the wooden collection plate around. You drop coins or pound notes in (this was the 1980s), or gave your donation in an envelope. Everything you did was public, and humans being people, they made judgements. And when I say judgements, they appeared not to have heard the parable of the widow’s mite, or more likely they had and thought: what a tightwad, go Scribes and Pharisees! Who gave the most cold hard cash, and why were they doing it were the two questions that detained the congregation while we mused on whether you could get drunk on communion wine.

A rough set of rules emerged. Children were less keenly judged, but rich kids got to give more. For adults, giving a lot might indicate holiness, but also guilt, so a lot depended on how robust your prior reputation was. The envelope givers usually came out on top since they look generous, pious and modest. Money causes a lot of problems when it comes to the gift relationship. It is often a serious breach of etiquette to ask for money as a gift. Unless you live among saints, giving money sparks a massive agonising problem of how much you give as your gift is immediately measurable next to others. The gift relationship depends on maintaining a degree of ambiguity and separation from the cash economy.

Gifts are weighted with these various relationships, and so is the rest of the economy. Cash transactions are especially sensitive to the meaning given to money beyond its face value and purchasing power. In the decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US Dollar came to be acknowledged as what it had been for many years under communism, the one reliable transferable value. During that time public discourse acknowledged the dollar as being ‘worthy’ of this role. What better suited a superpower than to use the cash of the other superpower. That helped Russians cope with the cognitive dissonance of being in a society ruled by chaos and anomie, with a currency that felt like it was actively their enemy (Lemon, 1998).

Focusing on the meaning of money does not let us end up saying that is all there is about it which is where rational choice theory could be refreshed. ‘Rational’ is often drawn narrowly in terms of interests and should include the person’s identification of their own moral positioning in relation to the activity, their motivation. That appears in some accounts of criminal dealings, how and who they deal with, while others emphasis pure instrumental calculation. Even that is itself referring to a set of shared cultural expectations, a market habitus: a deeply embedded sense of what money means, and how it will behave in a given set of circumstances.

Crimetech is a catch all for the technology developed by criminal enterprises to further their aims. It is the set of botnets, hacking tools,  bulletproof hosting and interfaces that join up criminal intent with their victims. (There is a company selling various bits kit for forensics called ‘CrimeTech’. They are the go to if you need tape with ‘Evidence’ on it, or that thick chalk you draw round a body.) Crimetech is specific in its purpose. There is wider melange of technology used by criminals which is not crimetech – Tor, cryptocurrency and such are independent of it but we should be aware of how some technology articulates and gives affordance to hostile actors.

The prevailing framework is of technology and crime is of tech as a quality that enables or disables crime or security. Crime exists on a scale from cyber-enabled to cyber-dependent. A little less encryption here, a little more there. As technology is now so embedded and provided as a service to criminals we have to move past that and think of tech as part of the material matrix. So rather than this gradient from ‘lo tech’ to ‘full on tech’ we could see intersections between different kinds of technology and the material operation of crime, in some instances surrounding a hard core of dedicated, tech dominant crimetech operations. Really we are talking about the old classics: what is the division of labour, where are the command and control processes, how are criminal enterprises able to combine different data types and where are the critical points where harm happens. 

Consider a phone scam that’s highly centralised, which combines basic and simple technological platforms and user scripts, and a social engineering attack which used tested AI driven communication forms to ensare victims. The first is heavy on human labour, and can be undermined by time wasting tactics on the other end. The latter is less contact driven, more passive, highly failure tolerant and generates more data. A zero day exploit is of a different quality as it is likely to be valued in itself, traded and used by a range of individuals and enterprises, including state agencies.

As well as the organisation/complexity axis we should also consider hwo crimetech scales. Many crimes are low severity individually and hence tend to be unreported, but have an impact at scale which is what makes them hard to prosecute. This focus on a scalar threat is a recurring one in many documents now such as the Mills, Skodbo and Blyth (2013) which explicitly tackles it. To me we are facing two challenges: first, tools and exploitation modes are designed to scale up and down depending on opportunity. Second, distributed delivery means interventions tend to end up punching fog. In each case, my interest comes back to how crimetech reorganises and revalues criminal labour, just as other platforms do the same. The same problem can occur in both cases. In the world of venture capital the relentless focus on devaluing human labour means we miss how much labour goes into algorithmic control. In the world of crimetech the extensive labour behind scalar threats is also hidden.

Voice messaging sends prerecorded audio messages via messaging apps. Users can mix and match audio messages with other media such as text or visual.  Voice messaging allows people to get around the flatness of textual communication, adding tone and nuance. It requires greater intensity of engagement at the other end. The receiver has to listen, not just glance. Zoomers have a reputation for fearing the phone call and voice message allows a less demanding but still personal way of interacting.

In every way voice messaging is its own communication media. It has specific interactional characteristics that set it apart qualitatively from text messaging, one to one calls, and other modes of communication. Yet almost every article I read on digital society namechecks textual, audio call and video communication. None mentions voice messaging, one of the most significant changes in communication media in recent years. It is completely under the radar of digital sociology even as part of our standard list everyone uses of ‘this is how folks interact now’.

Voice messaging has some fascinating characteristics. Zhang (2028) reports that in Chinese professionals consider it ‘obnoxious’ and only tolerate its use when it is sent from a senior to a junior person. The reasons are probably the same for both parties: it has limited information density and resists rapid, easy consumption. A voice message conversation appears just as a list of audio links. There is no simple way to parse or prioritise content without having to listen to the whole thing. It is a demanding medium for the receiver, but not the sender. In business/professional worlds it is a statement of who is time rich, who is time poor, and who matters more. Effectively, ‘I couldn’t be bothered to type this out’.

As well as shifting or exposing power relations in one set of communications, it may shift them in another direction in a different set of interactions. It opens up some possibilities for people who are unable to use text, or find it difficult. Its use can signal the presence of intimacy and care. It allows users to signal the content and intent of their communication. Here is a longer message I would like you to be more involved in listening to. It moves us away from a literal understanding of literacy as textual aptitude. As a mode it also highlights the attentional context of consumption. A voice message makes it harder to prioritise one’s attention in consuming communication, but on the other hand displays a greater commitment to the interaction.

On the next point, does our not bothering with voice messaging indicate we are too text focused in both method and critique? Textual sources and modes of analysis are simpler in many ways. There is a lot of textual data, and using text allows us to avoid or obfuscate some ethical questions around data reuse and anonymity. Voice messages tend to just be private so are not immediately accessible. There are practical reasons but also our theoretical tools are designed around the bloodless written word and we suffer for it.

Zhang, Zara. 2018. ‘Sending WeChat Voice Messages Is a Status Symbol in China’. Quartz.

Just adding to the rash of ‘stop thinking disinformation is the problem’ takes out there. The high cultural capital crew like to imagine there to be a bright line between illegal and illegal, organised and opportunistic, rational and emotional. And also that they know which side of the line they would be on. Likewise, information manipulation. Disinformation is the cosy mug of horlicks that the information saturation set reach for to explain democratic events they do not like. Why, if only those damned twitter bots did not spin constant lies and rile up the little people then we wouldn’t have to deal with events, which are inherently tiresome. On the other hand, maybe lots of people just do not want to lie in the bed you have created for them. 

Challenge: what’s the difference between propaganda, political campaigning, advertising, and information operations, if there is one? Why is it okay when our side does it? There is a long history of fake news and election manipulation. In an early example of cancel culture. the ostrakon was used to expel citizens from Athens and was highly open to manipulation. The Soviet Union placed a fake news story in an Indian newspaper about AIDS being a US developed bioweapon. Many governments engage in shaping public opinion, from the health (cigarettes be bad) to the attitudinal. Plenty of institutions engage in astroturfing, other manipulation of civil society. What is new in the current climate is the global reach of nationally motivated hacker groups, not all of which are or need to be centrally coordinated.

It is a powerful propaganda tool used by nationalist regimes to suppress civil liberties, undermine opposition and simply swamp out opposition or independent information and as a tool of international relations. But also itself become a go-to tool for strategic de-legitimation (you used the fakes!). There’s a fear of institutional fragility which speaks of a moral uncertainty in liberal elites. More neutrally, an information economy and polity is exposed to attempts to manipulate information for strategic ends as opposed to everyday annoyances.

The narrative around disinformation feeds into the narrative that certain choices can be objectively deemed false. Discussions of Brexit always implies there is something false to it: Cameron called the vote for cynical party management reasons and Johnson falsely posed as an anti-EU populist. Falsity lets us off the hook of doing proper material, historical analysis.

Disinformation strikes at a number of question at the intersection of information science, sociology of markets, sociology of technology and the philosophy of knowledge: how can disinformation be defined, recognised and how can systems be made resilient against it. There are several thorny ontological and epistemological questions between the politics of knowledge, preference falsification, technical and social verification and conceptual space theory. We don’t easily know what disinformation is when we see it so we need agreement that we are in fact talking about the same thing.

There are a number of developments in the organisation of information markets that are live right now and which mean the problem isn’t just open to immediate technical or oversight solutions: financialisation of disinformation, the vertical integration of political campaigns with new media, and the development of a distributed labour infrastructure which is agile and available. There is also a collective effervescence to disinformation action. When Russian hackers take out Estonia’s infrastructure or Chinese internet activists DDOS US government websites, this is partly for the joy. Therefore we should consider this as a type of national political action and participation, not just a wily propaganda ploy.

If you see the ‘No user serviceable parts inside’ notice as a challenge, I am with you. I am in the class of people most open to the right to repair movement so I want to introduce some reflection on what it means and whether it is the right way to frame what we want. And what we want is knowledge and control over the material technologies of our lives, and to resist the constant ramp towards platform lock in that now pervades the physical as well as the virtual realm.

A right is just a desire, along with the capacity and willingness to exercise it. You do not have the right to vote. You can vote if some conditions prevail (you are an adult citizen, mentally capable, not in prison, able to get to the polling station, give a toss etc). Likewise, the right to free speech, property, right to life etc. Any right you mention can be terminated. Please do tell the nurse switching off your ventilator about the European Convention on Human Rights Article 2. Trust me, she’ll do it just to save on the electricity. The whole thing is a massive scam, like dishwasher tablets. I’ve never bought them. It cleans just as well without them.

When we campaign for rights we really just mean: we want this not to be just the province of affluent, high cultural capital, centrally approved sort of folk.It just means nobody else will. Alcohol might be banned in Saudi Arabia but wealthy, male Saudis exercise their right to get merry very easily. A right to intoxication would mean allowing people the legal and actual capacity to buy and use alcohol or other drugs. Maybe the Saudis would have had more luck banning alcohol if they just let Apple sell the stuff but lock it to people who had phones running iOS 16.

Okay, I put that a bit strongly, naming rights helps organise and codify them. Right to repair is a set of requirements that are primarily about returning control of technology to users and the communities they belong to. This is a laudable goal, which will only be met in a very limited way with an actual right to repair. We should understand why this shift happened and why some technologies appear to be repairable in the first place. The reason I say this is that otherwise it is very easy for a company to throttle a right to repair just by ceasing to make the relevant parts. As someone who finally got the part they need for my 10 year old Canon EOS 5D (see picture) I know that it is easier to observe in theory than practice. And the Canon is super-repairable. I could get right into the guts of it but still need to replace the expensive shutter unit, rather than the cheap shutter itself. And I can afford the time to do all this.

The ability to repair old bangers exists only because: for many of us, we couldn’t afford new ones; and some are worth it to keep roadworthy but are essentially useless. Software locked tractors massively impinge on the ability to maintain a significant fixed capital investment but that is quite a specific type of use case. Can we analogise from that to Apple’s penchant for soldering everything onto the motherboard, and gluing everything that can be glued?  Likewise, PCs are not more popular than Macs because they are sometimes repairable and upgradable. They are more popular because they are more popular, they fit more use cases, and can do more stuff – especially but not only games. What the r2r movement is objecting to is the centralisation and concentration of the supply chain and the damage that does to communities’ ability to adapt technology to their needs. I believe that we need to expand this attitude to every technology where it has happened, which is most of them, from pharmaceuticals to bicycles. I also think this logic is tending towards each of these technologies acting as part of an integrated system – e-bikes, smart drugs, they all function as parts of an integrated whole. R2R is one way of pushing back against some of the more damaging elements of that. So my main angle is really that it is the starting point to go beyond the valuable use cases that it invokes to a broader take on the infiltration of technology into social life.