*Most stories are spirals*. Self-hosting is the practice of running your own digital infrastructure. So rather than paying Apple or Google to store my files and photos on a server in North Dakota where the National Security Agency can thumb through them I keep them on a server in my …
Chalkface to touchscreen: Convivial learning with Socrates The past is strange, and we are all someone’s past. Mostly states and institutions are technology solutionists at heart. All our incentives lead that way. If only we could get just the right amount of leverage, tweak inputs in just the right way …
The word is now redundant and should be replaced with ‘sex’. I mean the non-sexy kind of sex, biological sex, the division of species into reproductive classes. In humans that physical fact has deep social effects. The latter are called gender. Recently, gender has come to take on another meaning, …
Some themes to apply to current times. Solid times One of the themes of mine is the return of various concepts, institutions and practices that were thought to be obsolete, or that some institutions tried to make so. The return of cash money or its nearest digital equivalent, the return …
One sign of societal decadence is shying away from clear explanations because they are too easy. So here we go: American universities do well because they have a lot of intellectual and practical resources. British universities perform round about what you would expect for a country of that size and …
I am sharing some plans for how I introduce topics to students. I would like other teachers to use them freely. From my course ‘Illicit Markets, Criminal Organizations’ Crime is fundamentally an instance of human insecurity. We need to know what systems create security and insecurity, how and for whom, …
Colleagues and myself have studied football fandom and alcohol in terms of what is called the carnivalesque.(Bandura et al. 2023). This is an idea that has been applied quite a bit in alcohol studies. A lot of theories of the carnival have relied on Bakhtin (1984) and the idea that …
Gentrification has three meanings. All refer to a kind of relentless nicening, the civilizing process at work. First a process whereby by affluent, middle classes take over a previously working class area or occupation, as in the gentrification of Leith or of football. Estate agents think it is a good …
One theme of mine is territorialization of the digital world, and the tight relationship between cyber criminals and their governments. Sometimes this is practical, as in the fact that Russian cybercriminals can operate freely as long as they do not target Russian /CIS citizens. Sometimes it is felt nationalism as …
Nothing is a silver bullet. Except when it is. I was reminded reading Nicholls et al (2022) report on drug consumption rooms of the critique of them as ‘not a silver bullet’. This term means a dependable solution to a otherwise tricky problem . It put me in mind of …
