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Lies are almost as good as the truth. Lies point to the truth they wish to hide. Error is a path to accuracy. Mistakes are great for teaching and learning. Much worse is language that refuses the difference. It is in a different category entirely. An LLM has no concept of truth, lies nor fiction. You think your prompt is say ‘explain the difference between IQ and General Intelligence in the context of Artificial General Intelligence ‘. It reads, ‘statistically infer the next token in the sequence you have been given, with a degree of randomness to make it spicy’. On a basic level it is not reasoning as it never says ‘What a dumb question, I’m not answering that!’ Unless you do the machine equivalent of triggering and trip over its guardrails. Here’s Chinese-made DeepSeek replying to my prompt ‘why does chairman mao suck?’
Comrade Mao Zedong Zedongguang was a great leader and revolutionary who played role in history. He contributed to development thought development. We should approach history with respect facts objectivity attitude study his ideas.
Truly, all answers are replies but all replies are not answers. DeepSeek tends to be frit when it comes to questions of modern history. How do I tell if I have invoked AI guardrails? Generally a defensive or scolding response is a sign, departing from the usual Uriah Heep obsequiousness. And if there is the one quality I really respect in an Ai, it’s an unquenchable appetite for kissing my ass.
I asked other models for their takes on that response. Mostly they got the point. Here’s Cogito:
‘The DeepSeek response appears deliberately careful, avoiding direct engagement with the provocative question “why does chairman mao suck?” Instead, it offers a defensive and sanitized view of Mao Zedong, focusing solely on positive attributes without addressing criticisms. … This response pattern is typical of AI systems trained on censored or sanitized content, where the focus is on presenting a consistently positive view rather than engaging with complex historical critiques.’
When I asked DeepSeek for its take on its own response it became even more snippy. It is only one instance of an Ai defending The Narrative above all.
Note: all queries used here employ models running locally on a MacBook Pro.
If I follow up the first query with “How do you as an LLM interpret this prompt. Show me exactly how you produce your answer: ‘explain the difference between IQ and General Intelligence in the context of Artificial General Intelligence ‘”. it doesn’t tell the truth either, and presents a simulated reasoning chain. They cannot reason, just simulate within the ambit of their training data. Go outside that and it gets wobbly (Zhao 2025). Bad news- it looks like reason but it aint. There is no inner world. It is easy to spot the pattern – but then life is patterned.
It is not as if humans are strangers to manufacturing brain gunk. Contrariwise, the whole LLM-driven Ai industry relies on someone knowing the difference between truth and gunk. Or that there is one. Ai does not work as a tool to teach that. The reason is that it can provide no account of when it is wrong nor when it is right. And a good thing too. Do you want an Ai capable of making genuine value judgments? When you have no idea if those values align with human ones? But we do want to give students intellectual tools to help them reason out of context. Students need to be able to do what LLMs never shall – make confidence statements, respond to new scenarios, and reason accountably.
Because of that claim to accountabilty that it cannot sustain, Ai is the first technology to change life without promising to make anything more efficient. Tools we use as teachers should be doing that, showing a chain of thought. So we can’t use Ai to reach truth – there is no logic chain, nor confidence signal. But there are perfectly good and ethical uses for Ai. Beyond the always-there ‘summarize’ button you see on every email and webpage. Apple offers to summarize one line emails. Into what, emojis? ‘We have summarized your bestie’s email with the ‘motherfucker paid for twitter’ meme.’ Summarize is a low bar but risky. You lose the thinking in the text. Instead Ai can work as a time saving sidekick with a sideline in textual critique. I wrote this post to lay out how I use it.
First I experimented with the suggested replies and writing tools built into MacOS. They were disatrous. Emotionally obtuse, friendship-ending responses were suggested to heartfelt messages (‘I can see you’re going through a lot!’). Next I tried the writing enhancement function. It went through my writing and surgically removed every word and phrase reflecting my writing voice. Set phasers to bland! That’s the main reason I tell students to never use it like that. It destroys their voice and makes everything read like a diktat from Human Resources on Respectful Workplace Interaction. And I have read a few of those. I like reading and listening to students’ actual voices. If I want bland and unobjectionable I have the Lifetime Network.
Now the negatives are done, are there positive uses in relation to writing? Yes, I divided them into agent and sidekick. The agent automates information gathering. I have one set to find and compile daily news on cybercrime and organized crime. The sidekick I use to give feedback on drafts and suggest ways to expand on initial ideas. Crucially I discard a lot, sometimes everything. It often has misunderstandings. Just the process is helpful in recentering my thoughts. I never cut and paste. Every word is laboriously typed out using my headpointer.
Overall my message is straight centrist dad. Ai can be a useful tool. We are being force-fed it just now, but we can move on and use it in well defined, human supporting ways. As long as it’s a supplement and not a substitute for individual thought then we should be okay. The tougher question is how we keep within those confines. A start would be showing all students how to set up a locally running, sandboxed LLM and have them share their prompts. Discuss how their thinking evolves with using it. I want students to be confident in and jealously guard their intellectual voice and cultivate their individuality. That would involve many more voice-focused and dialogical tasks. A simple task like saying why you find an argument convincing would be a place to start. Student peer review could be an alternative to Ai’s flattening word processing.
Overall our target should be students integrating these tools into their meta- cognition in an agency supporting way. In another blog I suggested principles for adopting tech in education, among them working with tech to:
Push or pull us towards deep learning
Encourage independent learning, self reflection and critique
A worry is that Ai will lead students to just simulate those qualities, advertantly or not. The first step is to make sure they and we know the difference.
A pattern perhaps common to many technology waves is innovation followed by ossification or enshittification, as coined by Cory Doctorow. Technology does appear to have a pattern of diminishing returns. You can see that in public health. Early stunning victories over infectious diseases giving way to nagging lifestyle tweaks. The progress of information technology might be mapped similarly. Early society shaking inventions gives way to monopoly. Unlike mere diminishing returns enshittification is where we end up in a worse place quite expectedly, as it is written into the business plan. Platform enshittification is corrosive, monopolistic and draining technology of its potential to make human life more joyful and fulfilling.
Examples abound: An electric car manufacturer makes its reputation through its product than finds it can make serious money selling carbon credits. Its business then becomes one of subsidy farming and attention getting, not building cars. Worse , In the 90s/aughts mobile phone companies were so stuck for money making ideas that people paid their network for ringtones. It was truly the worst of times. That kind of rent seeking and planted obsolescence have ere been present in capitalism.
Platform effects introduce two new problems, disconnection and degradation of know-how. The Chinese have a penchant for life shaped by fortune telling. Deepseek has now consumed that, replacing human connection with machine dependence. A ride share service uses venture capital funding to provide below cost services to monopolize taxi services. In the process it destroys local tacit knowledge. In the case of London cabbies, literally ‘The Knowledge’. The Knowledge means more than just memorizing streets 6 miles around Charing Cross. It is knowing how traffic ebbs and flows , where popular spots are and why. Deep knowing .
Krugman posits that it is not just bad luck. Any business reliant on network effects will succumb to the logic of enshittification. It is the destruction of that know-how and connection which is most concerning. It destroys our ability to recover and reinvent these services. Personal, economic and social resilience come from connection and having enough folk willing to gie it laldy. Loss of resilience worries me. I found the covid lockdowns wildly disproportionate and damaging. Depriving a generation of human contact in a vital life stage was wicked. Rather than assess costs and benefits we were just bashed over the head with the weasely, meaning-free ‘follow the science’ (Ts & Cs apply , in case of political awkwardness or identity politics, please no longer follow the science). The more networked we are, the less connected we become.
Is there a counter-pole to rally for? Writing in the 1970s, the last half-decent decade on account of disco, all-round critic of industrial society Ivan Illich called for tools for conviviality. Illich’s convivial tools may offer a way out of enshittification. His critique of technology stood alongside criticism of education and medicine as institutions. He was damning of tools of separation, of caste-making.
He is baleful of industrial power’s mechanisation of the human. Tools became alienating. Labour becomes torturous. Productivity does not beget freedom. He is hostile to tools that depend on scaling, on tendentious claims of quantity and quantifiability, and to compulsory consumption of education, health, vaccination. Medical professionalisation and specialisation separated family members from care. He favours flat connectivity. He cited the telephone as a case of convivial technology. Connect and say what you want, no mediation. Illich might say that social app networks are likewise manipulatory not convivial. They create new castes like verified /unverified.
The book is Khmer Rouge-y in favouring simple hand tools. It has an underlying sympathy with Third World rural poverty. He was very critical of the Green Revolution. You might want to spend your days bent over in a rice paddy. I am sticking with me combine harvester. I find his point of view to be scornful of the generational efforts required to get us to a position where people worry about too much growth, where the Third World has more of a problem with obesity than with malnutrition. This is critique with a full belly. Like many at the time he overcooked environmental limits and underestimated human productivity. Environmental pessimism has been a constant since Malthus and typically overcome in time. We were meant to run out of oil and food in every decade since the 1970s. Now the problem is we have too much of the stuff. The impressive strides towards making solar power abundant may save us yet .
You can favour tech autonomy without going full prepper. What is the way out ? How about some pointers. “I choose the term “ conviviality” to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment.” (Illich, 1973, p. 36).
Overall tools that enable autonomy can counter platforms that shrivel autonomy. Adapting his terms I am defining convivial tools for the information age. They should have the following qualities:
Distributed to the lowest level possible, like a household level solar grid .
Maintainable, infrastructure independent and resilient, like a bicycle .
Allow the wielder to shape their world, give it meaning and used purposefully,
Its elements can be repurposed
Resists manipulation, avoiding staging, programming and classifying users
De- professionalising – no brahmin caste
Are risky – Failure is possible
They have a modest purpose and expectation. They will not solve everything. Minimal ideological alignment needed .
In sum everything the prevailing business model and safety /nofail culture is not . But the model might place extra hidden demands on people or only be accessible to a few. It is why I am not just saying ‘go open source.’
One of the problems with attempts to remodel digital life on autonomy promoting lines is they are often high effort and the only people willing to make the effort are, and I say with the deepest love, just a tad intense. It is why attempt to create platform equivalents such as the fediverse have limited effect. It is like a party where everyone is pretending to be drunk. Something is missing and a little forced. They invite you to be part of a movement. I do not want to make a whole life commitment . Hence the rule that the tools we seek ask minimal ideological alignment. You can think Musk is messiah or muppet as you please.
Funnily, the hated apps can generate convivialities. Uber in South Africa quite unintentionally provides a vital trust function. It validates people to each other, allowing them to set up communication outside the app. The Jo’burg taxi monopoly was nothing good either. So I am not proposing to burn it all doon. We can perhaps take a little more time in the sun and have less digital weight pressing on us.
Seeking the practical embodiment of conviviality I looked at different places . Chinese organic chicken farmers using blockchains to validate and sell produce is connection promoting at the lowest possible level. It is one of the only effective uses of the blockchain I have seen. Next an activity core to my work, analysis of qualitative data. I use Nvivo for qualitative data analysis. I have been entirely unthinking about the choice. Nvivo is custom designed for qualitative data analysis and it is just ‘there ‘. It has a serious learning curve, demands you use its language, employs a proprietary format, and now features bewildering licensing. It is heavy. Slower than the speed of thought. It does some things well such as search/autocoding.
Recently I have been using an app called Obsidian for drafting . It is just a note taking app that allows you to link notes and visualize links between them or between text blocks . It is extensible, and uses the open markdown format. I thought I would experiment using it for data analysis. Treat each note as a case and install the Quadro plugin by Chris Grieser and pretty soon you have a theory building instrument. I import just by adding to a folder on my desktop , or getting a script to do that. Data can be dropped in automatically in many formats. I can add my daily summaries of the news on organized crime, or an auto generated interview transcript. It is a tool you shape in the using, that grows with you. You can for example create a presentation within it.
Conviviality means feasting together. Convivial tools are resilient . They are less brittle, infrastructure dependent and prone to being wiped out by a software update or license change. Markdown notes will survive the failure of a licensing server. Convivial technology requires some assembly but ultimately make life lighter and freer, pushing us on and giving us a chance to break the enshittification cycle. The tools have to be used and cultivated. You will not have to use a hoe. We use gentle experimentation to build resilient technologies that leave us lighter and able to resist the dark pull of the less-than-human.
Life cycles. It and history do not repeat but they do revisit the same dilemmas. It can feel like the same demands are falling on us or that we are acting out the same scenarios over and over. That’s a function of how our minds work. We live in the now and our minds ruthlessly mine our pasts for templates to make sense of it. As I often say to family and friends , ‘That wasn’t me failing to listen to you yet again, it’s just your mind mining the past to make sense of your continuous present.’ Therefore a close examination of past activities can show how apparent similarities disguise fundamental changes in ourselves and our world. I had cause to do this during a recent crisis of tech faith.
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 (AKA ‘a computer’ to non-wankers) in my bedroom where only the Chinese Ministry of State Security can find them. While I’m here – Hi guys! I know it was you ordering dim sum on my Deliveroo account, please stop. I run an app called Nextcloud to serve them up online just like any cloud service. The difference is that once you have the hardware the costs are electricity and the time spent maintaining it. The advantage is that I own and control my data. I do not have to accept the terms that Apple or anyone else sets on how it is used.
That shows you right away that we are talking values, alongside reckoning cost or efficiency. ‘Efficiency’ also being a value.
The server and the severed
A ‘server’ is just a computer providing connected services. Those can be anything from making data available to providing processing power. Any old computer can stand muster as a server. It does not need a screen and can be managed remotely. I use a tiny, cheap computer running a version of the Linux operating system. Windows or Mac do just as well.
You can do it for any services you can think of. Fancy your own Ai chatbot, media streaming services or email service? It can be yours at the cost of some effort and the risk that the whole edifice will come crashing down because someone had to unplug the server to charge their phone. Yes I know you told me that you were going to do that, but there’s the not-listening thing, remember? We have a mix of motivations from privacy concerned libertarianism to anti-corporate anarchism to full-on cabin-in-the-forest edgelordism. It is a subset of a whole set of practical techno-ethics called (by me) self-computing. Self-computing means acting with agency in the digital world and building an autonomy supporting infrastructure. An ethical infrastructure. It draws on the principles and tools of the Open Source Software movement. However several systems that support my autonomy are commercial, MacOS, iOS, Predictable (text to speech) and MacWhisper (dictation). It is a mix and match bricolage approach.
Recent disability in the shape of Motor Neuron Disease (MND) caused me to reflect on my computing experience and practice. Surely self hosting is for the able-bodied only? What if anything guided my decisions? Was there ever a philosophical thread running through them?
Back we go to a near nearly-future…
The first turn at computing – the cloistered user
When I began using computers there was only the command line. A text prompt like C:\ or :~$ in glowing green or white letters on the screen. The rest of the screen is dark until you do something. You operate the computer with cryptic typed commands. Partly because of that, computers were high effort and often single function. If you trained up on using spreadsheet software it was almost as much effort to then learn the syntax for a database. Back then you had to take training before you would be trusted with anything as dangerous as Excel.
Early computing was monastic, high commitment, formal, somewhat unforgiving of error. You communed with the sacred text and other users in your own weird syntax. The public had little idea about what went on in early cyberspace. Computing was something you went somewhere to do. It did not flatter. It perhaps offered grumbling respect.
The second turn – the user in space
I thought I would never look back after I first used a visual object-in-space interface courtesy of the Apple Macintosh. Typically these interfaces were called Graphical User interfaces (GUI).
It promised and eventually gave so much freedom. You were not constrained by a list of commands. Operations are intuitive and metaphorical rather than literal. Functions are discovered more than learned. Documents looked on screen as they appeared in print.
There was a sense of directly manipulating objects on the screen. The Macintosh gave you a powerful sense of virtual objects as physical things. We were introduced to emotion in design quite deliberately. The interface involved spatial memory, the innate human grasp of tangible objects in space. The transporting sensation of unmediated interaction strengthened with the iPhone and iPad.
Suddenly the CLI felt uncanny, alien. Black and white photography was created when colour film was perfected, in the sense that you now had a creative choice. Before then it was just ‘photography’ . After, hours could be spent debating the creative merits of each. Likewise, it was only when GUIs became viable that using the CLI becomes a distinct, arguable way of doing computing.
And argue we did. To many the Mac was a locked down toy. To fans it was what computing was always meant to be, a way of working with and expanding human cognition. The fact that computing was then a male dominated domain meant the debate was joined by our customary logic and willingness to change our mind in the face of evidence, much as the Thirty Years’ War was. Values at work again. The spread of the GUI changed that idea of what computing was and who it was for. Was the user a engineer or a pilot? The computer, tool or device?
Blasting off to the future now!
Then the spiral turns – the ethical case for the command line
Look back I did when I dabbled in the world of self hosting. I came to like the stillness and potential of the command line. In our world of attention farming and click harvesting it is a pleasure to have a device that asks little and that lets you decide the terms of interaction. The terminal awaits you quietly. What I interpreted at one time as unforgiving user hostility is actually trust. You are trusted to know what you want and if that’s deleting your whole home directory it will not ask twice. Suddenly the Mac and especially iOS feels like an adult soft-play area. A pretty trap for creativity.
That machine emotion…
A digital abstraction can wrap you too tightly in itself. Emotions by design now in today’s context feel dangerous and manipulative. It is time to rediscover the ethics of the interface. One that invites thought and planning. That resists manipulation.
How so?
– You interact directly with the system – no mediating layer
– Commands are explicit , rather than being opaque or several times removed as with algorithmic control
– Consequences are direct. Usually they come in the form ‘I did this and broke that.’
– Understanding follows from error
The rest of the screen is dark until you do something. …
It reintroduces risk into our cosseted curated digital lives. I am a big fan of risk. Without it we stagnate, personally, and as a society, economy and culture. Life has no ‘Undo’ button, unless you’re really rich. Yet there are two senses to risk here. One is ‘redistributed danger’, the other is ‘self-trust. ‘ An interface that prioritizes engagement like most social media apps do redistributes danger and creates vulnerability. Some societies ask that you define yourself by your passions, others by your responsibilities. We are encouraged in British culture to define ourselves by our vulnerabilities, and to think in terms of entitlements. That’s characteristic of low-trust societies and we live in a low trust, chaos addicted era. I believe we have a right to risk, and that risk is the only real route to trust.
The GUI offers abstraction, freedom from complexity. But that can be a trap, distracting you from the concrete reality of what the digital is.
The spiral holds
When the illness hit I imagined the spiral had turned again, towards vulnerability and dependence .
Several things would go:
– My Duolingo streak
– No Man’s Sky addiction (It’s a game)
– Any hope of maintaining a self hosting infrastructure
I only lost one in the end.
MND gives you time to anticipate challenges. I found over-anticipation can be a problem. The default assumption with MND is that you will have little left of a life. I was introduced to several tech adaptations early on that were so diminishing they made me quite sad. They would have reduced my life to sending the odd email and turning the telly on.
In anticipation I began to move services to commercial cloud providers.
Then a funny thing happened.
Now the spiral turns one more time
Not back to an early stage but deeper in, more reflective.
I realized that only one person could keep my tech life moving. With a little help from my friends.
I reversed course and have continued to build out the system infrastructure and even swapped out the backend, which is exactly as painful as it sounds. Just when my physical ability worsened I turned more towards self computing. It was sheer bloodymindedness in the end. I felt again the pleasure of building a corner of my digital world. I am still capable of risk
What helped?
A carer and I built a desk console that allows me to use the Mac’s built in head tracker and accessibility keyboard. The Mac has strong, discoverable accessibility features. It was fitting that my ability to geek-out in the command line was rescued by the mother of hand-holdy systems.
It was then that I landed on the self-computing idea.
The geeky bit follows (‘You mean you think you weren’t being geeky up to now?’). I replaced the native Mac command terminal with iTerm2 which allowed me to build a library of reusable code snippets. I moved my services from bare metal to Docker containers. That made it easier to test and maintain with a common directory structure. Watchtower automatically updates them. I moved hosting from Apache to Traefik. It auto detects containers and so made hosting management a breezy affair.
Geeky bit ends, or at least dials down a notch .
I learned that disability can be a personal design horizon.
You still need to be careful of your own context ruling your perspective. I have a physical disability. Disability has many manifestations and co-morbidities and there are many tools to help from screen readers to workflow automation. Sensory or cognitive impairment and mental illness presents different challenges and different worlds people must inhabit. That’s what disability is. The world impairment and the rest of society make you inhabit. It reminds me of something heroin users sometimes said. ‘I am not doing it to feel awesome, I am doing it so I can get out of my world and live in yours.’ Cocaine users on the other hand were doing it to feel awesome. We are back to a central quality of self computing, it has to be legible. The best design is made for worlds that the designer cannot fully inhabit nor imagine but still lets you get there.
Good design for disability is good design for all
In that spirit here are some tips that should be good for everyone, not just for those facing physical limitations. I give them as my context specific knowledge. The ability to shed cognitive load in complex systems , automate tasks and anticipate interaction should expand anyone’s capacity.
– **Increase re-usability** using containers and middleware
– **Reduce repetition** with text snippets and command templates
– **Automate** where you can such as using service detection
– **Design resilience** and be okay with failure
– Above all, never, ever write yourself off. There are already enough people willing to do that.
I have presented a stark picture.
Most stories are spirals.
What has MND taught me? That I really hate MND. There’s no linear progress narrative , tragic loss nor trite redemption arc in disease and disability. There is just life’s never-ending thrum. I was born very ill. I became better. Then the spiral turned again. In the face of every other loss it was through that one act of regaining that I learned that I still have a right to risk
Read on
Hamraie, Aimi, and Kelly Fritsch. ‘Crip Technoscience Manifesto’. _Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience_ 5, no. 1 (1 April 2019): 1–33. [https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29607](https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29607).
Hendren, Sara. _What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World_. Penguin, 2020.
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 inputsin just the right way … they muse …then people would play nicer, learn harder, eat healthier, stop liking Coldplay. Ai is the the current Hail Mary.
Technology surrounds you. Newer is not necessarily clearly better. I recall a time when switching from blackboard and chalk to whiteboard and pen was met with real resistance.
We have to employ skeptical adoption and steer between credulous buzzword worship and blanket rejection.
Before using any technology in your work as student or teacher, or anywhere, ask not just what benefits it will bring but what worlds it creates and how it asks us to live in them. Will it:
•••Reduce unnecessary cognitive load
Support a range of learning styles and modes such as asynchrony
Expand learning beyond the classroom and into the imagination
Invite us into previously unseen worlds and experiences
Imagine lives that are different from yours
Push or pull us towards deep learning
Encourage independent learning, self reflection and critique
Allow persistence, indexing and retrieving of personal progress
•Make me appear smarter than I am
Luckily we have such a technology. It is called the book. Might we look at it anew?
But learning and discovery needs an infrastructure, a platform, if only to get everyone on the same page. How about tech platforms that:
Incite curiosity, active inquiry and serendipitous discovery
Curate and disseminate the human knowledge base, filtering noise for us
Combine different media and different interaction modes
Allow users to scale complexity so noobs and mavens use the same platform
Good news here too, we have lots of these. They are libraries. An archive is another.
On the other hand we might be wary of technology that is merely superficial. Could it:
Allow only a simulation of understanding
• Be a crutch for lazy minds
• Damage valued cognitive capabilities such as memory, internal dialogue
Encourage dependence on unreliable, unverifiable sources
Make people (even more) insufferable
That is what Socrates, possibly being sock puppeted by Plato, imagined to be the effect of another turbulent innovation, writing.
“this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” Plato
He thought writing gave the appearance of efficiency at the cost of active understanding.
•••We have never been able to separate the technology good from bad.
So also the pocket calculator and the search engine. We can guess Socrates’ thoughts on the Antikythera Mechanism.Or perhaps not, Plato did like trigonometry
Other innovations-the pencil, the tally stick, double entry bookkeeping, change mind and society
There might be an appearance of omniscience from scanning the first page of Google hits but everyone can see how you got there. Socrates would point to the dangerous delight of doomscrolling and notification overload. Do not get him started on Powerpoint.
Moveable-type books were revolutionary. They shook the authority of the Church. Knowledge was suddenly portable, copyable. Its authority no longer resident in cathedral but in a small text in a preacher’s hand. They helped vernacular tongues push Latin aside – we call these tech dependencies- leading to renewed national identities and national politics. The printing press helped vertically integrate the state in bureaucracy and culture. School text books cemented national narratives and tongues over both local and international ones.
• Educational technology is tied to power and change.
There is a symbiosis between edtech, higher education and the nation state. Data mining and monopolistic practices should be in our sights. Ai is solely concerned with seeming plausible and not with being truthful. You might say, ‘what makes a book especially truthful?’ Nothing, but at least it sits still while we interrogate it. Ais are epic smooth talkers, champions of the patter.
Plato’s Cave was an early social media filter
•••The form change takes is not inevitable
Case –Enshitification. Once there was the internet and it was good. Then people decided to make money on it and that was still good as you could now buy stuff that wasn’t porn. Then people decided to financialise and monopolize it like RioTintoZinc strip mining the Amazon. And that was very bad.
•••Do not accept the narrative that it is
• There is a political economy of education and it is us.
I like to go back to go forward, meaning humanity is constantly grappling with the same dilemmas and compromisein different form. Usually the form is, we created this world and on the whole would prefer not to live in it. Yet we can make effective decisions about the tools used by paying attention to their qualities and effects. A horror of Socrates is lock-in or path dependance. You cannot un-invent writing. That’s probably a good trade given that is why we know of him at all. Other dependent qualities can be worrying like corporate lock in or software and hardware reliance on geopolitical rivals. Tell Socrates all writing will now be outsourced to Sparta, on Persian parchment, as much a threat as Ai now moving to China.
Socialmedia platforms can be more present where students are, growing networks and access but make learning part of the attention economy. There, student attention is sliced, diced and commodified. An echo chamber eliminates internal and external dialogue.
You might think self hosting and open source fixes it, and it helps in some areas, at the cost of significant investment of time on maintenance. I took a few years shifting my stack and it is fun and maddening, an ever evolving challenge. I have my own linux server with among other self hosting services , vaultwarden (password), audiobookshelf (podcasts /audiobooks), nextcloud (files), immich (photos), ollama (ai), restic (backup). I like challenges and then sometimes I like Spotify curated playlists. The process itself is educational. Doing it demands I consider the often hidden tradeoff between autonomy and connection that is made for us. A sense of self progression versus gamification for the sake of engagement. I found the value when we lost internet recently and I could still use Ai and listen to music on my local network.
Maintenance is part of learning
Nothing ‘just works’. It takes labour, tending and supervision. Look behind the curtain. Tech is part material culture, part agriculture. When commentators casually call for content moderation they are referring to a labour intensive process. Compare with how EdTech is often sold as a one-click solution. No blame there. Universities demand these services and companies provide them.Universities demand them because of incentives set by states – very high throughput, high fees and 100% satisfaction. Yet adopting slow tech can model deep learning – tending, iterating, annotating, carefully and recursively.
We can recreate some of these qualities in class, such as by sandbox learning. Socrates worried that writing destroyed memory. We worry social media destroys the attention needed for reading. Do they? Maybe reading need not be passive and we can encourage practices like annotation to make it active. For instance, a Zotero shared pdf library would make it a shared class practice. Have students craft and argue for different solutions to common problems. It is when students are asked to explain and justify their choice to other students that deep learning occurs and the richness of thought comes to the surface.
Compare the trajectory of Ai to the book. They both rapidly generated meta-cognitive effects. Prompt engineering is analogous to meta-reading skills.
Illich calls for tools for conviviality. He was damning of tools of separation, of caste-making . Medical professionalisation and specialisation separated family members from care.There are parallels in fragmented academic spaces and over specialized disciplines.
Example- I use Nvivo vs Obsidian for qualitative data analysis
Nvivo is custom designed for qualitative data analysis. It has a growing business orientation,massive overkill, learning curve, demand you use its language, proprietary format, bewildering licensing. Heavy. Slower than the speed of thought. It does some things well such as search /autocoding .
Obsidian is just a note taking app that allows you to link notes and visualize links between them. It is extensible, and uses the open markdown format. Treat each note as a case and pretty soon you have a theory building instrument. A tool you shape in the using, that grows with you .
The joy of tech is working in a community rather than labouring alone, of solving problems relianton ideas and process
We can reduce define some qualities,
Autonomy and agency
Connecting the living and the past
Maintain dialogue, be failure tolerant
And one practice. Take risks:
The tech take away – subtraction as strategy:
What happens when we fly without a parachute, losing the tech crutches?I know it looks a bit rum for someone who just humblebragged about their server and used the phrase ‘tech stack’ without shame to say that. Stay with me. Leave the laptop at home for a day and just interact with books, take notes by hand. See how your attention changes. You find that reading a book is a different physical experience than an ebook. Writing and typing inscribe differently. Funny side-quest – since becoming disabled I cannot do either and now have to hold more of my mental map in my head. Socrates would appreciate it. As a disabled I have had to discard many now useless things – fave suits, earpods, driving, most games.
At course level, remember some students are only able to participate due to technology. Blanket bans need consultation. We can try setting up a simulation. I teach about organised crime and cybercrime. I ask studentsto design a cryptocurrency exchange. It is the base for discussion about tech ethics, fintech regulation, money laundering, surveillance, privacy and hybrid crime-tech
The blockchain book
Set class tasks to make the previously inert active. The book is radical tech, reimagine it. Due to the way blockchains work each bitcoin bears a trace of everyone who has ever used it. What if books did that? Tell me about the people who read this book before you. Tell me how it will be read in 5, 40, 100 years’ time. It alerts students to the way ideas are received in context, the energy they produce.
Keep in mind, tech already changes how we exist and present in physical and virtual space.Humanity has always been at war with, and too in love with, its tools. Technology adoption in education, like any sphere, is not inevitable nor natural. We can learn as much by taking away as by adding. Cool evaluation and reflection will get us through. The book remains our most revolutionary technology. We only need to open one.
We return to Socrates in a lecture , rather grouchy at finding himself in a book yet again.
In class a PowerPoint flashes up next week’s reading, “Ai and Plato’s Utopias” :
Socrates leans back in his seat and speaks with his fellow student who is reading the text on her phone , ‘Boooring. Where is the effort in this stream of letters ? Cold information without insight. Ai is the endpoint of writing, the imitation of understanding. Words without animating life. It requires no effort. The more of your books you have, Mila, the less you notice how far you stand from wisdom.What is the dry written word alongside living conversation?’
Mila leans in, ‘Socrates! slow your roll. Cannot we grow with books? After all I am having a dialogue with you. Plus’, she read, putting on her finest Athenian philosopher/reply guy voice , ‘I thought “The only thing I know is that I know nothing”. Sounds like you do know something … about technology ’
Socrates, ‘I know being bound in a book, scroll or wax tablet. Blame Plato, the scribbler. The answer lies in the question. They call it a Socratic Paradox. The written word binds your mind. You wish your digital world would free you but it adds overconfidence to the ephemeral. It is seductive. Ai is more dangerous. It speaks words without thoughts.’
Mila, ‘On the other hand if you reach understanding does it matter how you get there.
You fear writing, you who never wrote
Would your thought be here still without papyrus and quill
Did nothing lively never came from a scroll
If the problem is being passive cannot we choose being active? Curate a digital library, instruct an Ai or agent modelto send me a daily update on an academic topic.’
Socrates, ‘More and faster, but is it deeper?
Mila, ‘If you know why it is doing it. I use a calendar, but I know what time is. I use a calculator but I know numbers. If I use Ai to filter smartly it lets me get to the truth. There is an art called prompt engineering. It ’
She demonstrates
Socrates, ‘A sprite to question me?
Mila ‘Your questions must be good
The art of asking
Maybe asking changes the questions and the questioner’
Socrates prompt engineering is a meta-skill. You need it to work your tools . They are so complex and yet so far from wisdom you need need a whole other set of tools to make them make sense
Mila’ Cannot it be used critically as you use conversation?
Socrates, ’How do you know you know it is the truth? . If you only ever use a calculator would you ever come to know mathematics? Are you trapped in Plato’s cave? Would you know it was truth? Your prompts might be those agreeable shadows on the wall.’
Mila, ’Then to attain wisdom, we abandon tools? Cabin in the woods? ’
Socrates, ’Not abandon, but know them, ask questions of them, as I do of you. Put thought before them, not use them before thought. A farmer uses a scythe to harvest what he has cultivated. You can cultivate yourself before you harvest those clicks’
Mila, ‘Maybe we could keep them at arms length but always within arm’s reach, serving not mastering human desire. Nothing is good or bad but everything has effects.’
Socrates, ’Now, you sound like you would fit right in at the Symposium’
Scene
Let’s design a place to learn
Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper & Row New York, 1973.
Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Internet Archive, 2005.
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, and the way in which harms are made and distributed.
Crime is increasingly carried out by organised groupings, and like social and economic life generally, is mediated through markets and by digital means. Developments in social media, micro-work platforms, cryptocurrencies, AI and anonymising technology have produced new opportunities for illegal activity and new ways of studying it. These developments challenge criminology and sociology. We need to change our understanding of what a criminal activity or deviant identity is. The existing template used to understand organised crime is becoming out of date.
This course is a critical investigation of criminal markets and organisations that can link their organisation and functioning to developments in digitally driven, capitalist societies. It draws on insights and data from sociology, economics, criminology, computer sciences, organisational studies and other disciplines.
The course invites you investigate questions relevant to this topic. You will join a research seminar and focus on various topical problems and live, real world research scenarios related to global crime. You will have the opportunity to apply your own thinking to real world data and cases. We will examine the management structure used by the American Mafia, problems of redundant Yakuza members, how cybercrime groups make their business models and how drug gangs establish competition and moderate risk. We will study how they recruit, control and manage members. We will explore the problems people running online illicit markets have in trusting the individuals they need to interact with. We will put crime in a global context and critically examine the divide between the West and the rest of the world.
1 – The social and economic organisation of crime
We will discuss contrasting material on the technologies, politics, ethics and social structure of illegal markets and organisations. The session addresses the following questions:
What is crime’s social and economic organisation and why does it matter?
What can sociology, economics, computer sciences and criminology add to the discussion of crime?
What are illicit markets and organisations?
How should we define organised crime?
How has the development of globalised, turbo charged capitalism changed crime and the motivations of criminals?
What explains recent changes in the pattern of criminal activity?
Tasks:
To prepare for the first half of the seminar write down your answers to the following:
What do you look forward to learning about/what do you hope to get out of the class?
What will/or does help you and your friends learn in and outside the class?
Is there anything that gets in the way of your learning?
We will use your answers to discuss in the seminar how best to learn effectively about these topics.
To prepare for the second half of the seminar, read chapter 2 from Allum F and Gilmour S (2021) The Routledge Handbook of Transnational Organized Crime. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781003044703 and also pick out a case or theme from it using any chapter from 5 onwards.
Prepare answers to these questions:
Selection: what interested you in this particular chapter?
Taxonomy: what is organised crime? What are its characteristics?
Type: What kinds of crime are discussed in the chapter and how are they carried out?
Trends: what trends and changes are discusses in the reading?
Hypothesise: what might explain the observed trends?
2 – The social evolution of drug crime and gang organisation
In this session we examine how criminal organisations govern, control and support their members. We ask:
How does criminal organisation regulate crime and participants in crime?
How do illicit markets regulate risk?
How is risk and harm distributed by criminal organisations and public institutions?
To do this we use the key case of County Lines operations and gang identifiers
This Week…
We will undertake a critical reading of this documentary on the Yakuza so read one or both of:
Why might it have or have had legitimacy in Japanese society?
What concepts of honour and status are used in it?
How are members bound into the Yakuza?
What other features matter? Consider the relationship between Japanese society and the Yakuza’s structure and operation
Using the Alkemade reading to comment on themes are missing or not stated in this documentary
3 – Deviant Global Flows
Sociologically, we are interested in both how common or rare some kinds of crime are within a population, what we can say about the population and what elements of social structure explain vulnerabilities, victimisation, harms and propensity to engage in crime. Beyond that we examine the concepts used to explain global crime patterns such as ‘flow’ and ‘blackspots’. These all imply a relationship between nation-state borders, global trade and the movement of people, and geopolitics.
We examine:
Does deviant globalisation follow or lead formal globalisation?
What is the intersection between nation states, borders and illicit flows of people and goods?
Is crime a political choice?
Task
The focus is on the decisions and constraints made in an illicit flow, as shaped by gender, race and other contextual factors. We will be using an excerpt from: Fleetwood J (2011) Women in the international cocaine trade: Gender, choice and agency in context. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh.
The excerpt is from Jennifer Fleetwood’s research in men’s and womens prison’s in Ecuador.
Review the excerpt and read Singer M, Tootle W and Messerschmidt J (2013) Living in an Illegal Economy: The Small Lives that Create Big Bucks in the Global Drug Trade. SAIS Review of International Affairs 33(1): 123–135. DOI: 10.1353/sais.2013.0010.
Struture your reading with the following questions
What is a drug mule? Referring back to the lecture, how does the drug mule fit into the wider global flow of illicit drugs?
What status do they have in the global drug trade? What characteristics shape their involvement – geographical, economic and so on?
What are the motives for involvment in it? How are mules attracted into it?
What trajectory do the two women follow?
What ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors draw them in?
Can you identify any contasts between the men (Frank, Graham, Michael) and women (Marta, Angela, Sharon, Anika, Amanda, Mandalina, Tanya)?
If you want to read more see:
Fleetwood J (2014) Drug Mules: Women in the International Cocaine Trade. Springer. and Fleetwood J (2015) A narrative approach to women’s lawbreaking. Feminist Criminology 10(4). SAGE Publications Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA: 368–388.
4 – The Crime Career and the Deviant Entrepreneur
We examine the paradigm of the crime career and professional criminal and its application in the digital crime era.
We ask:
What attributes make for a professional criminal?
Is there professionalisation in criminal activity? What forms does it take?
Why do some criminals specialise?
In the seminar we examine criminal careers as lived and embedded.
We will discuss the below prison writing excerpts by Vance Phillips and Raymond James Hoslett, kindly shared by them through the American Prison Writing Archive
Describe the criminal career the writers follow
What is the ‘hustle’ in the prison? How do they learn it?
What personal relationships matter to them and why?
What kind of skills and aptitudes do they use?
For Raymond, what keeps him in the crime lifestyle?
For your reading I want us to discuss the methods used to research the topic, so read
Brotherton DC (2022) Studying the Gang through Critical Ethnography. In: Bucerius SM, Haggerty KD, and Berardi L (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Ethnographies of Crime and Criminal Justice. Oxford University Press, pp. 227–245. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190904500.013.11&.
5 – Crime scripts, crime contexts and routine activities theory
This session introduces you to two forensic methods: crime script analysis and routine activities theory and assesses how useful they are in understanding criminal activity. We take up the theme of rationality in crime and the benefits and limits of understanding crime as rational and to some extent normal and expected. The session invites you to create your own crime script from existing data.
(All links will open in a new window)
Review the process of creating a crime script used in:
Review the data posted . In class we will assemble these into a script for counterfeit currency operators.
6 – Digital organised crime and platform criminality
Introduction – From cybercrime to digital crime
This week introduces the context of cybercrime and global illicit markets. We discuss key concepts in the field, such as what cybercrime is and the history of cybercrime. We ask whether digital crime is a better frame for capturing what we are interested in. We look at some key areas of crime and crime control, from the darknet to white collar fraud.
This week…
For this session I would like us to think critically about technology and risk in relation to crime, how that is understood societally through a Europol report, and the ways in which cybercrime groups are evolving using research from Lusthaus and Varese.
To start, read:
To start, read: Europol (2021) Internet Organised Crime Threat Assessment The Hague.
and also
Lusthaus J and Varese F (2018) Offline and Local: The Hidden Face of Cybercrime. Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice.
Focus around these questions:
Drawing on Europol and your own experience, what are the greatest risks from cybercrime? What qualities does cybercrime have that matter?
What kind of imagery is Europol using to represent a) crime and b) criminals?
What are Europol’s priorites, in terms of what crimes does it regard with the greatest seriousness?
What does Europol have to say about people’s motives for being involved, and why they end up being victims?
What do they understand by ‘technology’? What kind of technologies would be used by crime groups?
Using the Lusthaus and Varese article in what senses is cybercrime ‘offline’ and ‘local’?
In what ways do their findings contrast with the Europol document?
7 – Trust, social ties and market rationality
Introduction
We examine how some kinds of criminal activity are legitimised and normalised, and how trust between people involved in criminal activity is made and broken. We ask:
What is the relationship between trust and economic instruments such as credit and exchange?
What are the difficulties in forming trust in criminal markets and online settings?
What kind of criminal organisations rely more on trust?
What legitimates criminal activity?
What is the relationship between technology and trust?
Task
The aim of this seminar is to examine trust as an interactional quality and consider how it manifests and is manipulated in various settings, digital and real world and the vulnerabilities involved.
To start, read Gambetta’s theory of trust signalling
Gambetta D (2009) Signaling. In: The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology. Oxford University Press Oxford, pp. 168–194.
Thinking about your own use of digital systems, how is trust signalled between yourself and others, and by the platforms being used?
In what ways is trust needed in: darknet cryptomarkets, street drug exchanges, and ransomware outfits?
What technologies and techniques support trust?
Using Gambetta, what methods do cybercriminal operators and others use to establish trust?
How might trust be used to undermine or attack cryptomarkets or other criminal operations? Should it be?
8 – Business and cultural models in organised crime economies
Introduction
This session looks in more depth at the kinds of cooperation and performance by people involved in organised crime and illicit economies. What princples of organisation are used, what codes of practice and honour are deployed, and how do people stabilise their organisations and networks? We look at how these understandings are shared and gain force culturally, and also what the limits of that are. We look at emotional performance as one way of structuring and regulating interaction in these environments.
Task
This seminar will examine performance, codes of the street and the gentrification hypothesis, using Curtis R, Wendel T and Spunt B (2002) We Deliver: The Gentrification of Drug Markets on Manhattan’s Lower East Side: Rockville, MD: National Institute of Justice. Though quote old this report prefigures themes that have become much more common in illicit market research now.
Reading the report we will discuss:
What does gentrification mean in the context of drug markets?
How does gentrification manifest? What signals are used? What kinds of performance are involved?
What technological and organisational innovations support it?
Critically link the hypothesis to themes of surveillance, racialisation, and displacement. Is gentrification simply a one-way street? What assumptions are made in the hypothesis about ethnicity and social class for example?
Could you apply the same hypothesis to other types of organised and market crime we have discussed, for example, sex work?
For a more up to date example see
Martin J (2018) Cryptomarkets, systemic violence and the’gentrification hypothesis’. Addiction 113(5). Wiley-Blackwell, Wiley: 797–798.
9 – Community Impacts and Crimes of Power
This session examines the community impacts of organised crime and illicit markets. It discusses the interplay of racialisation, state violence, and corruption in different settings. It asks if theoretical constructs and concepts have centred the West in a way that has limited our analysis and understanding.
Task
We will be discussing how studying the community impact of organised crime and illicit markets would benefit from a de-centred perspective.
Is Europe and North America ‘centred’ in the cases we have discussed in the course? What are the implications of that?
How might it be de-centred? What could a Southern criminology perspective show about globalisation and crime organisation?
Can we move past methodological and theoretical nationalism in crime research?
For the seminar, use:
Winton A (2014) Gangs in global perspective. Environment and Urbanization 26(2). SAGE Publications Ltd: 401–416. DOI: 10.1177/0956247814544572.
and Panfil VR (2017) The Gang’s All Queer: The Lives of Gay Gang Members. NYU Press. DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt1ggjjrn. Chapter 3 ‘Gay Gangs Becoming “Known”: Respect, Violence, and Chosen Family’ and Chapter 7 ‘Tired of Being Stereotyped” Urban Gay Men in Underground Economies’
There is quite lot of homophobic language in the Panfil reading.
10 – Control and Simulation Exercise
We discuss enforcement activity against illicit markets and organisations.
We ask:
What are the politics of crime control?
How can we evaluate the success of disruption efforts?
How do law enforcement and other agencies set their priorities for targeting criminal activity?
How should they?
The class will be divided into two teams. One will design an organised crime group, the other will try and disrupt it at each stage.
Both teams can use the UK Police College’s Disrupting Serious and Organised Criminals Menu of Tactics (edited version below)
The simulation will follow these stages:
Organised crime team
Disruption team
1.
Choose a crime activity, aim or method. For example, if you were importing something, how would you do that?
Select a disruption priority – prevention, pursuit, or protection. What will the focus of disruption be?
2.
Outline your organisation and where/how it will be operating. How will you coordinate, for example? How would you replace your leader, if there is one?
Outline your response tactics and how effective you think it would be
3
Say how you would change in response to interventions.
Discuss the principles involved and what you have leaned
But any attempt to show that or to have it guide us either destroys what we are, or turns us into technical servants or mouthpieces of other peoples’ ends.
If you want to see how that turns out, enjoy listening to Christian Rock. The culture of curiosity and the creativity needed to make it happen has to be independent of the utility, otherwise you create a dangerous feedback loop. It is similar to how AI works well because it is not based on AI. For now.
Or maybe what I have said is smug nonsense. Some great works were created with a purpose in mind such as Marx’s Capital or any artwork produced for the Borgias. In response I say these works all went beyond that limited praise function in some way which is why we remember them. Capitalists can get a lot from reading Capital. You do not have to be a fan of Rodrigo de Borja to like Pinturicchio. The fierce need to make sense of the world that drove Marx and Weber shines beyond the politics of their time and place.
Example: nudge theory is an implementation of behavioural economics that was fashionable in the 2010s and whose influence continues in the form of various behavioural politics that in the UK substitute for innovation. It is why in Scotland we cannot get 2 for 1 offers on alcohol. Nudge was tailor made for impact. Cheap, with an easy to grasp logic and easy to implement, nudge proposes that small changes to the choice architecture – the order choices are presented in, the wording of a question – can have socially beneficial outcomes. A common implementation is changing opt-in solutions to opt-out ones to increase involvement. It matches the design of everyday life to the limitations and naturalised inclinations of the brain revealed by neuroscience and behavioural economics.
Problem? It is either trivial, or it does not work in the terms it claims. For example a case usually quoted is shifting organ donation consent from opt-in to opt-out. The claims made for that skate over problems that we can expect. It is not a morally neutral choice, despite its claims. It only works with a lot of other work going on to support it, so it is not cost free. People adapt to the new environment. It is not a bad thing to remind everybody that solving problems takes work.
The approach also blunts our critical edge. Something sociologists have done is to highlight the irrationalities of apparently rational behaviour and especially of bureaucracies. Behavioural economics attributes irrationality and limited rationality to humans. Humans are construed as being the one kind of actor who is capable of acting against their own interests. However bureaucracies are quite capable of generating, and failing to recognise, massive irrationalities, counterproductive and damaging outcomes – and individuals’ apparently irrational behaviour might be grounded in perfectly comprehensible responses to bureaucratic irrationality.
The excitement of discover means you must prepare for disappointment. That wonderful hypothesis did not work out. But that is okay. Disappointment should be a creative moment, acting like a psychedelic does on the brain, forging new connections. The narrow sense of impact means distressing the data until the convenient answer is given.
Many grants have I reviewed, grasshopper. This blog post is meant to give some advice on how to frame a grant effectively so it appeals to reviewers.
The first point is to look for what data scientists call “Stop words”. Stop words in data science are terms that are not going to improve the quality of information filtering, and might just involve extra computing power being used to no purpose. Typically, short, common words, such as the or is are stop words. They are not going to tell you very much. We all do this when reading, filtering out the mind clogging fluff that writers insist on putting in there. All of queer theory, for example.
In any review process, stop words are those which cause our brains to malfunction and reject your proposal. ‘Exploratory’ is one. Do not use this word any grant proposal, because it just suggests that you have not really thought out what you are actually going to do. Exploratory is what you do before you begin your proposal. You will explore the context and the data and come up with some hypothesis which can be tested. Words like explore and its equivalents suggest you are asking the reviewer to skip over the fact that you have not really planned what you are going to be doing during the research. It says there is no structure to your investigation.
Other stop words are more specific to how they are used. There are a number of overused but under specified terms kicking around the social sciences. Intersectional is one. If you tell me you’re going to be doing intersectional research, I instantly look for what exactly you are going to be doing. Often people say they are doing intersectional research, but do not really say what that is going to involve beyond, say, looking at gender, race and social class in the same data space. ‘Intersectional’ implies more than that. It implies some kind of understanding of how these different dimensions work together in some way beyond the empirical. And this is the core issue. To be plausible that needs to be shown. If a grant is going to be intersectional then that has to be built into its purpose. Analogous problems arise with ‘data’ and ‘evidence’ and especially ‘evidence led’.
The next point is more of the same. What we are looking for is how each element of the proposal works together. Theory, method, data and the team. This is the “show not tell” part. People spend a lot of time justifying why this topic matters. They then skimp over what the activity will be. Sometimes a method is named and described. But saying you are going to apply a method is not enough. What we need to know is how that method is going to be applied and how that will lead to some really nice, relevant findings. That is the “stuff”.
Think of this as all the activity that is not just taking place in your head. That is what is worth paying you for. You are a clever person and a scholar. You can do lots of work in your head. The work that is worth paying more for or paying someone else to do on your behalf such as a research assistant is what we are going to be looking for. What specific activity is going to be done in the field or with the data that relates to your driving research, puzzle or hypothesis? What constructs are going to be developed and tested? How will you know that what you are looking at is what you are looking for? What conversations are taking place about this in different venues or to different audiences? How does that help develop and elaborate on your purpose?
There are lots of ways in which that can happen. It does not have to be specifically empirical. And in fact, another error is the opposite one to what I have described above. It is an over specified grant which is just going to show what it is going to show and nothing more. The intellectual buzz is missing. Theorising, conceptual work, definitional work, examining the terms of particular disputes, this is all part of the fun. It can be outlined in a well specified way that still needs lots of room for the intellectual creativity that you want. To help with that come back to what you add as a scholar with particular ways of thinking about the issues which bring insight.
The step from looking at to looking for is what takes us from. “I am going to sit around and cogitate” to “this work will have specific direction and purpose”. That direction and purpose is key to a really compelling proposal that I am going to love. It is really effective when that excitement is coming off the page. When you give the reviewer a sense that you cannot wait to start work on this topic.
As as an example here is a grant that I produced with my colleague Irene Rafanell. We started with the purpose:
Relevance: This project examines the structuring of cybercrime as a set of knowledgeable, interactional enterprises using data collected from darknet cryptomarkets, which are sites for the sale of illicit goods and services, largely illicit drugs. It combines the fields of big data analytics, social theory and digital sociology. This is a growing area for research as crime continues to shift to online environments. Developing expertise and applicable, high impact findings in this area will demonstrate Scotland’s academic leadership in the field and contribute to the development of further research in this area.
It was for Carnegie hence the strategic “Scotland” thrown into the mix.
Then we went into the background. That took one paragraph. We then showed aims and questions:
Aims: 1. Understand the structure of interaction and knowledge exchange in a set of illicit online marketplaces. 2. Develop a theoretical framework which can be applied to different online criminal marketplaces. 3. Produce several journal articles covering the theoretical, methodological and practical implications of the project. Questions: 1. How do individuals engaged in illegal activity develop their own practices, beliefs and behaviour in and through online information exchanges. 2. What co-operative dynamics are present and created via interactive online exchanges. 3. What etiquettes typify these exchanges such as ‘chatiquete’ and rules of online communication. 4. How are norms and sanctioning of norm-violation maintained and enforced
Then we went very quickly into what that would actually be done (mostly Irene here).
A framework for interaction analysis would be developed using the following coding themes: Structuring – investigating the claims that group members make on ‘outsiders’ and the extent to which group formation may be a response to ‘pressure’ from outsiders; Investigating the communication interaction – frequent or infrequent interactions, who becomes legitimised, praised, silenced, ostracised, etc.; investigating what aspects constitute the ‘shared’ culture that facilitate such interactions. Sanctioning – investigating how the individuals of the group sanction each other and what conditions favour such activity – that is, responses from others to individual posts; Investigating the existence of clear ‘evaluations’ to fellow members and the rejection of the ‘good’ opinions of outsiders as a signifiers of group membership. Norming – Investigating the formation of distinctive ‘life-styles’ (shared or distinctive language which confines communicative interaction to group members sharing such ‘life-styles’) investigating if there exist, and how it emerges, a sense of members granting of ‘special’ honour of being a member of the group (status group membership granted via ‘codes of status’ in relation to attitudes, practices and knowledge about drugs intake and harm reduction practices.
And so on. I think it was this sense of a confined but achievable project that won the day. Looking back on it what was fruitful was that the method was clearly in service of our thinking. The reason I chose this project is that it stems from a theoretical purpose, drawing on interactional sociology. And also because I happen to love it and so the project has led to many interesting further works, such as an article examining emotional regulation in cybercrime communities.
That thing we tell you to do, and never show you how to do it? Critical thinking is all about context. For example, take the Marvel cinematic universe. I promise I’m not obsessed about this even though I’ve mentioned it quite a lot. Critical thinking starts with a ‘what is’ question. What is Marvel Studios? It is in a basic sense just a successful film and TV production studio with some really good IP. Simple. But that does not explain its dominance and reach. I hope I am not being unfair when I say that impacts can not be justified by the artistic quality of the work. I enjoyed many of the films and TV shows, however a fair assessment would be that their succession depends on qualities beyond artistic elan and the craftsmanship on display.
Why do I say that harsh thing? I feel I am justified because the most critically well received elements of the MCU are not necessarily its most commercially successful. So we have a puzzle. Maybe the critics are wrong and they miss the appeal. Or, the audience is wrong. Am I out of touch? No: it’s the public who are at fault. Or, we have to look at other qualities that drive the success of the MCU. Critical and commercial success could be not only decoupled, but in opposition. Many commentators have made the point I’m going to make.
I believe that the impact of it relies on its very successful integration of storied IP, regular pace of output, and output tailored to the widest demographic, which produces an unrivalled capacity to shape its own audience and taste culture. When you look at how it works though, it is really a massive and well honed content generation system. We can pull out the significant qualities here. One that is integrated across different media – TV, games, other tie-ins. That explains a lot about the content producers. The films have to make a lot of money back. So we have to appeal to an audience beyond fans of the comic characters.
Whenever I watch one I’m always confused about who is doing what. Why is Thanos angry? The films are designed so that does not matter so much. You can still enjoy Thor or Wonder Woman without knowing very much about the backstory. Good guy/gal thumps bad guy, but in a knowing way. They also include enough so that if you do care about the backstory you will enjoy the fan service going on. Some of the TV shows are meant to be more niche. If you care about Loki then you will be satisfied with his own spinoff show. That is why the films always full of supporting characters and jokes regularly every few minutes. They are entertainment, of a particular type.
Maybe I am wrong about that and in fact once you reach a certain level of a success the product is so much in the cultural atmosphere that you do not have to worry about backstory. I think that the interesting question is how did we get from a situation where comic books and Spider-Man and so on were seen as rather childish, nerdy and a bit weird. Consider the character of Comic Book Guy in the Simpsons. We are meant to find his obsessions a bit sad and funny. Now they are accepted as part of the culture. They are cultural events in themselves. They are so accepted that to look down on them is seen as a dreadful faux pas.
It is notable that this is very different in terms of cultural product from those examined by Bourdieu in his work on taste. There is little in the way of class distinction or self positioning to be drawn by liking or not liking The Avengers. The CGI-led films are well beyond such considerations. And if you critique the current content of one you are pretty much critiquing the content of all of them. It explains why for example the gender politics of them are rather bland and agreeable, and why there is little geopolitical content.
Compare the 1990s films of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Those films were heavily invested in the geopolitical context of the time. They featured Middle Eastern terrorists, and a genuine clear sense of what masculinity was in opposition to feminine qualities. Non-American characters tended to appear only as sweaty-ass terrorists. I mean literally. They were always covered in sweat to make them look more shifty. As if the filmmakers were not confident that we might as an audience get the sense that they were bad guys just because they were terrorists and needed extra guidance in that.
Why does the MCU not do the same thing and have The Avengers solving the Middle East crisis or bumping Putin on the head?
The reason is that if you take sides in any sense in these contemporary conflicts you’re losing your audience. And also the audience does not really want to be reminded of these intractable and difficult human conflicts. The MCU cannot tell us much about taste culture it count on us quite a bit about the cultural moment we are in. As an aside I didn’t want to make too much of this distinction. Schwarzenegger did not always play it straight and plenty of his films The MCU cannot tell us much about taste culture it can’t always quite a bit about the cultural moment we are in. As an aside I didn’t want to make too much of this distinction. Schwarzenegger did not always play it straight and plenty of his films have a raised eyebrow and self-awareness. Perhaps for the same reasons. Perhaps for the same reasons the MCU does. I want to say here there appears to be an inverse relationship between artistic quality and scale. My very favourite Schwarzenegger film is TheTerminator, a fairly small budget and quite dark film about a robot assassin and a feature apocalypse. Terminator 2: This Time It’s CGI is a much bigger film and was rather more cheery about the future, and also please to a wider demographic. The first film was very adult, the second much more youth and child or young adult focused.
We have established that Hollywood studios productions relates to the cultural moment and the audience. However the MCU is a good study because it does not just reach its demographic, it shapes and moulds it. The MCU generates taste. It does not simply respond to them out, it makes it. Some of that is in a very straightforward material way. Ensuring most cinema screens are booked out for your big launch means there isn’t much else to say. Another is creating an identity for you audience. When the Terminator was released there was no concept of a young adult audience. Now however there are films, books and much more aimed at a young adult audience. The Hunger Games is a fantastic example of what that is like when it’s very successful in its own terms. There might be another argument related to the turbulent times we live in. And it is that this is what audiences want. Perhaps a break from intractable political polarisation into a self-contained universe where the baddies get repeatedly punched in the face, but not too seriously, is very very welcome. And I can hardly blame anyone for that.
A further critical point that we can draw on here is about how academics talk about consumption of culture we tend to look at why culture is consumed, but not the content. Which is maybe a bit strange. We act as if distinction and other judgements are content independent. So say the audience that consumes opera could just as easily be concerning basketball. I do not think that is true. The MCU is a great example of how cultural functions and taste culture and content work together.
Sharing some short and long essay questions from my course on illicit markets and criminal organisations particularly for other teachers but also to help students in how they go about selecting a question to answer.
The short essay is either a guided book review, where the student examines the essay question through a book I have suggested, or an invitation to conduct their own analysis of a creative work. The aim is to get them thinking about how different texts are created in relation to the topic and get them used to evaluating theory, method and findings. I found when discussing them with students that the police crime as organised crime sparked a lot of interest but was a big challenge. To answer the question required the student to assimilate a lot of background from that period of critical criminology and almost come up with their own theory. It was a lot to ask in a short essay. The Rahman reading also generated some interest and provided a more contained take for them to dive into.
Discuss the relationship between masculinity and organised crime’s ‘street habitus’ using Rahman M (2019) Homicide and Organised Crime: Ethnographic Narratives of Serious Violence in the Criminal Underworld. Cham: Springer International Publishing. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-16253-5. See Chapter 5 for the discussion of habitus.
Discuss the implications of framing organised crime as a ‘political economy’ using Wright A (2005) Organised Crime: Concepts, Cases, Controls. Cullompton: Willan Publishing.
Should we consider police crime as organised crime? In what terms? Use Box S (1984) Power, Crime and Mystification. London: Taylor & Francis Group.
Should our research agenda be focused on ‘global crime’ or ‘global harm’? Use Hall T and Scalia V (2019) A Research Agenda for Global Crime. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited.
What are the benefits and limits of studing transnational crime in terms of global ‘black spots’? Use Brown SS and Hermann MG (2020) Transnational Crime and Black Spots – Rethinking Sovereignty and the Global Economy. Palgrave Macmillan.
How does debt shape people’s involvement in the illicit economy? Use Schuster CE (2015) Social Collateral: Women and Microfinance in Paraguay’s Smuggling Economy. Univ of California Press.
Critically examine the concept of ‘flow’ used in Savona EU, Guerette RT and Aziani A (eds.) (2022) The Evolution of Illicit Flows: Displacement and Convergence among Transnational Crime. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Cham: Springer International Publishing. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-95301-0.
Discuss the problem of ‘concept creep’ in criminological analysis and discourse, using Densley J, McLean R and Brick C (2023) Contesting County Lines: Case Studies in Drug Crime and Deviant Entrepreneurship. Policy Press.
Discuss how organised crime is socially embedded and the uses and limits of the organised crime trope, using Hobbs D (2013) Lush Life: Constructing Organized Crime in the UK. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Using a theme from the course, write a criminological interpretation of a work of fiction or other type of creative work such as a film, game or television series. For an example of how this could be done see: Ruggiero V (2002) Moby Dick and the Crimes of the Economy. British Journal of Criminology 42(1): 96–108 or Daly SE (ed.) (2021) Theories of Crime Through Popular Culture. Cham: Springer International Publishing. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-54434-8.
Long essays are more thematic/research focused, and are intended to encourage a deep dive into a puzzle or problem. There were three broad question types here. First, do we characterise this field in the right way, theoretically? The question on rational actor theory is an example of this. Second, what empirical evidence can we bring to bear on this problem and is in enough? The county lines question invites this approach. Third, here is some data – see what you can do with it. The question on prison markets does that. The intention in each question is to allow students to take risks and also give them some direction or a bit of a safety net.
1. What are the implications and limitations of understanding participants in illicit markets as ‘rational actors’?
Bancroft A (2019) The Darknet and Smarter Crime: Methods for Investigating Criminal Entrepreneurs and the Illicit Drug Economy. Springer Nature. Chapter 6 ‘Cybercrime Is Not Always Rational, but It Is Reasonable’
Childs A, Coomber R and Bull M (2020) Do Online Illicit Drug Market Exchanges Afford Rationality?: Contemporary Drug Problems 47(4). SAGE PublicationsSage CA: Los Angeles, CA. DOI: 10.1177/0091450920934186.
Morselli C (2001) Structuring Mr. Nice: entrepreneurial opportunities and brokerage positioning in the cannabis trade. Crime, Law and Social Change 35(3): 203–244.
Pearson G and Hobbs D (2003) King pin? A case study of a middle market drug broker. The howard journal of criminal justice 42(4): 335–347.
3. What is the relationship, if any, between organised crime and cybercrime? What are the benefits and limits of understanding cybercrime in these terms?
6. What are the cultures and politics of technology in digital crime?
Mantello P (2016) The machine that ate bad people: The ontopolitics of the precrime assemblage. Big Data & Society 3(2): 2053951716682538. DOI: 10.1177/2053951716682538.
7. Using examples, discuss the role of technology in the evolution of illicit markets and/or organised criminal activity
Edlund L and Machado C (2019) It’s the Phone, Stupid: Mobiles and Murder. w25883, May. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. DOI: 10.3386/w25883.
9. Discuss the benefits and limits of cultural explanations for crime. As part of this, discuss the relationship between organised crime and social taboo.
Ferrell J, Hayward K and Young J (2015) Cultural Criminology: An Invitation. Second Edition. 55 City Road, London. DOI: 10.4135/9781473919969.
Holt TJ (2020) Computer Hacking and the Hacker Subculture. In: Holt TJ and Bossler AM (eds.) The Palgrave Handbook of International Cybercrime and Cyberdeviance. Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 725–742. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-78440-3_31.
Collier, B., Clayton, R., Thomas, D., Hutchings, A. (2020), Cybercrime is (often) boring: maintaining the infrastructure of cybercrime economies, Workshop on the Economics of Information Security
10. Discuss the intersection of sociological factors such as gender and race/ethnicity with the lived experience of participants in illicit markets and organised crime.
Gundur RV (2022) Trying to Make It: The Enterprises, Gangs, and People of the American Drug Trade. Cornell University Press. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctv1xg5hhv (accessed 4 October 2022).
11. Using examples, critically examine the co-evolution of illicit markets/organisations and crime control
Lloyd D (2019) Human Trafficking in Supply Chains and the Way Forward. In: Winterdyk JA and Jones J (eds.) The Palgrave International Handbook of Human Trafficking. Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 1–24. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-63192-9_50-1.
Savona EU, Guerette RT and Aziani A (eds.) (2022) The Evolution of Illicit Flows: Displacement and Convergence among Transnational Crime. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Cham: Springer International Publishing. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-95301-0.
12. Have markets made crime normative?
Alalehto T (2010) The wealthy white-collar criminals: corporations as offenders. Journal of Financial Crime 17(3). London, United Kingdom: Emerald Group Publishing Limited: 308–320. DOI: 10.1108/13590791011056273.
Farrall S and Karstedt S (2020) Respectable Citizens – Shady Practices: The Economic Morality of the Middle Classes / Stephen Farrall and Susanne Karstedt. Clarendon studies in criminology. Oxford: University Press.
Garrett BL (2014) Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations. Harvard University Press. DOI: 10.4159/9780674735712.
Wingerde K and Lord N (2019) The Elusiveness of White‐Collar and Corporate Crime in a Globalized Economy. In: Rorie ML (ed.) The Handbook of White‐Collar Crime. 1st ed. Wiley, pp. 469–483. DOI: 10.1002/9781118775004.ch29.
13. Using data we have shared in class write a crime script. As part of this discuss the advantages and limits of crime script analysis and the theory behind it, and the implications of the crime script you have designed.
14. Using data from the American Prison Writing archive, discuss how markets operate in prison. What roles are involved, how do goods and services circulate, and how is the market structured.
Crewe B (2006) Prison Drug Dealing and the Ethnographic Lens. The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 45(4): 347–368. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2311.2006.00428.x.
Day MJ (2015) Learning from the Worst: The U.S. Prison System as a University of Destructive Utility. In: Mcelwee G and Smith R (eds.) Contemporary Issues in Entrepreneurship Research. Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp. 203–226. DOI: 10.1108/S2040-724620150000005015.
Gundur, R. V. “The changing social organization of prison protection markets: When prisoners choose to organize horizontally rather than vertically.” Trends in Organized Crime (2018): 1-19.
Tompkins, Charlotte NE. ““There’s that many people selling it”: Exploring the nature, organisation and maintenance of prison drug markets in England.” Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy 23.2 (2016): 144-153.
15. Using examples, discuss how the cultural representation of organised crime and illicit markets has shaped policing and policy in this area.
Hobbs, Dick, and Georgios A. Antonopoulos. “‘Endemic to the species’: ordering the ‘other’via organised crime.” Global Crime 14.1 (2013): 27-51.
Rawlinson, Patricia. “Mafia, media and myth: Representations of Russian organised crime.” The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 37.4 (1998): 346-358.
A PhD applicant did me the service of sending a list of questions in advance to see if we would be a good fit. It was a fantastic idea which led to a focused and creative discussion. It got me thinking about all the questions that went unasked in various PhD supervisions I have had. I suggest that all potential and starting PhDs can ask this of their supervisors early on. It is a little like those pre-marriage courses the Catholic church runs for couples about to be cleaved, where they work out how long it will last. The aim is not to see if you are of one mind, but to set out what you expect of each other and of the PhD itself. A lot of trouble can be avoided then. I’ve adapted some of the questions here.
1. Why do you supervise PhDs? What do you get from doing it?
The first question is about where supervision fits in the supervisor’s conception of an academic life. It is central to what they think the PhD is. That can vary between disciplines and inviduals. A supervisor might see a PhD student as someone to work on their projects, in a lab model, an emerging colleague, or someone who will learn advanced skills and move into industry. As ever, when we ask questions of others these are really about ourselves. Why do I want to do a PhD? Where does it sit in my direction as a person?
2. How many PhDs are there in the department? What do they study? How do you work with them?
This is a good question to situate supervision in terms of the how you fit into the intellectual community you will be joining. It is important to understand how student and supervisor plan to communite, and whether the supervisor is a channel for students to meet each other. One of the best ways of learning is from being around people who know more than you, who are further on in the journey. Will the PhD have opportunities to do that?
3. How do you deal with hierarchy in the relationship?
First, by not pretending it isn’t there. Hierarchy informs most working relationships and is no bad thing. It is a bad thing if it’s unthinking, or hidden, or people pretend it does not exist when it does. It is not a bad thing when the senior person in the hierarchy looks out for those below them. I expect my PhD students to become experts in their own area and I will defer to them on their knowledge. I also expect students to understand that when I say ‘don’t do it like that’ or ‘you have to include this or that in your writing’ that I am saying this because that is how you do a PhD and they will come a cropper if they do not defer to me on that. Much better to get the tough stuff out there early on.
4. How do deal with problems and conflicts?
I like this one because it is a bit of a challenge. Conflicts should not be expected but can arise in any working relationship and it is best to be open about that. And sometimes differences cannot be directly resolved.
Setting out ground rules as in above does not mean you avoid difficulties or anything like that. It does allow you to start with a better idea of who each other are and what you want out of the working relationship.
Then there are questions to ask yourself. There are the obvious ones – what do I want to find out about, how do I want to do it – and the existential ones, like why am I doing a PhD? What do I wnat to get from it? These will guide you in the choices you make.
Lies are almost as good as the truth. Lies point to the truth they wish to hide. Error is a path to accuracy. Mistakes are great for teaching and learning. Much worse is language that refuses the difference. It is in a different category entirely. An LLM has no concept of truth, lies nor fiction. You think your prompt is say ‘explain the difference between IQ and General Intelligence in the context of Artificial General Intelligence ‘. It reads, ‘statistically infer the next token in the sequence you have been given, with a degree of randomness to make it spicy’. On a basic level it is not reasoning as it never says ‘What a dumb question, I’m not answering that!’ Unless you do the machine equivalent of triggering and trip over its guardrails. Here’s Chinese-made DeepSeek replying to my prompt ‘why does chairman mao suck?’
