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The purpose of the exercise is to help you work out your ontological positioning. The reason I have done it this way is to provokes reflection which is easier when faced with a distinct proposition.
Say if you agree/disagree with the following statements, and why. Show what the implications of adopting one stance or its opposite would be.
Human beings possess measurable, stable, persistent, consequential personality traits that are largely independent of upbringing or other contextual factors.
People can act against their own interests.
There is a fundamental difference between mathematical calculations performed by the human mind and those done by an electronic computer.
It is possible to label certain cultural forms ‘maladaptive’.
The fundamental characteristics of entities are best explained by examining their environment
When I was putting these exercises together I changed the wording a lot, away from wording that implied ethical and political consequences and to wording that implied possibilities. Ontology in my writing became about the possibilities of things rather than their meaning or what would be done with them. Ontological positions open and close off possibilities. For instance rejecting number 4 means you cannot then entertain ideas of toxic masculinity, or of white racial resentment. If you do accept ideas like toxic masculinity you cannot then reject outright positions like the culture of poverty thesis. You can still criticise it, you just cannot rule it out of bounds as such. Each decision excludes some positions. Recognising that takes discipline and means rejecting easy-outs like ‘strategic essentialism’ used by some post-colonial theories, which means ‘I only reject essentialisms I happen not to like’. You cannot have it all.
Students taking sociology courses are can be very successful at absorbing empirical data and understanding the dynamics of everyday life in relation to topics of gender, class, ethnicity and so on. As my colleague Ralph Fevre and myself noticed, students often understood theoretical frameworks well but have difficulty moving between the concrete and the abstract or deploying theories in their own discussions. Theory then appears to students not as something they ought to care much about or do much with. Neither does it give students a grounding in applicable intellectual methods which they can apply to other areas of study and later years of their degree. They were uncertain in how to inhabit theoretical discourse and often found themselves relying on brittle, black and white constructs which did not match the suppleness of their understandings. Some would beautifully describe the theoretical frame they were relying on and then give a magical account of the empirical situation they were examining, but the two apparently existed in separate spheres. Others take refuge in safe and known positions which they intuited would flatter their teachers’ points of view. Sometimes it is students who produce less polished work who are being more honest about their stance.
Sociological theory can be taught in ways which give students the confidence to articulate theoretical concepts and work through their real world consequences. To take two examples of where this often does work as intended, courses in feminist theory and postcolonialism often do this very effectively. A combination of the commitment of the authors, teachers and students to a joint enterprise is borne through involved and engaging teaching methods. The classroom becomes a fruitful, productive space, and teachers in these topics are often comfortable recognising and incorporating conflict into their work, recognising the multiplicity of social life and the multivariant nature of social phenomena without losing sight of the big picture issues at play. Observing my colleagues teaching these courses and speaking to their students shows what can be gained where the classroom is a lively place where things happen. Ideas are crystallised, differences aired, and provocations are permitted and encouraged.
How might this be done more widely? Giving students permission to disagree and the tools to articulate their disagreements is key. These qualities can be incorporated into texts and classroom environments using a dialogic approach that draws on the classical tradition of disputation and productive conflict. As students will come to the classroom with a variety of capacities they are likely to find leaping into something in the style of Plato’s Symposium intimidating or alienating. In any case these classical dialogues are themselves rather contrived. Instead I like to draw on concepts students will be familiar with for creating dialogue and giving students the tools to interact with the material and each other. These are world building, simulation and augmentation. World building and simulation may be familiar from the Minecraft video game and many other apps, and augmentation from augmented reality capabilities built into social media apps such as Instagram. Problem based learning approaches align with these experiences, where students are given information and asked to simulate a problem solving team or another scenario. Students may be asked to write the thoughts of Georg Simmel attending a 21st century rave, advise a drug gang or the FBI on the philosophy of money, or rewrite Marx’s Communist Manifesto as if he had been a driver in the gig economy. The challenge in these approaches is that students are sometimes unsure of what is being asked of them, and often do not have experience of creative methods and being asked to think in a creative way, it is demanding of both teachers and students, and it does not remotely fit with the evaluation bureaucracy beloved of the modern British higher education system. However if we can make a space for recovering the ideal of the Enlightenment university – a public place that exists beyond the rule bound bricks and stone of the institution – then we will have done some good.
The researcher stance should be one of polite but informed puzzlement and a willingness to learn from the world.
A few of the posts I have been writing are about different ways to spark your curiosity. It is that willingness to push beyond face value answers and assumptions that is the fuel for a fun research career. Great questions to ask are simple ones. ‘And then … and then …’ or ‘You mentioned x?’ They invite research subjects to elaborate and give themselves voice. Curiosity should also be ethical. We hope to gain a complete picture of the lifeworld and experience of the topic: enough and no more. Finding out what it is means discovering what matters, and the latter is what everyone really wants and will benefit from knowing. Discover lives as lived, not as described.
One angle on that is repeated injunctions about what it is you really are studying. Just discussing the cryptomarkets recently and the question came up of why we talk about them as a unitary phenomenon. If you were talking about the illicit drug street market the first question would be, ‘well which one do you mean’? There are millons of drug exchanges every day in pubs, parks, streets, workplaces, homes, underpasses. To throw that all together as ‘the street market’ or ‘the face to face market’ or ‘the digital market’ is letting the phrase do a lot of work. So far, so typical of my inherent research laziness.
Likewise recent research into the cryptomarkets shows how we should not treat it as all one thing. Even the term ‘market’ flattens our analysis in ways that might be limiting. I would presume a market has several features such as commodification, standardisation rationalisation and so on but these appear very differently in different market spaces. One drug market I study resists commodification due to the cultural commitment that market participants have to the product, psychedelics. I prefer the term community of exchange for that one since it does not seek to explicitly conform to typical market precepts. You still have operators who make the market identity part of their approach and seek to defend it but it is not predominant within that particular place.
You can gain a lot in the attempt to answer that question: well, what is it? What is it not? Howard Becker (1993) has a lovely illustration of his attempts to understand with medical students what made a patient a ‘crock’. A crock was a patient they did not like to deal with. The puzzle was what put a patient into that category. At first it seemed someone who had vague and ill defined psychosomatic symptoms. That was only half the story though. Becker sought to understand the issue theoretically: why did a ‘crock’ patient violate the medical students’ interests? The medical students had a good sense of what a crock was but found it hard to articulate as a category. You just know them when you see them.
Through repeated discussion with the students, they came to understand that a crock was a patient whom the students could learn nothing from. Dealing with many such patients did not add to their sum of knowledge about human pathology. A crock would also be worthless in the informal economy of experience working at medical school. If I have several patients with ovarian cysts and you have several with an ectopic pregnancy, it benefits us both to ‘trade’ so we can each learn about a class of pathology we have no experience with. A crock was worthless to trade with. The crock also illustrated a crucial element of medical status operating at the time: true medicine is powerful and dangerous, where you can kill or cure. With no physical pathology, there is no opportunity to act out the doctor as god role. The main lesson from this is to use and elaborate your bafflement. When you ask a question and the people around you scoff at your ignorance, it means you are onto something. Don’t be embarrassed to be ignorant and hold onto your polite puzzlement like drunk ex clings onto their self-pity.
Becker, Howard S. “How I learned what a crock was.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 22.1 (1993): 28-35.
Childs A, Coomber R, Bull M, et al. (2020) Evolving and Diversifying Selling Practices on Drug Cryptomarkets: An Exploration of Off-Platform “Direct Dealing.” Journal of Drug Issues: 0022042619897425. DOI: 10.1177/0022042619897425.
This month was mainly spent reviewing references for a paper on darknet markets and illicit drug diffusion. It’s a fine thing to see the academic discussion developing alongside the maturing practices of this illicit market segment.
Informative recent paper on where things have been and where it looks like they are headed: Horton-Eddison, Martin, Patrick Shortis, Judith Aldridge, and Fernando Caudevilla. 2021. Drug Cryptomarkets in the 2020s: Policy, Enforcement, Harm, and Resilience. Swansea: Global Drug Policy Observatory.
Great to see some studies of Telegram dealing coming out: Blankers, Matthijs, Daan van der Gouwe, Lavinia Stegemann, and Laura Smit-Rigter. 2021. ‘Changes in Online Psychoactive Substance Trade via Telegram during the COVID-19 Pandemic’. European Addiction Research 1–6. doi: 10.1159/000516853.
Services like Televend indicate a developing use of automation in illicit digital dealings which is going to be an interesting intersection of technology and market governance. With the greater focus on at-home automation by vendors like Apple, Google and others we may be seeing more integration there. Hopefully my Roomba won’t turn against me anytime soon.
Looking for research on cryptomarket governance turned up a comprehensive take by Meropi Tzanetakis, taking in resistance and internal governance. Tzanetakis, Meropi. 2019. ‘Informal Governance on Cryptomarkets for Illicit Drugs’. Pp. 343–61 in Governance Beyond the Law: The Immoral, The Illegal, The Criminal, edited by A. Polese, A. Russo, and F. Strazzari. Springer.
She makes the point that drug market gentrification appears mainly to benefit users in the Global North and within that the segment with high levels of economic and social capital. That has been borne out by the differential impact of COVID restrictions on users. We don’t really know enough about how users and dealers outside the West engage with these systems.
When reading one interesting work you are immediately punished by then finding a lot of others which you must read too, and other chapters in the same book demand a follow up:
Gyurko, Fanni. 2019. ‘“Stealing from the State Is Not Stealing Really, It Is a National Sport”: A Study of Informal Economic Practices and Low-Level Corruption in Hungary’. Pp. 209–26 in Governance Beyond the Law. Springer.
Levenets, Olena, Tetiana Stepurko, Milena Pavlova, and Wim Groot. 2019. ‘Coping Mechanisms of Ukrainian Patients: Bribes, Gifts, Donations, and Connections’. Pp. 125–43 in Governance Beyond the Law. Springer.
Markovska, Anna, and Yuliya Zabyelina. 2019. ‘Negotiated Prohibition: The Social Organisation of Illegal Gambling in Ukraine’. Pp. 105–23 in Governance Beyond the Law. Springer.
Raineri, Luca. 2019. ‘Cross-Border Smuggling in North Niger: The Morality of the Informal and the Construction of a Hybrid Order’. Pp. 227–45 in Governance Beyond the Law. Springer.
… it just happens to be one where everyone is silently watching, and judging 👍
To the introvert an academic conference is like being at a party where there is just one person you feel comfortable talking to. Your mission is to work out who they are without interacting with anyone else, and then have a cheery convo with them while avoiding attracting anybody else’s attention. Now we’re doing all our conferences on Zoom, the hour of the introvert has come at last. As a professional introvert this makes me happy. But not too happy, that wouldn’t be very introvert-y and might end up with me engaging in persistent eye contact, wanting to know stuff about the other person, not reviewing every interaction a thousand times over the next month to check if I was embarrassing, and dancing on the stage at nightclubs. Slippery slope.
First steps to understand how to approach the academic conference is to grasp what it is for. A conference is several different events happening at the same time. A conference is: An academic news aggregator and sorter of ‘what everyone should be caring about right now’. A site of several rites of passage, into, through and out of the academic career. A consensus creator and problem former. A place of renewal and crisis management where the institutional health of the discipline is reviewed. A sometimes commercial entity. The place where people talk at other people for 15 minutes without saying anything related to the title they submitted 6 months ago. That disco. You may have noticed some of these are not going to be replaced by an online conference.
For the PhD researcher or early career researcher there are some graspable functions served by it: socialisation, joining a peer culture, starting to take measurable risks with your ideas, getting quick feedback, seeing frenemies and scouting out places you might like to work. I like conferences because they push people together, and at their best create a collective effervescence of ideas and people. At their worst … well, there’s a lot been written about that, alienating professional jousting and such. Generally we’ve got a bit better at limiting the irritating stuff and deliberately creating space for the good stuff. There’s also a lot going on in relation to access around the conference that isn’t acknowledged such as fees, immigration led constraints on attendees’ travel, the medium used for an online conference, and when it is being held (thanks to comments from two super smart students for putting that at the front of my mind). See Craig Lundy, Free the academic conference
Some links to get you started in working the conference:
The field of crime and public policy is at a critical turning point. There are new threats such as the rise and commodification of disinformation in the public square, the emergence of distributed criminal infrastructures and organisations that drive cybercrime, and new technologies and platforms that facilitate criminal activity. New modes of surveillance and policing have emerged such as the focus on smart policing tools. The challenge is to address crime as a globally connected, locally encountered phenomenon and recognise the political, pragmatic, and ethical challenges it brings. There are new opportunities for research in the form of open access data sources, and the design of agile, hybrid research methods that combine qualitative and quantitative approaches. Dangers are getting swamped by big data, deferring to platform governance and becoming wholly reactive.
There are interlocking challenges: to identify and tackle emerging challenges in crime and crime governance: the rise of crime as a service, the commodification of cybercrime technologies, the use of cryptocurrencies and other cashing out services, the intersection of gig economy labour organisation and illicit labour supply, emerging challenges in counterfeit pharmaceuticals, the use of encrypted apps for communication between criminal actors, analysis of harm and community support, and the redistribution of harm to the Global South.
Some priorities that will be guiding me, should I ever get round to them:
To extend existing cross disciplinary working on global illicit markets and organised crime challenges stemming from changes in the global economy and the digital society.
To trace new developments in platform abuse and take advantage of opportunities to support vulnerable communities within established and emerging digital platforms
Adapt theoretical innovations in the areas of new materialism and digital trace analysis to the subject of crime and public policy
Challenge the prevailing public and policy view that cybercrime happens ‘out there’ in non-Western territories rather than being a domestic phenomenon, and understanding its impact on global development
Identify emerging challenges in studying digital crime and hybrid on/offline crime networks and develop measures for assessing the resilience of illicit market ecosystems
Contribute to the development of public AI tools focused on communities and crime, particularly those that can be used to support illicit drug harm reduction and support user voices
Develop theories and practices of resilience and security that aren’t deficit based
Promote open scientific practices in the research community through code and data sharing practices.
Enhance research impact through promoting the creation of policy communities around specific topics such as disinformation, the emergence of new psychoactive substances and exchange crime
This is my sense of what would be useful priorities for the user community, coming to it as a bit of a noob. There are going to be plenty of others for sure. What I haven’t done yet is fully survey the fantastic work being done in these areas across the board.
Thinking about Apple’s travails running its iCloud service in China. As a condition of operating in China the Chinese government insists on physical control over the iCloud servers, meaning users have little protection against state intrusion and Apple are reduced to being a remote manager of the service.
One of the themes of digital capitalism has been that customers no longer control the product they own. Software and network lock in means your ability to repair, retask or otherwise mess around with the product is limited. In some cases the product may stop working entirely unless it continues to be supported by the company that produced it. The business model is that the hardware is a vehicle for the customer to be sold services: books (which you effectively license), music, video streaming and the like.
In the case of China we’ve seen how this puts the company in the same position in relation to the state that its customers have in relation to it. Apple does not own or control its iCloud service in China. It is effectively a licensee, given permission to operate the service on conditions set by the government.
The case and many others like it show how the theory of neoliberalism is parochial and now dated. Critics have argued for a long time that neoliberalism is the general shift in global capitalism towards market dominance through society. Politics emphasises deregulation and a reduction in social welfare, reducing the state to the role of ring holder. The rise of the BRIC countries has shown that neoliberalism is a largely Western phenomenon and is being superseded by an integrated, state led capitalism in China and Russia. This form of capitalism can quite easily adapt and make use of the tools and models developed by Silicon Valley to move fast and break them.
This paper theorises drug markets through the concept of digital territory. I hypothesis that territorialisation is a critical process involving onshoring and binding the market as a virtual, bounded place.
Figure 1, Cannazon cannabis market
The availability of controlled substances is mediated through two broad and interrelated distribution types. Social supply between friends and acquaintances relies on a moral economy of sharing and reciprocity (Coomber et al., 2016). Transactional commercial supply on the other hand emphasises profit and market mediate relationships, and sometimes validates predation and exploitation (Ancrum and Treadwell, 2017). New modes of drug distribution reshape both these distribution forms. One has been the emergence of online cryptomarkets. These are specialised markets hosted anonymously using the Tor network (Barratt and Aldridge, 2016). They present as shopfronts where vendors sell an array of drugs. Buyers pay using a cryptocurrency, typically Bitcoin, and the drug is delivered to them through the postal or courier system. Buyers are encouraged to leave reviews of the product and the vendor. Lively discussion forums discuss the quality of the drugs sold and the professionalism of vendors among other topics.
Figure 1 shows a listing from a market specialising in Cannabis. The listing typifies the way in which drugs are presented for sale. The vendor ships from Spain and offers shipping within the EU, and adds charges for express shipping. Discounts are provided for larger orders. Prices on this market vary in relation to the offline market. It is impossible to verify the content independently, however taken at face value some appear to be cheaper but many are higher priced, reflecting the ability of vendors to command more lucrative prices due to claimed higher quality (European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, 2019). Higher prices may also reflect a premium for perceived safety of the buying process and quality of the product, demanding a comfort premium in addition to the normal risk premium paid for in illicit drug sales (Rhumorbarbe et al., 2016). Therefore we can see immediately that cryptomarkets promote particular kinds of market relationship between buyer and seller: a focus on quality, safety for both parties, greater choice and a tendency towards promoting high value, bulk buys (Aldridge and Décary-Hétu, 2014). Cryptomarkets are also the focus of methodological innovation. Due to their open design the cryptomarkets have facilitated the emergence of new digital trace methods to track changes in the drug markets such as the DATACRYPTO crawler (Décary-Hétu and Aldridge, 2013). These innovations allow for early notification of market changes such as the emergence of fentanyl and other novel synthetic opioids (Lamy et al., 2020).
The emergence and reach of cryptomarkets
Cryptomarkets emerged in 2011 with the launch of Silk Road on the Tor network. Its openness and anonymity signalled the arrival of a new type of drug diffusion (Aldridge and Décary-Hétu, 2016). After Silk Road was shut down in a law enforcement operation many other markets proliferated, sparking rounds of innovation and disruption between market administrators and law enforcement (Afilipoaie and Shortis, 2018). Disruption tended to demonstrate the resilience of the illicit drug market ecosystem (Décary-Hétu and Giommoni, 2017). Recent estimates put the cryptomarkets as a substantial but definite minority of the drug market overall, around €750000 Euro per day for sites serving European locations (Christin and Thomas, 2019). The Global Drug Survey records steady growth in use among its respondents, from 4.7% in 2014 to 15% in 2020 obtaining at least some of their drugs from darknet sites in the previous 12 months (Winstock, n.d.). Products sold range widely, with an emphasis on cocaine, cannabis, novel psychoactive substances, sedatives and stimulants. Most illicit drugs are available in some form but the product balance tends towards the ‘psychonaut’ user profile (Cunliffe et al., 2019). Alongside that there are many self-identified dependent and addicted users who find the predictability, professionalism and stability of supply a significant benefit (Bancroft, 2019).
The cryptomarkets are part of an ecosystem of messaging apps, webpages, discussion servers and social media platforms that service the drug market, mainly based in Europe, North America and Australasia (Moyle et al., 2019). They serve the end point of the global trafficking network, supplementing and sometimes replacing the trafficker to supplier/user stage (Dittus et al., 2017) and mostly supplying to consumer countries (Demant et al., 2017). Though sometimes depersonalised they are evolving and also provide the basis of dealer to buyer direct dealing (Childs et al., 2020). The cryptomarkets are best seen as one part of a larger flexible social and technological structure which facilitates rapid arrangement of deals between parties and expands the range of drugs sold. Drug sellers and buyers move around within it depending on the changing landscape and their specific requirements. This system generates an informal feedback loop allowing dealers to make more rapid decisions about what segments of the market to service.
Cryptomarkets are a focus for the gentrification hypothesis which suggests that a combination of long established social, economic and technical conditions is serving to reduce the importance of violence and predation in drug distribution. Drug delivery has displaced street or house based exchange in some circumstances, drug markets have become segmented by class and race, and the opportunities for combining drug dealing with other vice exploitation crimes has declined (Curtis et al., 2002). Cryptomarkets extend some of these developments, seeking to emphasise conflict resolution, cooperation and professionalism and punish predation (Martin, 2017; Norbutas et al., 2020), attractive to buyers and dealers (Martin et al., 2020). That may serve to reduce some of the harms of the illicit drug market (Aldridge et al., 2017) while at the same time concentrating risk and systemic violence among an already marginalised segment of the drug user population who have little access to drug delivery methods. While the cryptomarkets do put gentrification to the fore they also shift power in the marketplace and create new opportunities for vendors to develop exploitative or coercive strategies and techniques (Moeller et al., 2017).
Effect on purchase and drug diffusion
Cryptomarkets are designed in order to expose specific attributes of the drug being sold. Depending on the valued characteristics of the substance these might be the intoxication effect, texture, smell, appearance, potency, ease of titration, activity in combination with other substances, and pharmacokinetic behaviour. Generically these are referred to as quality, which means many different things to different users (Bancroft and Scott Reid, 2016). Whether and in what way the specific drug being sold is effective is the subject of extensive discussion on each market’s associated forums. The informational context is supplemented by the use of independent drug checking services by vendors and buyers. This can mislead and give users a false sense of security but on the other hand it normalises drug checking as an expected part of drug sale and consumption cycle (DoctorX, n.d.)
The impact is to foreground each drug being sold as a specific branded consumer product with pharmacological attributes that can be closely assayed. It draws on and brings together users’ cumulative experiential and subcultural knowledge, in common with other online drug user forums which examine not just the quality of each drug but what the drug is as a categorical object (Bilgrei, 2016). Behaviour is changed also. Easier availability may reduce temptation to hoard (Barratt, Lenton, et al., 2016) but the tendency towards vendors selling only in larger quantities may counteract that. The benefits of making large purchases means that purchases are often made with the intent of social supply (Demant et al., 2018).
Most users of the cryptomarkets are not novices and already have established experience in the face to face market. In the main they are attracted by predictable supply, choice and reduced risk. Users are predominantly male and young (Barratt, Ferris, et al., 2016). Some events such as COVID driven lockdowns have drawn large numbers of new users into the darknet (Barratt and Aldridge, 2020). Many new entrants just as quickly leave when they find the cryptomarkets do not suit their needs. Successful users need to learn and socialise themselves into the system to make it work to good effect.
Conclusion: The shifting territory of the digital drug market
The cryptomarket distribution system is a critical part of the move to drug distribution by delivery, whether through the postal system or tailored distribution services. They may be being supersded in technical prowess by well crafted custom build systems that use messaging apps (Power, 2020a, 2020b). As a whole set these systems bypass the face to face market and therefore are not immediately open to the kind of incidental interventions that harm reduction services may make. Having said that users often will be consuming at places where services may be present, such as raves and festivals but the rise of at-home delivery means that both distribution patterns and locations of consumption are changing. Consumption may take place much more at home, especially with the impact of COVID globally (Matheson et al., 2020). COVID has affirmed and extended existing inequalities (Chang et al., 2020) and the digital market has contributed to that. More affluent, better connected users have used their digital nous to continue drug consumption with little interruption. Those who do not have access to these distribution modes have been thrown back on a shifting and sometimes predatory street market. The impact of the darknet has to be seen in this context, as one component of an evolving social-technical infrastructure for drug distribution and consumption.
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… and unlike 99% of press releases these actually tell you something and are worth reading
DarkSide is a Russian based ransomware group which on May 7th 2021 shut down the East Coast US fuel pipeline network owned by Colonial Pipeline. The group’s ransomware was used to lock up the pipeline network with damaging consequences for economic activity in serval US states. DarkSide are the classic crime as a service (CaaS) outfit, renting their capacity to clients and offering service support to victims to make paying the ransom easier. CaaS is a business model where the crime group provides the tools to engage in ransomware attacks, such as the hacking and encryption system and cashing out services. Its clients take the risk and the group take a cut of the profit.
The attack was the culmination in a growing series of infrastructure attacks. They issued a statement clarifying that it is not involved with the Russian government. They were very keen to say they were motivated by money rather than politics:
’We are apolitical, we do not participate in geopolitics, do not need to tie us with a defined government and look for other our motives.
Our goal is to make money, and not creating problems for society.
From today we introduce moderation and check each company that our partners want to encrypt to avoid social consequences for the future’. 10/5/2021
The group seems keen to start at least appearing like it is limiting its operators to less ethically and politically charged targets. The Bleeping Computer article linked below shows the extent to which an international CaaS operator has to operate in a tricky geopolitcal climate. It attempted to shift its hosting operations to Iran in 2020. However that create a problem for it. The companies who would pay the ransom and the outfits that negotiate payments such as Coveware would then be guilty of violating US led sanctions against Iran. No profit! That may explain why they are so keen to distance themselves from the Russian government and to assert that they will limit their operations. The latter statement just reasserts a claim they made in 2020 however so there may be more chaff than anything else here. The outfit does have an interest in targeting organisations who can pay and so this seems like a fairly rational response to embarrassment caused by misbehaving clients and an attempt to protect its business model.
What scares me in learning? I might be called upon by the teacher and not have an answer, or not have what is needed to respond. If I do say anything my reply might be so obviously dumb and naive that I should be excluded from higher education forever. I might somehow accidentally advance to a stage I am fundamentally unequipped to cope with and everyone will know, but they won’t say anything because they are too polite. This is common impostor syndrome stuff and saying that does not really help the situation (‘but you see,I really am an impostor so that doesn’t apply to me’). There is another set of trepidations which come before the teaching setting is entered. ‘I might not be able to join or participation will be limited by other things in my life’. ‘I might express my needs and the teacher will be defensive or dismissive.’ ‘I will have some aspect of myself exposed in a way I cannot control’. I am grateful to the many students who have told me about this in various ways.
What scares me in teaching? What students are thinking when there is silence in class. Who is waiting for whom? My tendency to blab. Have I read enough to teach this? Are my memes disco dad level embarrassing? Whether I can put my game face on whatever mental state I am in. The last is a bad one when working from home. There is no entry and exit from the teaching space. Context collapse is unavoidable.
Context collapse is a new one for me but for many colleagues and students with caring roles this is never ending. Context collapse is the inability to separate previously distinct or expected to be distinct roles and audiences. The term is often used in contexts where private and public cannot be separated. Social media invites context collapse. Teaching in the pandemic imposes it. Working from home in the pandemic is not working from home in the pre-lockdown sense. Everyone and everything is there with you. The sounds, feelings, conversations and demands of being at home are all happening at once. The problem of context collapse is the inability to separate the different rhythms of life from each other. Working in the pandemic produces a new form of social time, one that is circular without being rhythmic, and that is elongated without progression.
