Tag: Sociology

Wolfgang Messner – Is AI Sparking a Cognitive Revolution That Will Lead to Mediocrity and Conformity?

Link to an article by Wolfgang Messner:

“Is AI Sparking a Cognitive Revolution That Will Lead to Mediocrity and Conformity?”

Bonus links: “You Are Having Fun” and “Soft Surveillance and Control: Artificial Intelligence as a Tool of Gradual and Deep Political Repression in the Service of Contemporary Capitalist Hegemony” and “Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop”

Julian Vigo – How Privilege and Woke Politics are Destroying the Left

Link to an article by Julian Vigo:

“How Privilege and Woke Politics are Destroying the Left”

 

Bonus links: Review of Kill All Normies and “Too Much of Not Enough: An Interview with Alenka Zupančič” (“(Moral) outrage is a particularly unproductive affect, yet it is one that offers considerable libidinal satisfaction. By ‘unproductive’ I mean this: it gives us the satisfaction of feeling morally superior, the feeling that we are in the right and others are in the wrong. Now for this to work, things must not really change. We are much less interested in changing things than in proving, again and again, that we are in the right, or on the right side, the side of the good.”) and Beautiful Soul Quote and Review of Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History and  “The Politics of Online Friendship” and “Against the Neoliberal Blackmail: Identity Fetishism and the Privatization of Affect” and “What’s Wrong With Identity Politics (and Intersectionality Theory)? A Response to Mark Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle” (And Its Critics)” (“The upshot in political practice is a static pluralism of reified social categories, each vying for more-subaltern-than-thou status on a field of one-downsmanship.”) and “The Politics of Identity” and “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism” and “Amuse-Bouches II – Testimony and the Pass” and Review of The Trouble With Diversity and “The Political Economy of Effective Altruism”

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor – Five Years Later, Do Black Lives Matter?

Link to an article by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:

“Five Years Later, Do Black Lives Matter?”

 

This article raises some excellent points and identifies many key issues (for instance, aptly referencing Jo Freeman’s classic essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”), though its analysis is often vague and occasionally superficial (that vagueness and superficiality being explainable in political terms)

Bonus links: “Social Service or Social Change?” and Crowds and Party and The State and Revolution and Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (the gist of Taylor’s theoretical framework is more thoroughly stated in this book) and …And the Poor Get Prison and “Stop Kidding Yourself: The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People” and “The Left Hand and the Right Hand of the State”

Edgar Cabanas & Eva Illouz – Against Happiness

Link to an interview with Edgar Cabanas & Eva Illouz, conducted by David Broder, regarding their book Manufacturing Happy Citizens: How the Science and Industry of Happiness Control our Lives (2019):

“Against Happiness”

 

Bonus link: “In the Name of Love” and “Žižek!” and “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Interesting?”