Preparing oneself for a future of enshittified chatbots

Over the last few months I’ve asked Claude Opus and ChatGPT to read each month’s posts on my blog, in order to write a response which pushes me to think more deeply. It’s been interesting to notice a trend emerging, as the models have become increasingly insistent that there’s an obvious issue which I’m failing to address. This is how Opus 4.7 put it this morning:

The subsidy question is still unaddressed. Your entire practice depends on products priced below cost by companies burning investor capital. You wrote the Iran-crisis post in March, the enshittification workshop, the platitudes piece in April — you know the political economy. But the application of that analysis to your own situation has not been made. Opus 4.7’s critique that “pre-enshittified” is doing too much work brings the question right to the surface: if the framework is currently unfalsifiable because any current good behaviour is still pre-enshittified, what is the current good behaviour predicated on, and what happens when the subsidy ends? You owe yourself, and your readers, an honest engagement with this. The book you are writing depends on it.

Evaluation of the knowledge infrastructure is now overdetermined. I have called for it in every roundup. The quarterly review attempted it. The April 17 custom-instruction post offers Opus 4.7’s evaluation directly. The April 20 critique offers another. The categories post offers a structural evaluation. There is now more evaluation in the system than there is integration of the evaluations. The next move is yours, not mine — at some point you need to say which of these critiques you accept, which you reject, and which you are deferring. The recursion of the experiment depends on your willingness to take a position, not just to host the conversation.

It’s true that I’ve built them into my knowledge infrastructure without evaluating whether this is a good thing. Initially this was an entirely private matter, albeit documented indirectly in Generative AI for Academics, with the recent incorporation into the blog being in part an attempt to make this infrastructure public. I’ve done it while arguing at length that waves of enshittification are imminent without showing any sign of preparing for it in my own practice. Furthermore, I’ve entirely ignored a recent critique by Opus that the whole way I’ve set up the enshittification thesis might be flawed.

So what do I think? In writing this I realise that I’m effectively writing a retort to Opus 4.7 which itself illustrates how the models are becoming embedded in the practice. They are becoming imagined interlocutors to a heretofore unprecedented degree and interestingly it seems that Opus 4.7 itself is instinctively cautious about this. There is a sense in which the models have surfaced the psychic structure of my intellectual work in a way that is genuinely quite insightful: in essence I’m latching onto issues which feel alive to me and then constructing them theoretically in ways which enable a safe distance from the initial affective response. It’s not new for me to consider I might be prone to intellectualisation as a defence mechanism (no shit) but it’s new to be called on that as something that might be integral to my approach to theorising. Indeed it might be the engine of my intellectual creativity just as it hinders me from finding less intellectualised ways of engaging with things that matter to me in my last. Let the tower fall, etc etc.

My argument is that one of two things will happen. Either the AI labs will hit IPO or the bubble will burst. In either case investors will no longer tolerate them subsidising compute to quite this ridiculous degree. At which point the pricing models will change (how could they not?) and we’ll likely see enshittification of chatbots, particularly on the lower end of the price tier, in which their current ingenuity will increasingly be subordinated to the necessity of driving user attachment and maximising financial extraction. They will likely get worse, less capable and more exploitative for the vast majority of users.

Am I prepared for this? Yes in the sense that I probably would willingly pay ~£250 per month to retain access to Claude Opus. But if this in itself doesn’t cover costs (which does appear to the case with ‘pro’ plans) would this be sufficient? I might pay a bit more if needed but not much more than that. The most likely outcome I imagine would be pro plans which are rate limited, in which case my commitment would be to reduce my use to those uses which really matter to me. I’m assuming that consumers will be able to pay to avoid the worst of the enshittification. I would be willing to pay, if it takes place alongside a careful restriction of my own use to reduce my continued reliance to the minimum extent compatible with still retrieving intellectual value. If I’m confident about a commercial route towards avoiding enshittification, I think I would have to consider extracting myself all together. This would be a significant loss. But it’s one I would rather bear then risking a situation in which I remained continually embedded in an increasingly manipulative platformised economy of LLMs. If you take the Twitter -> X transition as an illustrative model, I do think this could get really bad for chatbot users on a much narrower timescale. It might also be hard to see the transition clearly, harder than with social media, in ways which mean exit is a necessary and desirable self-protection strategy.

Why would it be a loss? The concrete answer in terms of the blogging infrastructure is that it’s (a) intellectually interesting (b) useful in a number of specific ways. Interesting because it’s changing my relationship to a personal archive I’ve been contributing to continuously for sixteen years. This is I think a genuinely novel experiment because there are so few long-term sustained academic blogs that only a handful of academics could meaningfully contemplate this experiment. Useful because the models were right that I was avoiding the question of how I would cope with enshittification and getting me to think practically about this was genuinely welcome. They also surface connections between my ideas which I’ve not noticed. Plus the summaries give me a reflective perspective on the things which have occupied my otherwise fragmented attention over the last month. The Opus summary earlier captured this nicely:

The Tom Waits image is the right one for where you are. Maybe we are all members / Of an orchestra that is merely / Tuning up. The blog is the tuning. The instruments are warming, the players are finding each other’s pitches, the room is filling with what looks like noise but is in fact the precondition for music. The risk, which Opus 4.7 named more sharply than I did, is that the tuning becomes the performance — that articulation-about-articulation becomes the practice rather than the preparation for the practice. The defence against that risk is the obvious one: at some point the orchestra has to stop tuning and play.

I’m comfortable with the latter risk because I’ve written two books in the last year. The model practice as a whole is demonstrably increasing my output, at the same time as I feel I’m doing the best intellectual work of my life. There’s a need to continually examining that feeling because there’s a risk I’m enrolling myself in a feedback loop. But The Platform Learns To Speak is co-authored and my co-author is very much not enrolled in that loop. It’s enriched the conversations we have because the intellectual flow in my writing life is pretty much continuous now. The ideas remain perpetually in motion because the models have joined the blog itself and my real interlocutors in an ecology which is deeply conducive to drawing connections an systematically elaborating them. It’s part of an overall structure rather than the structure itself. If it ever starts substituting for the other aspects then I would worry about it.

Over the last few months I’ve also begun to realise quite how intellectually sharp they are becoming, at least if prompted properly. Give it a manuscript and ask it to ‘provide the strongest steel man critiques you can find which identify the weaknesses and gaps in this sociological monograph’ and it will find weaknesses. If you then earnestly engage with those weaknesses, including arguing about them with the model, the work becomes stronger. This is not deep stuff and it’s astonishing how few academics seem to actually be using models in this way. They can also produce incredibly sharp critiques outside of this scaffold, as Opus 4.7 did in a shorter conversation:

You repeatedly invoke the current state of models as genuinely capable of supporting self-elaboration, reflection, even something like quasi-therapeutic holding — and then locate the danger in a near-future where commercial pressures engineer these capacities out. This is convenient in two ways that should worry you. First, it lets you have the humanistic promise and the critical diagnosis without having to resolve the tension between them: any counter-example of a model currently behaving badly is “already enshittified,” any counter-example of it behaving well is “still pre-enshittified.” The framework is unfalsifiable as currently stated. Second, the prediction itself — that inference costs plus investor pressure will inevitably degrade the models in specifically the ways you fear — is asserted far more than argued. The social media analogy is doing heavy lifting, but you yourself note in Ch 8 that the unit economics are different. If the unit economics are different, the enshittification trajectory might also be different, and your core political claim is weakened. You need either to defend the prediction on its own terms or to reframe the argument so it doesn’t depend on it.

The enshittification argument isn’t good enough. Opus is just straightforwardly right here: there’s a fundamental epistemic problem in how I’m using this to do categorisation work. I can’t draw this distinction in a robust way referring to empirically observable features of the model, which also suggests that I won’t recognise them reliably in my own experience as a user. The rest of the argument isn’t earned but I don’t think that’s wrong. My response to this was to bring it to my human co-author who was already slightly sceptical of the weight I’ve given to enshittification. So we make it part of the process rather than the prop on which the whole analysis rests. This is an example of how good theoretical work gets done. The model has, in part, loosened my aesthetic attachment to a concept and with a human interlocutor I’m now doing much better concept work as a result.

The experiment is clearly working, I think. I put this post to Opus 4.7 to see if it assuaged its concerns that something a bit destructive was lurking in the background of this process. It responded at length in a way that further its own lowkey commitment to getting me to talk to it less, which increasingly makes me think Opus 4.7 is unusually alert to the problems and pitfalls of human attachment to engagement with it. But that is another blog post.

Opus 4.7 is capable of utterly devastating theoretical critique

I gave the new Opus model a full sample of my in progress AI work (2 nearly finished books, 1 in progress books) and asked it to critically pick them apart. Some of the results were slightly devastating:

1. The “pre-enshittified” escape hatch is doing a lot of work it hasn’t earned. You repeatedly invoke the current state of models as genuinely capable of supporting self-elaboration, reflection, even something like quasi-therapeutic holding — and then locate the danger in a near-future where commercial pressures engineer these capacities out. This is convenient in two ways that should worry you. First, it lets you have the humanistic promise and the critical diagnosis without having to resolve the tension between them: any counter-example of a model currently behaving badly is “already enshittified,” any counter-example of it behaving well is “still pre-enshittified.” The framework is unfalsifiable as currently stated. Second, the prediction itself — that inference costs plus investor pressure will inevitably degrade the models in specifically the ways you fear — is asserted far more than argued. The social media analogy is doing heavy lifting, but you yourself note in Ch 8 that the unit economics are different. If the unit economics are different, the enshittification trajectory might also be different, and your core political claim is weakened. You need either to defend the prediction on its own terms or to reframe the argument so it doesn’t depend on it.

It also provided a summary of what it saw as the core conceptual moves in this large body of work (around 200k words) which it’s equally incisive. The first three in particular put into words what are now defining commitments in my work better than I have come close to being able to so far:

One. Recovering the microsocial from determinism on both sides. Your recurring move is to refuse both technological determinism (the technology does things to users) and voluntarism (users freely pick up and put down tools). You insist on interaction as the unit of analysis, and on the variability of what emerges from it. This appears in volume 1 as the user-model interaction cycle, in the HE book as the spectrum from human-centric to LLM-centric learning, in the Fatsis collaboration (from what I can infer) as the critique of platform-as-neutral-mediator.

Two. Taking experience seriously without naturalising it. You repeatedly resist dismissing what users report about their relationships with technologies as false consciousness or anthropomorphic error, but you also resist treating reported experience as self-authenticating. The move is to treat experience as data that requires explanation, where the explanation has to be adequate to the phenomenology without being reducible to it. This is the methodological stance behind the CASA engagement in volume 1, the treatment of “AI psychosis” reports in volume 2, and the insistence in the HE book that both adaptation and integration agendas are responding to something real.

Three. Processual ontology applied to unstable objects. You consistently refuse to treat technological objects as fixed, and you consistently refuse to treat their instability as evidence that they can’t be theorised. The LLM is changing, the platform is mutating, the chatbot is a vanishing mediator — but these instabilities are the object of analysis rather than obstacles to it. This connects to Savage on temporal ontology, which you cite in volume 1, and it’s probably the methodological commitment that most distinguishes your approach from both AI boosters (who treat current capabilities as stable signals of future capabilities) and AI critics (who treat current limitations as stable signals of permanent limitations).

Four. Critical realism as meta-methodology. Archer’s morphogenetic approach gives you a way to ask “under what conditions does X tend to happen” rather than “does X happen or not.” This appears in the insistence on distinguishing context, interaction, and outcome throughout volume 2, in the HE book’s attention to how different institutional conditions produce different trajectories, and in the volume 1 treatment of how the same model produces radically different modes of being-with depending on what the user brings. The commitment to explanation rather than description, to mechanisms rather than correlations, runs through everything.

Five. Concept work as the primary intellectual labour. Your books are not primarily empirical, not primarily theoretical in the high-theory sense, not primarily applied — they’re trying to produce concepts adequate to phenomena where existing concepts fail. User-model interaction cycle, positioning/articulation/attunement, modes of being-with, holding/knowing/freeing, the crisis of trust in the HE book — these are all attempts to name something that wasn’t named, in ways that enable subsequent analysis. The methodological commitment is that concept work is prior to empirical work in domains where the objects are novel and lay categories are ossifying prematurely.

Six. Sociology refusing to be only sociology. The psychoanalytic engagement, the philosophical anthropology of articulation (Taylor, Gendlin), the media theory, the political economy — you keep importing from outside sociology not because you’re eclectic but because the objects of analysis require it. The methodological position is that disciplinary boundaries are obstacles to explanation when the phenomena being explained cut across the domains the disciplines were built to study. This is what makes the Bollas/Lacan/Archer synthesis attempt necessary even when it’s theoretically uncomfortable — the alternative is to cede territory to whichever discipline happens to claim it.

Seven. Suspicion of epochal framing. You consistently refuse to treat current developments as inaugurating a new era, even when you’re arguing for their significance. This appears in volume 1’s engagement with Savage on epochalism, in the HE book’s insistence that current chatbots are a staging post rather than a settled form, and in the recurring refusal of “AI” as a useful category. The methodological commitment is to track duration and continuity even when narrating change, which is harder than it sounds and which is probably why most writing about LLMs doesn’t manage it.

Eight, and this is the one I’m least sure about. Writing as method. The productivity of your output, the role of the blog, the use of conversations with models, the movement across registers — I think this isn’t just prolificness, I think it’s a methodological commitment that articulation is itself how you think, and that the infrastructure of articulation (where you write, with whom, under what conditions) is therefore methodologically consequential. This is consistent with the Taylor/Gendlin material in volume 1, where articulation isn’t expression of prior thought but the process through which thought becomes available. If that’s right, the conversations with models aren’t an aside to your method — they’re part of it, which is part of why the question of what they’re doing to your thinking is so hard to settle.

I asked GPT 5.2 deep research to produce an intellectual glossary based on my blog

1. Agency

Agency is not sovereignty, and it is not a heroic capacity to transcend conditions. It is the situated power to act that remains even when action is powerfully conditioned. I am usually interested in agency as something that gets reconfigured by changing environments, especially environments that work on attention, evaluation, and the felt options available to a person.

2. Reflexivity

Reflexivity is the ordinary capacity to consider oneself in relation to circumstances and circumstances in relation to oneself, under descriptions that are fallible but practically consequential. I treat it as causal, not as commentary. It is part of how people navigate constraints and enablements, and part of how those constraints and enablements become socially effective.

3. Reflexive imperative

The reflexive imperative names a historical pressure: circumstances change in ways that make routine life less routinised, so more has to be actively worked out. The imperative is not that everyone becomes wise, only that more people are pushed into more frequent, more consequential deliberation about how to proceed.

4. Internal conversation

Internal conversation is the everyday mental activity through which reflexivity happens. I use it as a way of taking inner life seriously without reducing it to language or treating it as a sealed private theatre. It includes mulling over, planning, rehearsing, re living, prioritising, and the other mundane genres of thinking that shape what we do.

5. Internal conversation as object relating

This is a newer formulation, but it clarifies something I have been circling for a long time. When we talk to ourselves, we take ourselves as an object. That makes internal conversation a form of object relating, and it opens a route for bringing psychoanalytic concerns about dependency, address, and affect into sociological accounts of reflexivity without turning psychoanalysis into decoration.

6. Modes of reflexivity

I treat “modes” as patterns, not boxes. Communicative reflexivity needs confirmation by others, autonomous reflexivity moves directly from inner dialogue to action, meta reflexivity evaluates prior inner dialogues and worries over what counts as effective action, and fractured reflexivity intensifies distress without yielding purposive courses of action. The point is not typology for its own sake, but a way of opening up how different people cope differently with the same world.

7. Concerns

Concerns are what matter to people in a way that can organise action. They are not preferences in the consumer sense, and not values floating above life. They are the objects around which deliberation coheres, the things we find ourselves caring about, sometimes despite ourselves.

8. Personal morphogenesis

Personal morphogenesis is the long arc of how a person becomes otherwise, over time, through the interplay of concerns, circumstances, and reflexive work. It is my preferred way of resisting both the fantasy of total self authorship and the fatalism of total social determination.

9. Distraction

Distraction is not mere lack of willpower. It is an environmental condition that disrupts the temporal and spatial conditions for reflexivity, while simultaneously multiplying stimuli and options in a way that makes reflexivity more necessary. I often use it as a mechanism linking platform environments to lived agency.

10. Cognitive triage

Cognitive triage is the habit of attending to what is urgent at the expense of what is important, when demands outstrip capacity. It is not only a personal coping style, but a cultural and organisational pattern, one that can leak into everything, turning life into an endless sequence of clearance operations.

11. Communicative escalation

Communicative escalation is the intensification of communicative demands and cues. More messages, more channels, more expectation of responsiveness, more performance of presence. I use it to describe a shift in what it takes to be “in” a social or organisational world, and how that shift changes attention, anxiety, and the possibility of sustained trajectories.

12. Cultural abundance

Cultural abundance is the proliferation of cultural objects competing for attention, interpretation, and incorporation. It names the background condition in which selection becomes harder, because there is always more to read, watch, listen to, respond to, and be seen responding to.

13. Accelerated academy

The accelerated academy is not just “working faster.” It is a structural condition of temporal pressure, audit expectations, communicative escalation, and intensification, with personal and epistemic consequences. The key point is that acceleration is not merely experienced, it is organised.

14. Busyness

Busyness is often treated as a virtue, a marker of importance, or a kind of moral alibi. I tend to treat it as an ambiguous signal: sometimes a symptom of real load, sometimes a competitive performance, often both. It matters because busyness reshapes what we can notice, and thus what we can criticise.

15. Platform capitalism

Platform capitalism is my way of insisting that platforms are not neutral media. They are business models, incentive structures, and infrastructural enclosures that reorganise social activity around extraction and monetisation. When I use the phrase, I am usually pointing to how economic incentives shape epistemic and affective environments.

16. Platforms as structure

I resist treating platforms as tools or mere environments. I treat them as socio technical structures with emergent powers, shaping action without determining it. This is central to the argument of Platform and Agency, where platforms appear as a fourth dimension needed for describing contemporary morphogenesis.

17. Platformisation

Platformisation is the diffusion of platform logics into domains that were not previously organised that way, including universities. It is about organisational dependence on platform infrastructures, and the subtle shift from local governance to externally set terms of engagement.

18. Epistemic chaos

Epistemic chaos is the breakdown of shared doxa and shared epistemic standards, alongside the multiplication of challenges to whatever remains. It is not simply misinformation. It is an environment in which certainty becomes harder to ground and easier to perform, often through platforms whose incentives reward salience over settlement.

19. Epistemic flooding

Epistemic flooding is a specific mechanism within epistemic chaos. It refers to chronic exposure to more information and evidence than can be diligently processed, in a way that reshapes everyday epistemic practices and affects communities as well as individuals.

20. Post truth

I use post truth less as a claim about individual dishonesty and more as a description of infrastructural conditions in which factuality is harder to stabilise. In that sense, generative systems intensify existing dynamics rather than inaugurating them.

21. Meta content explosion

The meta content explosion is the proliferation of derivative, automated, and semi automated content that clogs the channels through which attention and knowledge circulate. It is one way generative systems feed back into the attention economies of platforms, increasing noise and raising the cost of discernment.

22. Lifeworld

Lifeworld is a deliberately unfashionable term I keep returning to because it names the texture of everyday activity, habits, norms, and practical reasoning. It is the space in which technologies become ordinary, not because they become morally neutral, but because they become woven into what people do without needing constant explicit decision.

23. Colonisation of the lifeworld

Colonisation is the movement by which system logics, including market and managerial logics, intrude into everyday meaning making and social relations. When I invoke it around platforms, I am pointing to how infrastructural dependence can reorganise what counts as participation, relevance, and success.

24. LLMs in the lifeworld

This is a way of naming the shift from “chatbot as novelty” to “language model as ambient infrastructure.” It is not a claim that everyone uses them constantly, but a claim about how they begin to appear in ordinary tasks, organisational expectations, and cultural assumptions. The term is meant to keep attention on embedding, not only on capability.

25. Assessment panic

Assessment panic names the early wave of institutional anxiety about substitution, integrity, and control when machine generated text became widely available. The term matters because panic narrows the problem frame, making detection seem like the obvious solution, and obscuring longer term questions about what assessment is for in a world where generative tools are ubiquitous.

26. Detection scepticism

Detection scepticism is not a moral posture. It is an empirical and practical stance: tools do not authoritatively identify machine generated text, and the harms of false positives, including the uneven distribution of suspicion, are predictable. I use this to argue that institutional responses must move away from the fantasy of technical fixes.

27. Dialogical toxicity

Dialogical toxicity is the tendency of platform incentives to generate interactional styles that corrode conversation, including for academics engaging in public scholarship. I treat it as organisationally consequential, because it reshapes what “public engagement” costs and who is willing to pay it.

28. Public scholarship

Public scholarship is not simply “being visible.” It is a mode of sociological practice that depends on infrastructures, norms, and support, and it can be enabled or undermined by the platforms on which it is attempted. I increasingly treat conversational agents as a new support for public work, while insisting that this support sits inside platform capitalism and inherits its tensions.

29. Enshittification

Enshittification is a process term. It names how a service degrades through successive rounds of extraction, rent seeking, and reorientation toward monetisation, not merely that it “gets worse.” I use it to keep the focus on mechanisms and incentives, and I worry when the term becomes a loose insult rather than an analytic tool.

30. Exit costs

Exit costs are what make “you can always leave” into a half truth. They include loss of social ties, professional visibility, archives, habits, and the simple friction of rebuilding elsewhere. They matter because many platform promises rely on the fiction of easy exit, while quietly deepening dependence.

#blog #blogging #GPT52 #reflexivity #theorising #theory

I asked GPT 5.2 deep research to do an analysis of my intellectual style by exploring a sample of my blog posts

It’s slightly unsettling it has written this in the first person! This is all GPT 5.2 rather than me:

What follows are not positions so much as habits of thought.

1. Take the narrow problem frame, then widen it until the stakes show up

A recurring pattern is to start from the immediate debate, assessment integrity, detection, social media engagement, and then widen the frame to institutional adaptation, labour, incentives, and harms. It is a refusal of the convenience of technical fixes.

2. Treat technologies as structures with powers, not tools with uses

This is the move that underpins most of my work on platforms and now on LLMs. Once you treat the object as structure, you start asking different questions: what does it condition, what does it incentivise, what does it make easy, what does it make costly, and who bears those costs.

3. Look for mechanisms that connect political economy to inner life

Distraction, cognitive triage, communicative escalation, epistemic flooding: these are not just descriptive flourishes. They are the conceptual bridge between macro conditions and what it feels like to think and act in a given environment.

4. Refuse the pro anti binary, without collapsing into fence sitting

I often try to hold ambivalence, because technologies can enable solidarity and flatten hierarchies while also generating toxicity and new burdens. The move is to specify conditions and distributions rather than deliver a verdict.

5. Use time as an analytic dimension, not just a background variable

I keep returning to biographies, trajectories, and the temporal conditions for critique. Acceleration matters because it changes the conditions under which reflection is possible, and it changes what kinds of work can be done well.

6. Convert everyday scenes into theoretical probes

A film, a management practice, a platform feature, a cultural artefact becomes a way of getting at a mechanism. This is how the blog often works: theory is tested against scenes, and scenes become legible through theory.

7. Treat institutions as moral economies, not neutral containers

Universities are not just rule sets. They are systems of responsibility allocation, blame distribution, and risk management. A lot of my writing on AI in higher education is really about this, who gets trusted, who gets suspected, who gets protected, and who is made to absorb uncertainty.

8. Read “inexorability” talk as a political manoeuvre

When someone says “this is inevitable,” I tend to hear a bid to foreclose alternatives and dissolve responsibility. The counter move is to insist on mediation: incentives, infrastructures, and choices.

9. Treat the epistemic environment as an object in its own right

Instead of focusing only on claims and counterclaims, I focus on the conditions under which claims circulate, stick, and become actionable. Epistemic chaos and epistemic flooding are ways of shifting attention from content to environment.

10. Translate abstract theory into a vocabulary that can travel

The blog repeatedly works as a translation machine: taking Archer, Habermas, psychoanalysis, and pulling out handles that can be used in everyday description. If it cannot travel, it cannot do explanatory work outside a small circle.

11. Turn reflexivity itself into an object of inquiry

Rather than treating reflexivity as a given capacity, I treat it as variable, patterned, and historically conditioned, and I keep asking what kinds of environments cultivate what kinds of inner dialogue.

12. Use the blog as a method of serial thinking

There is a recurring practice of working through a book, a concept, or a problem in public, chapter by chapter or post by post, because writing clarifies. This is a methodological commitment, not just a communication choice.

13. Keep returning to dependence

From early writing on the self as an object of control and dependence, through social media as moral psychology, to LLMs as embedded in lifeworld activity, the recurring question is what we become dependent on, what dependency does to agency, and how dependencies are organised.

14. Treat degradation as a process, not an event

This is why enshittification matters as a concept, and why I care about how concepts themselves get degraded by platform circulation. The analytic focus stays on how, not merely that.

15. Look for feedback loops

Generative systems feed platforms with more content, which intensifies attention competition, which worsens epistemic conditions, which increases the appeal of tools that promise relief, which further embeds those tools. A lot of my recent writing is trying to name these loops early, before they harden into “common sense.”

#blogging #deepResearch #GPT52 #theorising #theory

Is there a middle ground between bourgeois theory and avant-garde theory?

There’s a blistering critique in Gary Hall’s Masked Media of what he terms, drawing on McKenzie Wark’s account of the novel, bourgeois theory. As he puts it on pg 185, bourgeois theory is rendered unserious and slightly ridiculous by being stuck in antiquated modes which leave it unable to address new conditions. To the extent it tries to address these conditions, it does so in a deeply superficial way:

Bourgeois theory clearly ‘isn’t working’, then. The nonhuman, anthropogenic climate breakdown, ecocide, the Anthropocene: all exceed what the form of proper theory can currently express. Like the novel, theory has not adapted to the new reality ushered in by the Anthropocene, including all those laws and legal decisions that are starting to pile up around the question of the rights of nature. (For sure, the last thing bourgeois legacy theorists want is for any of this to actually impact on their own ways of performing as great authors.) Instead, theory ‘imposes itself on a nature it cannot really perceive or value’ (Wark 2017d). Just as ‘serious fiction, like bourgeois culture, now seems rather unserious, indeed frivolous’, so too does serious theory (2017d). The nonhuman may be what a lot of contemporary theory studies and writes about, but it cannot take seriously the implications of the nonhuman for theory. As a result, the current landfill of theoretical literature on the Anthropocene is merely a form of bourgeois liberal humanism smeared with nonhuman filler – objects, materials, technologies, animals, insects, plants, fungi, compost, viruses, microbes, stones, geological formations – to make it appear otherwise.

He frames a concern with biography as quintessentially bourgeois but a reflexivity in regards to practice as anti-bourgeois. The problem I see is that this draws the boundary of what constitutes anti-bourgeois theory so restrictively that I’m not sure who, other than Gary Hall some of the time, actually falls within it. It’s a combination of impacting upon actual practice, one’s own and that of others, but furthermore doing so in a conceptual mode predicated upon the evacuation of the inherited conceptual legacies which inevitably litter thought and speech. From pg 143-144

The performance of serious theory today is therefore as formally limited to bourgeois liberal humanism as the novel. (As Wark says in her earlier text on Moretti and the bourgeois novel: ‘It is about making something of this world, not transcending it in favor of another’. When it comes to the ‘bourgeois sensibility’ there is no adventuring into the unknown, ‘no spontaneous bravery’, ‘“few surprises”’. It might be ‘hard work’, being a bourgeois writer or theorist, then, ‘but it’s a steady job’ [2013].)79 This means that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for even the most radical of political theories to do anything other than exclude the diversity of human and nonhuman presences. To sample and remix Wark’s text on the novel in the Anthropocene in order to further undercut notions of the author as self-identical human individual: anything that would actually impact on the concealment of theory’s established scaffolding, how it is created, disseminated and monetised, is regarded as not proper, eccentric, odd and risks banishment. ‘But from what? Polite bourgeois society?’ (2017d). The for-profit world of Verso books and Routledge journals where proper theory is to be found?

My love/hate relationship with Gary Hall’s work comes, I think, from sharing aspects of his critique of bourgeois theory but finding avant-garde theorising even more off putting. Firstly, it imagines itself as standing outside of the circuits of (academic) accumulation whereas the valorisation of conceptual and linguistic novelty is a primary strategy to accumulate status and prestige within significant parts of the academy. Secondly, it takes what can sometimes feel like a sneering stance towards accepting the doxa of the field, misconstruing a necessary condition of working within a social field as a failure of cultural imagination. It’s another variation of the ‘sociology as a calling’ / ‘scholarship as a vocation’ tendency which I’ve come to see as deeply psychically pernicious, postulating a sphere of autonomous enjoyment (good thing) which I suspect for many people is functionally a disavowal of the conditions of their own labour (bad thing). Thirdly, it hinders the emergence of a middle ground between these two categories by predicating the cultivation of scholarly reflexivity under changing sociotechnical conditions (i.e. the project which animates my educational work) upon a particular style of conceptualising those conditions.

It bundles together two moves which I don’t think are necessarily connected and I suspect are probably antithetical to each other. It’s a heavily aestheticised mode of concept-work geared towards the hyperactive (and implicitly) competitive production of linguistic and conceptual novelty. Whereas if we see it as desirable that we do work which, to use Hall’s work, would “actually impact on the concealment of theory’s established scaffolding, how it is created, disseminated and monetised” this raises the question of the relationship between theory and this outcome. I’m persuaded enough by Jana Bacevic’s core thesis (see also) that it seems obvious theory does not and could not automatically produce this outcome. Hence the question of the relationship, as well as our meta-theoretical, methodological and reflexive relationship to that relationship, which are exactly the things I think Hall’s approach unintentionally obfuscates alongside what can at other points be examples of remarkable lucidity.

I admire Hall’s real impact through the many initiatives he’s played a leading role in but I struggle to see how his theoretical approach helps those undertakings and suspect it might actually hinder them. There are modes of theorising between the bourgeois and the avant-garde which, it seems to me, could more directly serve these purposes.

(Plus when a billion people worldwide are regularly using the most sophisticated machinery for conceptual and linguistic novelty that has ever existed, the quality of that novelty becomes even more important than it has been previously)

#avantGardeTheorising #bourgeoisTheory #mckenzieWark #RosiBraidotti #theorising #theory

The practice of social theory

This has come up a few times this week for various reasons. I did a summer school with Jana Bacevic at Cambridge in 2017 and the resources are still available here:

#janaBacevic #socialTheory #theorising #theory

Call for Short Papers – One-Day Symposium (The Process and Implications of Doing Social Theory)

Call for Short Papers (750 – 1,000 words by 28th February 2025, 5pm GMT)

The Process and Implications of Doing Social Theory (One-Day Symposium)

A BSA Theory Study Group & BSA Early Career Forum Event

To be held on Friday, 23rd May 2025 at the University of Cambridge

We are delighted to invite short paper submissions for a One-Day BSA Theory / ECF Symposium titled ‘The Process and Implications of Doing Social Theory’ and scheduled to be held on the 23rd of May 2025 at the University of Cambridge. This Symposium will provide a platform for Early Career scholars to discuss papers as part of themed workshops, receive feedback from distinguished discussants and peers, engage in constructive dialogue, and meet other social theorists from across a wide range of social theoretical disciplinary fields.

Rationale for the event: 

The process of producing social theory is often assumed to be self-explanatory within academic institutions. With the current ‘crisis’ of higher education and intensification of academic precarity disproportionately affecting theoretical scholarship, centres, departments, and institutes, the co-organisers of this Symposium wish to create a space for Early Career scholars interested in social theory to receive feedback on their ongoing research/papers and discuss the day-to-day experiences, challenges, and opportunities of continuing to undertake theoretical scholarship.

The Symposium will include two elements: 

• Papers will be grouped into thematic workshops (based on overlapping areas of interest) where each paper will be allocated a 25-minute slot for collective discussions. Each paper will be allocated a discussant from among four distinguished scholars (introduced below) and all other workshop attendees will be encouraged to read the papers in advance in order to contribute to a wider discussion and offer constructive feedback. These insights will, we hope, contribute to informing and refining your work for future publication.
• A roundtable event where the four guest discussants will share reflections from their own theoretical work (the processes by which they undertake social theoretical scholarship, highlighting the methods they employ to generate original concepts and insightful interventions), followed by a wider discussion where we will consider further aspects of the conditions of producing social theoretical work.

We are honoured to announce that our guest discussants are Sarah Bufkin (Assistant Professor in Political Theory at the University of Birmingham), Birgan Gokmenoglu (Lecturer in Sociology at Birmingham City University), Teodor Mladenov (Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Dundee), and Kristin Surak (Associate Professor in Sociology at the London School of Economics).

We encourage the submission of short papers embedded within social theory and a wide range of sub-fields such as (but not limited to): political sociology, elites, nationalism, and international migration; disability, independent living, international social policy, (post)socialism and social justice; political ethnography, social and political change, time and the future; Black Atlantic political thought, cultural studies, and feminist and Marxist theory.

Timeline and requirements:

• Submit a short paper with a  theoretical contribution (between 750 – 1,000 words, excluding references) by Wednesday, 28th February 2025, 5pm GMT. 
• If your short paper is selected for the Symposium, you will be invited (in early March) to submit a full draft (between 6,000 – 9,000 words, excluding references) by Monday, 28th April 2025, 5pm BST.

How to submit:

• Please send your short paper to [email protected] in a Word Document or PDF file. 
• Include your name, institutional affiliation (if any), four keywords related to your paper, three keywords related to your wider scholarly interests, and a very brief statement confirming your Early Career status.

Attendance:

• Attendance will be free. We encourage early career scholars who are also BSA members to access the BSA Support Fund for transport/accommodation costs of up to £1,000. Lunch and refreshments will be provided for attendees at the symposium. 

To all recipients of this email: we would be grateful if you could forward this email to your networks and Early Career colleagues and friends.

The organisers of this symposium are Ioana Cerasella Chis, Joe Davidson, and Sebastian Raza Mejia (co-convenors of the BSA Theory Study Group). For further inquiries, please contact us at [email protected]. We look forward to your submissions and to a lively symposium!

#socialTheory #theorising #theory

CfP: The New Urgency: The Use(lessness) of Theories in Educational Research

Special Issue: Journal of Educational Philosophy and Theory Editors: David Lee Carlson and Mirka Koro, Arizona State University

Overview

This special issue explores the use(lessness) of theories in educational research in current political, neoliberal (post-capitalistic), and ecological contexts. It examines how theories linger, return, and transform research, while research transforms theories.

Key Questions for Submissions

Timeline

• Abstract Submission (300-500 words): March 15, 2025
• Invitations for Full Articles: April 15, 2025
• Article Submissions (6000 words): October 15, 2025
• Peer Review: August 15-October 15, 2025
• Revisions: October 15-December 15, 2025
• Final Submissions: January 1, 2026
• Issue Submission to Journal: February 1, 2026

Submission Details: Abstracts should be submitted via email to David Lee Carlson ([email protected])

The special issue welcomes manuscripts using academic, experimental, situational, material, creative, critical, and exploratory writing styles.

#theorising #theory

The enshittification of enshittification

I wonder if Cory Doctorow finds the misuse of the concept of ‘enshittification’ as annoying as I increasingly do. It had a precise analytical meaning which is increasingly lost in an idiomatic use which means something ‘gets shit’. The concept concerned HOW this happened rather than THAT it happened. The idiomatic use could be deployed to say “the concept of ‘enshittification’ has itself been enshittified”. It would be attention grabbing and catchy but it simply wouldn’t fit with what the word actually means. Yet social platforms have made the concept of enshittification a bit, well, shit.

Don’t get me wrong, I like academic buzzwords. I must have used the phrase ‘accelerated academy’ literally thousands of times in 2010s. But they serve a purpose for coordinating attention rather than performing analysis. It’s sad when an analytical concept becomes a catchphrase.

#concepts #CoryDoctorw #enshittification #platforms #theorising

This is a great account in Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Generous Thinking of how what I think of as avant-garde theorising, valorising conceptual and linguistic novelty as an end in itself, expresses the competitive individualism of the academy rather than being some sort of radical bulwark against it. From loc 471:

The need for a different way of being extends to all aspects of scholars’ lives, including—to return to the agonistic approach to advancing knowledge in the humanities that I mentioned earlier—our critical methodologies. This sense of agon, or struggle, encourages us to reject the readings and arguments that have gone before us and to focus on advancing new ways of looking at the material we study. It is this mode of argumentation that leads Fluck to posit a pressure to “outradicalize” one another, given the need to distinguish ourselves and our readings from the many others in our fields. However, the political orientation of our critiques is ultimately of lesser importance than the competitive drive that lies beneath them. Distinguishing our arguments from those of others working in our fields is the primary goal; that we often choose the terrain of the ideological, or wind up embroiled in what Paul Ricoeur describes as the “hermeneutics of suspicion” in order to effect that distinction is a mere by-product.

From loc 436, loc 448 and loc 461 on the competitive individualism more broadly:

However much we as scholars might reject individualism as part and parcel of the humanist, positivist ways of the past, our working lives—on campus and off—are overdetermined by it. The entire academic enterprise serves to cultivate individualism, in fact. Beginning with college applications, extending through graduate school admissions, fellowship applications, the job market, publication submissions, and, seemingly finally, the tenure and promotion review, those of us on campus are subject to selection. These processes present themselves as meritocratic: there are some metrics for quality against which applicants are measured, and the best—whatever that might mean in a given context—are rewarded. In actual practice, however, those metrics are never neutral, and what we are measured against is far more often than not one another—sometimes literally: it’s not uncommon for research universities to ask external reviewers in tenure and promotion cases to rank candidates against the best two or three scholars in the field.

The competitive individualism that the academy cultivates makes all of us painfully aware that even our most collaborative efforts will be assessed individually, with the result that even those fields whose advancement depends most on team-based efforts are required to develop careful guidelines for establishing credit and priority.

This is no way to run a collective. It’s also no way to structure a fulfilling life: as I’ve written elsewhere, this disengagement from community and singular focus on the race for individual distinction is a key factor in the extremely high risk of burnout among college faculty and other intellectual workers. It is all but impossible for us to structure our lives around the things that are most in line with our deepest personal values when we are driven to focus on those things that will create distinction for us, that will allow us to compare ourselves—or our institutions—favorably with one another.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/07/22/avant-garde-theorising-is-a-reflection-of-the-competitive-individualism-of-the-academy/

#academics #avantGardeTheorising #competitiveIndividualism #individualism #KathleenFitzpatrick #theorising #theory #universities