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Things I learnt reading climate change fiction this year
For the second half of the year, as part of a book-length research project that I started working on, I began reading a few books, fiction mostly, to go along with my academic reading about climate change, environmentalism and renewable energy. I learnt quite a bit from these, and this is my attempt at putting…
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Raymond Williams with a word on climate aesthetics
Two short excerpts from Raymond Williams’ essay ‘Culture is Ordinary’ (which is nice for lots of reasons) – but these two are important things to keep in mind for climate activists and action. The first is about the working class’ relationship to (industrial/mechanical/electrical) power and the real benefit to life that it brought, which…
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Aesthetic Seriousness
“Over the centuries, empirical, clear thinking has become branded with the image of Default Men. They were the ones granted the opportunity, the education, the leisure, the power to put their thoughts out into the world. In people’s minds, what do professors look like? What do judges look like? What do leaders look like? The…
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Eve Sedgwick on Paranoia
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on paranoia, one of the best things I’ve read recently and which I’ll be incorporating into a chapter for sure. If you want to understand much of what goes on, both online and off, and particularly to do with activism, then look to understand paranoia: The first imperative of paranoia is There…
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[talk] Flarf ‘poetry’ and the Facebook tagging algorithm
So I gave a short paper at CODE last week entitled ‘Flarf ‘poetry’ and the Facebook tagging algorithm’ and got lots of positive comments and questions afterwards. Here’s an embed of the audio, and here’s a direct download. The slides to accompany the talk can be found here.
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Some comments on, and two reservations about, #AltLit
I’ve recently joined (found?) the massively distributed online (sub?)culture that calls itself (is called?) Alt.Lit. My journey of discovery is not so important, but it started on twitter, moved to Facebook and now I see it everywhere. And let’s be honest, it’s not really a literature movement anymore; it’s become a cultural juggernaut steamrolling everything…
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Modern camouflage
In the following video, McDonald’s Marketing Director Hope Bagozzi answers a question asked (I think) via Facebook: “Why does your food look different in the advertising than what is in the store?” To answer the question (and this is the brilliant part) she goes on to reveal over the next three minutes all of the painstaking…
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On the unintended consequences of anti-snark internet culture IRL
In our era of the Internet – an era in which memes and chain emails alike cross from screen to the world and back again – has the encroachment of snark from the internet undermined our ability to properly mock those deserving of mockery in so-called meatspace? Compare and contrast two entirely unrelated pieces – the…