"A fascinating account of anti-environmental rhetoric and discourse, and of the ideology of technology at the heart of Silicon Valley.... Douglas shows that what seems the most materialist of outlooks rests on a fantastical ‘metaphysics’ of the market economy." @profafinlayson.bsky.social

The populists are on the Britcard case: Starmer as Davros building 'checkpoint Britain' and Farage as Dr. Who coming to save us from tyranny. www.tiktok.com/@crewkernega...

There's going to be a critical country-defining fight in the next few weeks as to whether the new system is just a rebrand / extension of GOV.UK One Login done by GDS or is something new done by Oracle / Palantir or worse.

Larry Ellison envisions a surveillance state in which techbros rule. '“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,” Ellison said in an hour-long Q&A during Oracle’s Financial Analyst Meeting last week.'

Another example of how the extremely online conspiracy reactionary cults are the avant-garde in our culture, watched closely & imitated by reactionary populist politicians while once mainstream media trails behind with liberal politicos floundering at the start line. truthsocial.com/@realDonaldT...

"this is fine" British Library Manuscript - royal ms 20 a ii f3r

This is great. Being a political scientist at the moment is a bit like being a climate scientist a few years back. You can see clearly catastrophe is coming, but most people seem blithely unaware of it

RIP Tony Harrison. A real marker of cultural change: in 1985 the nation was scandalised by a poet using the F-word on TV; today it’s fine to use all the swear words but putting a fine poet on TV would upset almost everyone. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/s...

At least the FT understands the stakes. Mainstream politicos seem oblivious to the state project Tech corps are implementing, imagining that ‘proper’ politics must come back. And with digital ID in the U.K. Labour will pay Palantir to build the new state on top of them. www.ft.com/content/85ee...

The answer is ‘no’ judging by this tragic and hilarious interview. www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

That opposition to regulation for the common good (which used to be denounced as communist oppression) should now embrace medieval anathematisation of any restraint on tech power certainly feels preordained, teleological. www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

I’m interested to see how the digital identity cards argument unfolds on the radical right. It’s obvious that it’s been connected to immigration policy so as to appeal to the right. But the right get a long way framing Starmer as ‘two-tier’ repressive & eager to criminalise opponents. So…

A treat for all Emergency Podcast listeners. I'm chairing which means I can finally (finally!) interrupt @jemgilbert.bsky.social. You want to hear this! Plus @yasminalibhaibrown.bsky.social (who I'll not interrupt) & Mark Perryman. Oct. 8th 18:30-20:00 www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-starme...

A good analogue for the general crisis of political culture. Speakers' Corner isn't what it was because people go there not to be part of Speakers' Corner but to broadcast themselves on digital media (& that means delivering the drama the online market demands) www.garbageday.email/p/everything...

Last week I had a bit in @theguardian.com about how rhetoric provides a vocabulary for people to think/argue with. Here's my colleague @robtoes.bsky.social explaining how exactly that was done by online reactionaries inventing 'Boriswave'. Read & learn. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

Something the BBC could do "thanks to the unique way it's funded" is not have a Westminster Gossip Correspondent and sent a health correspondent to talk to the Health minister, an energy correspondent to talk to the energy minister etc

We are so far into bizarro world that ‘PM to criticise main opposition party’ is major headline news. I hope the speech brings home to people that they cannot rely on government or party to & must act together for each other. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

The long-awaited emergency podcast on Rayner, Labour's deputy leadership election, Burnham, Mandelson, that other guy, and Your Party internal tension. With me and @profafinlayson.bsky.social. Available here and on all podcast apps: culturepowerpolitics.org/2025/09/18/e....

The subheading for my bit of this says 'debate'. I'd prefer word 'argument' - giving people reasons. Debate is an entertaining joust between celebrities. That's not the same as showing people why & how they can be part of taking actions to shape a common future. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Woaah! The New Yorker ups the political temperature to, er, 'troubling'. It's worried that the US government is 'capricious'. Wow.

A report on Peter Thiel’s lectures on the Antichrist. Attendees include guy seeking investment in sperm racing & guy who wants to put a titanium cross on the moon. Well, at least one part of the authoritarian alliance ruling the US believes we went to the moon. sfstandard.com/2025/09/16/p...

Gosh.

The Labour leadership oppose PR because they think it would harm their electoral chances. Soon - maybe not soon enough - it will dawn on them that without PR they have no electoral chances. I’ll be interested in how they then justify their changed position.

been very hard to watch a bunch of 50-year-old podcasters come to terms with having a job.

I'm sorry @fromtga.bsky.social, but this article would have made sense about 600 days ago. Now it should be past tense. US democracy is gone and the rest of us should take note and adjust accordingly. Maybe the UK and France still have 400 days.

A Q&A I did earlier this year with about digital political culture. Some might find it relevant to current events. The tl;dr is that it’s all different but it’s also the same: people want and need a vocabulary to think with & things to do to feel like agents in their lives. Who gives that wins.

FREE TO READ: Renewal co-editor Jack Jeffrey talks to @profafinlayson.bsky.social about the subcultures of the online right and how they are transforming political communication renewal.org.uk/articles/the...

NEW ISSUE: Renewal Vol. 33 No. 2 Published amidst far-right mobilisation and a Reform surge, the new issue of Renewal (guest co-edited by @sachahilhorst.bsky.social) features activists, journalists, and academics analysing the radical right threat and debating how social democrats can respond

Here are Democrats saying ‘could’, ‘might’ happen in response to the thing actually happening. In the U.K. too I meet a lot of people who think nothing much is or will happen in our politics, even though it’s happening all around them. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/u...

An ‘objective’ problem for political analysis is that internet subcultures aren’t a displaced form of politics/ideology as (we imagine?) were modernist music/fashion/subcultures. Internet subcultures subsume politics & ideology, subordinating them to the logics of the platforms on which they grow.

The reporting on Charlie Kirk’s killer in the UK & US highlights again how fundamentally ill equipped mainstream media is to report on political violence in the digital age. They do not know anything about online far right meme culture & it’s starting to do real harm. #r4today

I wrote about the groypers and the Fuentes-Kirk fight years ago, in Hate in the Homeland. Cautioning here that there is still a lot to know about the shooter’s motivation, I’m sharing these two paragraphs here to set the history of this fight in context:

Vibe shift. www.politicshome.com/opinion/arti...

I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.

It's like (Brexit) déjà vu all over again

Credit to Ed Davey for this. www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...

I think a key UK political science question is how the current government can shoot itself in more feet than it actually has. And for theorists the issue is how to characterise a form of rule in which the government shoots itself in the foot, then puts the foot in its mouth and shoots it again.

This is the sort of thing I’d recommend to any political party that asked me. They don’t (because I’m not related to the right people). But I’m available. I also do weddings. Of course my advice is not clever. It’s what ANYONE would say who lives in the world outside SW1. Still, call me?

This is a heck of a thread. Essential reading.

Good & clear on the gulf between A.I. hype/snake oil & actual political economy. moneypower.substack.com/p/the-politi...

podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/p... very interesting discussion on the long history and pre-history of ‘unemployment’ with @robertsaunders.bsky.social, well beyond the statistical history that Foucauldians have focused on

it’s very strange how MAGA is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It shows up and its behavior now causes me to agree that 1) elites are corrupt and self-interested 2) there’s an elite pedo network 3) universities are under the thumb of the state pushing its messages Wouldn’t have said any of this in 2015

Edited to add: "...and also quite a large number of academic researchers and writers not to mention many left-wing analysts active on podcasts, substack & YouTube". It's a good article, well worth a read: www.ft.com/content/0e24...

A very good parable of our times. www.ft.com/content/bfb7...

All the investment that goes into the AI bubble isn’t going into: roads, bridges, wi-fi, car charging points, housing, water supply etc. That’s is a reason for low productivity growth. Yet we’re told to invest in the AI bubble as it’s the only route to productivity. gizmodo.com/wall-streets...

“Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation” (Keynes). www.ft.com/content/8a16...

A very precise ‘coding error’. www.axios.com/2025/08/06/c...

There’s more & more such evidence. It poses a question. Is the Labour pivot to Reformish voters: A) a cleverly targeted move to win votes in key constituencies; B) a tactic based on an error (misunderstanding of what’s going on); C) substantively ideological (i.e, they believe it). Discuss.