Vital piece of investigative reporting from Sky. They've uncovered the X algorithm which feeds users extremist right wing material from the moment they join the site. It is a far-right radicalisation engine, by design. news.sky.com/story/the-x-...

The image of the philosopher is obscured by all his necessary disguises, but also by all the betrayals that turn him into the philosopher of religion, the philosopher of the State, the collector of current values and the functionary of history.

So-called #genAI means the abolition of the future through the proliferation of endless streams of stochastically rendered generic pasts. Having turned large parts of the cultural archive into training data, it now traps us in a foreverized pastness, a 24/7 nostalgia for a past that never existed

Blue sky morning on Bruntsfield Links

More from the misty Meadows this morning

think that realistically I would have always been deeply, deeply worried about the rise of far-right ideas in public discourse but I truly never expected this level of blithe elite complacency, turns out I do feel worried but mostly I feel like I'm going insane, watching them do.......nothing at all

Thousands of Londoners have indefinite leave to remain. They have legal rights and are our friends, neighbours and colleagues, contributing hugely to our city. Threatening to deport people living and working here legally is unacceptable.

Beyond the media's omission of migrants navigating a path to ILR paying thousands of £ for the NHS, visa fees, NI, etc., and of any opposing views, this to me is as clear a plan to strip dignity away from those who choose to build a life here as can be. And it's been given legitimacy.

What's effectively happening here (in the British media at large, too) is the construction of "anti-racism" as somehow a "political alternative" to racism, rather than as a minimal civilisational standard, which in turn (further) vindicates racism as *also* an acceptable political position.

Don’t buy the hysteria. Ignore the right-wing propaganda. Buy the facts. The UK’s problems are no more being caused by immigration than they are by a group of charity fundraisers rowing past Great Yarmouth. @timharford.ft.com

But it’s also been a site of racism and racist violence for a century as well. It was especially bad in the 1970s and 1980s, with economic decline exploited by the National Front to foment racial hatred. As I say in my book:

It's fairly pointless fact-checking this sort of racist bilge, but as it happens I live in Plaistow and -- of course the area is undoubtedly multicultural, one of the most diverse in the country -- but there are certainly white children here. I've got two of them in my house.

“The Overton window moves when there are no ideas to fight the ideas moving it.” @lewisgoodall.com asked a senior gov’t minister - Peter Kyle - about Musk’s comments at Saturday’s rally. His response? It was “too silly to even talk about.”

Pleased to share that after a long, at-times difficult review process, 'Attuning to Uncertainty: Enacting Health in Platformised Taxicab Driving' w/ @tiagoemoreira.bsky.social is out now! Available open-access here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Reminder: if interested in learning about Uber drivers' struggles for finding value in their work, and some of the ways in which they contend with diminished chances of doing so, come by Room 2.220 at 2:30pm tomorrow! #wesconf25 @britsoci.bsky.social @bsaecf.bsky.social

enshittification | noun | when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits

Looking forward to presenting at the BSA Work, Employment & Society conference next Wednesday, contributing to a timely debate on 'Continuities and Discontinuities in Work and Employment'. See abstract for my talk below, based on a paper in its initial stages. Join us in Room 2.220 at 2:30pm! :)

3 project reports now available for our Leverhulme-funded Rural Racism project. A film below reflecs just 3 of our 135 in-depth interviews. These supplement statistics, gaining insights into the human experience of racism in the countryside, where only 4% of the population is from a minoritised gp

Dining across the divide: ‘I was really hardline about immigration – but her struggles softened me a bit’

The Center for the sociology of innovation learned with great sadness that Michel Callon has passed away. A graduate of the École des Mines, Michel joined the center in the late 1960s and was its director from 1982 to 1994.

trying to relate a Deleuzian/materialist analysis of everyday socio-spatial enactments of race with the racial capitalism literature, and this by Kendra Strauss provided the best opening for it. 'Racialization' here goes *beyond* labour market hierarchies. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

2. Domaining: associating certain knowers (usually based on their perceived characteristics/identity) with certain domains of knowledge, and thus limiting their knowledge claim to contribution *within that field* (see also: why is de Beauvoir a 'feminist philosopher' and Sartre a 'philosopher')

Happy #100th citation to "Epistemic injustice and epistemic positioning" (2021, not 2023), surpassing "Knowing neoliberalism", my erstwhile-most-cited article! 🎉 This is especially remarkable as the article is itself subject to practices of citational erasure/omission/appropriation it theorises...

New paper in @natureportfolio.nature.com's Scientific Reports! We investigated emotional & psychological impact of late ADHD diagnoses in women Highlighting how undiagnosed ADHD contributes to life-long challenges & how diagnosis in adulthood can be life-changing #ADHD #WomenWithADHD #ADHDawareness

Platform companies like Uber helped normalise this dynamic pricing and workers have pushed back with attempts to monitor and track rates (see Worker Info Exchange), but yes, "without a public record of all fares, it would be difficult... to determine if Delta is charging vastly different fares..."

4th July 2025 22.18

Public lecture in London on 30th June, 6pm, on mine and Anna Secor’s new book, to the title of: The Politics of Feeling in Crisis Times: Populism, Progressivism, Liberalism. Event bite link here, would be lovely to see people there!: www.eventbrite.com/e/the-politi...

Sometimes I think we’ve become completely anaesthetised to terrible events because they happen to other people. I don’t believe the families would have been subjected to the almost gleeful public display of the footage of the crash when I was a kid. 2025 is quite a horrible time really.

Of note (and dangerous) is how his rhetoric and online engagement are causing fissures *within* the far right.

me writing my first post phd paper:

No comment.

25th May 2025. 20.55

For those interested, my PhD thesis on how platformisation is experienced by workers in the UK's taxicab trade is now available to read online: etheses.dur.ac.uk/16033/ Stay tuned as I rework parts of it into papers (and hopefully also a monograph)!

11th May 2025 06.51

But why are on-demand delivery platforms allowed to facilitate dangerous working conditions: www.theguardian.com/news/2025/ap...

Reminder: if you're at #britsoc25, and interested in hearing about how the rise of the gig economy is leading to new forms of racialisation that exceed white/non-white and conventional racial-ethnic lines, come attend my talk at 1:30pm tomorrow.

Looking forward to being at the BSA annual conference next week, where I'll be presenting some of my PhD work on how racialisation is evolving in response to the rise of the platform (or 'gig') economy. Come along to Room 1.218 at 1:30pm next Thursday :') @britsoci.bsky.social @bsaecf.bsky.social

🌳 My first solo article is out! Check out "Models vs infrastructures? On the role of digital twins’ hype in anticipating the governance of the UK energy industry", now out in Environmental Science and Policy doi.org/10.1016/j.en...

As a general rule, you would be right to think you've wasted your life, if your only claim was: "I belonged to this or that school."

Every time I'm back at my alma mater - Lahore Univ. of Management Sciences, or to us, LUMS - I learn about the latest student and faculty-led challenge to state narratives (a study circle, a talk, etc.), how it was clamped down on, and how it's now starting anew. May that continue.

'Paris has already introduced specific parking charges for SUVs. Drivers of these vehicles now have to pay triple the amount of those who drive regular cars' Hopefully coming to London soon

If you happen to be at the @britsoci.bsky.social's annual conference and if you want to hear something beyond the moan about how "they" are destroying "our" higher education, I'll be speaking (alongside @jkom.bsky.social and @alinecourtois.bsky.social) at the Presidential event on the Future of HE:

New (albeit not-so-new) paper w @tiagoemoreira.bsky.social on shifts in the category of frailty since Covid. I enjoyed using this intuitive, ANT-inspired computational method for tracing how scientific knowledge evolves over time. Would recommend! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Annual fast-forwarding to the summer

This kind of free PR ought to say a lot more on how platforms treat their drivers. More work to be done on apprising students of this. But limited experience shows that there's an opportunity here: to dent market attachments to these platforms, build support for platform workers.

After work hazy sunshine on Bruntsfield Links

Just two of many (!!) lovely views in Argyll, Western Scotland.

What are *hype studies* about? We are a group exploring the frenzies, gurus, attention cycles and waves of excitement and disappointment we're experiencing when interacting with contemporary science and technology. To learn more, follow hypestudies.org P.S. Credit to Pierre Depaz for web design! ☀️

A fantastic thesis - on self-worth in the taxi trade and platformisation creatively using, amongst many theoretical resources, pragmatic sociology - and a pleasure to examine it with Karen.