Toby Bennett

Ah, geez. This is sad:

"First Monday will cease publication, after 30 years, with the May 2026 issue, volume 31, number 6, scheduled for release around the first Monday of May, 4 May 2026."

firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

Great overview (& essential reading) on the new science policy landscape in the U.K.

I think I ended up in the same place. I agree "AI" is mostly playing the role of a utopian technosocial imaginary (a la flying cars or space travel), and demands a different political valence, but I think he is positing it as a material means of actualising cybernetic socialism (as well)?

I'll let this graph sit with me for a while, I especially think the distinction between Playful Productivism and Worldmaking is not something I had really thought through before, and it seems worth contemplating

The Socialist Charcuterie Board - The Ideas Letter Taking issue with Benanav’s institutional vision of a democratic political economy of technology, Morozov argues that generative AI exposes a deeper problem that socialism has yet to solve: how to…

I actually agree with a lot of stuff in @evgenymorozov.bsky.social's follow-up essay (which, despite the snark, I liked a lot more than the first one)! And yet, I vehemently disagree on the role of AI as sketched in the essay.

“no one who has witnessed over two years of genocide in Gaza is likely to disagree with either Hammad or Said that the intellectual class has utterly failed to fulfill its social function”

The difference between "haven't had pushback" and "ignored and stamped out all pushback" feels like it's being slightly underplayed here.

🤔

YouTube video by stevethedalek Tesco vs Denmark

Precursor to today's shed wars.
youtu.be/lfSi0D7KESk?...

if you're not following this stuff private credit sounds like its private investors' risk but in all sorts of ways through pensions mortgages and life insurance this is not private risk but public risk. what's happening is even less transparent than the run up to 2008 imvho

Friday evening food for thought maybe...

This is remarkably Stuart Hall-esque argumentation:

"many pages of intricate design [...] with a striking silence about political strategy. How does any of this become plausible? Contestable? Lovable? Winnable? [...] It cedes the terrain of technological imagination to the Thiels and the Musks"

A Real Political Economy of Technology - The Ideas Letter Two technological futures are competing for political and material priority: generative AI and the green transition. Benanav argues that while AI is marketed as a world-reordering breakthrough, its pr...

What might we be able to build in the future that we can't build today? For the @TheIdeasLetter, I wrote about the political economy of technology and technological change in a world beyond capitalism.
www.theideasletter.org/essay/a-real...

It's a good exchange once you get past all the tiresome sniping and reach the substance of it. The accusations of Habermas-style splitting of realms are correct, I think. And "freedom once you've eaten your vegetables" is a good line.

Well that's very good. Especially for a Thursday evening.

This is remarkably Stuart Hall-esque argumentation:

"many pages of intricate design [...] with a striking silence about political strategy. How does any of this become plausible? Contestable? Lovable? Winnable? [...] It cedes the terrain of technological imagination to the Thiels and the Musks"

Finished. If this academia thing falls through, think a future career in set design awaits me. As long as it's exclusively for Where's Wally immersive experiences.

I have been subject to many a sidling. Need some of that Scots straight man energy. I too often descend into sub-Hugh Grant "oh gosh... err... crikey" mode. Happy to babble about Daston any time though!

This is a good anecdote. I can imagine it well but want to know what happened next... He gives the impression of being able of delivering a withering put down without the put-downee realising until much later.

What's the future of AI? Who's the most attractive virtual boyfriend? Why is the venerable historian Quentin Skinner concerned about the gig economy? How do you study a database? What did I come away from a Beijing record store with?

Answers to all this and more here!

When I used to hang around music people, and music questions were how you said hi, I'd ask not "what music are you into" but "what music do you hate". They'd look at me like the deliberately contrarian nob I definitely was but it really was a good way of quickly finding out what makes people tick.

What's the future of AI? Who's the most attractive virtual boyfriend? Why is the venerable historian Quentin Skinner concerned about the gig economy? How do you study a database? What did I come away from a Beijing record store with?

Answers to all this and more here!

I can send if you need, though ERP is a small-ish part of it (ch.6/7 are about systems work more generally). But me too! I like the implementation struggle between off-the-shelf and local organisational eccentricities - which I'd like to do more work on one day...

Some executives, particularly those in fast-growing high-tech companies, have used enterprise systems to inject more discipline into their organizations. They see the systems as a lever for exerting more management control and imposing more-uniform processes on freewheeling, highly entrepreneurial cultures. An executive at a semiconductor company, for example, says, “We plan to use SAP as a battering ram to make our culture less autonomous.” The manager of the ES implementation at a computer company expresses a similar thought: “We’ve had a renegade culture in the past, but our new system’s going to make everybody fall into line.”

Funny (telling) quote about ERPs from 1998: "“We plan to use SAP as a battering ram to make our culture less autonomous.” hbr.org/1998/07/putt...

Resonates with a snippet from my book - I wasn't aware there was a longer history of this sort of thing but I shouldn't be surprised.

Hypomnemata: January 2026 Hypomnemata: “a material record of things read, heard, or thought […] a kind of accumulated treasure for subsequent rereading and meditation […] a regular and deliberate prac…

Some things I read, listened to and thought about in January: AI's Economy of Scale; Chinese masculinity, music and Maoist discourse; and a few bits and pieces of intellectual history and so on.

Part one of an effort to develop a reflective writing habit.
tgpbennett.wordpress.com/2026/02/03/h...

This image primarily features text. The main heading reads: “Cultural Studies Special Issue - What’s Become of Australian Cultural Studies?: The Legacies of Graeme Turner.” Additional text specifies “Volume 29, Issue 4 (July 2015)” and “Full Access through April 2026”

To mark and memorialize the passing of Graeme Turner, the 2015 special issue of Cultural Studies on Turner’s scholarship and impact—“What’s Become of Australian Cultural Studies?: The Legacies of Graeme Turner”—is available to read by all through the end of April: www.tandfonline.com/toc/rcus20/2...

I always wondered if this really was what Gramsci meant. But it's true anyway.

Starting as I mean to go on: late.

Donald MacKenzie · AI’s Scale AI’s scale doesn’t matter just to specialists. The rest of us are being taken on a ride along the logarithmic curve...

This is a must-read, but I can't help thinking that more emphasis needs to be placed on the resonance between the pursuit of scientific scale for AI and the underlying and explicit pursuit of business scale at all costs for platforms and investors
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...