Defragmenting our selves
The left in Britain has a great narrative of loss in the story of enclosures. The rich stole the land of the commoners, forcing them to be wage slaves at best, forcibly urbanised slumdwellers dying from disease at worst. The narrative was written strongly and passionately by Marx, and many of the best social historians…
Some of the most curious ideas a society develops will rarely be remarked upon. Once an idea is commonplace it becomes common sense. Perhaps the most curious idea that our society perpetuates – so normal that it is the theme of childrens’ cartoons or inspirational posters – is the idea that we can and should…
David Smail, a dissenting psychologist writing in the 90s, was prone to making sweeping statements about the uselessness of therapy. This feels, I suspect, a little odd to most people who have had therapy and felt that it benefited them. However when you scratch beneath the surface of his contrarian statements some genuinely interesting points…
We all exist within networks, and through these networks move material goods, information, power. The stuff-info-power network is easy to explain. What is less easy is to discuss the ways that stuff, information and power interact with each other. Life is complicated. We should probably complicate it even further. I think the landscape of care…
The dangers of big data have by now become apparent to all. Objectification of humans can now take place on a scale unseen in human history. The only organisations that can afford the costs of collecting and process big data about our lives are governments and large corporations. This means your existence has a kind…
If you’re not having fun in life, is that because of something inside you, or something in the world outside? This is a discussion I and my therapist have had in various forms on numerous occasions. With an activist perspective I am prone to putting the blame for my distress on the outside world and…
An organisation I am part of – let’s call it The Process because I like it that the Spanish language uses that term for organising – held a large assembly last weekend. The Process is aiming to do ‘relational organising’, or perhaps another way of putting that is that we are trying to form a…
We live in a time when the public discussion on rights often has a conservative hue to it. There are institutions that enforce rights, bodies that define them, campaign groups that attempt to expand them. Economic rights have however always been more controversial than the social rights laid out in most constitutions. The right to…