My new book, plus platform surveillance and techno conciousness and justice
An extra newsletter
My new book is out…
My new book Georg Simmel’s Concluding Thoughts: Worlds, Lives, Fragments has just been published.
I first got the contract for the book about five years ago, but focused on writing it during 2018 (after I completed The Data Gaze). If you are interested, I wrote a short piece about the background to the book and the writing process here. The book focuses upon Simmel’s later writings, covering the period 1914-1918. Drawing on those writings it covers a wide range of topics, from the limits and boundaries placed around life, to the crisis of culture, to the way we conceptualise the world from fragments. Simmel was interested in the tensions that define social life, as a result a number of the issues covered in those writings are still of relevance today. I try to explore these in the book.
I’m hoping to write one or two short pieces about Simmel over the coming weeks, which I’ll hopefully find a home for. I’ll include any links to pieces in future newsletters.
Here is the publisher’s blurb for the book:
This book draws upon the work of Georg Simmel to explore the limits, tensions and dynamism of social life through a close analysis of the works produced in the final years of his life and reveals what they might still offer some 100 years later. Focusing on the relationships between worlds, lives and fragments in these works, David Beer opens up a conceptual toolkit for understanding life as both an individual experience and as a deeply social phenomenon. Taking the reader through artistic and musical forms of inspiration, to the problems of culture and on to the conceptual understanding of lived experience, the book illuminates the richness of Simmel’s ideas and thinking. This sophisticated dialogue with Simmel’s lesser known later works will provide fresh insights for students and scholars of cultural and social theory and pave the way for a reinvigorated engagement with his ideas.
The book is in fairly expensive hardback/ebook and so might be for library orders and reading lists in the first instance (review copies are available as well, if you think you might want to write a review). If things go well for the book a paperback might hopefully follow at some point in the future.
Platform Surveillance…
The open-access journal Surveillance Studies has a special issue on ‘Platform Surveillance'. Here is the editorial description of the issue: ‘This special responsive issue on “Platform Surveillance” critically assesses the surveillance dimensions and politics of large-scale digital platforms. The issue includes an editorial introduction to the topic and its implications, dozens of articles on specific platforms or platform trends, three book reviews of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and an interview with Zuboff about her work.’
Techno conciousness…
An interesting article that explores the heightening of conciousness caused by social media. It's by L.M. Sacasas in Real Life magazine. Here is a representative excerpt:
‘Social media platforms, like writing (or any other representational media), also externalize and heighten consciousness through self-alienating or distancing effects: To glance at your profile, to frame an image or message for posting, or to scroll through an algorithmically sorted feed is to see at least some aspect of yourself suspended in time and space. But the audience we address through these platforms, especially with communication broadcast to no one in particular, is quite different from the audience presumed by writing, let alone the interior audience of one in our memory that Spaemann highlighted. This online audience is simultaneously ever-present but elusive, especially through mobile devices.’
Can AI be creative…
The FT Tech Tonic podcast has an interview with Marcus du Sautoy about his book The Creativity Code. The book and the interview explore whether AI can be creative and can develop original thinking or even conciousness. There are some interesting examples and reflections on the future of AI. Apparently AI is struggling writing but is getting the hang of music. It made me wonder how long it will be before we have a number 1 song composed by AI. You can imagine the news coverage.
Predictive predictions…
The Amazon system just recommended to me the book Prediction Machines.
The ‘seduction industry’…
Rachel O'Neill recently published an excellent critical and ethnographic book examining the ‘seduction industry'. In a recent author interview with the LSE Review of Books Dr O'Neill discussed the work that went into the book, her approach and argument, and the way that her findings connect to a wider mediation of intimacy. A fantastic and revealing interview that provides insights into the brilliant book Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy.
Justice?
If you've not seen it, I'd recommend watching Murder, Mystery and My Family. A number of episodes are currently available on BBC iPlayer. The title of the show and the fact that it is a daytime TV are a bit misleading. This is the second series, the first aired last year. In each episode a potential historic miscarriage of justice related to a murder trial is nominated by a relative of the convicted individual. Two barristers then investigate the case and examine the evidence before taking it to a judge for a decision on whether or not it was a safe conviction. The cases are from different periods, but are mostly from around 1900 to 1950. It's a serious and thoughtful show that gives glimpses into the history of the criminal justice system. The first episode of this new series reveals a particularly tragic case.