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doorsclosingslowlyDark Patterns.
Dark Patterns are "tricks used in websites and apps that make you buy or sign up for things that you didn't mean to" and there is a fascinating gallery of examples on the site, from misleadingly labelled buttons to very obfuscated site design. As with questionnaire design and statistics reporting, the aspect I immediately gravitate to when learning about something is its potential for manipulation.
Pankaj Mishra: Watch This Man. A book review for Civilisation: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson (LRB, 2011).
I've read and hated and argued against this book in class, and I wish I'd known Mishra's concise rebuttal back then. Lots of good references.
China Mieville: On Social Sadism (Salvage, 2015).
I'm pretty sure I was googling for articles on social murder instead when I stumbled across this article and got distracted. Serious content warning for descriptions of police brutality, torture, murder, racism, casual cruelty; but it attempts to pull together many threads I was aware of separately but not in juxtaposition. Something to think about.
David Wallace-Wells: The Uninhabitable Earth, Annotated version (Intelligencer, 2017). // Laurie Laybourn-Langton, Lesley Rankin, Darren Baxter: This is a crisis: Facing up to the age of environmental breakdown (IPPR, 2019).
Two overviews of research on climate change. I'm assuming Wallace-Well's 2019 book of the same title is even more comprehensive and up-to-date, but I haven't got it yet, and the article makes for chilling but lucid reading. The IPPR report focuses a bit more on socioeconomic impact.
Dark Patterns are "tricks used in websites and apps that make you buy or sign up for things that you didn't mean to" and there is a fascinating gallery of examples on the site, from misleadingly labelled buttons to very obfuscated site design. As with questionnaire design and statistics reporting, the aspect I immediately gravitate to when learning about something is its potential for manipulation.
Pankaj Mishra: Watch This Man. A book review for Civilisation: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson (LRB, 2011).
I've read and hated and argued against this book in class, and I wish I'd known Mishra's concise rebuttal back then. Lots of good references.
The slave-trading, self-commemorating European conquerors of Asia and Africa, Naipaul writes, ‘could do one thing and say something quite different because they had an idea of what they owed to their civilisation’. Ferguson, a retro rather than revisionist historian, tries to summon up some of that old imperial insouciance here. Consequently, his book is immune to the broadly tragic view – that every document of civilisation is also a document of barbarism – just as it is to humour and irony.
China Mieville: On Social Sadism (Salvage, 2015).
I'm pretty sure I was googling for articles on social murder instead when I stumbled across this article and got distracted. Serious content warning for descriptions of police brutality, torture, murder, racism, casual cruelty; but it attempts to pull together many threads I was aware of separately but not in juxtaposition. Something to think about.
David Wallace-Wells: The Uninhabitable Earth, Annotated version (Intelligencer, 2017). // Laurie Laybourn-Langton, Lesley Rankin, Darren Baxter: This is a crisis: Facing up to the age of environmental breakdown (IPPR, 2019).
Two overviews of research on climate change. I'm assuming Wallace-Well's 2019 book of the same title is even more comprehensive and up-to-date, but I haven't got it yet, and the article makes for chilling but lucid reading. The IPPR report focuses a bit more on socioeconomic impact.
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