More me (now with link to Friday discussion)

and apologies for repeated email ...

[A link to the Friday discussion is added here and below]

I have a couple of posts brewing, but also some urgent writing deadlines coming through. Hence, there may or may not be a full new post this week, depending. In the meantime, a catch-all for some of the other stuff I have been up to here and there over the last several weeks, and an online event on Friday.

On Friday, I’ll be doing an online discussion, organized by James Cham, with Dan Davies and Marion Fourcade. It will likely focus on their respective books, The Unaccountability Machine and The Ordinal Society (with Kieran Healy), both of which I have written about, and both of which are excellent. A couple of weeks ago, Brad DeLong mentioned the mindmeld of Farrell, Shalizi, Gopnik and Evans, adding in Fourcade, Healy and Davies. This event was planned separately, but I do think that there is a shared terrain of ideas coming into view …

Speaking of which, here is Brad’s own synthesis of these ideas (the emphasis on Herbert Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial in the closing sentences is exactly right imo).

I have a piece in the new issue of Democracy: “Reining in our Tech God-Emperors,” which talks about Elon Musk, and is where I really started to think about the ideas I developed at greater length in the “we’re getting the social media crisis wrong” essay from a couple of months back.

I’ve been on podcasts, mostly talking about Silicon Valley, deformed publics and DOGE.

With Paul Waldman, here.

With John Ganz and Max Read, here.

With Noah Kunin and Julian Sanchez, here.

And, for the moment, that’s it!