David Beer is a Professor of Sociology at the University of York. His work mainly explores how transformations in technology and media reshape culture and society. The focus of that work is often on questions of power. He also writes on the history and future of social thought, with an interest in imagination, creativity and inspiration. David's book's include The Tensions of Algorithmic Thinking, The Data Gaze and Metric Power. Email: david.beer [at] york.ac.uk
Website: https://davidbeer.net
by David Beer The other day, in a cavernous sports superstore, I thought of J.G. Ballard. Echoey. Compartmentalised. Fluorescent. Stuffed with product. It was, probably quite obviously, the sort of place Ballard might have imagined the norms of society suddenly collapsing in on themselves, unable to carry their own contradictions. Banal yet shiny, ordered yet…
by David Beer A good weather colloquialism can be quite suggestive. Take skafrenningur, an Icelandic expression for a ‘blizzard from the ground up’. It occurs when loose snow is hurled around by gusting winds. A pixelated yet impenetrable wall of snow. You can neither properly see through one nor, without great struggle, walk far within…
by David Beer There was a prevailing idea, George Orwell wrote in a 1946 essay on the Common Toad, ‘that this is the age of machines and that to dislike the machine, or even to want to limit its domination, is backward-looking, reactionary and slightly ridiculous.’ It was only a couple of years before his…
by David Beer Lana Del Rey exists in a meticulously crafted world of her own. It’s a world apart. I purchased an invite to drop-by this summer, so that I might glimpse its finer details. Along with the crowd at the Anfield stadium in Liverpool, I was standing at its perimeter, gazing inwards, wondering. The…
by David Beer Could there be anything more insulting for a writer than someone assuming that their writing is an output of generative artificial intelligence? The mere possibility of being confused for a neural network is enough to make any creative shudder. When it happens, and it will happen, it will inevitably sting. By implication,…
by David Beer Danish author Solvej Balle’s novel On the Calculation of Volume, the first book translated from a series of five, could be thought of as time loop realism, if such a thing is imaginable. Tara Selter is trapped, alone, in a looping 18th of November. Each morning simply brings yesterday again. Tara turns…