http://www.kevingillan.info Wed, 01 Feb 2012 16:06:20 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Tom asked: Just spent the morning listening to a couple of folks who were labour activists in the 40s and 50s. Now wondering how we organise politically under the sociological conditions of late modernity. If the class structure isn’t there to support the traditional labour movement (in the same way), what can we build instead? An important [...]]]> http://www.kevingillan.info/rantlog/188 Conservatives in power, vicious cuts applied to the welfare state while regressive taxes increase, police violence perpetrated against the poor against a background of declining legitimacy. Yes, the parallels between 2011 and 1981 are irresistibly suggestive of a political explanation for the British summer riots. The triggers in 1981 were ‘heavy handed’ and often racist policing reflecting [...]]]> http://www.kevingillan.info/rantlog/184 The ConDems incessantly justify cut after cut with reference to Labour’s supposed welfare profligacy. So maybe its time to remind ourselves why the budget deficit has increased dramatically… Here’s a useful graph (from the BBC) that shows the fluctuations in the budget deficit since the 1980s, with the deficit expressed as a proportion of GDP. Prudence was [...]]]> http://www.kevingillan.info/rantlog/176 Here is the presentation from my talk at 6 Billion Ways, you can make it full screen and explore by clicking on items and zooming in and out (a scroll wheel is handy). Or use the controls in the bottom right corner to follow a pre-defined path. If it doesn’t seem to be working here, [...]]]> http://www.kevingillan.info/articles-papers/171 In Times of the Technoculture, my old boss Frank Webster argued that current info society trends in the capitalist economy are largely the logical extension of trends that have been around more or less since the birth of capitalism. Specifically, Taylorism brought scientific management to the workplace, with surveillance and discipline hand in hand; but [...]]]> http://www.kevingillan.info/rantlog/149 Today’s protests will be mainly read as anger at the hike in student fees resulting from the government’s massive withdrawal of funding from higher education. Very important issues, to be sure. But the issue at stake is broader, even, than the debate over whether higher education is a public good. Refusal to pay for higher [...]]]> http://www.kevingillan.info/rantlog/155 Johnson, Steven. 1997. Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way we Create and Communicate. Basic Books. [NB These are notes to self, they become pretty ungrammatical towards the end!] This interesting and erudite book starts from the position that the collision of technology and culture is nothing new, but that with the increased pace [...]]]> http://www.kevingillan.info/techblog/151 Jesse Norman MP was on last week’s Politics Weekly podcast at the Guardian talking about his new book on The Big Society (Indy review). He said that the Conservatives weren’t trying simply to shrink the state in order to replace it with the market, but instead wanted to harness and ‘unimaginable reserves of social energy’ [...]]]> http://www.kevingillan.info/rantlog/146 I occasionally want a local web server on my netbook for fiddling around, but don’t want it running on start up. So, using the following steps I removed it from the start up list and created a launcher button to start and stop apache and mysql. 1. Remove from startup list: $sudo update-rc.d apache remove [...]]]> http://www.kevingillan.info/techblog/141 While ECHR’s judgment as described below seemed pretty final, the Labour government still attempted a final appeal – asking for the case to be heard in the ‘Grand Chamber’ (i.e. throwing another few ECHR judges in to the pot). They didn’t have any new arguments or grounds for appeal though and so today I heard [...]]]> http://www.kevingillan.info/rantlog/134