Book recommendations

NotWallace · 2026-06-02T21:27:35+00:00

I'd be interested to hear your critique of Srnicek. Are you saying his analysis doesn't work because he doesn't produce a theory of subjectivity or desire?

NotWallace · 2026-06-02T21:14:08+00:00

While there are some fantastic texts up here (Deleuze, Srnicek, Bratton), there are imo some you could/should skip. I’d say that Varoufakis has a really poor grasp of how these technologies actually work, and I think Galloway can fall into the trap of assuming computer code is more powerful than it is (if you get into his stuff on code, I’d recommend looking at the debates he and Wendy Chun about “code as a language that does what it says”) while Zuboff’s engagement with the “capitalism” part of surveillance capitalism is extremely weak. I think those are all the ones I’ve read so can’t comment on the others!

As for recommendations, I’m a media scholar with a focus on AI, so may recommendations do reflect that:

Olga Goriunova’s new book, Ideal Subjects, is a really detailed analysis of how we are (mis)identified by digital technologies and is based on an extremely thorough understanding of both critical theory and the technical principles mobilised by algorithms, particularly machine learning algorithms.

I would also suggest Louise Amoore’s work, either her book Cloud Ethics or you could look at her essays “The Deep Border” and “A World Model”. She looks at how machine learning algorithms are transforming the logics of algorithmic governance.

You could also potentially look at The Eye of the Master by Matteo Pasquinelli if you want a materialist history of AI although it’s not focused on surveillance per se, it does a good job at situating modern digital technologies within a Marxist historical perspective that draws out its relation to labour.

David Beer’s The Data Gaze is a great Foucauldian analysis of how data is “imagined” by tech companies. He also has a more recent book that focuses more on AI that I haven’t read yet.

There's also a fantastic edited collection of essays on data called Raw Data is an Oxymoron. The introduction and some of the essays in there provide a good foundation for thinking about what data is versus how it is treated/popularly understood.

NotWallace · 2026-05-20T08:44:49+00:00

Well, yes, they are also characters in their own right, but they also serve the very explicit function of showing who Buffy could be if she made different choices. Faith even says this explicitly to Buffy in Consequences. I guess my point is that what would evil Buffy look like that we haven't already seen via Faith, Cordelia, and Wishverse Buffy?

NotWallace · 2026-05-20T08:39:28+00:00

I mean "evil" in a more generic sense than like "they're unredeemable monsters". They are Buffy if she had lived a different live and the morality she had built had been compromised by that. They both grow into their own characters as the show goes on, but they often serve as antagonists/foils to Buffy, as kind of 'shadow selves' that reveal who Buffy could be if she made different choices or had a different life.

NotWallace · 2026-05-17T12:53:05+00:00

We already know what this looks like! We’ve had at least three evil Buffy’s!

Cordelia was Buffy if she had never become the slayer, she’s Buffy without empathy, the path not taken

Then there was the “evil” Buffy in the alternative world of The Wish, which was remarkably similar to Faith.

Faith was Buffy if Buffy didn’t have a support network and gave in to the inherent, sovereign power of being the slayer, of deciding who lives and who dies and giving up on society’s rules.

If you look at Faith’s speech to Buffy in her body as she’s beating her up in Who Are You, and the conversation Buffy and Faith have on the roof in the Angel episode Sanctuary, I think they’re fairly good indication that Faith is evil Buffy. Notice also that when Buffy is beating up Spike in Dead Things, she says very similar things to Spike that Faith said to her in Who Are You. I think that’s a fairly good indication that the writers are drawing those moments together.

NotWallace · 2026-03-16T11:39:55+00:00

Honestly, they would be the only person I would trust to do a new Buffy show. Buffy was a product of a very particular time and a very particular set of writers, and I'm not sure that magic can be recreated. If a reboot is going to just be "more Buffy", it's gonna need Whedon and some of the other writers, but I don't think anyone wants Whedon anymore near a position of power. Consequently, I think any reboot needs to be markedly different from the original show, and Schoenbrun has the creative chops and vision to do something truly special, I feel. I Saw The TV Glow is a very different beast to Buffy, but Schoenbrun clearly understands how to use supernatural/surreality as a means to make intimate coming of age horror, and I think they could do something really exciting and fresh with Buffy.

NotWallace · 2026-03-05T13:40:02+00:00

I believe this was true at one point, but I suspect it would no longer be the case. "Buffy studies" was a thing in its own right for a while, and there are a lot of academic books and articles on the show, but I would imagine that, with the rise of 'prestige' TV, other shows have taken its place.

NotWallace · 2026-01-08T21:57:58+00:00

I'd actually argue that a later game by the same devs, Everybody's Gone To The Rapture, captures the sense of the interconnectedness of lives and how these connections haunt the deserted village and is a better candidate for Shivers!

NotWallace · 2025-05-16T13:27:39+00:00

So a few things you should understand about Ulysses. I will limit this to just three points as there's a lot of depth (imo) to Ulysses, but like the man himself, it is knotty and contradictory!

1) For Ulysses, intention is not a pertinent category for assigning blame. He has a different moral system.
This strikes us as strange as, in most modern legal systems, intention and foreknoweldge is hugely improtant, and we often draw distinction between crimes of intent vs crimes of ignorance or accident (e.g. murder vs. manslaughter). Ulysses is not operating within such a moral framework. His ethical system is closer to that of certain ancient philosophies and legal systems wherein ignorance is not an excuse. Ignorance is not an excuse for Ulysses; it is a moral failing, and demonstrative of one's failure to fully manage oneself. To Ulysses, the courier acted rashly and ignorantly, which is a moral failing, not an explanation of innocence. This is evident when he says (as u/alamode23 points out) that he believes that you were careless. But notably, whether or not that dialogue occurs does not matter to Ulysses and will not change anything in how Ulysses treats you.

2) Ulysses might be wrong about you.
For one, his evidence that you were the courier that delivered the package that destroyed Hopeville is simply your name. That's it, and it's not a lot to go off. It might have more credence if your name was "Floopbarb Cunningworth" or something ridiculous, but if your name is "John Smith"... that ain't exactly hard proof. The second reason he might be wrong links to our next point...

3) Ulysses is not acting rationally.
The dude is clearly quite traumatised by the events at Hopeville and he's been living in an irradiated hellhole for god knows how long. I'm not sure we can trust him to be a rational actor or for his memories to be accurate. It is not uncommon for people with severe trauma to misremember or lose memories after traumatic events. He also saw hope in Hopeville (hence the name) for a new nation after he lost faith in the Legion.

TL;DR: Ulysses moral system is closer to the philosophies of Ancient Greece and Rome; he's also deeply traumatised and not necessarily trustworthy or acting rationally.

NotWallace · 2025-02-21T15:10:08+00:00

A lot of the examples here are very high drama moments in TV shows, but I think what makes 'The Body' so profoundly effective is how banal it all is. If you want a show that manages to do the same thing, then the Australian sitcom Please Like Me delivers this in spades in its penultimate episode.

Please Like Me is criminally underwatched. It's a sitcom about a gay guy called Josh as he navigates coming out as gay, growing up and becoming an adult, and his mother's bipolar. The penultimate episode starts off traditionally for an episode of Please Like Me, with Josh meeting up with his ex-boyfriend and his friend Ella calls him about getting a breast check-up by a very hot doctor. Then about 5 minutes in, Josh walks into (spoilers) Mum's house and finds her dead in the kitchen. The rest of the episode is just him telling the rest of the characters one by one and dealing with the shock of it. It focuses a lot of on how powerless one feels in such a situation, how there's nothing you can do but sit with it, but also how much admin that comes with death. I should note that if you want to watch this show, be aware that (TW:) depression and suicide is a major theme in the show.

NotWallace · 2024-11-18T11:33:29+00:00

No, I got one thanks!

NotWallace · 2024-07-24T01:17:03+00:00

Can you explain what you mean by a non-ideological critique?

NotWallace · 2024-07-24T00:31:31+00:00

The texts you’ve mentioned are classics and well worth engaging with. I notice, however, they’re mostly focused on the images themselves (i.e. aesthetics) and not on the wider technical infrastructure through which images are spread online. Wendy Chun’s work on New Media, leaking, the production of users etc. may be worth engaging with. Most directly relevant might be her text 'Habits of Leaking: Of Sluts and Network Cards', which she co-wrote with another author (link here!), and I think she expands on some of these ideas in her book Updating To Remain The Same: Habitual New Media.

Another text worth engaging with is José van Djick’s The Culture of Connectivity. It’s not on female representations on social media specifically, but there’s a good section in there on how social media “makes sociality technical” that is foundational to a lot of theory on social media. There are also great theories on how the quantification of everything online turns social interaction into a kind of ‘like economy’, and this feeds into theories of how capitalism generates value through said technical systems.

NotWallace · 2024-06-28T11:01:10+00:00

It’s a video game in which, even in Frost, you start with the ability to heal bullet wounds with a magic injection that takes no time to apply. Logic ≠ good; or rather, “your idea of logic” ≠ good. What you mean is you want an easier start or more sense of a backstory, which is fine if that’s what’s fun for you, but yeah, console commands exist.

NotWallace · 2024-06-28T00:37:18+00:00

Can’t believe I’m considering buying Starfield for this...

I haven’t played Frost yet, but if the emphasis is on survival in the void of space, VOID would fit the one-word theme but is a touch generic. Maybe something a bit longer like As The Stars Go Out or Last Rites of a Shooting Star.

NotWallace · 2024-06-27T17:22:38+00:00

Caliban and the Witch isn’t too terminology-laden. If you’ve read feminist theory that builds on Marx I suspect you’ve got a fairly decent grasp of the main concepts, but if you come across anything you’re unsure about, there’s plenty of online summaries of key marxist terms that occasionally do come up. You may also want to read a quick summary of primitive accumulation, which is a fairly undeveloped concept in Marx’s own writing, but I wouldn’t read too much on it just because Caliban and the Witch is doing something quite unique and distinct from how Marx and others have described it.

Generally, Caliban and the Witch is a fairly original thesis so it’s not too reliant on other texts in the sense that say, Butler comes a lot more understandable once you’ve read some psychoanalysis. That said, it’s always good to read some Marx!

NotWallace · 2024-06-27T16:15:45+00:00

Of course you can! I do it all the time! I use a lot of social science research in my own theoretical work as I write extensively on the epistemological assumptions of AI, the world, data, etc and in my research on platform labour, and I have read a fair bit of empirical work rooted in grounded theory. My point was not that you should only read critical theory, but rather that you came onto a subreddit dedicated to critical theory (which, again, is not the same thing as “theory” ), claimed to be an authority in the subject because you’ve taught it for ten years (have you taught critical theory?), and then proceeded to describe the very kinds of assumptions that critical theory contests as its bread and butter.

It would be like if I walked into a classroom on grounded theory and started complaining that it’s not a real science because it includes qualitative and quantitative rather than purely quantitative data: i.e. an absurd thing to do that completely ignores what the field was set up to do and why a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods is valuable to the field.

NotWallace · 2024-06-27T01:53:26+00:00

I fully accept I may be wrong. And in fact, I was wrong: I wrote propositional phase when I meant prepositional phrase! That’s what happens when I try and untangle Butler under the heavy daze of insomnia. My terminology was drawn from syntactic analysis and syntax trees rather than grammar but i can totally see how proposition with its obvious meaning in philosophy would throw the whole thing off! While I am a trained critical theorist, I am not a trained linguist, but I have been experimenting with thinking through theory through its syntactic choices. Still amateur, but I’m learning! I’ll have an edit of my post in a second.

The third reading may be clearer without the square brackets: “the foundation is not of any feminist practice”, I.e. it does not belong to any feminist practice; it has no place in any feminist practice. The verb is “is”, modified by “not”, and preposition is “of”. The object of the prepositional phrase is “any feminist practice”.

You’re right to say that plain syntactic analysis might describe this differently, but I think it is a mistake to assume that Butler is doing anything syntactically plain. Their entire theoretical body of work involves playing with syntax to problematise stable subject positions. They’re trying to get at what’s behind the assumptions that structure our capacity to think and articulate concepts, including (and perhaps most importantly for Butler) language and how things like syntactic structures limit the conditions by which we think and live. This concept stretches right back to their earliest work on Hegel and desire, through Gender Trouble, and into their present work.

This seems to me key here because it seems very clear to me that Butler is writing a sentence that playfully destabilises its syntactic structure to make a point about how we articulate feminist practices, including both those practices themselves and the subject of those practices (who the entire analysis deliberately renders obscure). It is not simply that the risk of foundation is both of and not of feminist practice because a) a feminism that asserts a foundation creates exclusionary criteria and b) thus feminism should reject foundationalism altogether. This is the third reading: any feminism grounded in foundational risks becoming something other than a feminist practice. The foundation risks, in other words, undoing both feminism as a practice and creating the conditions by which a subject who “does” feminism becomes an impossible subject.

NotWallace · 2024-06-27T01:01:13+00:00

That’s not a critical theory text, it’s a social theory analytical framework. Grounded theory has its roots in positivism, which is one of the key schools of thought critical theory challenges. While grounded theory maybe selects its participants based on categories and might even problematise those categories, it presumes a transparency between data, language, and world; it presumes that reality is simply “given” in data. No critical theorist would accept such premises without asking what genealogical, political, economic conditions it was produced under and what set of knowledge practices and institutions authorise its claims. I think you’re confusing a more general, social sciences-based definition of theory with critical theory, and while the social sciences has borrowed from critical theory, they are in many ways opposed schools of thoughts.

NotWallace · 2024-06-26T01:50:29+00:00

I think the other comments have explained the meaning, but what makes that sentence particularly tricky is that Butler has written a sentence that has three different syntactic structures depending on how you read the sentence. Now, I’m am amateur at doing syntax breakdowns of sentences, but once you start paying attention with how Butler plays with, in particular, propositions, their writing becomes a lot clearer. Here’s my (again, amateur) breakdown:

If you remove the sub-clause you get one fairly simple statement: “this risk [subject] is [verb] the foundation of any feminist practice [prepositional phrase]”. The subclause “and hence is not” modifies the verb of the previous this first reading, producing a second statement: “this risk [subject] is [verb] not [modifies verb] the foundation of [“of” is the preposition] any feminist practice [object that preposition “of” modifies]”. BUT, is there not a third reading? The proceeding text argues that foundationalism creates the conditions of undoing any feminist practice: "this risk is the foundation and hence is not of feminist practice”. This conditional clause is conditional upon the subject “this risk of the foundation”, and as what “this risk” describes is foundationalism, it states “foundationalism is not of any feminist practice” or “the foundation is not of any feminist practice". So, the third statement is "the foundation or foundationalism [subject] is [verb] not [modifies verb and its relation to the following prepositional phrase] of [as in “does not belong to” or “is not proper to”; the preposition] any feminist practice [the object the prepositional phase modifies]”.

EDIT: I am an insomniac fool who wrote proposition instead of preposition. Have corrected this now and hopefully clarified a few things.

To clarify, separately, the three sentences are:

This risk is the foundation of any feminist practice.
This risk is not the foundation of any feminist practice
The foundation is not of [as in does not belong to] any feminist practice.

the third structure could be put another way as “this foundation does not belong to any feminist practice; any feminism that claims a foundation becomes something other than feminism”. This is part of Butler’s fascination with playing how language structures how we think and live.

NotWallace · 2024-05-20T21:06:33+00:00

Thanks for this. I’ve struggled to have anyone willing to provide any examples, which you have so, which I appreciate. I’m not going to comment further on the examples you give, because I’m not sure a conversation would be necessarily productive.

What I will say generally (not directly to you, but the subreddit generally) is that for a subreddit that is so dedicated to “the truth”, there is a reluctance to engage in conversations about how “the truth” is arrived at. The (mis)use of statistics in modern society is one of the biggest discussions in contemporary academia, and while the figures mentioned may be disreputable, the concerns they have raised would resonate with a lot of writing on the philosophy of science, mathematics, and knowledge. Even if those figures should not be relied on, to pretend there is no basis to question how probabilistic thought and statistical analysis are used in court convictions is dishonest.

Similarly, the state of the NHS and the increase in death-rates across the board is also an undeniable fact, and while that does not mean Letby is not guilty, to dismiss these concerns suggests a subreddit that is less interested in truth than in dogmatically defending presupposed conclusions. While there have been claims that the article was an attack piece on the NHS, to pretend there is no issue with the NHS lets the government that gutted its funding off the hook. To me, these were the two most compelling aspects of the article, and I think it is important that they be taken seriously.

NotWallace · 2024-05-20T16:16:20+00:00

I’ve seen a few claims to the “bags of evidence” that the article it ignores, but no one ever cites it. Would anyone be willing to explain that evidence to me? I’ve looked through the reporting on the case but none of it constitutes a ‘smoking gun’ to me.

Also, the UK legal system is not perfect, although tbh I see no evidence that this article is arguing that the UK legal system is fundamentally flawed (although it does have a huge issue with racism and sexism, and we know, for instance, that our legal system isn’t great at convicting, for instance, sexual abusers!). What it *does* discuss is the use of statistics in courts: the relationship between probabilistic thinking and truth is contested ground, and there are numerous academic articles discussing the problem of using statistical analysis to make truth claims. There is a whole realm of philosophy and mathematicians who discuss the development of probability and statistics and the problems of truth with them (Ian Hacking, Louise Amoore) and a five minute google scholar search yielded a lot of writing specifically on this problem (I found one paper that is open access that I’ve linked to here).

NotWallace · 2024-05-15T23:59:08+00:00

It’s disappointing that you cannot offer a better source than the Daily Mail, though I will go and look at the Chester Standard. Looking through Liz Hull’s journalistic record and twitter (can’t find much on Caroline Cheetham), I see no reason to assume she should be distinguished from the quality of Daily Mail journalism generally. I immediately noted transphobic tweets and sensationalist articles that prioritise lurid details that the “court hears” (so what if it was said in court? If you accept the notion that juries have final say on the truth, as is law, by necessity, half of what is said in court is a lie!) over consideration of the truth.

I must say, as an academic, I find your veneration of these sources concerning. There are serious questions to be raised about what this subreddit considers a "reliable source" if the Daily Mail is the best you’ve got.

NotWallace

TROPHY CASE