Dr Laura James's writings

David Graeber (of Bullshit Jobs fame) spoke at Chaos about managerial feudalism and the caring classes . It's a great talk, describing how everyday people's experience of the workplace is shaping their choices in politics and around Brexit.  He also talks about our focus on production activities, using a nice example of a teacup - you make it once, but use it for service and wash it many times. Graeber recurs in a recent edition of Drew Austin's Kneeling Bus : Last year, I wrote an essay for Real Life about AirPods despite not owning a pair myself at the time. That was intentional and fairly essential to the piece, as I was examining the earbuds’ externalities: how it feels to inhabit public space without an increasingly ubiquitous pair of headphones when everyone else is wearing them. If AirPods offer a near-perfect user experience to the users themselves, what kind of user experience do they impose upon the non-users? (That’s a good question to ask about many things, ...

Last year's thoughts on weeknotes basically still stand: One thing my weeknotes show clearly is that each week there are diverse topics catching my eye, and although I can probably sketch out a few recurring themes, they are all happening in parallel — and most of them are not topics I am actually working on, in a paid sense. There’s not been the clear blocks of time to synthesise any one of these strands, or sufficient bits of time to work through them with others, as I generally think better with others. Seen at Doteveryone's new office: https://www.instagram.com/p/B5dUD_cpwHv/ A lot of last year's yearnotes still stand, too. So what changed in 2019? I left the Trust&Technology Initiative in good hands, but stayed on at the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Cambridge to help as an interim with industry collaborations and miscellaneous research facilitation things. By December a new research strategy manager had started and I was able to han...