@tgpb
Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture & Organisation at University of Westminster Wrote a book on the mundane work that makes Big Music work; do editorial bits at Journal of Cultural Economy; some other stuff... https://tgpbennett.wordpress.com
Agree and same. I guess one thing about journal articles is not that it's a useful way of counting (as he says) but that it's a useful fiction where the essay form is made commensurable with other forms of knowledge production. But automating the latter doesn't mean the former will be valued more...
Ah I love this film so much. It did something very odd, and very good, to me when I first watched it about 15 years ago. Had no idea it was being screened in its original location. Go find it!
Today I'm dressing up as the character "Toby" from this book: a frustrated office worker attempts to parlay professional experience into academic credentials; realising the fragility of the HE labour market, he considers the viability of a move into consultancy instead (with hilarious consequences).
One of the prompts for this writing was a wander along the South Bank of the Thames. I stumbled across this little installation, which turned out to be promoting the Dirty Business programme on C4.
Watching it now. It's pretty astonishing.
www.channel4.com/programmes/d...
I saw someone recently going "Bro, sure LLMs aren't perfect but they have absolutely surpassed any reasonable expectation of what you'd expect from the most advanced Turing test - what else more proof of intelligence could you possibly want from them?"
And it's 100% this:
They spent years training thousands and thousands of people to be able to articulate "this thing feels icky" as a systematic critique and then networked them into each other. The results went exactly as you'd expect.
TL;DR/ most (by which I mean infinitesimally most) writing is Bartleby, not Shakespeare.
Yes & more: we can't fully evacuate the mundane & routine from our own writing/thinking. It feels like both sides of AI discourse often rest on an idealised fantasy of pure creation. But there's more Bartleby in Shakespeare, even the odd glimmer of Shakespeare in Bartleby, than many want to believe.
One of the prompts for this writing was a wander along the South Bank of the Thames. I stumbled across this little installation, which turned out to be promoting the Dirty Business programme on C4.
Watching it now. It's pretty astonishing.
www.channel4.com/programmes/d...
π¨Publication Day π¨
Iβm thrilled to announce the publication of my 9th book, Music Technology Panic: Narratives Beyond Piracy, with Anthem Press.
Reaching number nine is a huge milestone, and Iβm excited to finally have this one out in the world.
www.amazon.com/Music-Techno...
As a Chingford resident I can vouch for this.
I refuse to engage with any of this discourse, entirely made up of people making wild generalising claims and deliberately talking at cross-purposes over one another. Maybe social media's not for me.
There's a pretty big contradiction here over where the power lies in this ecosystem. I think the tension between rights ownership and user data ownership is the correct one to point to over how the space is being shaped. I'm sceptical of anyone (like this guy) selling quasi-niche answers though.
Trying my hand at the clickbait genre. Bit of internet nostalgia for you there.
How long does it take to look at art? Are video games really an industry? When is tax policy also cultural policy? When is water infrastructure cultural infrastructure? Should managers be intellectuals? Should intellectuals be managers? How do you make art with MS Excel?
All this and more inside!
Another effort attempt to write my way through what I've been reading. This one is about dwelling, cultural policy and biographies of postwar theorists.
Via Barnett Newman, MF DOOM and J Dilla, Excel artist Oleksiy Sai, AI, and the political economy of pubs.
tgpbennett.wordpress.com/2026/03/01/h...
Another effort attempt to write my way through what I've been reading. This one is about dwelling, cultural policy and biographies of postwar theorists.
Via Barnett Newman, MF DOOM and J Dilla, Excel artist Oleksiy Sai, AI, and the political economy of pubs.
tgpbennett.wordpress.com/2026/03/01/h...
There must be a name for that special type of queue-jumping resentment you feel when you get off the tube but, by the time you've walked to the other end of the platform, another train's arrived and, OUTRAGEOUSLY, those people manage to get to the exit before you. (Apart from "pettiness".)
Posting this on a Friday afternoon because I don't think enough people listened to it last year. I love it.
jankadereit.bandcamp.com/album/shira
π₯ We have had a lot of changes in our editorial line-up in the last few months - check out the new host of AEs www.tandfonline.com/journals/rjc... including @taschn.bsky.social @provokedeconomy.bsky.social Janet Roitman @kathrithm.bsky.social Horacio Ortiz and Lena Pelladini-Simanyi π₯³
RIP Γliane Radigue. A performance of this remains one of my favourite ever concerts
I moved to online teaching across multiple pieced-together precarious contracts while home-schooling 2 small children. I think I did a good-ish job but it was exhausting & I get the outrage over this. But I think I agree with the students - who are claiming against institutions, not their lecturers.
You make an innocent post, go off to teach, and then come back to find you've gone and "done numbers" (in relative bsky terms).
I'm reminded why I was once advised never to represent an argument visually because people will only look at that bit and then it quickly starts circulating context-free.
For some reason, my abiding memory of year six (age 10-11) is Hot Shots Part Deux...?
π₯new episode out this very morning! βWhen the planet hits the balance sheetβ feat. Kristin Asdal & @stistien.bsky.social Stine Engen - hosted as ever by @philiproscoe.bsky.social @addiemcgowan.bsky.social open.spotify.com/episode/4WqW...
If you publish with us and you want us to feature your article or special issue there weβre taking pitches againβ¦
Our slightly exhausted blog has woken up and is now updating www.journalofculturaleconomy.org
Haha yes! Well - I think it's probably(?) quite a reasonable graph but having repeated "please put time on the x axis!" so many times to undergrads, it's definitely not at all intuitive. (I'll refrain from making comparisons between UGs and FT readers...)
(or did I misunderstand the question?)
Every line shows a 25 year trajectory and I guess it's useful to know where they started and ended? It could potentially go from right to left if the proportion of grads in the workforce had decreased (and in some cases it kind of does). But I'm not sure if there's a better way of showing this...?