The editor of SFRA Review built his latest column around my @aeon.co essay "The Looting of Science Fiction." Chuffed to see the argument land in the field's flagship SF-studies journal - Silicon Valley keeps the aesthetics of SF and bins the warnings. sfrareview.org/wp-content/u...

The article can be read in full open access through the Roskilde University repository: forskning.ruc.dk/en/publicati...

A nice one from the SF-studies world: my essay on Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 - on turning speculative fiction against the speculative logics of finance - picked up an Honorable Mention for the 2025 SFRA Innovative Research Award! Congrats to winner Regina Kanyu Wang!

They spent a decade wanting to destroy the government. Now Palantir has $13.7bn in its contracts, Andreessen sits on its Pentagon board, and SpaceX got $1.6bn the same day Musk pledged $100m to the GOP. They didn't lose the war on state. They privatized winner. www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Some good news worth sharing: @distinktionjournal.bsky.social is now Q1 in both of its categories - Sociology & Political Science, & Social Sciences (miscellaneous) - with its SJR rising from 0.472 to 0.708. Readership has also grown by roughly 15–20% each year, which is another piece of great news.

Some good news: our proposal Hijacked Futures / Recuperated Futures has been selected for The Sociological Review Monograph Series. Really happy to be co-editing it with Ana Alacovska (CBS), a great scholar and brilliant collaborator. Looking forward to thinking, writing, and speculating together.

Final article of the special issue is out! Erdogan Sima (University of Lapland) reframes state datafication as a technopolitical project, showing how it depoliticises politics & reshapes agency through Rancière's concept of the "police order." Fully open access. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Corriere della Sera, one of Italy's oldest and most widely read newspapers, devoted a full column to my @aeon.co essay how tech elites mine science fiction for its aesthetics while discarding its democratic politics. www.corriere.it/il-punto/la-...

I've just submitted the manuscript of my new book, Fictional Worlds and Financial Realities in Speculative Literature and Film, to Palgrave Macmillan! It reads six works of SF - Gibson, Stross, Robinson, Villeneuve, Hawley, Garland - as a way of seeing how finance colonizes the future. More soon.

Book update: Drafted Chapter 6 on Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, reading the film as the convergence of AI & speculative capital. It shows how consciousness is manufactured and owned as proprietary capital, and how the founder’s sealed bunker prefigures corporate governance beyond the democratic state.

One thing I like about the UK is the sheer intensity of local politics and grassroots struggles. I just went to a local event at a church in Brighton about these issues, and it was amazing.

What a book! It grabs you from the very first pages.

6th article out! Dominik Zelinsky argues Silicon Valley leadership is shifting from charismatic “visionary founders” to more paternalistic, control-heavy authority. Using Weber, he frames this as a crisis of charisma & a drift toward “techno-feudal” legitimacy based on entitlement and personal rule.

New article out in International Political Sociology, "Making Finance Legible: Speculative Fiction & the Sociology of Futures". It explores how finance builds invisible systems - debt, derivatives, algorithms - that shape the future, & how speculative fiction makes them visible. Link + thread below.

Currently reading a 2017 New York Times interview with Peter Thiel - this is where he explains why he prefers Star Wars to Star Trek! www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/f...

Today, Palantir posted their manifesto to millions. I published an analysis of exactly this text in @sciasculture.bsky.social, arguing it functions not as political theory but as a corporate manifesto for the nationalist-militarist faction of the tech oligarchy. www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Got a grant from the Sociological Review Foundation for my workshop, "Who Owns Tomorrow? Sociology, Materialised Science Fiction and the Privatisation of Futurity"! It’ll be at UCL’s Centre for Capitalism Studies in September 2026 - more on speakers and the programme soon.

The fifth article in the special issue I’m editing on Silicon Valley is out! @maxhaiven.bsky.social introduces the Worker as Futurist project: 13 Amazon workers writing speculative fiction about ‘The World After Amazon’ - reclaiming the future from those who’ve monopolized the right to imagine it.

I’m giving a talk at my university today called “Corporate Leviathan: Tech’s Reactionary Turn and the Politics of the Technocapitalist Man.” This is the image of the corporate leviathan I’ll be showing!

I have spent years theorising post-politics. The concept still explains why radical critique circulates freely while the structures of power remain untouched. If that question interests you, start with my book! www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/1...

The repoliticised subject of the 2020s - passionately engaged, perpetually outraged, yet incapable of transformation - isn’t evidence that post-politics is over. It’s evidence that post-politics continues under new subjective conditions. My review of Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics is now out in EJST.

Arrived in Cambridge for a talk about how Silicon Valley materializes science fiction. Brought a guide. Feeling less perplexed already! @quinnslobodian.com @bentarnoff.com

Visited my two favourite bookshops in Copenhagen today. Ended up getting six books and having five conversations about books and life. Not a bad Saturday!

The proofs just landed for my review of Anton Jäger's new book Hyperpolitics, forthcoming in European Journal of Social Theory.

Same episode: Fisher said it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Industry’s update: we don’t even need to imagine it. We choose it. “We choose to be ruined rather than change”.

New article in Global Studies Quarterly - the first academic piece developing my “materialized science fiction” framework. Thiel, Musk, and Andreessen don’t just love SF; they’re turning it into a blueprint for sovereignty. Fully open access: academic.oup.com/isagsq/artic... Short thread ↓

Have you read Anton Jäger’s new book Hyperpolitics yet? If so, I’d be curious to hear your take. I did, and couldn’t resist writing a review - especially since it sparked some thoughts about post-politics. It’s forthcoming in European Journal of Social Theory.

Saturday diagnosis: we escaped post-politics only to drown in its louder, angrier ghost.

Book Writing Update: Drafting chapter 4 on somatic capitalism through the lens of Alien-Earth. The show itself isn’t great but it sparks some fascinating questions about “materialized science fiction,” transhumanism, longevity, and AI - how Silicon Valley dreams of rewriting the human body and mind.

From science fiction to political reality: proofs are in for my article, “Materialized Science Fiction: The TechOligarchy’s Blueprint for a New Global Order.” Forthcoming in Global Studies Quarterly.