Academia

For the last year or so, left-leaning UK voters have been subjected to the looming nightmare that Reform – a bunch of xenophobes and welfare-state-slashers – might form the next government. There has been very little silver lining to this. The one bit of schadenfreude to be gleaned is the impending annihilation of the Conservatives as an electoral force. For someone (like me) who grew up in the 80s, this is really quite the thing – even if what they come to be replaced by might be even worse.

It is becoming more and more up for question, though, whether Reform are replacing the Tories at all, or merely reinventing them under a new name. There are two elements to this. First, as Reform realises it might have to govern soon, it is walking back some of the more batshit elements of its programme (though many remain!), and at least attempting to talk the talk of administrative competence. It is moving closer in several respects, that is, to a more conventional Tory position, even as the Tories lurch to the right. Second, recall that one of Reform’s major structural problems is a lack of would-be MPs and ministers who are in any way competent. The people who have been elected as local councillors have made them a continual laughing-stock.

To some extent this hole is being plugged by constant defections of former Tory ministers (no, I’m not claiming these people are competent! But they are trumpeted, at least, as showing the party has experience and gravitas). But every former Tory minister who joins (today it was Nadeem Zahawi, tomorrow who knows?) raises the question of whether Reform are killing the Tories, or saving them by giving them a new flag to wrap themselves in. Would a Reform government be, in personnel and to some degree in platform, that distinguishable from the kind of Tory government Truss might have led if she hadn’t gone down in flames so quickly?

This also prompts questions about whether the continual defections of prominent Tories to the party might, at some point, be noticed by some of their prospective voters. Reform holds together a fractious coalition of voters, many of whom do not consider themselves Conservatives and might indeed hate the Conservatives (it is, remember, a protest party above all, and protest parties are not meant to be fond of people who have until recently spent years in government). As more and more Tory grandees join the ranks, might the coalition start to fracture?

I’ve been asked by a couple of friends, who have signed contracts to write nonfiction trade books, whether I have any advice on how to make sure the book gets written. I think in general non-fiction trade writing is quite a different challenge from academic writing, which I discussed here in 2022, when I was working on Limitarianism. But how does one actually make sure the writing gets done, especially if one has a job (academic or otherwise) that already consumes more than 40 hours a week and is prone to procrastination?

Here are some lessons I learnt while working on my book from the Fall of 2022 till the Summer of 2023.

First, yes, one needs dedicated time set apart. I was on leave when I wrote my book (which, under the Dutch system, is actually just holidays one has saved up for many years, but that’s a discussion for another day). I cannot imagine how I would have written the book otherwise, in such a short timeframe. To make things worse, the interest of publishers was so great (with the translation rights for half a dozen languages already sold before I started to work on the book full-time), that I felt daunted. And then, for the first time in my life, I had writer’s block. I was scared I had entered a world (–it’s an industry, really–) where I wasn’t sure I could deliver, and I was freezing. [click to continue…]

In political epistemology, there is a lot of criticism of the metaphor of the “marketplace of ideas,” the thought that people somehow “trade” in arguments or ideas and thereby arrive at true beliefs.* The longer you think about it, the less sense it makes. Ideas come in networks, not as separately tradeable items; “trading” suggests that you don’t have any deep connection to the ideas in question, and if people follow the profit motive, or look for entertainment, rather than search for truth, why expect that somehow, truth would mysteriously result from the process?

But what, then, would be a better metaphor for thinking about processes in which people change their minds, coming to accept new views or arguments? Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the metaphor of moving – in the sense of changing residence, relocating. The verb functions most beautifully (of the languages I know) in Dutch, where verhuizen means something like “re-housing;” French is similar with déménager, where ménage is the household. In my native German, you us the same word, umziehen, as for changing clothes – strange enough once you start thinking about it…

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To all of you – a healthy, flourishing, and meaningful 2026!

To the world – I am less sure where to begin, since 2025 was, politically and morally speaking, one of the worst years since long. Let’s hope for peace, definitely. Responsible leaders with sound morals. Positive tipping points in climate action. A decline of all that crypto/post/neo/full-blown fascist crap that spread like a virus in 2025 (and before – but it seems to have accelerated in 2025). And therefore, I hope that many more people will become more like (a good chunk of) the commentariat of this blog – progressive, politically well-informed, and also asking perhaps the most urgent question at this point in history: what should we do? And what does the answer to that question imply for what I should do?

More and more of my friends are explicitly asking that question, but we are often unsure of the answer. Although I have some thoughts (in fact, I’m hoping to write a book on it), it is not self-evident. But it helps to not think about this question by oneself, but to raise and discuss it with friends, in organisations, and online. And if the answers seem overwhelming, I find that a one-hour walk with a dear person in the fields and the woods does wonders.

Also – I’m glad you are still reading us (and joining the discussions) after all these years, thanks.

I am at the airport in Melbourne (again). I’m sitting in the window eating one of those excellent boxes of kale, broccoli, beans, seeds, peas and a boiled egg that I am grateful are now available at airports. Next to me a father and daughter are observing the world – look at how that plane looks like a giant shark! And oooh, here come the bags!

What looked like an automated process when a Virgin Airlines robot told me my bag on the conveyer belt was heading towards the same destination as me turns out, my eyes now tell me as this adorable pair observe the world out the window, is also a matter of human labour. A human is driving all the bags to the plane.

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My last post described my attempt to generate a report on housework using Deep Research, and the way it came to a crashing halt. Over the fold, I’ve given the summary from the last version before the crash. You can read the whole report here, bearing in mind that it’s only partly done.

As I said, I chose the questions to ask and the points on which to press further. DR extracted the data (I was planning to get detail on this process before the whole thing crashed), produced graphs to my specifications and generated the first draft of the text, with a style modelled on mine.

If I were doing this to produce a report for publication, I’d initially I was about halfway there, after only a few hours of work on my part. But as with LLMs in general, I suspect the final editing would take quite a bit longer.

Still, the alternative would have been either nothing (most likely) or a half-baked blog post using not-quite-right links to the results of Google searches. So, I’m going to keep on experimenting.

Early versions of LLMs were mostly substitutes for medium-level skill. It made it easy for someone barely literate to generate an adequate business email or (in the graphics version) for a complete klutz like me to produce an obviously-AI illustration for a post (Substack expects some kind of picture)

But with Deep Research, I think there’s an amplification of general research skills. It’s ideal for topics where I have some general idea of the underlying reasoning, but am not familiar with the literature and am unaware of some important arguments

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I’ve long been interested in the topic of housework, as you can see from this CT post, which produced a long and unusually productive discussion thread [fn1]. The issue came up again in relation to the prospects for humanoid robots. It’s also at the edge of bunch of debates going on (mostly on Substack) about living standards and birth rates.

I’m also interested (like nearly everyone, one way or another) in “Artificial Intelligence” (scare quotes intentional). My current position is, broadly, that it’s what Google should have become instead of being steadily enshittified in the pursuit of advertising dollars. But I’m alert to other possibilities, including that more investment will deliver something that genuinely justifies the name AI. And I think a lot of the concerns about power and water use, the spread of AI slop and so on are either overstated or (as with deepfakes) are mostly new iterations of concerns that always arise with new IT and communications technology, and can be addressed with existing conceptual and legal tools.

With this background, I thought it would be interesting to try out ChatGPTs Deep Research (DR) on the question of what has happened to housework and why. As I may have mentioned before, I’ve trained DR on a big volume of my own writing. That produces a passable imitation of my style, and means I don’t worry about the ethical issues of plagiarising the writing style of others (of course, standard norms of citation and attribution still apply).

I decided to focus on single-person households, to abstract away from the issues of child-raising (which I want to look at separately) and the allocation of work between partners (about which there is a vast literature to which I can’t add anything new).

Everything went really well to start with. I prompted DR for time use data, then pushed further on with more detailed questions like the impact of air fryers on male cooking habits (I was given one recently and was impressed enough that I promptly bought a second). I asked for a literature search and got references to Judy Wajcman and Michael Bittman[2], both of whom I knew and a couple of people I didn’t. DR missed Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s classic More Work for Mother.

On the other hand, I wasn’t aware of Wajcman’s recent Pressed for Time and hadn’t thought about the broader issue of life administration, which DR pointed out. I gave it a more economistic take, trying to divide labour-saving innovation (electronic bill paying) from the labour costs of more digital consumption (retrieving passwords for streaming services etc).

I got DR to produce a LaTeX file, and was nearly ready to go to digital press when I noticed that the references were incomplete. At this stage, the whole process spiralled into disaster. Every draft seemed to lose more material, and to be worse written. Finally, I demanded an explanation
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I spent a good chunk of the afternoon watching l’Etabli, the film of Robert Linhart’s book (which I own but have never read). It is an arresting depiction of the brutality of the assembly-line and the racalialised hierarchies at work in the factory. The theme of the film is of a Maoist cadre from an academic and privileged background (in philosophy!) who enters the factory to foment resistance and revolution and finds that it is a lot tougher than he had perhaps imagined. But an opportunity presents itself when the Citroen management decide to make the workers toil unpaid for an extra three-quarters of an hour each day to “repay” the gains they’d made in May and June 1968. He helps to lead a strike and watches as the his new comrades are picked off by management and their goons, as immigrant workers are threatened with deportation and they are all subjected to acts of petty humiliation. A year later, we see him lecturing on Hegel at the University of Vincennes (later, I believe, dismantled by the French authorities as a hotbed of leftism).

The film is available to watch for free here (under “Drama”)

It reminded me a little of the Fourth International (Mandel version)’s policy of sending its students and white-collar workers into the “industrial working class” a decade later. Just as the industrial working class was actually disappearing from Western Europe and North America, they decided it was (as previously announced by Marxist theory) central to the struggle to overthrow capitalism. Some of my friends did end up in a car factory in Oxford, from which they were very soon fired once their identities became known. Others gave up good jobs in health and education but failing to find factory jobs ended up working in public transport. One of them I remember absolutely loved being a train driver compared the anxiety and stress of their previous school-teaching life. As for me, I was torn between my misplaced allegiance to the organisation (which in the UK at the time was the International Marxist Group then the Socialist League) and my conviction that this was all a dreadful mistake. So I took the path of least resistance and decided to carry on being a student (a postgraduate one) until the madness blew over. And so I ended up as a political philosopher in a university rather than whatever else I might have become (a lawyer, I suspect).

I heard a rumour that London IT professionals have selected the pub where they will meet when the internet goes down.

It is apocalyptic thinking, perhaps, but it also feels plausible. Though the internet feels permanent, stable and sufficiently distributed to seem impervious to target, this infrastructure that underpins our daily work and life is strikingly vulnerable. Undersea cables get damaged; phone and cable systems go down; and software is frequently corrupted or hacked.

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