Sources of knowledge and understanding

11 April 2026

Much of my life seems to involve relearning the obvious.

Like many, I have spent and still spend time worrying about the youngs' shift away from reading, especially my children's. I am an academic, and since I read SE Hinton's The Outsiders (or was it Rumblefish in fifth grade, I have loved books. They constitute the core of my being.

But I find myself also reading less than I used to. I have developed a habit of watching an hour or two of TV of film before sleeping most days. Part of me worries that I am losing my passion for books or getting lazy. So perhaps my concern for the young population is simply transference.

But over the winter I read a "the kids are alright" article by a librarian that began to shift my thinking. The article argued that writing is simply one format for transferring knowledge and that young people have simply expanded the range of information formats they employ, increasing their reliance on videos, summaries, blogs, podcasts, etc. It also points out that knowledge transfer has historically been oral and that writing is a comparatively new technology. Once one opens their mind to this possibility, it makes perfect sense. I grew up getting news from radio broadcasts and evening news programs. I loved watching science documentaries. Why not recognize the value of podcasts, documentaries, and so on?

Many worry that the emotive content leads many to a dull, unquestioning acceptance of knowledge from charismatic influencers. But demagoguery and gullibility has always been with us. One might argue that the post-truth era of AI fakes and internet ravings are actually cultivating a more critical mindset among young people. Studies consistently show that young people are better at discriminating the quality of information than older people. Most effectively compartmentalize the artificial humanity the olds worry about, as this article from the NY Times indicates.

In contemplating these concerns, my focus has been on social scientific knowledge. But yesterday, I had a revelation. "Revelation" is perhaps to strong a term. "Insight" is probably more accurate. I've been lecturing on the long history of racial capitalism the last couple of weeks. By chance, The Dig Radio put out a couple of relevant podcasts to which I listened, following a recommendation to watch The Act of Killing, which makes an incredibly visceral impression. Then, in class, to back up claims that historical slavery in Africa differed from industrial slavery in the Americas, I referred students to Achebe's classic, All Things Fall Apart, telling my students that they can get a feel for how society worked at the time. Then, yesterday, when discussing the Middle Passage, I referred to Lupe Fiasco's Drogas Wave, incorrectly attributing it to Kendrick Lamar. A student commented that she appreciated my use of hip hop references around these topics, and it hit me. To humanize ourselves, our actions, and our policies, we need all these sources of knowledge. A movie, a song, a painting, a dance, all communicate to us different feelings and experiences of the human condition.

And when doing policy, our goal should be to improve the human condition.

AI magic

28 March 2026

I might be sold. I just vibe coded my first app using Claude and Claude Code. And it was remarkably easy.

I know that's what everyone says. "It is so easy." But it was. I doubt it is easy if you have no notion of how to code. You have to at least have a sense of how the code accesses and manipulates data. You have to have some comfort around error codes, so that you can find the right prompt to get them fixed. And at least being able to loosely interpret the code couldn't hurt, though it doesn't seem to be obligatory. But with even my rudimentary knowledge it was trivial. I had my simple app running well in about two hours. And I would not have been able to do it myself without a lot of time and fuss. It might have been fun, but it would never have gotten done.

But I think the truly exciting aspect of this first vibe coding session is that I came up with an app that is uniquely tailored to my use case. I did not have to find a generalized app that can do everything. I developed an app (or Claude developed an app?) that reflects my individual work flow and narrow needs. Magical.

"Quizmaker" is designed to generate reading comprehension quizzes for individual readings or collections of readings in formats that can be directly uploaded my LMS and my Discord Quizcord account for use in class. The app extracts the text from each PDF in a folder, sends it to Claude for quiz generation, allows the user to edit the questions, and then exports each quiz in two formats. Quizmaker will save me hours upon hours of generating my own questions. I recognize that there might be value in composing my own questions, but I do not have the time. This is like having a TA create quiz questions for you.

Next step: Testmaker. Midterm exams are coming!

FAC'ing FAC

8 December 2025

Another prolific blogging semester! Here is my second and probably last post for the semester. Don't know if I was lazy or busy, but I suppose I'll review that around the new year.

Today I am simply writing to announce that part one of a two part podcast with me as a guest dropped last week. The Foreign Tigers podcast is run by two recent KU GSIS graduates. They invited me to share my developing thoughts about the future of capitalism and techno-feudalism. Drawing on Arrighi's work, I argue that we are entering a new systemic cycle of accumulation that I call fully automated capitalism (FAC) and that technofeudalism is the political economic geography toward which the global economy is trending. You can check out part one here. I still haven't dared to listen to it myself!

I had a great time with these guys. I hope we have future chances to explore.

Labor and value

13 September 2025

I've just returned to teaching after a yearlong sabbatical. I clearly need some practice to warm back up. My attempted class discussion on surplus value (based on the first chapter of David Harvey's The Limits to Capitaldid not go nearly as smoothly as I had hoped.

Fundamental to my struggle was my newfound understanding of Harvey's argument that "value" in the economic sense (and the sense that dominates our contemporary understanding) is bound up with the quantification embodied in the money commodity in the evolution of capitalism. The implication of this was tripping me up. It means that even use value entails a quantitative measure of value, even though people often treat it---as I did---as antithetical to quantifiable exchange value. That is, many of us talk about use value as being outside of capitalist exchange and therefore something to prioritize when pressing for social change. Though it is still something to prioritize, it is not outside of exchange. Marx and Harvey are clear that use value is inherently economic because a commodity without use value lacks demand and therefore value.

But I also wanted bring out the notion that some non-capitalist formations have no need to attribute value to the things in their world. If these "things", these products of labor, are not commodities, they do not have use value or exchange value as Marx presents them. Instead, they have value in a different sense, in the send that they are important to survival and social reproduction. Because this latter notion of value is so close to use value, differing primarily in their relation to exchange, I had trouble articulating the concept of surplus value.

If we overlook this complication, the explanation of surplus value becomes simpler. Surplus value is the value created by labor for which labor is not compensated. Value is the socially necessary labor time required to produce a commodity. Labor power is a commodity that has an exchange value. If laborers were compensated for all the value they create, then exchange value would equal value. Due to the unequal relations between the owners of capital and workers, however, workers are not compensated for all the value they create. Instead, their wages buy enough labor power to generate value sufficient not only to pay their wages but also to line the capitalists' pockets.

How this surplus value, this "accursed share", is dealt with is the fundamental problem of capitalism and the core driver of uneven geographical development.