Virtually Lost

Garry Robson is Professor of Sociology at the Jagiellonian University’s Institute for American Studies in Krakow, Poland. He has taught at universities in the UK and Poland since 1995 and written widely on a variety of subjects including class, masculinity, and community in the context of sport cultures in No One Likes Us, We Don’t Care: The Myth and Reality of Millwall Fandom (2003); class, gentrification, and the social structure of London, in London Calling: The Middle Classes and the Remaking of Inner London (2003); intercultural experience and social media use among sojourning international students in Digital Diversities: Social Media and Intercultural Experience (2014, with Malgorzata Zachara); and numerous articles and book chapters on race and football; social class, accents, and dialects in Britain; the British New Labour government and therapy culture; Poland in the European Union; and, latterly, the philosophy of technology, surveillance capitalism, and technocracy.

Introduction

1. Big Nihilism: How the Silicon Valley Culture Hurts Young People

2. The Road to Technocracy: From Sir Francis Bacon to the World Economic Forum

3. Shaping Twentieth-Century America: Elite-Military Social Engineering

4. Sustainable Development as Technocracy: Population Control and the Corporate Capture of the Environmental Movement

5. Human-Machine Systems and their Discontents

6. The Classroom Laboratory #1: The Self-Esteem Movement, the Therapeutic Ethos and Utopian Education Reform.

7. The Classroom Laboratory #2: The Child-Machine Interface, Social Emotional Learning, and the Data-Mined Pupil as ‘Standing Reserve’.

8. Conclusion: Technocracy Unchained Vs. the Soul of the World