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I’m doing something I should probably do more often: unfollowing a lot of people on social media. It’s not that they’re bad people. Quite the opposite. It’s that unfortunately good people often share bad things. I block or filter out a lot of people on Twitter and other networks: nazis, bigots, people who point at… [more]
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I’m not the best person to opine on Facebook: during its original meteoric rise I believed its momentum would slow and it would be overtaken by something less obviously dismissive of its users. After all, this was a business built on the belief that its users were “dumb fucks”, as Mark Zuckerberg famously said. So… [more]
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As you can probably guess, some of these titles are working titles. And some of the “last modified” dates are sitting there making me feel bad. We’re also trying to come up with a better band name – the GM bit of DMGM no longer applies, and it wasn’t a brilliant name anyway. My latest… [more]
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I retweeted a post by Common Space editor Angela Haggerty last night. If you’re not familiar with the social network Twitter, retweeting is when you copy somebody’s message so that the people who follow you on Twitter can see it. As part of a thread on Twitter’s toxic abuse problem, Haggerty wrote: Social media abuse is… [more]
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The thoroughly repellent Richard Littlejohn has written yet another anti-trans piece in the papers. It’s not significant in itself; it’s the usual bile from a man who rails against “vicious trolls” while being a vicious troll. But it’s significant because it’s been published five years since another Littlejohn column was implicated in the death of… [more]
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This is superb journalism, very frightening and quite clearly the tip of an iceberg. Observer:Â 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach. The short version: one company surreptitiously and unethically gathered data on 1/3 of US Facebook users and used it to precision-target them with political messages on behalf of the… [more]
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There’s a fascinating piece by philosopher Amia Srinivasan in the London Review of Books about sex, sexuality and entitlement. It’s wide ranging and covers everything from “incels” – self-proclaimed “involuntary celibates” who believe they can’t get laid because women are evil – to LGBTQ people. The core question is whether anybody is entitled to sex,… [more]
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There is a long and noble tradition of giving people a right good kicking in print, but it’s rarely done as well as this. Writing in Current Affairs magazine, Nathan J Robinson sharpens his stiletto and gets stuck into Jordan Peterson, a rabble-rouser who alternates between stating the bleeding obvious and making completely unhinged claims… [more]
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I don’t find Ricky Gervais funny. I thought the US remake of The Office was much better than the original, largely because he wasn’t in it: I couldn’t shift the feeling that his portrayal of a boorish, charmless arsehole wasn’t acting. I’ve been proved right many times since. Writing in Vulture.com, Matt Zoller Seitz takes issue with… [more]
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This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but an algorithm. In the New York Times. Zeynep Tufekci describes YouTube’s radicalisation problem. No matter the starting point, it recommends increasingly extreme content. YouTube has recently come under fire for recommending videos promoting the conspiracy theory that the outspoken survivors of the school shooting… [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
