2024 On The Sphinx

Compiling my list of favourite blog posts from this year, I was struck by how many of them seem to be from Substacks, or similar platforms like Buttondown, rather than traditional blogs. As ever, this does lead me to wonder whether I’m missing a trick, or at any rate being thoroughly Quixote-like in not just persisting with an old-fashioned blog rather than a newsletter but also actually subsidising it (not least by paying the No Ads tax) rather than trying to monetise my ramblings (it will not surprise anyone that my total income from adding a ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ button has been zero). On the other hand, who would pay for this tosh?

I think I have successfully overcome the last vestiges of any ambition to be a Significant Public Intellectual and trying to use this blog as a means of leveraging attention – I’ve managed to avoid getting into any public spats with dodgy Swiss research centres this year, which is the main reason viewing stats are down – and have indeed managed to spend less time on social media in general, not least because Ex-Twitter has ceased to generate any new Thucydides misattributions (just intermittent bursts of the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ thing) and Bluesky is still small enough that squashing Thucydides misattributions takes relatively little time.

So it’s a question of whether writing occasional blog pieces here does anything for me besides serve as a distraction from proper work – and on the whole it does, though it’s an open question whether this year’s periodic rants about GenAI count as the productive working-through of relevant ideas or as a total red herring. I am finally starting to feel a bit more like myself after four years of Long COVID, as might be judged from the relative absence of self-pity in the blog this year – which meant that I’ve relied less on this place as somewhere to keep my hand in at writing anything at all, but at the same time can feel grateful that it seems to have done the trick over the last few years. Looking ahead to 2025, I really need to get on with finishing some long-overdue books, but it seems entirely plausible that this will inspire more posts rather than fewer.

In the meantime, partly because I have written fewer (but also, arguably, better) posts this year, and partly in order to make this one a bit less unwieldy than usual, I’ve decided to try to be more disciplined, and just pick a single post from each month.

January: Screwface Capital on the enshittification of both academic publication and universities. “It does appear as if it is basically impossible to get a job as a university leader these days without a grand outside-the-box synergistic strategy for radical restructuring…”; this hasn’t got any less true over the course of the year.

February: Slave to the (Algo)rhythm on JSTOR’s ridiculous ‘if you liked this article, you might enjoy this sixty-year-old publication which has a couple of the same keywords’ widget, and its possible impact on student understanding. “We may at some point identify significant changes in research, reflecting the younger generation’s radical eclecticism and obliviousness to traditional narratives of disciplinary development…”

March: Shoulda Woulda Coulda in which, as ever, I seek to learn important life lessons from the cats. Notably, the pointlessness of long-term individual research plans. “Do I look like a man with a plan? I’m just a dog chasing random ideas, though to be fair I do have some idea what to do with one if I catch it… The idea of drawing up a five-year strategy seems absurd, in a world where resources are not instantly available but have to be hustled.”

April: No More Drama reflecting on the choices involved in presenting archaeological sites to particular audiences, with specific reference to ancient Philippi. “The site management knows which side its bread is buttered, as at least four of the various tour groups we passed (or rather, stepped out of the way of as they charged through), the majority of the ones that weren’t sulky/distracted Greek teenagers, were expressly following in the footsteps of St Paul…”

May: The Style Council muses randomly (in response to another excellent piece by Henry Farrell, https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-apocalyptic-systems-thriller), on the fictions of factional representation in historiography. “On the one hand, we’re saddled with a history that often involves an uncomfortably close relationship to story-telling, sometimes of the most banal kind, and on the other we’re repeatedly enjoined, or expected, to confine ourselves to the supposedly plain facts rather than indulging in excessive moralising.”

June: Trust In Me on the rhetorical aspects of GenAI bullshitting. “As someone commented in one of my focus groups, it doesn’t write like a student – and the point is not the snark that, yes, it can place apostrophes correctly for a start, but rather that it shows no sign of the caution and humility (sometimes in excess), the sense that things are always more complicated, that undergraduates have learnt is appropriate.”

July: Twelve Days in the Year. No particular point or coherence to this, as it is simply an account of a single day – something I’ve now been doing, with only occasional lapses, for a year and a half. I am wondering whether it’s worth continuing, as hardly anyone shows any interest – but when the only other post this month is another variant on my GenAI ranting, the practice does have its uses…

August: Die Like A Dog. Lots more GenAI stuff this month, especially focused on the fact that summarising tools may be a far greater threat to student learning than all the fuss about them getting their essays written by ChatGPT – but the point of my blog has always been that it’s for everything that interests or enrages me, not just academic stuff, and changes in veterinary practice certainly fit the latter label: “my sick cat is not your continuing professional development opportunity.”

September: Breathing. By this point I was actively trying not to spend my whole time getting cross about GenAI in university teaching and learning, not least because I’d put together a complete list of all the stuff I’d written over the last year or so, and it added up to a lot of words. But they keep pulling me back in… “I’ve been trying to think of a suitable analogy for the rise of Generative AI. Currently, I’m torn between cigarettes, asbestos and neoliberalism.”

October: Best of All Possible Worlds. Yes, there is an alternative timeline in which I went off to Nashville to become a songwriter under the tutelage of Kris Kristofferson…

November: Waterloo. On Richard Duncan-Jones and different approaches to academic life. “If your goal is neither to drive your enemies before you and hear the lamentations of their graduate students, nor to be acclaimed and envied by all as the dominant figure in contemporary ancient history, nor even just to be invited to somewhere nice occasionally to give a paper, then slipping away quietly is no tragedy.”

December: Land of Make Believe. “Do we need to devote huge energy to fact-checking something that is manifestly what would result if you gave Lawrence Alma-Tadema an unlimited CGI budget and asked him to make a Warhammer 40K movie?” Why the crass ahistoricism of Gladiator II matters in a way that the fantasy of Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings doesn’t. Besides the crappiness of its crap sharks.