William Davies

William Davies, a sociologist and political economist, teaches at Goldsmiths and has written extensively on subjects such as neoliberalism and the ‘happiness industry’. This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain includes several of his essays for the LRB.

TV Meets Fruit Machine: Faragist TikTok

William Davies, 26 June 2025

In​ the mid-2010s, the Chinese technology company ByteDance studied the leading video clip-sharing platforms, such as Vine and Musical.ly, and identified some crucial weaknesses. The clips were not well formatted for what had become the world’s most popular interface, the vertical smartphone screen. And while the existing platforms were well designed for watching and sharing videos,...

A Crisis in Credibility: Labour’s Conundrum

William Davies, 21 November 2024

Before​ Labour took power in July, there was a lot of talk about ‘foundations’, and it has continued since. The second chapter of the party’s election manifesto was titled ‘Strong Foundations’. On the fourth day of the new administration, Rachel Reeves gave a speech outlining the ways she planned to ‘fix the foundations of our economy’. In a...

Fever Dream: Fourteen Years Later

William Davies, 4 July 2024

George Osborne​ gets booed at the London Olympics. Suella Braverman cracks gags during her visit to a half-built asylum detention centre in Rwanda. Boris Johnson is illegally presented with a birthday cake. A Tory staffer throws up as the exit poll drops. David Cameron keeps his bladder full all night to achieve maximum focus during EU negotiations. The Bank of England takes emergency action...

Anticipatory Anxiety: Generation Anxiety

William Davies, 20 June 2024

In the​ 1980s the term ‘anxiety’ was almost eliminated from the lexicon of American psychiatry. The infamous DSM-III (the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) took an axe to various legacies of psychoanalysis that had dominated psychiatric thinking in the postwar decades. Among them was a preoccupation with anxiety. Anything and everything...

Antimarket: Capitalism Decarbonised

William Davies, 4 April 2024

Thewords ‘market’ and ‘capitalism’ are frequently used as if they were synonymous. Especially where someone is defending the ‘free market’, it is generally understood that they are also making an argument for ‘capitalism’. Yet the two terms can also denote very different sets of institutions and logics. According to the taxonomy developed by...

Thanks to the work of behavioural economists there is a lot of experimental evidence to show what many of us would have suspected anyway: that people are not the rational, utility-maximisers...

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‘What’s​ on your mind?’ Each day, the 968 million people who log in to Facebook are asked to share their thoughts with its giant data bank. A dropdown menu of smilies invites...

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