Slowly catching up on the blogging guerilla warfare
A while ago, I discovered a blog written by an academic I knew only for one of his great books Ringmar, Erik (2008). Identity, Interest and Action: A Cultural Explanation of Sweden's Intervention in the Thirty Years War (Cambridge: CUP, Cambridge Cultural Social Studies). I realised that this impressive academician senior lecturer double Dr. Ringmar serial important book publisher was really more kind of a cool guy you'd like to hang out with at the local pub. He resigned after a year-long controversy for the blog entitled "forget the footnotes" on his academic employer the London School of Economics. He was writing whatever he bloody pleased calling cats cats, some professors "notoriously self-important wanabees", the LSE not better than the London Met, and the head of the school an "anti-intellectual businessman". Of course the kids there loved this rock n' rolling Ringmar dude, but the rock-hard n' ruling establishment a lot less. Anyway the guy got it all planned, since he already had a job guaranteed elsewhere. The point was to demonstrate the hypocrisy of our so-called democratic institutions on free speech. It all got clear to me in the column he wrote for the Huffington Post. Many people got fired for writing, or more rightly lashing out, about their jobs. Why? Because it hurts the shareholders, it ruins the stock-market value of the institutions owned by capitalists. Hence the last taboo remaining in our democracies is the market: "The market has become a threat to freedom. The market is today the only authority that never needs to justify its power over us."
Ringmar calls for a cyber guerilla tactic by blogging against the market to blast this last citadelle against our natural right to free speech. He published a free e-book, and almost free print version, A blogger's Manifesto.
For me this guy is the next coolest academic after Indy (not the last one from the unbaringly long name about crystallic alien skulls movie though), and he's the kind of academic I'd like to become.
