WELCOME to the web site of Bob Hughes, author of "Dust or Magic" (a study of the history of computer-based media and its working culture), campaigner on human rights issues, and senior lecturer in publishing at Oxford Brookes University.

I am working on a book about "life, work and technology as if profit didn't matter" for publication by Pluto Books in early 2011. Some of these writings give a foretaste:

• "Make them eat chips" - a review of Anthony Wilhelm's influential but surprisingly little-criticised book Digital Nation.


• Unhealthy Obsessions - a short article for Red Pepper examining the murky background to UK Immigration Minister Phil Woolas's recent pronouncements about population and immigration. (December 2008)


• "Suits and Creatives" - an article about the so-called Creative Industries: for the inaugural issue of Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation. It draws on the work Michael Burawoy, and my own, dreadful experiences in advertising in the 1970s and 80s.(January 2007)


• "From Useful Idiocy to Activism" (and the 177kb PDF version ) presented at the 2005 Critical Computing conference in Aarhus, Denmark.


• "Class war on your desktop" - a short piece from November 2003 about capitalism and computers, for the trAce Online Writing Centre.


• "Old realities run riot in the new economy" - a review of Chris Benner's: Work in the New Economy - Flexible Labor Markets in Silicon Valley - for Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, February 2006


• "Narrative as Landscape" - presented at the 1997 MENO workshop on Hypermedia and Narrative.


• An example of "Morphscript" - a technique I worked out in 2001 for turning a series of captioned images into a rolloverable, user-controlled animation - and an example showing how it can be used to create richly-annotated texts. It uses a fairly short Javascript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

These are two campaigns I'm involved in: No-One Is Illegal - which campaigns for the abolition of immigration controls - and The Campaign to Close Down Campsfield. Campsfield, just north of Oxford, is one of Europe's spreading "Gulag Archipelago" of prisons for immigrants).