What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.

Every lecture the course claims to run gets a dated page and a teaching-team reference. A course decides how many lectures it needs; one of them carries a real deck. related: connects lectures to the sessions and assessments they feed.

Involution 101: Geertz's Rice Paddies

Where the term comes from — agricultural intensification that adds labour without adding yield — and why it outlived the paddies

Week 1 · 22 February 2027

Diminishing Returns Before It Was Cool

Involution had a life before the internet — in peasant economies, guild ladders, and the slow inflation of "entry level"

Week 2 · 1 March 2027

内卷: A Case Study in Viral Sociology

How a term for over-farmed rice paddies became the word millions of Chinese internet users reached for in 2020

Week 3 · 8 March 2027

The Unpaid Internship Industrial Complex

Credential inflation as involution — more qualifications required for the same job, with no corresponding rise in what the job pays or does

Week 4 · 15 March 2027

996 and Its Discontents

Presenteeism and performative overtime — the 9am-9pm, six-day culture that turns "working hard" into a signal rather than an output

Week 5 · 22 March 2027

The Red Queen in the Boardroom

Zero-sum competition through a game-theory lens — why running faster doesn't get you ahead when everyone else is running too

Week 6 · 12 April 2027

The Content Treadmill

Social platforms reward volume and recency over quality, turning attention into another arena where more effort buys the same reach

Week 7 · 19 April 2027

Publish or Perish (Also This Course)

Academia's own involution — citation counts, grade inflation, and a syllabus that gets more detailed every year without teaching more

Week 8 · 26 April 2027

Tang Ping and Its Critics

Lying flat, quiet quitting, and FIRE as exit strategies from zero-sum competition — and the critiques of each as private fixes to public problems

Week 9 · 3 May 2027

Trainees, Testing, Real Estate

Three case studies in comparative involution, checked against each other for where the mechanism actually holds and where it's just a metaphor

Week 10 · 10 May 2027

How (Not) to Fix a Zero-Sum Game

What intervention-design theory says about changing incentive structures versus just redistributing who suffers under them

Week 11 · 17 May 2027

Closing Lecture: Getting Off the Treadmill

What actually changes, and what doesn't, once you can name the loop you're standing on — a wrap-up, not a solution

Week 12 · 24 May 2027