Articles
The monsters we helped create
May 28, 2020
While digital tools are indeed democratising, they have also cultivated darker aspects of human nature: Self-righteousness, narcissism, cruelty, ignorance. Hyper-individualism has gone viral, now that we are freed from the restraints of traditional authority.
Read articleRead articleCrisis of Confidence
May 22, 2020
I don’t know the history of confidence. There are no data from which to make inferences about the evolution of human self-assurance. Did doubt plague the early agriculturalists of the Levant the way it does the youth of today? On waking, did they peer into a puddle and think, You look like trash? Did others regard their own reflection with the audacity of Snow White’s evil stepmother or Dorian Gray?
Read articleRead articleMonster Mash
May 21, 2020
Syria's Assad (torturer, murderer), India's Modi (vicious zealot), Brazil's Bolsonaro (total madman), Saudi Arabia's MBJ (killer thug), Israel's Netanyahu (moral midget), America's Trump (idiotic climate-change denier), China's Xi (merciless enslaver) - we cannot allow these monsters to...
Read articleRead articleNation against Nation
May 14, 2020
On the northern bank of the Ottawa River, amid the hurling of stun grenades and tear-gas cannisters, police and Indigenous militants exchanged gunfire, killing one. It was widely reported that Corporal Marcel Lemay of the Sûreté du Québec (SQ), the provincial police force, was shot in the face.
Read articleRead articleNow, for the first time, we pity USA
May 11, 2020
"Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity." — Fintan O'Toole
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The Re-Enchantment
May 5, 2020
“All of them means all of them” — so said the people of Lebanon, demanding that their leaders be sacked. Belonging to every one of the eighteen officially recognized faiths (and more, one expects, that are not), masses of protestors called for an end to corruption, an end to mismanagement, an end to disparity, and an end to sectarian division; in short, a total overhaul of the country’s political class.
Read articleRead articleInformation Wants to be Free
April 30, 2020
Data is the most consequential commodity in the world. If you have access to it, but don’t need it, it has little value. But if you have no access to it, and desperately need it, it is priceless.
Read articleRead articleSurveillance State / Surveillance Capitalism
April 28, 2020
The authorities can see everything people do, every move they make. This situation is comparable to George Orwell’s 1984 — except this is a more extreme version. The corporations know everything people do, every move they make. This situation is comparable to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World — except this is a more extreme version.
Read articleRead articleThe New Face of Surveillance
April 24, 2020
“Big data” is above all the foundational component in a deeply intentional and highly consequential new logic of accumulation that I call surveillance capitalism. This new form of information capitalism aims to predict and modify human behavior as a means to produce revenue and market control.
Read articleRead articleDark Pools of Money
April 17, 2020
Dark pools of dark money roam the financial ecosystem looking for quick kills. Using sophisticated computer algorithms, traders place thousands of orders per second, only to reverse them a few moments later. Sometimes these...
Read articleRead articleImagine a World
April 9, 2020
I now imagine a world where Ceos and Wall Street voluntarily cut their millions in bonuses and donate it to Public Health Departments and Hospitals. I now imagine a world where Bezos, Zuckerberg, Google, Boeing, Comcast, et.al, and yes, even the Koch brothers, literally throw money into ...
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let the crows come
March 27, 2020
"When I die / Throw my body, / Washed and naked, / Over the fence / And let the crows come."
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Change Must Go Viral
March 20, 2020
"It struck as if from on high, like a bolt of lightning. After striking an insulating material such as lawn or earth or flesh, lightning often leaves behind scorch-marks in branch-like patterns, which trace its path through the stricken material as the latter undergoes electric breakdown. Likewise, as the coronavirus contagion has surged through its human medium, it has left behind a pattern of destruction laying bare the structural failings of the world as we knew it before the shock of the pandemic.
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The Delusion of Economics
March 13, 2020
Human beings are in a state of denial about the calamity of calamities our economy is actively engineering. Unfortunately, we needn’t look far to find one of its major sources, namely, the modern study of economics (in particular, Economics 101). Each year, millions of students have their noses forced into textbooks that investigate or illuminate no causal connection extending from the economy to the ecosphere. (In this formulation, the environment provides fuel for industry, but suffers no return impact from it.) We’ve known for ...
Read articleRead articleSurviving the Plague
March 6, 2020
Ordinary life was suspended during the epidemic. Confraternities, associations that brought laypeople together for charity work and socialising, could no longer hold meetings. Public sermons were forbidden. The city’s schools were closed. Taverns and inns were shut. Gambling dens and barber shops were closed, ball games forbidden.
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