Articles
Co-opted by Capitalism
September 21, 2020
Earth Day’s fiftieth anniversary, which fell on April 22, marked a strange celebration for climate-change deniers. Breitbart News, the notorious mouthpiece of the alt-right, published an article that day under the headline “Michael Moore–backed ‘Planet of the Humans’ Takes Apart the Left’s Green Energy Scams.” The following day James Delingpole, who once wrote in The Telegraph that “it would be nice to think one day that there would be a Climate Nuremberg” for any and all “who talked up the global warming scare,” tweeted that Moore was his “new hero.” Marc Morano, who runs the denialist website ClimateDepot.org, deemed the film a “tour de force” in an interview with the Canadian far-right outfit Rebel News.
Read articleRead articleDigital Hyper Abstraction
September 16, 2020
While earlier forms of money consisted of anything from sea shells to sheep, coins made of gold and silver gradually emerged as the most practical means of exchange and for the storing of value.
Read articleRead articleFar-right media are after us. Here’s what we think of them.
September 11, 2020
The inevitable has happened: Adbusters has been caught up in the far-right’s hysterical, post-truth fantasia. To understand how the rabid right turns fact into fraud, abandoning even the pretense of truthfulness, read on. You are about to witness an example of how information is forced through the ideological meatgrinder, emerging out the other side as inflammatory delusion.
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David Graeber
September 5, 2020
David Graeber, the anarchist intellectual whose early efforts in Zuccotti Park made Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement, died Wednesday. He was 59.
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Welcome to Plastic World.
September 4, 2020
“I want to say one word to you. One word,” whispered the voice of prudence in The Graduate. “Plastics.” Cheap, malleable, disposable, and conducive to mass production, plastic was a byword for the boundless potential of postwar industry.
Read articleRead articleThe Plan is to Have No Plan
September 2, 2020
The plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and three thousand become a normal thing, and then to create massive confusion about who is responsible ...
Read articleRead articlePissing into the ocean.
August 28, 2020
O, that moment of spreading warmth, of near union with the elements. the squeeze of release, the pleasure of pressure abating, the discharge of personal intensity. It feels wonderful. and, as everyone knows, rapidly dissipates into nothing.
Read articleRead articleI'm not against surveillance per se.
August 24, 2020
I’m not against surveillance per se. I think it’s a very important technological tool that can help humanity fight against this epidemic, and against future epidemics, and we need to use it. But we need to use it responsibly and carefully, so we don’t end up losing our freedoms in order to get protection from epidemics. There is a huge danger of the rise of totalitarian regimes worse than anything we’ve seen before.
Read articleRead articleDear World Leaders,
August 14, 2020
We, the people of Earth are now speaking with one voice. And we demand some systemic changes:
Read articleRead articleLet's Play
August 4, 2020
Maybe we will keep playing what’s on the score in front of us, just as we’ve been taught. Habits we acquired so long ago we can’t even remember. Otherwise it’s chaos, right?
Read articleRead articlePost-COVID engaging differences
July 28, 2020
Those of us who aren’t on the Covid frontlines have been told to stay home. That is our job. (Meanwhile, our actual job may or may not have been eliminated.) But as the weeks roll into months, we’re discovering that doing nothing in a crisis is its own kind of stress. Confine stessed-out people long enough and something strange happens. It’s called the Third Quarter Phenomenon. And we’re in it now.
Read articleRead articleTime For Big Tech to Pay Up
July 21, 2020
Once called the “fourth estate” for its power, crucial to democracy, to check the three official branches of government — legislative, executive, and judicial — journalism has suffered a hemorrhage of resources since the advent of the digital era. While social media became a vaster and faster channel for news, papers’ print circulations and advertising revenues dwindled, forcing major newspapers to go online and many smaller, local ones to shut down entirely. “Between 1970 and 2016,” Jill Lepore wrote last year in the New Yorker, “five hundred or so [American] dailies went out of business; the rest cut news coverage, or shrank the paper’s size, or stopped producing a print edition, or did all of that, and it still wasn’t enough.”
Read articleRead articleLooking Back in Anger
July 13, 2020
In matters of life and fate, timing is everything. Culturally, socially, materially, the setting of your upbringing, specific to time and place, cannot but impress itself on you. And the parts of your upbringing that are not unique to you, but which are shared by all your coevals, likewise inform their sensibilities, bringing about a cohort of young people with similar experiences, common attitudes, kindred beliefs — in other words, a new generation. At least, that is the first assumption of the theory of generations. Generations, the theory holds, are defined by the events that their constituents witness together; by the culture that shapes them and which in turn they shape. Some generations are noted for the upheavals they lived through, others for those they precipitated.
Read articleRead article1 - Will we end our love affair with the automobile?
July 7, 2020
The automobile is a hundred years old. In a mere century, we’ve manufactured billions of them — and pumped trillions of litres of gasoline to keep them running. The oil and auto industries rose in titanic tandem, both creators of unimaginable wealth and sources of employment for generations of workers, around the world.
Read articleRead articleThis is powerful
June 30, 2020
Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.
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Fuck It All