The plot of the third season of HBO’s Westworld takes an unexpected leap: in moving from the titular park to the external world, what is found is not the anarchic capitalism of the cyberpunk genre that so influenced it, but an earth held under the sway of an invisible regime of near-total planning and administration. Not […]
Read More The Haze of PosthistoryThat globalization as it has been known, from its beginnings in the 70s and 80s and rapid acceleration in the ‘posthistorical’ 90s through today, has been under threat is not a new observations. Ever the target of discontent, it was the enemy of choice for a hosts of movements, formal and informal, that spanned the […]
Read More Speculations on Post-Covid AmericaThe essay below is the rough draft of a paper I penned sometime last year, but for various reasons I think that it remains a bit too fragmented and all over the place to be treated as more than a lengthy blog post. Despite being about the intersection of some of my favorite topics—weird American […]
Read More The Invisible LandscapeA new internet is incoming. As reported by Financial Times yesterday, the “New IP”—a proposed paradigm-shift in the architecture of the web—was unveiled before the United Nations’ International Telecom Union by Huawei, China Unicom, and China Telecom. It’s a bid to rework the rework the existing IP addressing system by allowing devices in a common network to […]
Read More Tactile PowerMaybe COVID will finally realise the dream of 1990s sociology and its 'network society': the end of face-to-face contact and the full virtualisation of the public sphere. — Anton Jäger (@AntonJaegermm) March 10, 2020 Harvard University is closing for remote learning. The rest will follow. — John Robb (@johnrobb) March 10, 2020 It plays well […]
Read More TelepresenceRana Foroohar: The coronavirus outbreak is very likely the thing that tips us into full-blown recession; I would put that risk at pretty close to 50% for 2020 https://t.co/Pz4kDk0z0R — Financial Times (@FinancialTimes) March 9, 2020 “This is the big one”, declare Rana Foroohar and Edward Luce in FT. This ‘big one’ is the active threat […]
Read More Coronacrunch 2 / Industrial Policy Round-Up 3Sum issues 13 & 14, dedicated to the strange temporalities of Shanghai and Ljubljana respectively, has dropped in conjunction with this year’s Fabula Festival. Sum 13: here Sum 14: here Between the two issues its a fun line-up: Mikkel Bindslev in dialogue with Amy Ireland, Bindslev in dialogue with Anna Greenspan and Nick Land, Primož Krašovec, […]
Read More Sum 13 & 14: Shanghai Frequencies + LjubljanastropheVia Foreign Policy: “Get ready for closed borders and crashing markets”. It’s an article where the liberal commentariat finally crashes into full doomercore mode, detailing a series of escalating, mutually-reinforcing tendencies capable of, at the limit, tearing apart the world order as we know it. James Palmer, the piece’s author (and FP’s Beijing-based senior editor), proposes […]
Read More CoronacrunchPlacing some tweets here, for posterity’s sake, of liberals and neocons clinging on for dear life as the solid foundations of the political establishment are swept away, just as they were in 2016: "I'm wondering if Democratic moderates want Bernie Sanders to be President? Maybe that's too exciting a question to raise. Do they want […]
Read More The FloodDecadence is having something of a cultural moment. The Decadent Society, a book by NYT columnist Ross Douthat, is slated to come out at the end of this month, and several high-profile reviews of it have begun to appear on the internet. One notable piece has been penned by Peter Thiel, published by First Things under the wonderfully […]
Read More Stagnation Conscious
Reciprocal Contradiction 