I have a new article out in the current edition of American Affairs: “From Technocracy and Populism to Technopopulism”. It’s a bit of an expansion on my older blogpost “Technocracy and Populism”. Be sure to check it out! Today, developed nations such as the United States find themselves in a position of deindustrialization, which has locked […]
Read More TechnopopulismThere was an interesting twitter exchange between Nicolas Villarreal, Vole, and myself yesterday on the question of the New Class. Villarreal opened with a comment that I think is the hinge-point of the entire debate: Seems that the debate over whether the "new class" is actually a class hinges on whether human capital/intellectual labor is […]
Read More New Class questionsThe 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 AmericaI recently had a conversation that led me to revisit Mark Fisher’s Flatline Constructs, and in particular, its final chapter, where Fisher undertakes a reading of John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness to illustrate the ‘strange loops’ that characterize contemporary ‘cybernetic capitalism’—and, by extension, illuminate the ways in which capitalism is inducing a “schizophrenization of culture”. It’s […]
Read More Paranoid Style, Take 2An interesting convergence of two sets of writings on populism and technocracy drifted across the tl yesterday: the latest issue of American Affairs, dedicated to the ongoing evaporation of laissez-faire’s hegemonic status in American thought, and a paper on the politics of Italy’s Five Star Movement (5MS) and Spain’s Podemos as being “techno-populist” in orientation. The […]
Read More Technocracy and Populism
Reciprocal Contradiction 