The global emergency has been emerging since at least the early 1970s but most people, especially the rich and powerful, have chosen either not to see it or pretend it does not exist. Clearly, it’s a challenging subject but, at the same time, there’s no shortage of evidence to support the view that something unprecedented…
Bushfires are commonplace in Australia and have been for many years. But they’ve recently reached new levels of intensity. They started early this year and become widespread long before the official ‘fire season’ was supposed to arrive. This time, however, the impacts and implications are no longer confined to the bush. Only last week, after…
I’ve recently been clearing out old files and discarding redundant material. Our recycling bin has seldom been so full of old paper. Yet I’ve also rediscovered valuable items that had fallen out of sight. They include letters from old colleagues and friends, short items I’d written for now-forgotten publications and the occasional gem of an…
Of all the ideas put forward by Karl Marx one that has always resonated with me is his view that people are ‘authors’ of their society yet have forgotten their authorship. In one sense this is unexceptional. Not everyone has the time, opportunity or breadth of mind to appreciate the social construction of reality, the…
Is Collapse Inevitable? (2024) By now even the sceptics, deniers and fossil fuel companies know that some form of global collapse is quite possibly just around the corner. A report from the Global Systems Institute in late 2023 confirmed the now undeniable fact that several major tipping points in the global system were about to…
Interrogating net delusions The works that have been considered thus far have each tackled aspects of the IT revolution in fairly straightforward ways. They amount to what I am going to call a ‘first wave’ of critique in that they deal with fairly obvious topics and employ quite straightforward thinking and analysis. Few or none…
Part two of this series summarises suggestions for ‘reform and renewal’ offered by Astra Taylor, a New York based writer, filmmaker and activist. It’s a ‘middle-of-the-road’ approach that’s well worth taking seriously (and augmenting with other accounts). We then draw on Misha Glenny’s analysis of the ‘dark market’ to show how the Internet has created…
To Save Everything Click Here, Penguin, London, 2013, 413 pp. + xv It’s probably fair to say that most people are increasingly bedazzled by the rapid appearance of new electronic devices, apps, social media and the dizzying array of options that they offer. Yet under the conditions imposed by globalised, corporatised late capitalism few opportunities…
Mass surveillance is fundamental threat to human rights says European report (Harding, 2015). Millions stolen as hackers hit banks (Yadron & Glazer, 2015). Spyware and smartphones: how abusive men track their partners (Williams, 2015). Introduction This short essay began as a series of reviews for the UK journal Futures. By the time I’d finished, however,…
Here be Monsters. Is Technology Reducing Humanity? Richard King, Monash University Press, 2023 Intro. The fetish of progress What most proponents fail to appreciate are the social, economic and political considerations under which tech innovation occurs. We came to see ourselves as intricate, largely autonomous systems no different from complex machines. We began to see…