Archive

Ten Years of Terror: Michael Dillon

Ten years of the War on Terror I think has to be locat­ed also in the con­text of more than ten years of lib­er­al wel­fare since 1989, and the dis­so­lu­tion of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War structures. 

Religion and World Politics part 18
Zionism and Its Discontents

It’s an emo­tive term, a value-laden term, every time we men­tion Zionism. In fact, as a mod­ern doctrine—and that’s what it is, quite a mod­ern doctrine—it’s only real­ly been around a rel­a­tive­ly short time. Really it came into being at the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry, where pres­sure groups and Jewish con­gress­es led by peo­ple like Herzl began to con­tem­plate the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a home­land for the Jews.

Hearsay Culture #252 — Prof. Ben Peters on the History of the Failed Soviet Internet

The Soviet expe­ri­ence sug­gests some­thing real­ly impor­tant for us today, which is that net­works are entire­ly com­pat­i­ble with sur­veil­lance. And many of our favorite things to talk about, then, peer-to-peer pro­duc­tion, or end-to-end intel­li­gence, kind of missed the point that I think is now obvi­ous. That whether you’re the NSA or Google or who­ev­er else…you’re a gen­er­al sec­re­tari­at, seek­ing to pri­va­tize our pow­er, and you are sur­veilling us, because you have a net­work in place.