Archive

How an Algorithmic World Can Be Undermined

All they have to do is write to jour­nal­ists and ask ques­tions. And what they do is they ask a jour­nal­ist a ques­tion and be like, What’s going on with this thing?” And jour­nal­ists, under pres­sure to find sto­ries to report, go look­ing around. They imme­di­ate­ly search some­thing in Google. And that becomes the tool of exploitation.

Disposable Life: Griselda Pollock

At the inter­sec­tion of the pol­i­tics of art or lit­er­a­ture or film and polit­i­cal the­o­ry, I’ve been think­ing about dis­pos­able life through a num­ber of lens­es, par­tic­u­lar­ly through work on the Holocaust and work that I’ve been doing with Max Silverman on a slight­ly dif­fer­ent ele­ment of it called con­cen­tra­tion­ary memory.” 

Disposable Life: Max Silverman

My approach to the ques­tion of dis­pos­able lives is this: In an age of late cap­i­tal­ism, advanced tech­nol­o­gy, and mass media, are lives eas­i­er to dis­pose of now than in the past? And my response is, unfor­tu­nate­ly, yes it is eas­i­er now. And this isn’t sim­ply because of the tech­nol­o­gy that is avail­able today that sim­ply was­n’t avail­able in the past.

Disposable Life: Gil Anidjar

In usages of dis­pose, dis­po­si­tion, dis­pos­ing, there is always a ques­tion of putting in order, and putting things in their place. Which also means of course hav­ing the pow­er to do so.

Roger Berkowitz on Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt loved it when unex­pect­ed things hap­pened in pol­i­tics. She thinks and thought that spon­tane­ity, new­ness… She used the word natal­i­ty,” which is often mis­used and abused in her work by oth­ers, but it means birth, birth­li­ness. And she thought that what made human beings dif­fer­ent from oth­er ani­mals is not that we were ratio­nal, but that we could start things new.

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. 

Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble

I’m going to pro­pose to us that the Cthulucene might be a way to col­lect up the ques­tions for nam­ing the epoch, for nam­ing what is hap­pen­ing in the airs, waters, and places, in the rocks, and oceans, and atmos­pheres. Perhaps need­ing both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, but per­haps offer­ing some­thing else, some­thing just maybe more livable.