TRUMP’S EAR, MAGIC TRICKS AND THE MYTH OF INFALLIBILITY All the powers, all the institutions speak of themselves through denial, in order to attempt, by simulating death, to escape their real death throes. Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy. Such was the case with some American presidents: […]
“Science isn’t really about truth, it’s about power.” This comes close to an admission that his own mechanistic-materialist outlook, too, is predicated not on science but on power. And when he announces in this grandiose and scientistic fashion the end of soul, spirit and free will, he is speaking not for truth but for power.
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” These words are from a brief but memorable conversation the journalist Ron Suskind had with Karl Rove, the chief political adviser and Machiavellian ‘teacher of tricks’ to the Bush dynasty. Rove was senior adviser and Deputy Chief of Staff during the George […]
Legends of the golem, usually sourced as an archetype in Kabbalah, are actually found in Talmud, but may stem from the same magical traditions. According to these stories, sometimes presented as cautionary tales, a rabbi could create a crude, humanoid being, in a travesty of God’s creation. These monsters had no will or intelligence of their […]
Gates repeated his dire warnings in a Netflix Documentary called The Next Pandemic, released on the 7th November 2019 as part of its ‘Explained’ series, and this time he even specified a novel coronavirus instead of vague talk about ‘super-pathogens’. Not only that, but the film-makers visited a ‘wet market’ in Guangdong, China, describing it as a ‘Disease X factory’. Over images of freshly killed creatures stacked together, the voice-over explains: ‘All the while, their viruses are mixing and mutating, increasing the odds that one finds its way to humans.’
RENÉ DESCARTES, DIGITAL GHOSTS AND A WIND-UP SHITTING DUCK Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and […]
ASSANGE’S WARNING, STEALTH TECHNOLOGIES and the STATE OF THE ART in BRAIN / CLOUD INTERFACE I suppose you would have to define robots, now — and the new generation of autonomous machines such as drones and self-driving cars, ships or any other transport — as the visible expression of an invisible system: an intelligence moving […]
Featured image: “Double” by Lena Mikulinskaya Doppelgänger stories came into fashion during the Industrial Revolution, as an archetype in Gothic horror. But while their atmosphere, tone and settings might draw on the imagined irrationalism of the medieval past, such stories unconsciously tap into something powerful but unacknowledged in the contemporary scene at the beginnings of […]
ON EXACTITUDE IN SCIENCE In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the […]
“It might sound great to turn it on — but what if it doesn’t turn off?” Until 2020, I’d never taken much interest in Elon Musk. In late January I was on a farm in North-East Thailand when an evenly spaced line of satellites passed overhead before dawn. Checking online, I confirmed that it was a SpaceX […]