∆ Before 2020 I’d never taken much interest in Elon Musk. But the man becomes harder and harder to ignore. Is Musk a genius? Well, if a genius is someone who doesn’t just master a field but changes it forever, then possibly he is. He can lay claim to a talent for rethinking, for going […]
∆ In 1998, Bill Joy, the founder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, co-author of Java script and chair of a presidential commission on the future of IT research, was invited to speak at a tech conference. The title of the conference was ‘Telecosm: the World after Bandwidth Abundance’. “From the moment I became involved in […]
My good friend Aaron the Seneca is sceptical. ‘Who would have thought I was so important?’ he asks, with gentle irony. ‘I know, right?’ I say. I know what he means. He’s not talking about himself: he means all of us.
Who would want to spy on nobodies like us?
Revised 13/12/2024 Tues 7 January, 2563 BE (2020 AD). The old lady was up before dawn, as she always is. She and her husband farm a few rai of land in Isan, North-Eastern Thailand, growing vegetables, rice and sugar. On this landlocked plain it gets hellishly hot in the middle of the day, and the […]
THE CONSPIRACY MYTH by Charles Eisenstein — A Response ‘The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution — the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology — are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the […]
‘Never resist a sentence you like,’ wrote Baudrillard in Cool Memories (1990), and his incandescent style overflows with irresistible sentences. Take, for example, the passage on religious iconography and the death of God, leading up to the stunning epigram: It is through the death of God that religions emerge. A beautiful sentence, dazzling in its […]
TELEVISION, SIMULATION, AND THE SADNESS OF ASTRONAUTS “We set out to explore the moon and instead discovered the Earth.” — William Anders, Apollo 8 astronaut. Television — or at least, the image dissection technology at the core of it —was invented by Philo T Farnsworth II in 1927, but it did not bring him much […]
“The tactic of the terrorist model is to provoke a surplus of reality and to make the whole system collapse under it.” — Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (2002). ∆ Baudrillard’s work is coolly psychedelic, giving us the same sense of dizzying replication that we love in doppelgänger stories and much science fiction. He was […]
My first real encounter with the Thought Police. This essay, part of a series applying Jean Baudrillard’s simulation theory to contemporary events, has been suppressed by WordPress. The piece evoked a series of mass-shootings in 2011-12, viewing them in the light of the document usually referred to as The Report from Iron Mountain. It sketched a timeline of […]
“It is through the death of God that religions emerge.” — Jean Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation, 1981) “What comes after God? What follows in the wake of our letting go of God? What emerges out of that night of not-knowing, that moment of abandoning and abandonment?” — Richard Kerney (Anatheism, 2010) Whence, whence this creation […]