“The Okhrana, the secret police of the GPU, is reported to have invented a filing system in which every suspect was noted on a large card in the center of which his name was surrounded by a red circle; his political friends were designated by smaller red circles and his nonpolitical acquaintances by green ones; […]
Fifth generation warfare (5GW) is conducted primarily through non-kinetic military action, such as social engineering, disinformation, cyberattacks, and the use of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and fully autonomous systems. It is ideological, psychological, biological warfare; at some point it may feature ‘hot’ or even nuclear war. It is all these things; but is it meaningful to characterise it as ‘spiritual’ warfare?
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 W Bush administration, as well as heading the Offices of Political Affairs, Public […]
“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 […]
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 […]
THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY ∆ It was 2551 BE (2008 in the Western calendar), and I was teaching at a school in Bangkok. I wasn’t enjoying it much. A top-dollar international school, but behind the slick PR it was an educational mess. Eight forty-minute periods in a day, and class sizes way too big. […]
‘Never resist a sentence you like,’ wrote Baudrillard in Cool Memories (1990), and his incandescent style overflows with irresistible sentences. If you interrogate them, however — which is perhaps to ‘misread’ Baudrillard — you find that his beautiful paradoxes mask assumptions and transitions which must be explicit in a valid argument. Take, for example, the […]
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 MURDEROUS CAPACITY OF IMAGES In 1981 Baudrillard was announcing, not predicting, the ‘death of the real’. In Simulacra and Simulation, he ironically reveres Disneyland, which he says ‘is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer […]