Author: PGR
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Like asking a giraffe to shorten its neck
Shoshana Zuboff’s back in town, and not a moment too soon: By now [surveillance capitalism] no longer restricted to individual companies or even to the internet sector. It has spread across a wide range of products, services, and economic sectors, including insurance, retail, healthcare, finance, entertainment, education, transportation, and more, birthing whole new ecosystems of…
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A commodified, nostalgic aesthetic
” …the visual remnants of vaporwave have long outlasted its radical ideological underpinnings. Almost immediately, its pastel, geometric, softcore aesthetics were gobbled up by media platforms, in particular the image-driven platforms Tumblr and Instagram. The pastiche compositions of Arizona Iced Tea cans and old Windows desktops were very quickly made available on all these commercial…
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The Favourite
I enjoyed this movie a lot: visually sumptuous, as you’d expect of a period drama, but completely lacking in the prevailing fascination with (and fawning over) royalty and aristocracy, choosing instead to portray the English upper classes as fruitcakes, fops, ruthless opportunists, or some combination of all three. So we get plenty of big dresses,…
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Aspirations
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The (exchange) value of education
This is not special pleading for philosophy. The same argument holds for innumerable other subjects which don’t have any direct economic benefit. I always cringe when people quote Socrates’s line “the unexamined life is not worth living” as though it were an argument uniquely for philosophy. All the humanities, arts and social sciences have a…