Category: Politics
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the contentment of Britain
Will Davies at Teh Graun: It’s not that democracy will end, but that it will be reduced to a set of spectacles that the government is ultimately in command of, which everyone realises are “fake” but that are sufficiently funny or soothing as to be tolerated. This being, of course, a favourite motif of science…
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regression to the mean
It’s not a shock — or at least it shouldn’t be. Rather, it’s a regression to the mean, albeit a notional and imagined mean: a grasping for a glory which was largely lost long before anyone who just voted to retrieve it was born, like a fading actor dressing up in the moth-eaten costumes of…
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a quasi-military device
Loads of grimly chewy stuff in this Will Davies interview. Like this map-is-not-the-territory riff about smartphones, f’rex: What the phone promises you psychologically is not content as such, but a space on the screen that is totally obedient to you. This translates into the illusion that the world, seen through the screen, will be equally…
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semiotics of utopia
It’s yer man Stan Robinson, trying to (quite literally) square away the reductive dichotomy of [u/dys]topia: It’s important to remember that utopia and dystopia aren’t the only terms here. You need to use the Greimas rectangle and see that utopia has an opposite, dystopia, and also a contrary, the anti-utopia. For every concept there is…
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on the contemptuousness of propagandists
Reading this piece about Isaac Levido, the new campaign manager that the Tories have employed this time round, I was struck by this quote from one of the pair of socnet edgelords in charge of their dAnK b0oM3r MeM3Z: “You can have a quote from an economist. Or you can have a picture of a…