Category: Social Theory
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images which know that they are science fictional / Neom
I would never attempt—nor even wish to attempt—to gainsay Gary Wolfe on the matter of science fiction as it appears in ink on pulp or text on screens; he is a model of critical generosity, and a very nice chap to boot. But there’s an aside in his review of the new Lavie Tidhar that…
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they’ll not know the difference
Work is going slow today, which is to say not really going at all; I had a medical procedure this morning—nothing serious: an elective procedure, shall we say, rather than an emergency—and, while I’m in less discomfort than I expected, I’m still fairly distracted. So I figure it’s as good a time as any to…
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Au ‘voir, Oncle Bruno
Very sad to hear about Bruno Latour’s passing on Sunday—though perhaps not exactly surprised, as I was aware he’d been wrestling with some form of cancer for a while. I’m not a good enough philosopher or theorist to talk eloquently of his position in and influence upon various fields of knowledge, except to note that…
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the creation of a non-discretionary door-tax
A great extended-metaphor explainer for money, from Cory Doctorow, channeling Warren Mosler: … consider this thought experiment devised by economist Warren Mosler, one of the foremost proponents of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT, the theory built upon this understanding of money): Sometimes when Mosler is explaining money to an audience, he’ll hold up a handful of…
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organ of leviathan
A very on-point aside found among a splurge of interesting musings on queuing from Jo Lindsay Walton: The Guardian is perhaps the most Hobbesian of the British papers, in its unwavering insistence that any order, however arbitrary, is preferable to disorder, which can only be understood as a war of all against all. Jo Lindsay…