Raymond Williams - Communications

Williams's fascinating investigation into forms of communication as they stood in 1962 - computers, radio, television, printing, photography, film - remains remarkably relevant today. The idea that reality is primary, and that communication of that reality secondary, is debunked - if we take the view that there is life, and then afterwards accounts of it, we degrade art and learning. Communications are, he argues, a major way in which reality is continually formed and changed. This is Williams's compelling introduction to modern means and institutions of communication.

Robert Reich - We need to talk about the real reason behind US inflation

Corporate giants are raising prices even as they rake in record profits. How can this be? Because of their unchecked power

Since the 1980s, when the US government all but abandoned antitrust enforcement, two-thirds of all American industries have become more concentrated.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/11/us-inflation-market-power-america-antitrust-robert-reich

Lovia Gyarkye - Permission to Imagine

A new collection of Stuart Hall’s writing offers a guide to the limits of representation in building anti-racist politics.

Gilroy and Gilmore open Selected Writings on Race and Difference by situating Hall as a cultural theorist and an educator. Although Hall, who taught at the high school and university level, would bristle at being confined to just two roles, his work in both fields shaped his approach to writing. As a teacher, he helped students develop their ideas and theories, which required abandoning dogmatic thinking and the desire to always be right. These experiences resulted in writing that isn’t primarily concerned with answering questions correctly or incorrectly. In “Absolute Beginnings: Reflections on the Secondary Modern Generation” (1959), Hall meditates on the limits of the British education system. Instead of teaching students to think critically, schools, Hall argues, are engines of propaganda, “making students familiar, through education, with the social and class barriers to education and culture which the society has already imposed.” As they get older, these lessons are reinforced through popular culture. The shows they watch, the music they listen to, and the books and magazines they read calcify their perceptions of class distinctions, making it harder for them to imagine a world different from the one they live in.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/permission-to-imagine

McKenzie Wark - Theory Daddy

The 1978 Schizo-Culture issue of the journal came out of a conference of the same name that Lotringer organized with John Rajchman in 1975. It brought together William Burroughs, Kathy Acker and John Cage with Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Jean-François Lyotard. The poster for the event was emblazoned with quotes from Deleuze about desire and Foucault on power, which signalled the will to go beyond the Freudo-Marxist dispensations then a commonplace among the New Left.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/theory-daddy

Carolyn Biltoft - Reading Roland Barthes in the Age of Misinformation

Barthes’s concept of myth is particularly relevant for our own era of misinformation, which has a tendency to feed and foment conspiracy theories of all kinds. Yet, as noted, myths do not traffic in “lies” per se; indeed, they actually move us away from simplistic true/false binaries and toward the more complex psychological terrain of credulity and incredulity. Straightforward “fact-checking” might not be sufficient to dispel the structures of myth or account for why people come to hold certain beliefs and deny others.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/reading-roland-barthes-in-the-age-of-misinformation/

Л.А. Алексеева - Идейно-теоретические взгляды Франца Фанона

Монография посвящена анализу мировоззрения Франца Фанона — представителя революционной демократии Африки периода борьбы за освобождение от колониальной зависимости. В ней  рассматриваются его теоретические и социально-политические взгляды, позиция по вопросу о национально-освободительной революции и т. п., выделяются демократизм воззрений Фанона, его готовность к революционным преобразованиям и вместе с тем подвергаются критике противоречивые, непоследовательные моменты в его концепции.

Alexander Galloway - Uncomputable: Play and Politics In the Long Digital Age

A journey through the uncomputable remains of computer history Narrating some lesser known episodes from the deep history of digital machines, Alexander R. Galloway explains the technology that drives the world today, and the fascinating people who brought these machines to life. With an eye to both the computable and the uncomputable, Galloway shows how computation emerges or fails to emerge, how the digital thrives but also atrophies, how networks interconnect while also fray and fall apart. By re-building obsolete technology using today's software, the past comes to light in new ways, from intricate algebraic patterns woven on a hand loom, to striking artificial-life simulations, to war games and back boxes. A description of the past, this book is also an assessment of all that remains uncomputable as we continue to live in the aftermath of the long digital age.

Юлия Штутина - Анархооптимизм и история человечества

О книге Дэвида Гребера и Дэвида Венгроу «Заря всего»

Последняя книга Дэвида Гребера, написанная в соавторстве с археологом Дэвидом Венгроу, вышла в Европе и США через год после смерти знаменитого антрополога-анархиста. Ее авторы не только предлагают отказаться от целого ряда устаревших концепций исторической науки и обновить популярные представления о ней с помощью недавно открытого материала, но и зовут читателя в будущее, к переустройству сложившихся социально-экономических структур в пользу более свободных и справедливых сообществ.

https://gorky.media/reviews/anarhooptimizm-i-istoriya-chelovechestva/

Paris Marx - Facebook’s “Metaverse” Must Be Stopped

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse is no utopian vision it's another opportunity for Big Tech to colonize our lives in the name of profit.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/11/facebook-metaverse-mark-zuckerberg-play-to-earn-surveillance-tech-industry

Fred Scharmen - Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space

Many societies have imagined going to live in space. What they want to do once they get up there whether conquering the unknown, establishing space “colonies,” privatising the moon’s resources reveals more than expected. In this fascinating radical history of space exploration, Fred Scharmen shows that often science and fiction have combined in the imagined dreams of life in outer space, but these visions have real implications for life back on earth.

For the Russian Cosmists of the 1890s space was a place to pursue human perfection away from the Earth. For others, such as Wernher Von Braun, it was an engineering task that combined, in the Space Race, the Cold War, and during World War II, with destructive geopolitics. Arthur C. Clarke, in his speculative books, offered an alternative vision of wonder that is indifferent to human interaction. Meanwhile NASA planned and managed the space station like an earthbound corporation. Today, the market has arrived into outer space and exploration is the plaything of superrich technology billionaires, who plan to privatise the mineral wealth for themselves. Are other worlds really possible? Bringing these figures and ideas together reveals a completely different story of our relationship with outer space, as well as the dangers of our current direction of extractive capitalism and colonisation.

Mark Dery - A Close Reading of the QAnon Shaman’s Conspiracy Manifesto

How RFK Jr., Naomi Wolf, and an NYU Professor Ended Up on the Same Page as QAnon Cultist Jacob Chansley

The “QAnon shaman” Jacob Chansley, the tattooed dude having an Excellent Adventure in Mike Pence’s Senate chair on January 6 put a photogenic face on the insurrection, and on Trump’s Idiocracy. Barechested, covered in neo-pagan tattoos, brandishing a spear, and sporting a fur headdress with horns, Chansley was catnip to media outlets. Was he a Burning Man bro gone MAGA? Adam Ant on ayahuasca? Or, as one YouTube wag put it, what you get “when you throw a Republican, a ton of shrooms and MDMA, a scratched DVD of Vikings Season 1, and a sweaty yoga mat into a boiling pot”?

https://lithub.com/a-close-reading-of-the-qanon-shamans-conspiracy-manifesto/

Marco D’Eramo - Bitmagic

The problem with cryptocurrencies is that as more and more are ‘minted’, the code of the subsequent block on the chain becomes increasingly complex, requiring ever more powerful computers to decrypt it. This means that whoever possesses the most advanced computers is able to mine the most tokens.

As a result, a digital arms race began, a fierce contest within the world of nerds. This variegated galaxy of libertarians, anti-finance leftoids and ‘cypherpunks’ has gradually developed into a fully-fledged sect with its own rites and lexicon, its believers, heretics and enemies.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/bitmagic

Григорий Голосов - От пост-демократии к диктатуре: консолидация электорального авторитаризма в России

Принятие поправок к конституции в 2020 году и думские выборы 2021 года стали важными вехами консолидации авторитарного режима в России. Особенностью российского авторитаризма является то, что с точки зрения происхождения этот режим является постдемократией, то есть результатом перерождения «дефектной демократии» в авторитаризм. На протяжении 2000-х и начала 2010-х годов механизмы такого перерождения носили преимущественно манипулятивный характер. Так, в конституции 1993 года были заложены элементы как суперпрезидентской, так и полупрезидентской системы, и манипулирование ими сыграло важную роль в укреплении персоналистской модели авторитаризма. Другим важнейшим инструментом автократизации стала смешанная несвязанная система выборов: в 2003 году она позволила «Единой России», получив 37,6 % голосов и проведя меньше половины одномандатников, сформировать устойчивое большинство, а в 2016 и 2021 годах сохранять конституционное большинство, получая лишь около 50 % голосов по партийным спискам. Вместе с тем, консолидация авторитаризма была достигнута в 2020–2021 годах не столько благодаря манипулятивным механизмам, использующим элементы демократического дизайна, сколько благодаря силовым методам подавления оппонентов, характерным для традиционных автократий. Таким образом режим был вынужден отказаться от тех преимуществ, которые дает электоральным автократиям их способность управлять рисками в условиях «управляемой конкуренции» и правдоподобной имитации демократических процедур.

https://liberal.ru/lm-ekspertiza/ot-post-demokratii-k-diktature-konsolidacziya-elektoralnogo-avtoritarizma-v-rossii

David Graeber, David Wengrow - The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.