ST. PETERSBURG -> MOSCOW 1918-2018 The Revolution Revisited 2nd Edition! commemorating the final chapter in the Russian Revolution on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the relocation of the revolutionary government from Petrograd to Moscow. Brest-Litovsk signed but civil war brewing, food shortages no longer spur on the revolutionary spirit, but now become a […]
before we discuss the trolley problem we need to find out what happened to the brakes for no-one builds a trolley without brakes but if the brakes were not working we need to find out why was it sabotage? worker action? were the brakes just poorly made? and if so, why? or the brakes were […]
The defiant optimism and energy behind the DiEM25 initiative is flagging due to uninspiring and unrealistic goals. To help counter this tendency, DiEM25 must contend with and reject an implicit Euro-chauvenism in its program. Prosperity, solidarity and security in Europe can not come at the expense of exploitation and unacceptable living and working conditions in the productive […]
>>this essay is in progress, expect changes, it may also morph into two or more separate essays<< It is ironic, in this age of advanced scientific and technological affordances, suffused with the triumph of reason, that the status of truth is seen to be in crisis. This may be due to the fact that the technologies […]
How do we know what we know? How does the data, the stimulus, the agencies which we experience as reaching us from outside of us become the impressions we interpret as knowledge? The production, giving forth, of knowledge occurs in obscure spaces within each of us, a domain of natural nano-technology which has only the […]
Liberal and Left are not the same thing, they are not interchangeable, each describes a different political position which is generally at odds with the other. In an age where the right is on the rise in all the highly developed economies, it is important to make this distinction. Many liberals are fine with fascism, […]
On Sublime Data There is a first datum that precedes and informs all data. Data is literally, etymologically a given, plural form of datum, from dare “to give”. Data is what we receive, it is the noumena which we variably and variously discern into phenomena. For a foetus in gestation, data comes through the flesh […]
The bottom layer of Benjamin Bratton’s stack model of the Internet is the Earth. Obscure and unfathomable (but not incalculable) like our own bodies, the Earth is the locus of a complex of chemical processes we still rely on every day. The Earth is the wellspring of all wealth that is generated through human labour […]
The materiality of digital devices is strictly disciplinary down to the chemical level of electronic transmission[1], from sensors to memory to processors to pixels. Microscopic views of computational circuitry reveal that digital data is reproduced in perfect nano-Taylorist robot factories, row after row of infinitesimal, ultra-specialized machines doing the same thing over and over according […]
There is no ecology without economy. Marshall McLuhan famously quipped “When Sputnik went around the planet in 1957 the earth became enclosed in a man-made environment and became thereby an “art” form.”[1] McLuhan pleaded for an ecology among the media that would save literacy. [2] “For the first time the natural world was completely enclosed […]
