Social Control

How Much Is COVID Being Used as a Pretext for Imposing Ever Greater Levels of Social Control?

Large corporations, especially Big Pharma, Silicon Valley and giant online retailers like Amazon.com, have profited enormously from COVID-19, increasing their already massive wealth—and political influence—to record highs not seen since the Gilded Age of the 1890s. To put a fine point on it, “The wealth of the richest 0.00001% of the U.S. now exceeds that […]

Davos reveals building blocks for “green” social credit system

Kit Knightly This morning, on one of the WEF’s live-streamed panels, Alibaba Holdings President J. Michael Evans claimed that the company is working on an app that could track an individual users carbon footprint. The former-Goldman Sachs vice-chairman told the audience of the “Strategic Outlook: Responsible Consumption” panel: We’re developing, through technology, an ability for …

Books About Wars in Your Country

A brief history of books, resistance, the police and politicians. It is humanly impossible for even the most learned judge to have read every book referred to in their court. For a brief while this week, the judge conducting the trial of activist Vernon Gonsalves, an accused in the Bhima Koregaon incident of 2018, became … Continue reading Books About Wars in Your Country →

Electric Media and All at Once-ness: Marshall McLuhan on ‘Our World’ broadcast (1967)

“In McLuhan community is based in pattern recognition, not in the nation state but in fragmented smaller groups, which are most often communities-at-a-distance, in global ecumene. Central here is not the citizen, but the communicant. McLuhan’s nomads are bad citizens. This is also a community of speed: speed as a set of interactions in simultaneity: actions, in not sequence, but […]