Consumerism has turned us into the new proletariat while our devices have switched off our brains
consumerism
Posted inEquality, General, Health, Lifestyle, Media, Tech
Popular art and the homogenisation of viewing subjects globally
The global hype around the HBO television series, Game of Thrones (GoT), which ended with what was apparently generally perceived by fans as an anticlimax of sorts, made me reflect once again on the pertinence of the intellectual work of that indomitable French thinker, Bernard Stiegler, for grasping the way that contemporary electronic technology is […]
Posted inEquality, General, Health, News/Politics
A world in need of redemption
This morning my two sons and I were having a texting exchange on Skype, while all of us were on our computers and online for various reasons — I was working and chatting to them in-between reading a PhD-student’s latest chapter of his thesis, and at least one of them was working while chatting too. […]
Posted inGeneral, Tech
The high cost of technologically controlling our social environment
Few people are in the position, or have the means, to be able to know just how detrimental the incremental control of our social environment – and our own feelings – by technological means really is. In a nutshell, it is a process that is gradually extinguishing the very core of our being. In his […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics, Tech
Why we need a politics of ‘spirit’ not consumption
Most people reading this are probably wondering what a “politics of spirit” could possibly mean. After all, it seems like an oxymoron to juxtapose “politics” and “spirit”. I would agree with that, at first sight anyway. Until you read Bernard Stiegler’s transfixing book, The Re-Enchancement of the World, subtitled: The Value of Spirit against Industrial […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle, Media
The fragmented bodies of consumerism
The advertising industry seemed to be working really hard to get the consumer’s attention this festive season. A few ads caught my eye — for the wrong reasons. While browsing at Stuttafords I was confronted with an image of a woman’s legs while the rest of her body formed the shape of a Christmas tree […]
Posted inGeneral, Media, Tech
The ‘stupidifation’ of our societies and failure of universities
It may come as quite a shock to learn that, contrary to what we are constantly told through the media, we actually live in the age of the systematic “stupidification” and infantilisation of society. What, I can hear most readers say with exasperation and indignation — we live in the age of information, of “knowledge […]
Posted inLifestyle, Media
The problem with the Rémy Martin man
Mayihlome Tshwete is the face of Rémy Martin. The billboard is plastered arrogantly in Rosebank (you can’t miss it if you’re driving down Bolton Road). The kind of masculinity advertised by the campaign — “You only get one life. Live them” — features young men such as Tshwete as the “product” of the slash generation. […]
Posted inBusiness, Environment, Lifestyle
Who are you calling radical?
The planet needs activism. It is being drilled, mined, excavated, pumped, and fracked more than ever before. Rivers are clogged with clingwrap, Simba packets, and toxic dyes; saturated with the run off from crops that are lathered in pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilisers. Forests are being wiped out: Even in the DRC where the Congo […]
Posted inLifestyle
A little known history of cocaine (Part 4)
For the part three of the series, please click here. In 1906 the US passed the Pure Food and Drugs Act that formally began the regulation of cocaine and the opiates, limiting their use to the medical sphere. In 1914 the Harrison Act was passed, which can usefully be seen as the beginning of the […]
Posted inEnvironment, Lifestyle
Our alien mother ship
I’d just watched the new Tom Cruise sci-fi about alien machines who invade the planet to suck up Earth’s resources. The movie has a happy ending, though: the alien mother ship is destroyed and Tom gets back to his rustic cabin, his family, nature. Like in most sci-fi’s, the planet is fought for and saved, […]
Posted inLifestyle, Media
The Harlem Shake and Western illusion of freedom
Co-authored with Arsalan Khan When five teenagers in Queensland, Australia, uploaded a video of themselves dancing to a short excerpt of Baauer’s song Harlem Shake it immediately went viral, garnering some 400 million views and spawning well over 100 000 copycat versions. Critiques of the fad thus far have pointed out that it looks nothing at all […]