Some time recently, someone sent me a WhatsApp message contrasting the political positions of Julian Assange of Wikileaks and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Underneath photographs of these two gentlemen, respectively, they read as follows: “Hi, I’m Julian Assange. I give private information on corporations & gov’t to you for free and the media calls me […]
Information
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
The present ‘world dis-order’
Bernard Stiegler, referring to the battle for the attention of (particularly young) users of technical devices such as smartphones, writes about the ‘dis-attention’ that results from this. What he has in mind is the manner in which capitalism, not wasting any opportunity for marketing, uses these mnemo-technical devices to disrupt the flow of attention on […]
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 inTech
The business of cyberwar
Most “connected” people will probably have noticed the symptoms of what is really a war going on right under our noses, even if one does not really put two and two together as far as the bellicose nature of these symptoms goes. I am not only talking about what ends up, mostly, in our spam […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Cyber warfare
In The Information Bomb (Verso, 2005, p. 62), Paul Virilio says the following: “ ‘He who knows everything fears nothing,’ claimed Joseph Paul Goebbels not so long ago. From now on, with the putting into orbit of a new kind of panoptical control, he who sees everything – or almost everything – will have nothing […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Why we always sow the same old reap
I think most readers will be familiar with that unbearable screech which sometimes blasts out of a concert’s or meeting’s sound system. Well, that screech is caused by the feedback into the sound system of some of the amplified sound already produced by the system. Because the sound wave of the feedback is in phase […]