This explains how a society without villains or conspirators, composed of good-willed but self-seeking individuals, can produce a culture that so many of its members despise.
Me, The Brand
We live lives so completely dominated by commercialism and monetary exchange that we think of everything, even ourselves, in the terms of the marketplace. Not content with turning time into a commodity (to be earned, spent, wasted, saved), we now endeavor to turn ourselves into commodities, brands, our own tiny little multinational corporations - Me, [...]
Twitter Away Your Life
We start as social creatures, isolate ourselves into small rooms writhing with power strips, then make friends with similarly sequestered people, trying to re-create the very communities we’re avoiding.
Class Is Back
Class is back in the US as the ownership society crumbles. Bush hoped to be proud father of the rightwing economic revolution’s grand project. Instead, he is its undertaker.
What Shall We Do With Our Future?
Prospect Magazine asked 100 writers and thinkers to answer the following question:
Left and right defined the 20th century. What’s next?
The responses they received were overwhelmingly negative. Almost every respondent expected the world to stay as screwed up as it is, and most expected it to get worse. The list of the dichotomies they see [...]
Open Knowledge 1.0
March 17th 11am,
6:30pm 2007 —
Open Knowledge 1.0— at
Limehouse Town Hall
On the 17th March 2007 the first all-day Open Knowledge event is taking place in London. This event will bring together individuals and groups [...]
Unnecessary Words
In my pursuit of ridding my life of the unnecessary, it would be foolish for me to ignore the non-corporeal unnecessary things; words, phrases and ideas that, like their physical brethren, seem useful but actually cost us dearly, this time in both misunderstanding and the unwitting perpetuation of ideas we might not agree with.
I [...]
Playing at Identity
Some of us like to think that we define ourselves by what we do, or by what we own, or by what we consume, but in reality we define ourselves by how we define ourselves. We take one half of our composite identity, our social identity, and internalize it; making the other half, our personal [...]
These are the ramblings of 