Category: Technology

  • Creating Freedom, by Raoul Martinez

    This looks like a very worthwhile read. Comes highly recommended, and if you’re interested in understanding and acting in these strange times, sounds like one for the Christmas list. From the review in The Guardian:  Creating Freedom is, in part, a mashup of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, James Lovelock’s The Revenge of Gaia, Thomas…

  • Post Truth | Hypernormalisation and the Radical Response

    In a post last week on the ‘Fake News’ scandal and the way that our information sources have become distorted, narrowed and – some now claim – deliberately confused by digital algorithms, I concluded by saying: In the chaos of this truthless mental and political environment, we more naturally turn to brands for security, to…

  • The Circle

    Very excited about the forthcoming film of one of the best – and most important – books of last year. Dave Eggers’ technological vision in The Circle is, I think, absolutely spot on, and resonates with a lot of what I’ve written, especially in chapter 6 of Getting High. 

  • When We Lose Touch, We Lose Feeling

    Came upon this in a cafe up in Bayswater. When all is smooth and screen-like, do we lose our ability to feel too? From The Forecast, a publication from the same stable as The Monocle. Not online, so seek it out. 

  • Post Truth 1

    Two stills from Adam Curtis’ excellent polemical documentary, Hypernormalisation.  They’re from a section on the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR, and the parallel collapse of any sense that any grand claims could be trusted, among a people who had been asked to believe one pack of lies, and then revolt, only to –…

  • Outbrain, In Your Brain: If Dream-Hacking Is Coming, Advertisers Will Be Licking Their Lips

    A friend sent me this TED talk the other day. It’s a really fascinating look into how (in very simplistic terms) neuroscience is beginning to ‘hack’ into our brains, and locate exactly where different thoughts are lodged. The presenter is funny, and tells a good story about how the BBC had latched onto one speculative…