SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH’S latest documentary is very likely to be his last. Released to cinemas on his ninety-ninth birthday, Ocean has the tone of a valediction: a swan song with whale song, and a shakier iteration of that celebrated reverential rasp. Notwithstanding its five stars in The Guardian and 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it is also something of... Continue Reading →
Fodder for Thought: The Artificial Intelligence of the Modern University
Considered in Greek mythology to be a member of the fifth generation of beings to appear after the creation of the world, Cadmus was a Phoenician prince and the founder of the Boeotian city of Thebes. A great slayer of monsters, he appears in Herodotus as the conduit through which the Phoenician alphabet was introduced... Continue Reading →
Certified Flesh: Why Body Horror Gets Under Our Skin
In Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool (2023), author James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård) is holidaying with his partner Em (Cleopatra Coleman) on the island of Li Tolqa, when he hits and kills a local man while driving back to his resort at night. The next day he is arrested by the authorities and told that the penalty... Continue Reading →
Thinking within the guardrails: a review of Techno by Marcus Smith
For those of us who would like to see a revival of the ‘techno-critical’ tradition in public debate (the tradition of Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul, Neil Postman and Langdon Winner, inter many alia), it is a cause of some irritation that the hegemonic view of technology remains the ‘instrumental’ one.
Talking Trash to Power: The Public Sphere in the Age of Trump
The late journalist Alexander Cockburn had a good line on the legacy media. Referring to the little ‘Correction’ boxes that would appear most mornings in The New York Times, he suggested that the principal reason the paper made such a show of its fallibility was to bolster its reputation for veracity. In owning to these... Continue Reading →
Zooming Out: The Ecomodernist Mindset at Large
The notion of the Anthropocene was first proposed twenty-four years ago by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen. It denotes a geological epoch defined by human activity, and remains an unofficial designation, with the International Commission on Stratigraphy—whose processes appear to be geologically slow—yet to approve it for technical use. Nevertheless, in that quarter of a... Continue Reading →
Standing ground in a turning world: Palestine and the Left
Dan, a former student of mine and now an academic, activist and friend, is referring to the regular rallies that are taking place across the world in response to Israel’s annihilation of Gaza. We are talking, at my instigation, about the character of those gatherings; and while in some ways it feels indecent to focus... Continue Reading →
Simon Gilby: Figuring out the individual
On a bleak industrial state outside Fremantle, Simon Gilby is smiling broadly, waving me up towards the spacious unit that temporarily serves as his artistic studio. His advice was to wrap up warm, which I’ve done, though I notice that Gilby himself is wearing a motorcycle jacket so spectacularly derelict a gust of wind may... Continue Reading →
A Review of Here Be Monsters
By the excellent Bruce Menzies, in The Fremantle Shipping News: https://fremantleshippingnews.com.au/2024/10/16/roaming-among-monsters/
Podcast for Fremantle Shipping News
Today I had the pleasure of sitting down with Michael Barker, editor of the Fremantle Shipping News, to chat about technology and the human condition. We went deep! https://fremantleshippingnews.com.au/2024/06/17/interview-with-richard-king-thinker-author-critic-poet
Nuclear frisson: On Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer
The best scene in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer comes towards the end of the movie. The titular physicist is talking to Einstein, recalling a previous conversation in which they’d discussed the possibility that an atomic bomb would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere. ‘When I came to you with those calculations’, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) reflects, ‘we thought we... Continue Reading →
On nostalgia and AI: An interview on the ABC’s Future Tense
On ABC Listen
Chess, nostalgia and AI: Two recent essays for Griffith Review
Paywalled, I'm afraid, but consider subscribing! The defence: Chess vs artificial intelligence Nostalgia on demand: Streaming memories in the experience machine
Orwell everywhere: Truth-telling in a post-truth age
EVERY NOW AND then a sort of morphic resonance overtakes the world of literature. For reasons that are far from obvious, a number of books about (or around) the same broad subject will suddenly materialise in a way that itself transforms public interest and even shapes public sentiment. In 2023, for example, the name of... Continue Reading →
Who do you think you Uhr? A review of David Marr’s Killing for Country
This review was first published in The Weekend Australian * Running to almost half a thousand pages, prodigiously researched and immaculately written, David Marr’s Killing for Country is surely one of the books of the year. Modestly described as a ‘family story’, it is in fact as solid a work of history as one could... Continue Reading →
Big Tech goes ballistic
A month or so out from Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated biopic Oppenheimer, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community is having its own Oppenheimer moment. Like the director of the Manhattan Project and Los Alamos Laboratory, who famously came to regret his part in the development of the atomic bomb, the Big Tech Titans are falling over each... Continue Reading →
A review of Rai Gaita’s Justice and Hope
As philosopher and broadcaster Scott Stephens suggests in his introduction to Justice and Hope, Raimond Gaita’s principal contribution to the practice of moral philosophy is to have opened it up to readers and audiences that wouldn’t usually encounter it. Most notably in his memoir Romulus, My Father (1998), but also in A Common Humanity (2000)... Continue Reading →
Here Be Media
A talk to the Economic Society of Australia: Monsters in the Machine, Technology, Growth & Human Flourishing An Author Talk with Goldfields Libraries An appearance on the Breaking the Spell podcast
Here Be Monsters Fremantle launch
An open invitation to the Fremantle launch ...
Here Be Monsters reviews
The reviews for HBM are coming in and, so far, have been enormously positive ...
Out on 1 May! My New Book, HERE BE MONSTERS: IS TECHNOLOGY REDUCING OUR HUMANITY?
Order your copy here!
Machine Learning
Me on Schwartz Media's The Weekend Read, reading my article on ChatGPT, published in the April edition of The Monthly
The Wolvadoodles: A Review of Sub-Imperial Power
Of all the recent failures of the Australian mainstream media, the failure to properly report and analyse the trilateral security partnership known as AUKUS must surely qualify as the most pitiable.
How the sausage is made: A review Frank Bongiorno’s Dreamers and Schemers
Towards the end of Dreamers and Schemers, his ‘political history of Australia’, Frank Bongiorno tells us that the term ‘democracy sausage’ first entered public discourse in 2012. The date, he suggests, is significant, for while the coinage seemed on one level to speak to the relaxedness and egalitarianism of the Australian electorate, and even to a sense of celebration and fun as regards the institutions of democracy, its introduction coincided with a sharp decline in public trust in politicians and the political process.
How to secede without really trying: A review of How to Rule Your Own Country
In How to Rule Your Own Country, Harry Hobbs and George Williams consider the phenomenon of micronations, which is to say territorial entities whose members claim independence or sovereignty but which lack diplomatic recognition.
Brave New Wild: Why ‘Resurrecting’ the Thylacine is a Dangerous Idea
In 2021 the National Film and Sound Archive released new footage of the last known thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger.
Zero Gravity: Floating Towards Posthumanism
‘They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence’, rasps Kyle Reese in The Terminator, referring to the Skynet computer system that launched a nuclear attack against humanity in the catastrophe known as Judgment Day. The trope is as old as science fiction itself, and shadows the genre with all of the tenacity of an Uzi-toting T-800.
As Politics Narrows, Divisions Widen (a Note on the Election and the Left)
When Bob Hawke died in 2019, two days before the federal election, many mainstream commentators took the opportunity to remind the prime ministerial hopefuls that in terms of charisma, persuasiveness and popularity they didn’t exactly measure up to the example of the Silver Bodgie.
Review of Who’s Black and Why?
In 1741, the exalted members of the Bordeaux Royal Academy of Sciences met to consider sixteen essays written in response to the following question: ‘What is the physical cause of the Negro’s color, the quality of [the Negro’s] hair, and the degeneration of both [Negro hair and skin]?’
Review of The First Astronomers
‘When profound ideas are introduced to the world for the first time,’ writes Professor Marcia Langton, in her foreword to The First Astronomers, ‘our world is fundamentally changed and the previous understandings consigned to history. There are those who continue to deny the intelligence and scientific traditions of Indigenous people. The idea that the only true science is that of Western thinking must be consigned to history.’
Suture Shock: Humanity goes under the knife
As we become ever more remote from ‘meatspace’, it’s worth considering the role the scalpel and the needle may play in that development.
Not the debate we need: On mitochondrial donation
If a society consisted of human beings who had been partly engineered or edited, would we think about human life in the same way or would we lose a sense of reciprocity with others?
It’s the stupidity, stupid! On technocratic populism
Even as it grows more menacing in point of imagery and political polemic, the Australian iteration of the anti-lockdown/anti-vaccination movement (if indeed it is a movement) still has the air of cosplay about it.
Identity Crisis: Radical Gender Theory and the Left
In his latest series of documentaries Can’t Get You Out of My Head (reviewed by Guy Rundle in Arena Quarterly No. 6), sociologist and filmmaker Adam Curtis focuses on a number of individuals who sit at the uneasy intersection of modern individualism, an increasingly technologised vision of the human mind and human behaviour, and a liberatory politics denuded of grand historical narratives.
Go Slow and Break Things
The short decade between the global debt crisis and the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency was a time of great excitement on the Left. Like the devil in Baudelaire’s The Generous Gambler, capitalism’s power had been based on its ability to convince the world that it didn’t exist; but in the months and years after the financial meltdown, its tail and trotters were distinctly visible to anyone who cared to look.
On Kate Holden’s The Winter Road
‘The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying “This is mine”, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.’ So wrote the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on Inequality (1754) ...
Review of On Life’s Lottery, by Glyn Davis
In Australia, Prime Minister Scott Morrison assures us, ‘if you have a go, you will get a go’. In other words, those who make an effort are guaranteed a shot at success. It follows that if you don’t make an effort, you only have yourself to blame when success remains stubbornly out of reach.
Review of Power and Consent, by Rachel Doyle
Rachel Doyle’s Power & Consent is about as well-timed as a book can be. Published as allegations of rape and a ‘culture of silence’ swirl around Canberra, it is a formidable salvo aimed at a field already strewn with casualties. Indeed, it is almost too well timed ...
Review of On Charlatans, by Chris Bowen
Though Bowen begins On Charlatans by asking why social democratic parties command less support among the working class, he spends the great majority of the book outlining the ‘fake legitimacy’ the populist parties offer them – a combination of post-truth rhetoric, resentful white identity politics, hyper-partisanship and climate-change denialism.
Biotech is about more than ownership. It’s about what human beings are.
To legalise mitochondrial donation may indeed be the moral thing to do, but the broader trend of which it is part requires thoroughgoing analysis, not only by religious groups but also by a material Left whose best traditions have always placed science within a radical humanist frame, not the other way about.
Interview with The Paradigm Shift on Brisbane’s 4ZZZ
https://paradigmshifton4zzz.com/2024/07/15/s2e30-technocriticism-with-richard-king/