… where politics & culture meet
THERE WAS A popular gotcha back in the day for which tech utopians showed a special fondness. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, with conservative critics still noisily alarmed at the internet and social media, proselytisers for the new technology would dip back into history and unearth some comparable commentator whose own example was comically self-defeating.
The Doomsday Clock was effective Cold War theatre, but does it fail to convey the threat of today’s slowly unfolding existential crises?
The tendency to think of climate change as something in humanity’s future, as opposed to something that is unfolding now, in real time and with lethal consequences, has retreated a little in recent months.
Superficially, at least, David Rieff seems well placed to write a book about woke culture. For one thing, cultural criticism runs in the family: his parents were Susan Sontag and Philip Rieff – both intellectuals with a keen understanding of how subjectivities are shaped by social change. For another, his own work has often displayed an astute grasp of the fraught relationship between the historical, the political and the psychological.
My sense is that political cartoonists are finding it pretty difficult to encapsulate the events of the last two weeks in our sunburnt country girt by sea. Not because they are so depressing: a good cartoonist can always wring dark humour from a tragedy. But because they are so clearly self-satirising.
I thank Alessandra Panizza for taking the time to review Brave New Wild (Jan-Feb), and for her forthright defence of an alternative model of social and scientific development, but her review contains a number of claims (or implications) that misconstrue my argument.
Unassuming as he is, in person and in prose, Carl Benedikt Frey will forever be associated with the great efflorescence of ‘crisis writing’ that emerged in the mid-2010s, in the long wake of the GFC. Though no proselytiser for radical change in the mould of Wolfgang Streeck or David Harvey, his 2013 paper ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization?’, authored with his Oxford colleague Michael Osborne, became part of the mood music of ‘the long interregnum’ – the sense that capitalism was either breaking down completely or approaching an inflection point whose navigation would mean untold disruption.
I first heard Peter Singer speak at the University of Western Australia (UWA) in the summer of 2009. The subject was the ethics of what we eat, and the tone of the talk was open and generous. Some in the audience were hardcore animal-rights people, as one would expect at a Singer gig. But the philosopher’s message was that ethical eating is, in fact, a pretty complex matter, bearing not only on animal welfare but also on economic justice and the environmental impact of agriculture, and that what counted as ethical behaviour in one sphere was often difficult to reconcile with ethical behaviour in others. His advice was therefore to do what we could, advice I for one resolved to follow before hogging into the free wine and nibbles around the Beaux-Arts-style reflecting pool.
When Tessa MacKay first got in touch to suggest that we meet for a coffee and a chat, I did what everybody does these days and immediately fed her name into Google. What I discovered were some remarkable paintings, but also – and less remarkably – a creation entitled ‘Tessa Mackay’ whose talents, successes, ambitions and interests had been (to some extent) curated in the ‘experience machine’ that is the Worldwide Web.
As far as I can recall, the audience laughed just three times at the Perth preview of Raoul Peck’s new documentary, Orwell: 2+2=5: once when the cinema manager, introducing the film, almost said ‘Enjoy!’, before correcting course and wishing us ‘a meaningful experience’; once on hearing Orwell confess his desire to give Sartre ‘a kick up the arse’ in his review of Antisemite and Jew; and once at some footage of a Trump supporter batting away a reporter’s questions on the basis that any criticism of her President was fake news.
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