My new book, Brave New Wild: Can Technology Really Save the Planet? is out and available at/through all fine book stores. And hopefully some disreputable ones too!
Brave New Wild is out and proud!
A New World of Warcraft
Though few of us would dispute the proposition (commonly attributed to George Santanya) that those who cannot remember the past are preparing themselves to repeat its mistakes, it’s advisable to keep your hand on your wallet when it comes up for sale in the marketplace of ideas, especially in times of open conflict. As David... Continue Reading →
Nature through a different lens
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 →
Interview with The Paradigm Shift on Brisbane’s 4ZZZ
https://paradigmshifton4zzz.com/2024/07/15/s2e30-technocriticism-with-richard-king/
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 →