… where politics & culture meet
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 →
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.
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 →
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 →
https://paradigmshifton4zzz.com/2024/07/15/s2e30-technocriticism-with-richard-king/
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 →
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 →
By the excellent Bruce Menzies, in The Fremantle Shipping News: https://fremantleshippingnews.com.au/2024/10/16/roaming-among-monsters/
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
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 →
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