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 Media
On the perils of social media
In 2010 the journalist Ginger Gorman, who was then working for the ABC in Queensland, interviewed Mark Newton and Peter Truong, a gay couple with a five-year-old son, born to a Russian surrogate mother.
Politics for Beautiful People
There’s disagreement about who first described politics as “show business for ugly people”: some commentators attribute the zinger to Jay Leno, others to political consultant Paul Begala. But there is broad agreement that whoever it was identified a genuine phenomenon. Politics in the era of mass communication has indeed become more “mediated” – as focused... Continue Reading →
Five Stars for Us! A Review of Steven Spielberg’s ‘The Post’
I was just four months old when the Pentagon Papers were published in 1971, but I remember very distinctly the mixed emotions that ran through my mind when I first clapped eyes on that historic edition of the New York Times in my local library. For here was everything I loathed and loved in one... Continue Reading →
Byte Back: On Two New Books About the Internet
At what point, I sometimes wonder, did Google’s motto ‘Don’t Be Evil’ become a standing joke? Was it when the multinational started monetising the information collected on its users? Or was it when it decided to avoid paying taxes? Surely it can’t have been as late as 2009, when it gave the US National Security... Continue Reading →
‘Pro-this, pro-that, anti-this, anti-that’: Everything that’s wrong with progressive politics in one, self-defeating artwork
"How we gonna make this shit okay to be a Nazi out here?" demands a guy in a red beanie, his bearded face filling half the shot. "That's bullshit, bro, it's not okay! He will not divide us!" He paces the street like a lion in a cage, circling back to the camera, angry. "He... Continue Reading →
The Dialectics of Truthiness
So, ‘post-truth’ has entered the lexicon. And not just via the boffins at the Oxford English Dictionary, who have made it their word of the year for 2016, but also via our own Prime Minister, who this week dismissed Bill Shorten’s attempts to elicit some answers about the Bell Group affair and Senator George Brandis’... Continue Reading →
Media Culpa: Journalists Take Responsibility for Trump
The late Alexander Cockburn once suggested – mischievously, as was his wont – that the principal reason The New York Times published a "Corrections" column every morning was to convince its readers that everything else in the previous day's paper had been 100% true, morally as well as factually. In this way The Gray Lady... Continue Reading →
L’Affaire McGuire: Eddie is a dinosaur, not a monster. There’s a difference.
Just when you thought it might finally be over – the demented accusations, the non-apology apologies, the corporate lemon-sucking/opportunistic advertising – two very different interventions served (briefly) to resuscitate the latest Eddie-centred shitstorm ... One came courtesy of The Footy Show’s Sam Newman. Looking, as he invariably does, like a man who’s been injected with... Continue Reading →