The Utopia that Never Was
Todd Hayen About three years ago, before this Covid swill was poured down our throats, my wife pointed out an article in the Toronto Star about a proposal to...
Virtual Reality and the Network State
Ryan Matters There is a willingness in this world for people to adopt new things because they are told to do so. There is also a willingness for people...
Occult Totalitarianism
Todd Hayen Oc·cult (adjective) [ ə’kʌlt ] 1. supernatural or magic, 2. not understandable, 3. secret, 4. hidden, 5. difficult to see. All five of these definitions could describe...
Waking Up in a Nightmare
Todd Hayen One thing this global awakening (at least an awakening for me and my fellow shrews) has made me realize is that we all have been living in...
None Worse for the Wear
Todd Hayen I just got off zooming today with a lawyer friend of mine. He seems to be a nice guy but rather “play it by the book” (as...
Why is Everything Broken?
Edward Curtin “Begin then with a fracture, a cesura, a rent; opening a crack in this fallen world, a shaft of light.” Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body Being sick for...
Counterinsurgency, PSYOPS and the Military Origins of the Internet
Dustin Broadbery Part 1: Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth As the digital revolution was underway in the mid-nineties, research departments at the CIA and NSA were developing...
Grave New World: The Soft Tyranny of Tomorrow
Julien Charles The Frankfurt School predecessor and Marxist author Walter Benjamin was fascinated by the curious transformations of capitalism from the mid-to-late 1800s, when Marx wrote, to the early...
The Alibi of Tyrants
Julien Charles “The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a...
Will the Year of the Cow End with a Mu?
John Griffin If you ever thought of becoming a philosopher, now’s the time. In fact, now is the only and last chance you have. The philosophical adventure – many...
“It’s just…” – Why I Won’t Submit
Addison Reeves It’s just two weeks. It’s just staying three feet apart. It’s just staying six feet apart. It’s just not going outside. It’s just not giving handshakes. It’s...
We Are Many. The Oppressors Are Not.
Hiroyuki Hamada I remember chatting with a man from Iraq in 2016. He was driving a taxi in Germany. I wrote about him in one of my essays[1]: Last...
The Cult of WTF
Lucy Davies If you’re finding yourself muttering WTF a lot more than usual; every story in the news, every advert on tele, every letter from your child’s school, every...
The Demonization of the Unvaxxed
Karen Hunt “Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.” Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children In The Silver Chair, book 6 of CS Lewis’s magnificent The Chronicles of...
Drinking Coffee in the Early Morning Rain and Thinking of Donald Rumsfeld
Edward Curtin It’s been raining incessantly for three days. It is a cool early morning in the beginning of July and I have just made a cup of coffee....
Between Us
Edward Curtin The road led up the hill between houses until it came to the lake where it ran between the lake and the woods and the thought of...
STAY SAFE: The Abuse and Neglect of Care
The global ‘lockdown’ has sought to defy our capacities for analysis, with its shock-and-awe impact on what has been our way of life. I begin, then, with a more...
Passing Behind Our Backs
Edward Curtin I never met the great basketball player, Bob Cousy, the man known as “the Houdini of the Hardwood,” yet he somehow influenced my life in ways I...
Hovering in Cyberspace
Edward Curtin We live in a fabricated reality where the visible world became nearly meaningless once the screen world became people’s “window on the world.” An electronic nothingness replaced...
(Neo)Liberalism and its Discontents
Frank Lee FROM CLASSICAL LIBERALISM TO NEO-LIBERALISM The contemporary neo-liberal coalition consisting politically of a centre-left, centre, and centre-right – what we might call the neo-liberal blob – has...
