“Humans turned themselves into masters only to find a new way to become slaves.”— Gunther Anders, The Obsolescence of the Human The society depicted in Terry Gilliam’s 1985 movie Brazil is industrial in its aesthetics and institutional in its metaphysics, bureaucratic beyond all hope. Gilliam’s original title for the project was 1984½, in homage to… Continue reading Of Refuse and Refuge: The Downward Spiral
anticon was a time, a team, a blip on a screen, a group, a label, a stable of men.anticon was a movement, a moment, an underground scene, a business, a base, a stance against the status quo.anticon was a voice, a mic, a 4-track backing track, a collective, a corrective, a fix for the pre-millennium… Continue reading Joseph Rathgeber: anticon and Beyond
McKenzie Wark opens her book Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (Verso, 2019) with an epigraph from Kathy Acker: “Post-capitalists’ general strategy right now is to render language (all that which signifies) abstract therefore easily manipulable.”1 Acker goes on, in her book, Literal Madness, In the case of language and of economy the signified… Continue reading Capitalist Surrealism
To declare something as posthuman is to draw a line between what is human and something that is not. In Nietzsche’s Posthumanism (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), Edgar Landgraf proposes Nietzsche’s “overhuman” (Übermensch) as well as the cyborg as shorthands for the posthuman. He quotes Bernard Stiegler, who, summarizing French paleontologist André Leroi-Gourhan’s prehistorical research,… Continue reading Reaching Nietzsche
“For the first time in history it is now possible to take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. Only ten years ago the ‘more with less’ technology reached the point where this could be done. All humanity now has the option to become enduringly successful.” Buckminster Fuller Though… Continue reading Gaming the Change: Douglas Rushkoff’s ‘Survival of the Richest’
