capitalism
The Supervillain as Ubertheorist
“Like modern society itself, the spectacle is at once united and divided. In both, unity is grounded in a split. As it emerges in the spectacle, however, this contradiction is itself contradicted by virtue of a reversal of its meaning: division is presented as unity, and unity as division.” — Thesis 54, The Society of […]
Short Term Profits of Dunbar’s Number
When considering the strategies of the two competing national parties in America during the last eight years of discourse, its good to recall Dunbar’s Number to help explain many of the actions taken, while they seem out of context.
Pre-dating this tumultuous period following 9/11, the Democrats had seemed like a group who actually had strategic […]
On Heroism
So, John McCain is labelled a “war hero” for having been a POW for about five years.
I guess being a POW for a long time is all you need to become a “war hero.”
One would think being tortured for so long would not make one a better candidate to be a President, but then, logic […]
Participatory Culture, or, the Cultural Logic of Prosumer Capitalism
If modernism begins from a criticism of tradition, and postmodernism begins from the tearing of cultural fragments (memes) from their foundations to be used in new, playful, and sometimes ironic contexts (remixing), then what comes next and how does it begin?
(sidenote: If one wants a simple way to understand modernism and postmodernism, one needs only […]
Pinochet and Pokemones: Deleuze and Late Capitalism
When Slavoj Zizek writes that, “There are, effectively, features that justify calling Deleuze the ideologist of late capitalism,” we should take him seriously. Deleuze, much like Marx, wrote against capitalism, but at the same time was fascinated by its ability to blow apart social formations and forge new ones. Deleuze, in his later writing on […]
2008 The Institute of Illogical Operation. 