fruit flies and free will

There’s an interesting news story from last year about fruit flies and free will that I found via The Pinocchio Theory blog in this post on theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman.
This is something I’d like to explore in great detail, but for now I just want to throw a few ideas out there. Basically, the study […]

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 […]

Youtube Poop, Dada, & Noise Music: Discuss

The Intellectual Laziness of Rejecting “Theory”

Suppose you legitimately wanted to grasp the writings of an intellectual, but they proved to be difficult for you to understand. What course of action could you take? Would you try your best to do a close reading? Would you consult secondary sources to see if they could shed some light on the topic? Would […]

The best/worst/best again idea for a cinema-crit/philosophy book ever

Okay, so I’m thinking of how these four movies relate to our current technological society:
Speed
The Net
The Matrix
The Lake House
Think about it. The chapter on Speed could be all about Paul Virilio’s theories on the integral accident and dromology.
The Net is about the problem of Google’s monolithic control over all information and the threat of […]

We’re Officially In the Fucking Future

So here at IllOp, we like to play games, and sometimes games tell us more about the world we live in that we’d like to admit. Take Cyberpunk for example. In Cyberpunk 2020 you have 9 basic classes to choose to play. They are as follows:

What is striking about this list is […]

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 […]

The Autonomy of the Unhuman

The concept of autonomy crops up again and again in political philosophy. Autonomy seems to refer at times to the autonomy of the individual, and at others to the autonomy of peoples, territories, classes or multitudes. One important example includes Autonomism, which is a “bottom up” or “grassroots” theory of Marxism (and the connection between […]