Imagine a World Without Religion

“Imagine a World Without Religion” is a slogan that is part of Richard Dawkins’ campaign to make atheism the sleek, sexy, and new solution to all the worlds problems.
As an atheist, this kind of position really irks me, as I tend to lean more Nietzschian in how I feel about humanity’s place in the universe. [...]

The Blame Game: How About a Nice Game of Global Industrial Capital Class Warfare?

Shortly following the massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico in early April, Fidel Castro made a statement concerning the situation, which was spread quickly in the U.S. press but then was quickly forgotten. His opinion on this matter has stuck with me ever since he wrote it, and I think it ought [...]

Technological Systems and the Modulation of Affect

‘Affect’ is generally defined as ‘emotion’, and philosophically defined as ‘the ability to affect and be affected’. One has ‘affection’ for someone or something. Two of the most powerful modes of affect are love and rage, polarized, yet intertwined. One can ‘kill in a heat of passion’, a phrase that implies both love and rage [...]

Weaponized Sound

Well, it looks like we called it three years ago.
During the G20 protests, we saw the first use against civilians of the LRAD sound weapons.
Apparently this is “change we can believe in.”
Now, politics aside, I am slightly frustrated at the outrage over this issue, not because I think using weaponized sound is a good thing, [...]

Boredom is Counter-revolutionary.

“…I consider
the potential of thousands of people with recorders, portable and
stationary, messages passed along like signal drums, a parody of the
President’s speech up and down the balconies, in and out open windows,
through walls, over courtyards, taken up by barking dogs, muttering bums,
[...]

Detrimental Delineations of the Digital Dream Machine

“Without a doubt our epoch prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to the reality, appearance to being. What is sacred to it is only illusion. More than that, the sacred grows in its eyes to the extent that truth diminishes and illusion increases, to such an [...]

The Value of Information

It would be a cliche to repeat the argument that, “Information wants to be free.” Instead, let’s analyze the concept of information. Is it born free, but everywhere in chains? No, it is produced by instruments and machines, recorded from every possible surface. But as soon as it is produced, it is put to work.
What [...]

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 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 [...]