Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label internet

Dawn of the Post-dead

The zombie apocalypse is already here and it’s happening, though not as fast as the movies tell us. Something is afoot, but nobody seems to know precisely what.   Social and news media warn us of impending disaster, financial, ecological, environmental, from space.   During the 20 th century, science supplanted religion in doom-saying and prosyletizing of the end of days.   According to mainstream scientific research, we will have entered a point of no return on climate change by 2050.   Prognoses of mass extinction events are a matter of when, not if.   No longer do we rely on dates painstakingly teased out of the Bible, but on algorithms in tech and finance to tell us how to adjust our attitudes to global catastrophe, how to prepare for widespread networks failure and disintegration of all that currently is.   It’s easier to get behind numbers than to rely on notions of faith.   Y2K was averted and these days most don’t really remember the event itself or the lead-up to it.   In

Ontological Incompleteness of the ‘Inward Immigrant’ or Why Nothing in Today’s Media-Saturated Overconnected World Makes Any Sense

Let me begin by using myself as an example.   I was born and raised in the Czech Republic.   My mother remarried when I was 11 and when I turned 12, she and I moved to the United States as a result of this marriage. I’ve lived in the US ever since.   I will spare the reader the nitty gritty details of the actual move, the integration, and so on, mostly to say that my experience and the experience of the thousands of others that emigrated to the US that year alone are on the surface typical. Cut to today and I can with a lot of confidence say that, as a first generation immigrant, having emigrated at the age I did, my experience of the world and of American culture can only be described as incomplete.   The same can be said of my experience of the Czech culture.   What would seem as an upper hand, being bilingual, having roots in both cultures (muliticultural), etc, to me seems, while not a handicap, as a void that can never be filled.   True, Walter Benjamin’s experiences as an exi

Behold the Pirates

The rise of the Pirate party in recent Czech elections shows that the left may in fact be invigorated enough to go beyond the Occupy movement and its ultimate failure. Gaining 22 seats in the Czech parliament, the Pirates are now the third largest party in Czech Republic. The only irony here is that the Pirates consider themselves a center party.   This digital ‘left’ acts as a counter point to the alt-right described by Angela Nagle in her book on the subject called ‘Kill All Normies.’   As if there is no end to all the irony in the world, in today’s upside-down world, it is the ‘right’ that is most plugged into the digital world and the internet, somehow able to coopt every tactic that the old ‘new left’ used in its political stance on very diverse issues, from feminism and gay rights, to environmentalism and animal rights, and literally turning them inside-out, into stances like men’s rights, which were initially tongue-in-cheek, but developed into a strangely potent politica