Subjects Archives: Media

I think the left should stop talking about ‘neoliberalism’, as I argue in a recent journal article published in Capital & Class.

In his brief Dec. 10 television address, French President Emmanuel Macron outlined the measures aimed at calming the popular anger of the “Yellow Vests”

U.S. elected leaders, and those that work for them, think their constituents are far more conservative than they are. The good news is that this means there is far more support for a progressive political agenda than one might think.

The outlandish “Russian interference” narrative just took a turn from the banal to blatantly disrespectful. For the past two years, the punditry on the supposed left have been peddling the lie that the thousands of dollars spent on Facebook and Google ads—purportedly at the behest of Putin—had more impact on the outcome of the 2016 elections than the billions of dollars that were unleashed by corporations, lobbyists and the dark moneyed oligarchs.

A new exhibit at a Washington, D.C., museum featuring an abridged version of the Bible sheds light on how Christian missionaries converted enslaved Africans to Christianity by teaching them the Gospel…except the parts about freedom, equality and resistance.

For academics working on Frantz Fanon Alienation and Freedom is no less than a gift. With the publication of this book we finally have the complete available works of Fanon in English. Aptly divided into neat sections – Theatre, Psychiatric Writings, Political Writings, Publishing Fanon, Frantz Fanon’s Library and Life.

Sorry to Bother You pairs a righteous political fury with surrealist flights of fancy. Writer-director Boots Riley explains how he came up with 2018’s wildest comedy.

In this in-depth interview, Akeel Bilgrami speaks on a wide range of issues of intellectual relevance and contemporary importance such as the relationship between Gandhi and Marx, issues of modernity, Chomsky’s philosophy, personal influences, academic philosophy in India, secularism, caste and current politics in India, Hindutva politics and the criminal threat of the present government, the Hindutva political challenge and ways of resistance, and the importance of Left politics.

In fact, my book begins with the early Marx because he created the first version of what I call the philosophy of praxis. The key problem of this version of Marxism is what Marx called the “realisation” of philosophy.

In 2018, Cambridge Analytica, the data mining and analytics company, dominated the news about political campaigning and data. But they are not alone in using personal data for political influence. Since we began actively documenting this industry, our global list has expanded to 329 organisations, and it is still growing.

In May 2017 artist Joana Moll, alongside Tactical Tech, purchased 1 million online dating profiles for 136€ from U.S.Date, a supposedly U.S.-based company that trades in dating profiles from all over the globe.

The guardians of the status quo refused to learn the lesson of Trump’s election, and so it will be with Bolsonaro.

Kim Stanley Robinson describes himself as “a patriot of the genre” of science fiction, writing at the intersection of science and politics for over three decades. His work is striking for its warmth and realism.

Twitter says it is about “what people are talking about right now”. Facebook argues its “mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them”.

WhatsApp and fake news go hand-in-hand in both Brazil and India. And judging by the Facebook-owned messaging app’s effect on Brazil’s recent presidential election, India may be slated for some serious trouble next spring.

“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.” —Malcolm X

It stinks, it is the most polluted city on earth, but that is not the most terrible thing about it.

AT THE BEGINNING of October, Amazon was quietly issued a patent that would allow its virtual assistant Alexa to decipher a user’s physical characteristics and emotional state based on their voice. Characteristics, or “voice features,” like language accent, ethnic origin, emotion, gender, age, and background noise would be immediately extracted and tagged to the user’s data file to help deliver more targeted advertising.

A Review of Michael Hudson’s new book AND FORGIVE THEM THEIR DEBTS

The camps organised by nationalist parties train children as young as 8 to hate Russians, foreigners and gay people—and they now receive considerable government money to do so, reports YURAS KARMANAU