Guy Rundle was founding co-editor of Arena Magazine(second series) and is now co-editor of Arena Quarterly (third series). He is a well-known essayist and the author of many books.
So if the world suddenly appears to be ‘crazy’—the default term used by clueless press galleries and mainstream political commentators—it is because its most visible elements are being re- or de-constituted at its deepest level, with effects both global and local.
As government and state policy-making are ‘steered’ by left hyperindividualist and right neoliberal forces in tandem, they become ever more incapable of addressing the unprecedented transformations of social life now occurring.
Zionism now not only has no internal restraint in its everyday conduct, it is addicted to the heady rush of violent political will to remain intact as a movement.
This dual character of this new world — opening society to new forms of inquiry and liberation, while closing off possibilities of life through the imposition of a new order of power — can be seen in the intellectuals of today.
During the Vietnam war you couldn't say 'fuck' on a theatre stage, but you could make the political proposition that an army our own soldiers were fighting should prevail. Now pro-Palestine marchers pass bus stops in which government-run anti-HIV ads feature men talking about how they fuck, chanting a geopolitical opinion that the government may well ban. What has occurred?
The announcement that Elon Musk’s Neuralink Corporation has succeeded in implanting a microchip capable of working with a human brain has hit the news just as I write this editorial. By the time you read this, it may have vanished again into the news-ether, or it may be all anyone is talking about. It is […]
Here we were amid the postmodern Kosovo poets and deluxe BDSM photoessay collections, permanently waiting to realise our potential, a ‘lucky country, of second rate men, who share its luck’.
What greater, fearless, audacious commitment to freedom could one man have, but that he would let the willing dismemberment of the poor be drawn into the cash nexus? Surely, if we are now offering the ritual carving up of humans, the Gods of the Market will finally, finally return explosive growth to us?
Three years after COVID gave the world a first reminder as to just how many, and how blithe, assumptions our current global arrangements were based on, the eruption of an old-fashioned land war appears almost unseemly in a high-tech era.
