'Increasingly Trump seems at heart to be an anarchist. That's dangerous for human rights and anything else that requires global rules', Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, recently tweeted while sharing Paul Krugman's 'New York Times' opinion piece, according to which 'For Trump, Failure Is the Only Option'. Krugman goes on to write, 'For Trump, disrupting NATO doesn't seem to be a means to an end; it's an end in itself'. The…
Rick Amor's Waiting (2016) presents us with an odd contradiction. While two men are clearly placed at the centre of the painting, as in other works by the artist, they seem at best marginally or incidentally its sujet: not only do the figures wear the the deindividualising business uniform of finance's faceless soldiers but also we cannot identify their features. Meanwhile, their passivity is highlighted by the solid opulence of the neoclassical pillars that frame…
Global political events like the G20 meetings are studies in information-distribution architectures: on the inside, the continuation of centuries-old traditional backroom diplomacy, where the earth is carved up according to the latest shifts of financial ownership secured by asymmetric stalemates of military-technological potential. 'Toujours y penser, jamais en parler' - information on the content or outcomes of the meetings mostly remains inaccessible although it later becomes translated into quasiphilanthropic- sounding final declarations pregnant with meaning…
A recent 'Time Magazine' cover encapsulated the new French presidency: Emmanuel Macron, with his slightly eerie and vacuous smile (imagine this: a French president smiling a l'Americaine - with his teeth showing), can be seen emerging from the shadows, as if to illustrate the sinister forces that manufactured the former banker, a previously little-known and unelected candidate, as the country's premier political force. The subtitle evocatively postulates the country's new political front lines: 'The battle…
Contrary to appearances, Donald Trump’s visit to the Middle East was a tense confrontation with two alienated allies that is bound to produce more political fallout.
Have data become a strategic commodity for twenty-first century governments?Facebook is newsworthy. Hardly a week passes without the company occupying some section of the newspaper, be it 'Society', 'Economy' or 'Politics'. Admiration for its skyrocketing market share, suspicion about its legendary CEO or indignation about its ultra-volatile privacy settings keep it in the headlines but alter surprisingly little of its astounding, ongoing success. More than 800 million people, according to the latest figures, have endorsed…
The popular US network series Mr Robot, and critical engineering, a techno-philo - sophical approach taken by Julian Oliver, Gordan Savicic and Danja Vasiliev, illustrate two faces and products of contemporary cyber-culture. An investigation and critical analysis of both faces can provide helpful lessons for creating cultural immune systems to help us find meaningful ways of navigating our digital-political future.
