The bright young things of Silicon Valley, with their dreams of direct democracy on Mars and digital immortality, are often difficult to take seriously. But their hubris is only the gaudy version of a broader cultural and political belief in the power of science and technology to edit, alter and override the very stuff from which our world is made—in other words, to ‘play God’.
The last six years of Coalition govern ment have been a period of unprecedented chaos and malignity. If the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years were The Killing Season, then the Abbott- Turnbull-Morrison years are/were The Hunger Games: a rolling spectacle of bizarre ordeals, frenzied bouts of fratricide, and cruelty raised to the level of art. Towards the end-for surely we are approaching the end-one almost expected to see the faces of toppled and departing politicians projected onto the…
In the five months since Malcolm Turnbull became Prime Minister of Australia, one concept more than any other has dominated the political discussion: the concept of the 'centre ground'. In the mainstream press especially, the notion that politics has a 'centre' and that Turnbull has to move towards it in order to win the next election (and that he is better equipped to do so than his erratic predecessor) has attained the status of an…
