Articles by: Richard King

Author Biography:

Richard King is an author and critic and a contributing editor to Arena. His most recent book is Here Be Monsters: Is Technology Reducing Our Humanity? (Monash University Publishing, 2023). His new book, Brave New Wild: Can Technology Really Save the Planet? (Monash University Publishing) will be published on October 1.

The limits of social cohesion

Arena Online

Richard King

27 Feb 2026

The idea that social cohesion is something that can be built through proscribing particular expressions, or “turning the temperature down” on debate, is this kind of politics in a nutshell.

TWO HOURS OF DESPAIR

Arena Online

Richard King

23 Jan 2026

All of this adds up to a visceral experience, there is nevertheless something slightly unconvincing about the documentary Orwell: 2+2=5.

Paradise by the Dashboard Model?

Arena Quarterly no. 24

Richard King

Dec 2025

Data modelling as a tool of environmental campaigning has created dataworld, in which nature’s full reality is lost, even to those committed to its salvation.

Minority Retort

Arena Quarterly no. 23

Richard King

Oct 2025

Embracing an individualist model of identity, Left progressives now participate in a ‘mad scramble for recognition’ in which the weaponisation of lived experience, an obsession with language and competing victimhood combine to create a ‘playbook of grievance’ that is at once ridiculed and adopted by the Right.

A New World of Warcraft

Arena Online

Richard King

11 Jul 2025

Like the floating, hyperrational island of Laputa in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which keeps order in its colonies with threats to rain down death from above, the US has determined to use its technological superiority to keep its enemies on the run and the poorer peoples of the Earth in their place.

Fodder for Thought: The artificial intelligence of the modern university

Arena Online

Richard King

27 Jun 2025

AI has proved such a challenge for the tertiary sector is that teaching, assessment-design and so on were already partly automated in the sense of being geared towards largely technical ‘outcomes’.

Talking Trash to Power: The Public Sphere in the Age of Trump

Arena Online

Richard King

30 Jan 2025

The media’s ‘managerial’ ethos actually makes things steadily worse, convincing a good number of listeners, viewers and readers that the mainstream media is as liberal and elitist and manipulative as the Right suggests.

Zooming Out: The ecomodernist mindset at large

Arena Quarterly no. 19

Richard King

Sep 2024

Readers who’ve spent any amount of time with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the literature inspired by them will recognise the register: here’s the problem; here’s the solution; here’s a technology or a policy that makes the solution possible.

Standing Ground in a Turning World

Richard King

15 Jul 2024

With the Gaza protests, the Left has reunified around a material approach. Extending that to a reflection on deeper social changes of recent decades is the key to a re-oriented politics capable of gaining ground.

Nuclear Frisson: On ‘Oppenheimer’

Arena Online

Richard King

31 Jul 2023

What concerns me is that Oppenheimer, far from shaking us out of our slumber, is unable to grasp the radical nature of what happened in the New Mexico desert or connect what happened there to our current techno-scientific moment.

The Eighth Day of Creation: How the new cultural technologies take us into the posthuman

Arena Quarterly no. 14

Richard King

Jun 2023

Human solidarity depends on the sense that we are all equal in coming from nature, and that attempts to reengineer ourselves will prove corrosive of this deeper equality.

Big Tech Goes Ballistic

Arena Online

Richard King

15 Jun 2023

The idea of an algorithmic catastrophe waiting for us down the road is from this perspective clearly limiting. The catastrophe is already here, and unfolding.