Timothy Erik Ström is the editor of Arena Online. He is the author of the forthcoming book Cybernetic Capitalism (Verso), and his collected writings can be found at his website: The Sorcerer’s Apparatus.
The coronavirus pandemic lays bare how the living, the dead and the grey zone in between are organised into a global system of power, ecology and technology; a formation whose vulnerabilities and contradictions are being pressed to boiling point.
There is a curious and seldom-told backstory and parallel story to the high-profile Cambridge Analytica scandal, one that makes the notorious firm seem like the tip of the democracy-sinking iceberg.
A parallel to the Cambridge Analytica scandal 'The development of powerful new means of communication has coincided, historically, with the extension of democracy and with the attempts, by many kinds of ruling groups, to control and manage democracy.' These words, written by Raymond Williams back in 1962, referred to the rise of printing in the long sixteenth century, through to newspapers in the nineteenth century, and radio and television in the twentieth century. This point…
The cyber-strategies behind the Christchurch attack Many of the best responses to the massacre in Christchurch have focused on a recog - nition of the human lives that have been torn apart by this shocking act; they are a conscious and affirmative counter to the cycles of dehumanisation that led to the rampage. Other excellent responses have sought to reckon with the social context in which such horror becomes possible - inquiries into the grinding…
The third in a series of articles in Google's twentieth-anniversary year The story of Google is a telling case study in the analysis of contemporary society, reorganised as it has been by the mutations of cybernetic capitalism. The company's history has been one of deep enthralment with technology, typically cast in naive 'how-cool-is-that' terms - it is a story peppered with geeky tropes and various vacuous watchwords like 'innovation', 'entrepreneurial' and, of course, lots and…
The systematic prioritisation of advertising, consumerism and commercial interests comes at the direct expense of meaningful forms of political and economic democracy.
The second of three articles in the twentieth-anniversary year of Google: advertising for monopoly power. Google's system of surveillance-fuelled automated advertising is highly effective, as noted in part one of this series (Arena Magazine no. 153). In part two here, I shall look more closely at the intertwined processes of surveillance and commodification, for herein lies the secret to Google's tremendous success. Advertising provides the company with most of its enormous revenue, but as advertisers…
On 4 September 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin deposited a cheque for $100,000 written by 'angel investor' Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. With this money put into a newly opened bank account, the pair formally incorporated their start-up, dubbing it 'Google Inc'. They chose this name in reference to the obscure mathematical concept 'googol', a number represented as a one followed by 100 zeros, or in scientific notation, 10100. The word googol was…
