Prometheus Unhinged

This issue of Arena, number 17, ‘Prometheus Unhinged’ takes on the fundamental challenges of technologies such as AI, neural implants, crypto finance, space colonization and the reemergent danger of nuclear weapons, and explores their common basis: a renewed simplistic faith in the power of technology to deliver human perfection, a belief shorn of much of the critical reflection on technology that was common a generation or so ago. Several pieces thus tackle the failure of the left to effectively respond to technology, – not only its annihilatory potential, but also the pervasive way it has reshaped social and political life – a reshaping that has allowed some to gain a sense of ‘liberation’ but at the cost of a larger disruption that now marches back at full force to shape the political landscape.

Within this larger transformation, we look at the way in which such mega-cultural movements are reshaping international affairs, in the Middle East and the Pacific, with pieces the US, Israel and Gaza, and the potential realignment of powers in the Pacific. Having looked far into the future, we return to the past-in-the-present, with reviews of David Marr’s book on Killing for Country, Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, and the crackdown upon Māori and Pacific Islander gangs in New Zealand. We remember the life and work of John Pilger, explore the philosophy of degrowth, the politics of YIMBYism, and the return of ‘Big History’ that signals a change in focus from the micro-narratives of postmodernism. Plus poetry by Barry Hill, John Kinsella and David Mason.