Tag: techno-capitalism

The Limits of Human Control: Nuclear technologies threaten all life, so why do we persist?

Arena Quarterly no.13

John Hinkson

Mar 2023

The hubris of science towards the everyday world is not a new phenomenon, but where the practices of technoscience now frame our world this tendency is radically escalated.

I Sing the Body of Work Electric: ChatGPT, AI, writing, technology and humanity

Arena Online

Guy Rundle

26 Jan 2023

With such developments unrestrained, we will become more like the imitations of ourselves than computers will become like us.

Fusion Net Gain Is Manufactured Ignorance

Arena Online

Darrin Durant

16 Dec 2022

Almost every word written about ‘net energy gain’ from a fusion reaction is a species of manufactured ignorance generated by managing uncomfortable knowledge, which is complicated by a tension between the desire to trust fusion experts but and the knowledge that those experts operate under powerful incentives to engage in hype.

Will Politics Re-Organise Around the Question of Technology?

Arena Online

Guy Rundle

16 Dec 2022

By the 1980s, the deep critique of technology, growth and the culture and psychology arising from it had been exhausted—beaten by the impasse of the historical moment.

Brave New Wild: Why ‘Resurrecting’ the Thylacine is a Dangerous Idea

Arena Online

Richard King

1 Dec 2022

Any public debate on de-extinction technologies must take account of the broader processes that are bringing such affordances into being, and the long-term social and psychological effects of regarding the latter as self-evident progress.

The Technoking and the Town Square: Musk, Twitter and radical individualism

Arena Online

Guy Rundle

18 Nov 2022

Many of its frequent users have spoken recently of the tragedy of Twitter being destroyed 'as a community', it is clearly nothing like a community in any real sense. Indeed it substitutes for real community in its absence.

Zero Gravity: Floating towards posthumanism

Arena Quarterly no.11

Richard King

Sep 2022

The transition to the posthuman will not turn on any Judgment Day scenario, but will be a slow and incremental process of quantity turning into quality.

The imminent crisis of mind

Arena Online

Paul Gardner

27 Jan 2022

Teachers across multiple settings are reporting much the same thing: that young children are now starting school lacking the level of oral language of their counterparts a decade ago.

It’s the Stupidity, Stupid! On Technocratic Populism

Arena Online

Richard King

25 Nov 2021

…while it is clear that Australians in general are more persuaded by ‘positive liberty’ arguments than the new libertarians would like to imagine, it is striking that the case for lockdown, or indeed for mandatory vaccinations, is only rarely made in those terms.

On Capitol Hill

Arena Quarterly no. 5

John Hinkson

Mar 2021

…we should not take too seriously the portrayal of Biden as a leader deeply formed in the experience of grief…he is also a Cold War warrior, with a demonstrable inclination to pursue the Democrats’ hawkish orientation towards war where it encounters resistance.

The Limits of Control

Arena Quarterly no. 1

Timothy Erik Ström

Mar 2020

Compelled towards impossible dreams of infinite growth within finite nature, the cybernetic capitalist system is decidedly expansionist and colonial...

Against Resilience

Arena Quarterly no. 3

Paul James

Sep 2020

In our topsy-turvy world...the ‘abnormal’ has become ‘normal’, to be resilient is now to be relatively comfortable with unsustainable degrees of madness and change.