Tag: techno-capitalism

Blasted Sea: A fossil fuel cacophony in Bass Strait

Seismic exploration has the central contradiction that has been with us since the first nuclear explosions opened the new epoch: the combination of the highly rational and the entirely mad.

Nuclear Frisson: On ‘Oppenheimer’

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.

Blame Profit, Absolve Technology?

In the tech world profit acts as a great ‘enshittifier’, but we also need to think critically about the materiality of the technologies themselves: their embedded alienation and their resource-intensive and polluting nature.

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

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.

Artificial Intelligence of Vanity

Lil Miquela is a software robot, but that doesn’t stop her followers from asking ‘What’s your skin care regime?’. Thanks to AI, even models will be out of a job.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.