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#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics

Accel­er­a­tion­ism pushes towards a future that is more mod­ern, an altern­at­ive mod­ern­ity that neo­lib­er­al­ism is inher­ently unable to gen­er­ate.

Hauntology: The Past Inside The Present

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

What Does The Amazon Echo Look Mean For Personal Style?—Racked

The message of many things in America is “Like this or die.”— George W.Trow, Within the Context of No Context, 1980. The camera is a small, white, curvilinear monolith on a pedestal. Inside its smooth casing are a microphone, a speaker, and an eye-like lens. After I set it up on a shelf, it tells me to look straight at it and to be sure to smile!

Verso

Hauntology: A not-so-new critical manifestation

Literary criticism Books blog The new vogue in literary theory is shot through with earlier ideas First published on Fri 17 Jun 2011 13.51 BST Shares 302 302…

The End of the World

The End of the World Our new issue, “ The Health of Nations, ” is out now. Subscribe or renew today! The Keynesian Counterrevolution Mike Beggs Elon Musk Is Not…

Fais tes cartons sans savoir où tu déménages par Paul B. Preciado—Libération

Ne produis rien. Change de sexe. Deviens le maître de ton professeur. Sois l’élève de ton étudiant. Sois l’amant de ton chef. Sois l’animal de ton chien. Tout…

Why Marvel and Other Hollywood Films Have Such Bland Music: Every Frame a Painting Explains the Perils of the “Temp Score”

Major motion pictures almost always have music, and that music usually comes composed especially for the movie. Every moviegoer knows this, of course, and most of them will by now be humming their favorite film-score music to themselves: themes from Star Wars, Jaws, The Godfather, the Indiana Jones or James Bond movies, and so on. But what about the music from more recent cinematic franchises? What about the music from the still-coming-out Marvel Comics movies, the most successful such franchise of all time?

Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, explained [Updated]

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The 50 Best One-Star Amazon Reviews of James Joyce’s Ulysses

Today is the publication anniversary of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses; it is also Joyce’s birthday. Elsewhere on Literary Hub, I took a look at the very different responses other famous writers have had to Joyce’s most notorious work, but what about your everyday bookworm? Turns out, regular readers are just as torn as the professionals on the subject, and their responses range from excitement to confusion to disgust-but the most amusing reviews generally being the negative ones, I trotted myself into a rabbit hole reading one-star Amazon reviews for Joyce’s masterpiece. Yes, there are lots of them.

Lacan, eroticism, & some thoughts on how it pertains to BDSM

On the suggestion of my primary supervisor, I have been taking a look at Jacques Lacan and Lacanian theory as it pertains to critical theory and literary criticism.

The Lord’s Prayer: the Maltese Semitic version and its historical origins—The Malta Independent

Some weeks ago, the Malta Independent carried an article about Pope Francis wishing to change certain words currently used in the Lord’s Prayer.

Exiting the Vampire Castle

This summer, I seriously considered withdrawing from any involvement in politics.

Punditry and Commitment

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Cockblocked by Redistribution: A Pick-up Artist in Denmark

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/cockblocked-by-redistribution

How privatization could spell the end of democracy

Between Trump and tech, never before have so many powerful people been so intent on transforming government into a business

For an Inclusive Culture, Try Working Less—Hacker Noon

My first software engineering job was writing C++ for the enterprise software company, J. D. Edwards, now part of Oracle.

VersoBooks.com

By Neil Fitzgerald / 28 November 2016

Writing from the Oulipo

Image: Killoffer, “La Manif,” 2009, Graphite on Paper48 x 63 cm, Courtesy of Galerie Anne Barrault

Whither the dream of the universal library?

A digital library would make knowledge, culture and literary achievement available to anyone with internet access. Photograph: Getty Images/Getty Images/Dex…

Portugal’s Example: What Happened After It Decriminalized All Drugs, From Weed to Heroin

Crime & Drugs

It Begins: Bots Are Learning to Chat in Their Own Language

Igor Mordatch is working to build machines that can carry on a conversation. That’s something so many people are working on. In Silicon Valley, chatbot is now a bona fide buzzword.

The Hidden Systems at Work Behind Gentrification—Motherboard

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/the-hidden-systems-at-work-behind-gentrification

United States v. Dylann Roof

In early January, three weeks into the federal trial of Dylann Roof, who killed nine black people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015,

The Party We Need

Our new issue, “Rank and File,” is out now.

A Yazidi Refugee, Stranded at the Airport by Trump

by Nora Caplan-Bricker

Trumpism and the Davos Man

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Robert Hanks

other people talking about procrastination, I find myself getting proprietorial: surely their fleeting pauses are as nothing to mine. Procrastination is the main way I express anxiety and depression, if I can use these medicalised, dignifying terms. It’s franker to say that I put things off because much of the time I’m frightened and sad (too frightened and sad for procrastination to be enough of an outlet: I also have an array of psychosomatic symptoms: rashes, headaches and stomach disorders—not that the line between procrastination and illness is necessarily sharp, if it’s there at all). I can remember putting off projects at primary school—chronically illegible handwriting as much as anything, I think—and a reluctance to put things down on paper dogged me through school and university; learning to type didn’t stop it pursuing me into a career in newspapers, an industry helpfully rife with deadlines and consequences, which meant that I was always forced to produce something in the end.

The Great A.I. Awakening

…

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Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has revived the idea of a union of Southern European countries, a proposal first launched by another philosopher, Alexandre Kojève, just after World War II. This “Latin Empire” could act as a counter weight to the dominant role played by Germany in the European Union. In 1945, Alexandre Kojève, a philosopher who was also a high-level French civil servant, wrote an essay called The Latin Empire: Outline of a doctrine for French policy. This essay [in fact a memo to the head of the Provisional Government, General Charles de Gaulle] is so topical that it is still of great interest today.

The Soviet Union collapsed overnight. Don’t assume western democracy will last for ever

Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in October, 2016.Photograph: Getty Images B elow the medieval citadel in Kazan, two vast frozen rivers turn the…

This Neural Network Dreams In Cities

2 minute read

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Maybe you’ve been to an art opening, or an art fair. You’re clutching a flute of lukewarm champagne (could be cava), you’re staring at this thing. People are not just saying they love it, they’re saying why they love it, how they love it.

Blame the identity apostles—they led us down this path to populism

Donald Trump owed his election victory to his popularity in rust-belt areas, such as Schuylkill Haven, Pennsylvania.Photograph: Mark Makela/Getty Images I have…

Why Are Americans So Anxious?

A scene from “High Anxiety” , with Mel Brooks and Madeline Kahn. 20th Century Fox AMERICA THE ANXIOUS How Our Pursuit of Happiness Is Creating a Nation of…

Listening to the Revolution

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The hygge conspiracy

Tuesday 22 November 2016 05.59 GMT

Neoliberalism’s epic fail: The reaction to Hillary Clinton’s loss exposed the impotent elitism of liberalism

Topics: Donald Trump, Elections 2016, Hillary Clinton, Limousine Liberals, neoliberalism, Elections News, Politics News

Malcolm Bull

until the end of his life, Heidegger kept a private philosophical journal in a series of black notebooks. He intended it to be published as the very last of his collected works, but his executors, recognising its importance, have allowed it to appear ahead of schedule. When the first three volumes were published in Germany in 2014, they caused the expected controversy, and prompted Günter Figal, the chair of the Martin Heidegger Society, to resign on the grounds that he could no longer represent the figure that emerged from their pages. Not before time, some might say.

Stefan Collini

the American journal n+1 was launched in 2004, an editorial in the first number lamented the state of contemporary culture. We are living, it said, at “a time when serious writing about culture has become the exclusive province of bullies, reactionaries and Englishmen.” The prominence of a number of male English writers in the leading US organs of opinion had been remarked elsewhere, but here that fact was turned, with an engaging exaggeration that became one of the journal’s hallmarks, into a symptom of wider cultural debility. Examined at all closely, the indictment starts to creak: if the writing is by “bullies” and “reactionaries” can it really be judged “serious”?

Swat Team

ll politicians love to complain about the press. They complain for good reasons and bad. They cry over frivolous slights and legitimate inquiries alike. They moan about bias.

Catholicism As Radical Atheism

Both in my latest book and in my recent writing, I have been working around the possibility of a strategy of radical atheism. Developing the seminal work of the German philosopher Max Stirner[1], I defined radical atheism as a process of individual disentanglement from the web of injunctions and demands laid all around us by normative abstractions. I defined as “normative abstraction” that particular position which abstract constructs typically occupy as soon as they cease to be docile tools in our hands and rear their head to the point of shaping, defining, and ultimately controlling our lives. Particularly, I focused on the most recent occupiers of this position, such as the burgeoning religions of work, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and so on.

The Holy Southern Empire: a proposal for Southern European anarcho-papism

Cura hominum potuit tantam componere Romam quantam non potuit solvere cura deum. A few months ago, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben published a short article on the opportunity to rethink the EU along its cultural traditions, rather than its economic dogmas. Agamben based his article on the work of the Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojeve, who presented the case for the political union of France, Italy and Spain in a culturally homogeneous Latin Empire which was to be politically and economically lead by France, and opposed to the Anglo-German block. Despite the violent public reaction that followed Agamben’s piece, I would claim that, if Agamben is to be judge guilty of something, it is not of having been too provocative, but not enough.

Unconvinced by Ken Loach’s benefits story? That says more about Britain than the film does

I, Daniel Blake, Ken Loach’s new film, has kicked off a row between the director and The Sunday Times’ film critic, Camilla Long.

Soylent, Neoliberalism and the Politics of Life Hacking

Make a tax-deductible donatation to CounterPunch today.

Neoliberalism has had its day. So what happens next?

Donald Trump seeks a return to 1950s America, well before the age of neoliberalism.Photograph: H. Armstrong Roberts/Retrofile/Getty Images T he western…

Memories of Trump’s Wedding

by Jon Lee Anderson

95,000 Words, Many of Them Ominous, From Donald Trump’s Tongue

“Something bad is happening,” Donald J. Trump warned New Hampshire voters Tuesday night, casting suspicions on Muslims and mosques. “Something really dangerous…

Review: “The Selfishness of Others,” or I’m O.K.

A specter is haunting America: the specter of narcissism. It shows up in the flood of recent books with titles like “Narcissists Exposed” and “The Narcissist…

Slow Wars

Subscribe online and gain access to the entire archive.

Sadomodernism

Subscribe online and gain access to the entire archive.

The Personal Essay Economy Offers Fewer Rewards for Black Women

Writing a personal essay can be a full-body activity, replete with tremors and tears and physical aches. Recollection is strenuous. Recreating a scene can be…

Race, rock, and the Rolling Stones: How the rock and roll became white.

Monitor Picture Library/Photoshot/Getty Images

Medium

My ancestors. How are you doing up there? I mean it’s been about 100 years now.

Beware the vibrant, emerging, misleading language of gentrification

Slogan city: a protestor fights back against gentrification.Photograph: Frantzesco Kangaris/Observer I have started a list in the back of a notebook, a short…

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Everything Was For Ever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation by Alexei Yurchak Princeton, 331 pp, £15.95, December 2005, ISBN 0 691 12117 If there is a prize for best title of the year, this book surely deserves it. Alexei Yurchak, a Russian-born, US-trained anthropologist, has written an interesting and provocative book about the way young Soviet Russians talked in the Brezhnev period and what they meant by what they said. For Yurchak, discourse is everything: there is no “real world” outside the world we construct via language. He argues that socialism really existed in the Soviet Union because people not only talked the talk (as they had to do) but at some level actually believed it.

The Sky Might Fall On Your Head

Every year—for the past 9 years—I have spent January 16 down Pimlico and Victoria. Walking, drinking at this or that pub; getting lost. I am not completely sure why I have found myself enacting this little ritual on my birthday.

The bonfire of Noam Chomsky: journalist Tom Wolfe targets the acclaimed linguist—Vox

Does he get the linguistics right?

A Declaration of the Dignity Image

The Tony Blair “selfie” Photo Op will have a place in history

Photo Op by kennardphillipps at Catalyst: Contemporary Art and War exhibition at IWM North Photograph: kennardphillipps/Reuters Tony Blair grins for his…

The Berenstein Bears: We Are Living in Our Own Parallel Universe

When I was growing up, all through elementary school we would watch movies and read books about the Berenstein Bears. I still even remember the theme song for the TV show, mostly, which wasn’t a song so much as a guy in a gruff bear voice speaking in rhyming couplets. If you don’t know who the Berenstein Bears are, they were nuclear family of anthropomorphic bears who lived in a tree out in Bear Country and had family-based situational comedy and taught life lessons.

This Company Has Built a Profile on Every American Adult

Connecting decision makers to a dynamic network of information, people and ideas, Bloomberg quickly and accurately delivers business and financial information, news and insight around the world.

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit—The Baffler

secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall be rewarded), but to a particular generational promise—given to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties—one that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite promised, now that it has failed to come true, we’re left confused: indignant, but at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation, ashamed we were ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with. Where, in short, are the flying cars?

This man seems to die in every terrorist attack. But he’s very much alive.

If you’ve clicked on any articles about the victims of recent terror attacks, you might have seen a photo of the man above.

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

Politics—Philosophy—Art—Subversion—Sedition

In partial defence of an unloved grammatical tool

PITY the passive voice. No feature of the grammar of English has such a bad reputation. Style guides, including that of The Economist, as well as usage books like the celebrated American “Elements of Style”, warn writers off the passive, and automated grammar-checkers often suggest that passive clauses be redrafted. There are just two problems with this advice.

Owen Hatherley

PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason Allen Lane, 368 pp, £8.99, June, ISBN 978 0 14 197529 Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams Verso, 256 pp, £12.99, October 2015, ISBN 978 1 78478 096 Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work advocate things that seemed to have disappeared from thinking on the left sometime in the late 1960s: technological optimism, futurism, the making of programmes and the issuing of demands as opposed to bearing witness through protest. Both use the curiously neutral coinage “postcapitalism” for their alternative, rather than socialism, social democracy, communism or anarchism, each of these tainted for the authors in one way or another. Srnicek and Williams reject practically everything that the Euro-American left has thought and done since 1968, bar a somewhat tokenistic acknowledgment of the importance of sexual and racial “intersectionality.” Their problem isn’t with “identity politics”—the common bugbear of everything-went-wrong-in-the-1960s leftists—but with the abandonment of the belief that a society beyond capitalism is both possible and necessary.

Farage is now Britain’s face at the EU: petty, unlovable, essentially terrified

‘To see Nigel Farage there with his desktop flag was to suddenly and irrevocably understand it: the UK is the Gareth Keenan of Europe.’Photograph:…

AI just got a big boost in its ability to understand the news

Technology news

Period. Full Stop. Point. Whatever It’s Called, It’s Going Out of Style

“We are at a momentous moment in the history of the full stop,” said David Crystal, who has written more than 100 books on language. Roberto Ricciuti/Getty…

Medium

Falling in Love (with Technology)

Prince’s death reveals how wrong our over-reliance on dangerous opioids can be.

Rick Diamond/WireImage via Getty Images

Classic Programmer Paintings

“The quiet art of careful patching”

Peek Into the Weird and Wonderful Age of AI (Yes, There’s a Chatbot)

On March 23, Microsoft revealed Tay, a Twitter bot trained to chat like a millennial. It worked … too well. Within hours, Tay was spewing racist, misogynist, xenophobic remarks, mirroring the users reacting with it with lines like “Hitler was right I hate the Jews.” Microsoft dropped Tay down a memory hole within a day, but as it turns out, Tay has a Chinese cousin, Xiao-Ice, also created by Microsoft.

Why America’s favorite anarchist thinks most American workers are slaves

A guaranteed basic income gives everyone access to the market, liberating workers to do the work they want to do, says London School of Economics professor David Graeber.

Starbucks Orders and the Mass Customization of American Food—The Atlantic

It’s been said that there are 87,000 ways to order a drink at Starbucks.

Awkward half-cat loafing on the stairs sparks Photoshop battle no one expected

The Internet will never tire of the strange beauty of an awkwardly placed cat.

Why I Quit Being a Writer

In the late 1990s, when I wanted more than anything to be a famous writer, I took a job as assistant to J.D. Salinger’s literary agent at Harold Ober Associates, the oldest literary agency in the country. Walking into Ober’s offices in midtown Manhattan was like climbing through a wormhole: Overhead lighting was eschewed for desk lamps, the ceiling tiles were yellow with cigarette smoke, and the drinks cart would make an appearance on Friday afternoons (except in the summer, when Fridays were half days).

We Asked Smokers if They Would Pay £23 for a Pack of Cigarettes

Imagine if you could delete bad memories. Well, you can

A new study shows that it’s possible to deliberately forget things.

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At the end of the 19th century, America had still never seen a belly dancer. So when Omene, a natural self-promoter with a knack for entrancing journalists, came on the scene in 1889, she gained national notoriety. But it was one particular encounter at a secretive Chicago newspapermen’s club, now known as the “Coffin Dance,” that made the belly dancer, as well as the members of Whitechapel, infamous. “It was, in fact, a regular chamber of horrors-far worse indeed than anything I have witnessed before ...

The Mystery of the Dead Hollywood Screenwriter Whose Hands Were Never Found

From Azzazin To Gun Aramaic: Muslimgauze Two Decades On Louis Pattison , May 3rd, 2016 06:59

Louis Pattison looks back two decades to when the electronic musician Bryn Jones was at the height of his powers recording as Muslimgauze—and speaks to the people who knew him and musicians who were influenced by him

The new astrology

Since the 2008 financial crisis, colleges and universities have faced increased pressure to identify essential disciplines, and cut the rest. In 2009, Washington State University announced it would eliminate the department of theatre and dance, the department of community and rural sociology, and the German major—the same year that the University of Louisiana at Lafayette ended its philosophy major. In 2012, Emory University in Atlanta did away with the visual arts department and its journalism programme.

Can Artificial Intelligence Be Ethical? by Peter Singer—Project Syndicate

PRINCETON—Last month, AlphaGo, a computer program specially designed to play the game Go, caused shockwaves among aficionados when it defeated Lee Sidol, one of the world’s top-ranked professional players, winning a five-game tournament by a score of 4-1.

When Computers Started Beating Chess Champions—The Atlantic

There was a time, not long ago, when computers-mere assemblages of silicon and wire and plastic that can fly planes, drive cars, translate languages, and keep failing hearts beating-could really, truly still surprise us.

What Kind of Day Job Should a Writer Have?

When I turned 30, I took my first short story workshop. I was working in commercial banking, a career I fell into with indifference followed by inertia after graduating from college. I was also playing in a DC men’s soccer league on a team largely populated by Capitol Hill staffers and other professional types.

Behind the New German Right

Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters Supporters of Pegida with versions of the imperial war flag, the Wirmer flag,…

Is That Even a Thing

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. John Gall Speakers and writers of American English…

Unity—does indie gaming’s biggest engine have an image problem?

Chief executive John Riccitiello explains why being popular with small independent studios is a mixed blessing

Permission to Footnote

In print and online today

Mario Vargas Llosa’s ‘Notes on the Death of Culture’

I call it the newspaper problem: About a decade ago I wrote an essay on contemporary poetry for a newspaper that will remain nameless, and had the occasion to…

Google’s AI Can Dream, and Here’s What it Looks Like

View the discussion thread.

There’s a Name for That: The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon—The Science of Society

There’s a Name for That By Pacific Standard Staff • July 22, 2013 • 12:00 PM When a thing you… January 3, 2015 at 12:21AM via Instapaper https://ift.tt/16YeVes

Narrative Science, robot journalists, customized news, and the danger to civil discourse.

William Gottlieb/Library of Congress.

Quirky serifs aside, Georgia fonts win on Web—Style—International Herald Tribune

LONDON—Log on to The New York Times’s Web site, and you’ll see it there.

Fin Notes

Catch Me (Him) If You Can

Big advances are often pure fiction

Saturday 24 June 2000 01.47 BST

Area Girlfriend Still Hasn’t Seen Apocalypse Now—The Onion—America’s Finest News Source

Fox 8 p.EDT/7 p.ABC Pete’s wife is still on him about building that darn shed, these kids are going to be the death of Sheila and Dave, and the hot next-door neighbor is up in EVERYBODY’S business! Sunday nights on ABC couldn’t be any more familiar!