Month: May 2014

TV still sucks, we should still complain about hipsters, your job shouldn’t exist

In an article for Salon, Alexander Zaitchik assails the current "golden age" of television, and the resultant binge watching, spoiler fearing, TV-obsessed (pop) culture we're living in: None of this could be happening at a worse time. According to the latest S.O.S. from climate science, we have maybe 15 years to enact a radical civilizational … Continue reading TV still sucks, we should still complain about hipsters, your job shouldn’t exist

Žižek on post-U.S. order, Harvey on Piketty, Rushkoff’s new job and doc

Writing in The Guardian, Slavoj Žižek  considers the capitalist global order in a world without superpowers: The "American century" is over, and we have entered a period in which multiple centres of global capitalism have been forming. In the US, Europe, China and maybe Latin America, too, capitalist systems have developed with specific twists: the … Continue reading Žižek on post-U.S. order, Harvey on Piketty, Rushkoff’s new job and doc

Ernesto Laclau dies

Ernesto Laclau, post-Marxist critical theorist and significant figure in discourse analysis (along with his wife and collaborator Chantal Mouffe), died on April 13. An obituary by British historian and academic Robin Blackburn was posted on the Verso web site: Ernesto and Chantal used the work of Antonio Gramsci to reject what they saw as the … Continue reading Ernesto Laclau dies

Ludology grab bag: video games and authenticity, semiocapitalism, and geography

Tim Biggs wrote an article at IGN considering video games in relation to the human search for authenticity: The postmodern condition presents a constant struggle and conflict between our own desires and a world that seems fully available to experience but devoid of concrete or objective meaning. Video games, by virtue of their most basic … Continue reading Ludology grab bag: video games and authenticity, semiocapitalism, and geography

Video mélange: David Harvey, Antonio Negri, and Saints Row IV

David Harvey has a new book out, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. In this video Harvey speaks about the contradictions of capitalism (approx. 19 mins): I recently stumbled across this nearly hour-long documentary on Antonio Negri, titled The Revolt that Never Ends: Lastly, this video from Errant Signal considers Saints Row IV as … Continue reading Video mélange: David Harvey, Antonio Negri, and Saints Row IV