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Granted tremendous freedom by the Politburo and backed by a concerted state secret intelligence effort, a new, privileged class of technical intellectuals and managers rose to prominence in Bulgaria in the 1960s.

Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age Behind the Iron Curtain

Big Tech companies have been able to present themselves as saviors capable of acting more promptly than the state, pushing pandemic solutionism and taking up tasks without being burdened by democratic deliberations. 

Pandemic Solutionism: The Power of Big Tech During the Covid-19 Crisis

Presenting the key takeaways from a study of two million YouTube comments from a ten-year period on Molyneux’s YouTube channel, this dataset offers unique insight into an important moment in the growth of online far-right radicalisation.

Inside the Cult of Stefan Molyneux

It feels as though every other day we encounter a new angle or emerging fact around machine learning, generative AI, and the incipient market for these products. This episode talks about the goals of the capitalist class in determining the future of AI.

The Hype & Hysteria Around AI

Digital technologies have enabled Big Tech firms to monetise the information on which markets are supposedly dependent; this information is meant to be transparent and truthful, but it is increasingly hoarded in data enclaves constructed by Big Tech firms to secure their monopolistic positions.

There Are No Markets Anymore

In Greek mythology, Pegasus is a deity who teams up with the hero Bellerophon to slay the monster Chimera. Later, Pegasus betrays Zeus by trying to reach Mount Olympus, and is struck down for it. In the same way, the spyware industry established itself as a unique way to counter malicious activity. But this innovation has betrayed its original purpose. It should be brought back to earth.

The Growing Global Spyware Industry

As AI becomes increasingly prevalent in our daily lives, it's important to understand the mechanisms behind its decision-making processes. What are the algorithms and models that underpin AI, and how do they differ from human thought processes? How do machines learn from data, and what are the limitations of this learning?

How Artificial Intelligence Thinks

Booms and busts are a common feature of capitalist economies. But when a sector crashes, businesses go under and working people lose their jobs. Similar to how software licensing works, we don’t own any of the programs we watch online; we’re paying repeatedly to licence them for our own personal use. So what is it all for?

Is Netflix Doomed?

There are important limitations to theories of data-owning democracy that have not yet received significant attention within the literature. This article highlights three ways in which digital socialists would consider a data-owning democracy to fall short of achieving a more just digital economy.

Data-Owning Democracy or Digital Socialism?

Interrogating the politics of invisibility that permeates Southern California’s oil industry. Most residents are completely unaware that the city is built among the thousands of active wells in Los Angeles County. Since the early 1900’s, the oil industry has used the media to greenwash itself.

Social Media and Oil in Southern California: Greenwashing Los Angeles

TECHNOLOGY

The economist discusses his book ‘The Collapse of Antiquity: Greece and Rome as Civilization’s Oligarchic Turning Point’, and how this history from 2000 years ago is still so relevant to understanding our debt-based societies today.

Origins of Debt

The zombie has often been used as a metaphor for industrial production and mass consumption, but older interpretations of zombies as industrial workers or ideologically duped consumers do not adequately explain why the zombie apocalypse has captured our imagination today.

Undead Labor and Instruments of Production

Yale University’s James Tobin's theory of inflation held out the possibility of an alternative path for economics and macroeconomic policy, but it has seldom received the same recognition or scholarly interest as Milton Friedman's 1967 theory of the so-called natural rate of unemployment.

The Forgotten Case Against Milton Friedman

The anachronistic ‘gentleman’s agreement’ that IMF and World Bank leadership come from Europe and the US needs to be eliminated. If the IMF stalls on enacting governance reforms, it prolongs the world’s perception of it as a North Atlantic monetary fund rather than a global lender of last resort.

Deweaponize the Dollar

This paper presents the state of the art in capitalist demand-forecasting at enterprises like Amazon, where machine-learning algorithms excel at modelling interrelated time series on a global level by extrapolating demand patterns in real-time. The paper closes with a proposal to reconfigure this predictive apparatus for socialist ends.

The Planning Daemon

This book presentation makes challenging economic ideas more palatable by plating them alongside stories about food from around the world and shows that getting to grips with the economy is like learning a recipe: if we understand it, we can change it – and, with it, the world.

Edible Economics

The weekend was not benevolently bestowed from above. It’s the product of incremental changes, won in a series of victories through resistance enacted by the labour movement. Broad coalitions were key – but the driving force for the weekend, like many other rights and freedoms we have today, was the organised working class.

How Workers Won the Weekend

While price competitiveness played an important role in the first three cycles, it failed to re-establish an export-led regime in the post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC) period due to decreased non-price competitiveness. Instead, the post-GFC combination of negative real interest interests did not address the negative financial balances of the household sector.

Price and Prejudice

Mixtures of millennialism, esotericism, conspiratorialism, populism, anti-semitism, libertarianism, and nationalism can be observed in a number of contemporary movements of economic redemption. These can sometimes find expression in troubling ways: in a cult, perhaps, or in violence, as in the case of ‘sovereign citizen’ extremism.

Paranoid Finance

This article reconstructs how the reorientation of German economics towards the global economics profession crowded out ordoliberalism. Ordoliberalism, publishing mostly in German and not being able to formalize its theory, could not keep up with modern German economics. This will also dry up the supply of ordoliberal staff for the bureaucracy.

The Rise and Fall of Ordoliberalism

POLITICAL ECONOMY

Efforts to build a circular economy are failing. 60 percent of plastic packaging waste in Europe is still not recycled. Millions of tonnes end up in landfill and incineration plants.  Governments allow plastic producers and multinational brands to influence waste management schemes and be the brokers between municipalities, recyclers and incineration operators. 

Europe’s Circular Economy Is Leaking

What comes after Sinofuturism, a term that has been used to define — and fetishise — the enmeshment of real and virtual in the 21st century Chinese world? Artists and curators working across Greater China reflect on the conceptual pathways they are charting beyond Sinofuturism to navigate the entanglements of analogue and digital cultures.

What Comes After Sinofuturism?

This article explains the most current arguments of this discourse after 2016, based on an analysis of the geopolitical imaginary of the Brazilian ultra-right. The text reconstructs three political languages of the field – the reactionary, the ultraliberal, and the authoritarian conservative.

The Geopolitical Imaginary of the Brazilian Ultra-Right

Through ethnographic work and content analysis of coca growers' demands, this article demonstrates how coca growers are the ones who best understand the historical reasons that led them to participate in this economy and, therefore, who can most clearly design and implement transition strategies in drugs and development policies.

We Are Not Drug Traffickers, We Are Colombian Peasants

About 16 million people in the US own one or more AR-15s. That is one in 20 people who own the semi-automatic weapon. This new reporting series explores how the AR-15 became America’s favorite gun.

How the AR-15 Became the Most Popular Gun in the US

Latin American countries experienced a significant reduction in income inequality at the turn of the twenty-first century. This study finds evidence that leftist governments lowered income inequality faster than non-leftist regimes.

The Pink Tide and Income Inequality in Latin America

How Chile became home to the world’s most radical free-market experiment—and what its downfall suggests about the fate of neoliberalism around the globe.

The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism

Kyrgyzstan’s vast gold reserves have enriched only a select few, and mining has caused irreparable ecological damage. Authorities often target those who object to mining projects. So how is resource nationalism creating slow violence in Kyrgyzstan?

Gold Mining and Resource Nationalism in Kyrgyzstan

Arguing for the existence of a hegemonic discourse of ‘transcendent nationalism’ that lasted from liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 until the end of the Park Chung Hee era in 1979. Transcendent nationalism pervaded political and social discourse through a conceptual history, focusing on the concepts of nation, capitalism, the individual, liberty, and democracy.

Korea's Fascist Moment

It is worth paying attention to Tokyo precisely because it shows that vast numbers of cars are not necessary to daily life. What Tokyo shows is that it is possible for enormous cities to work rather well without being overloaded by traffic congestion. Actually, Tokyo works better than big cities anywhere else.

How Tokyo Became an Anti-Car Paradise

WORLD

 Inequality pushes citizens to consume more populist content, but this relationship strongly depends on a perception of inequality as unfair – a result in line with previous research.

The News We Choose: Unfair Inequality and the Growing Success of Populist News

Fast food has historically been marketed as one of life’s simple pleasures, but a more insidious history lies at the industry’s core. This book investigates the complex trajectory of restaurant locations from a decided commitment to Whiteness, to the disproportionate densities that characterise Black communities today.

White Burgers, Black Cash

Addressing the global homeless crisis by focusing on the systemic failure of governments, private-public partnerships and non-profit organizations in eradicating homelessness. This trifecta has spawned the contemporary extractive homeless industry that for decades has been profiting from the creation and preservation of this particular social misfortune.

The Business of Homelessness

The right-wing embrace of organic and local food and farming isn't surprising. The back-to-the-land movement has long enchanted eco-fascists, libertarians, and others who are sceptical of the government and corporations. Yet far-right foodies are missing the bigger picture, especially the plight of workers in the food system, who can’t afford to pay $7 for a dozen of the free-range eggs they bring to market.

Blood, Soil, and Grass-Fed Beef

The militarized portion of the discretionary budget is by far its largest single component. And yet the same legislators demanding billions in discretionary savings have vowed to exempt that militarized spending from any cuts.

The Warfare State Copromises Our Welfare

In trying to distance themselves from the ‘lies and slander’ of the public, prominent incel forum admins and a plethora of related actors have shaped an identity for incels which symbolises innocence, victimhood, rationalism, and non-violence. Drawn to the allure of trying to understand this enigmatic community, scholars and media have fallen prey to the honeyed words of some incels and their supporters.

Incel PR

In the past two decades, media images of the surprisingly white 'new face' of the US opioid crisis abounded. But why was the crisis so white? The guests implicate racially segregated health care systems, the racial assumptions of addiction scientists, and relaxed regulation of pharmaceutical marketing to white consumers.

Racism, Class, and the Opioid Crisis

Investigating the Covid-19 activities of three different heterodox actors: rebel groups providing public health in the borderlands of Myanmar, a women’s vigilante movement stitching face masks in the Czech Republic, and a maverick scientific platform for the international sharing of viral sequence data.

Rebels, Vigilantes and Mavericks

Recognizing that corporations are leading efforts to colonize Mars, which is likely to be realized within the next few decades, attention must be given to the role played by businesses in shaping a multiplanetary future. Human rights offers a framework that can inform multiplanetary existence while simultaneously advancing mechanisms that strengthen corporate accountability.

Toward Multiplanetary Existence?

World War II is still killing people. Unexploded ordnance, the remnants of globe spanning conflict, litters the fields of Europe and the waters of the Pacific. The world spends a lot of money and time cleaning up UX in Europe and helping its victims. In the Pacific there it’s a different story. Especially in the Solomon Islands.

World War II Is Still Killing People in the Pacific

SOCIAL JUSTICE

The ‘Mexican Gothic’ style is a new genre, featuring the creepy castles and haunting figures of traditional Gothic novels, mixed up with drug cartel kingpins and colonialism, set in contemporary Mexico.

Mexico's Gothic Turn

The nineteenth century opened with a major shift in European mathematics, and in the Kingdom of Naples, this occurred earlier than elsewhere. Between 1790 and 1830 its leading scientific institutions rejected as untrustworthy the “very modern mathematics” of French analysis and in its place consolidated, legitimated, and put to work a different mathematical culture.

Reactionary Mathematics

A touring exhibition of 20th-century painting from the American Southwest is poised to be the next big art world hit. Yet the show forces us to ask: What is fueling the revival?

The Curious Case of the Transcendental Painting Group

This paper analyzes the Korean shamanistic elements that were utilized in performative, conceptual, and nature art practices by South Korean artists in the post-WWII period to the present.

Art-Kut! The Counter-Cultural and Feminist Spirituality of Shamanism in Postwar South Korean Art

Like Pabst and Sagan, Hirschfeld had been part of a radical cinema that defied national borders and Prussian militaristic nationalism, and fought against legal constrictions rather than conforming to them.

Love Has (No) Laws

Whether we like it or not, we never read texts in a vacuum, without context from other works. Instead, we draw texts from mental shelves, which contextualise, sort, and steer our understanding of them. But these invisible shelves are themselves inseparable from the material and visible libraries which exist in our real world, and with which they share an intertwined history.

The Dark Matter of Literature

The 2018–2023 architectural preservation process of a historic Black church in Massachusetts demonstrates a set of socio-architectural tactics identified as guerrilla preservation, or small maneuvers in pursuit of exuberance.

Guerrilla Maneuvers in Architectural Preservation

Kazakh women in Soviet cinema were deprived of cultural identity, often in favor of the ideological demands of the Soviet administration, for example, in order to emancipate women and attract them to the workforce.

Women’s Cinema Without Women in Kazakhstan

Bob Dylan's 2022 book, 'Philosophy of Modern Song', is pervaded by a mournful attitude — for a lost age of artfulness, mystery, and hope. In this sense, it's a quintessentially conservative book. But decline and nostalgia are not its only themes. In short bursts of prose reflecting on sixty-six totemic songs, Dylan conjures a country — and canon — defined most of all by mutability, motion, and menace. 

Bob Dylan's America

From the earliest days of the Soviet project, children's literature was taken unusually seriously-its quality and subject matter were issues of grave political significance. Yet, it was often written and illustrated by experimental writers and artists who found the childlike aesthetic congenial to their experiments in primitivism, minimalism, and other avant-garde trends. 

Word Play

ARTS & CULTURE

Where the Californian ideology would center the summer of love and the politics of the New Left, the zines ambiguously celebrated the nihilistic, authoritarian, and occult vectors of psychedelia – tendencies that have been associated with the late 1960s fate of the counterculture rather than its earlier heyday.

Post-Punk, Industrial Culture Zines, and the Information Dark Age

Authoritarian leaders with personal experiences of economic hardship are likely to introduce redistributive measures, leading to a decrease in economic inequality in authoritarian countries.

Authoritarian Leaders, Economic Hardship, and Inequality

Exploring the role of the state in neoliberal thought, challenging the notion that early neoliberalism was a nuanced, more moderate version of its later iterations. This article argues that the ‘dual argument’ of early neoliberalism was a new approach to market liberalism that saw the state not as the market's opposite, but as its precondition.

Dual Argument, Double Truth

In response to gathering external threats, the Japanese state is turning to space diplomacy that communicates the country’s science, economic and military space interests.

Japan’s Space Diplomacy in a World of Great Power Competition

Debates over populism pit those who see it as dangerous for liberal democracy against those who view it as necessary for mobilizing the marginalized. This article flips the question and asks whether and how populist rhetoric supports liberal democracy.

When Is Populism Good for Liberal Democracy?

This article sheds light on Gorbachev’s all-but forgotten logic behind promoting joint ventures, focusing on the case study of Pizza Hut. Although American fast-food restaurants’ very presence there, not to mention the epically long lines to get into them, would come to symbolize the collapse of the Soviet system, they were intended to do just the opposite.

Because of Him, We Have Pizza Hut!

The continuity of the American space dream as a unifying national narrative is facilitated by how private spacefaring is dependent on the US government’s emphasis on the pivotal role of private space industry for space exploration. This dependent relationship provides incentives for private space entrepreneurs to share and leverage the established American space dream.

Outsourcing the American Space Dream

While interrogating the constitutive pillars of the Capitalocene, this article’s aim is to highlight that capitalism itself is a material structure built on the ideological foundations of Western thought, whose approach to the predation of nature precedes Cartesian dualism.

Anthropocene, Capitalocene or Westernocene?

This article aims to understand not only the top-down mobilisation of sports by the authoritarian government of Vargas, but also the bottom-up initiatives that the agents of the football elites to press for their own agendas.

Populism and Professionalism in Brazilian Football During Getulio Vargas’s Regime

Between his government connections and his work for companies such as Pan American Airways, Thomas Corcoran seemed perfect to convince US officials to defend the company’s interests in Guatemala, where intense nationalism targeted this multinational corporation’s banana-producing empire.

Anti-Communist Bananas

ACADEMIC ARTICLES

In 1970, Syracuse University ran an information-retrieval study whereby participants used a computer terminal connected to an IBM 360 mainframe to search a database for relevant psychology abstracts. SUPARS (the Syracuse University Psychological Abstracts Retrieval Service) serves as both a design far ahead of its time and a counterexample to techno-utopian histories of the internet and the world wide web.

Ingenious Librarians

Recurring stories about postal workers burning their mail, hoarding it, or throwing it into the garbage and forests raise many questions about their working conditions. These incidents also call attention to the ambiguity of professional injunctions directed at workers more generally. 

Going Postal: An Anthropology of Postal Work in France

Offering a critical history of Charles Babbage's proto-Taylorist ideas on how to discipline workers – ideas embedded in the calculating engines that were his life's work, and ideas which themselves were first developed to control enslaved and racialized people.

Origin Stories: Plantations, Computers, and Industrial Control

The Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich had his superyacht’s rain shower outfitted with a switch that would allow him and his guests to take champagne showers. While this may seem like a crime against nature, it isn't the only one that superyachts can be accused of; in that sense, they're a symptom of our era.

Luxury, Calm, and Ecocide: On Superyachts

Countering the modern-day military-industrial complex would mean dislodging each of the major pillars undergirding its power and influence. That would involve campaign-finance reform; curbing the revolving door between the weapons industry and government; shedding more light on its funding of political campaigns.

Unwarranted Influence, Twenty-First-Century-Style

The costs of climate change make distributive conflicts increasingly acute between nations and within them. How will our societies strike the balance between classes and countries when confronting renewed nationalist ambitions and unprecedented collective challenges?

The Invention of Austerity

Longtermism’s corruption is inseparable from the way in which its core ideas are put into practice, and the baseness is still there when its programmes are pursued with rigorous legality. A critique of long-termism that enabled its adherents to see it in this harshly revealing light would be a welcome step towards envisioning and enacting a just and livable future.

The Toxic Ideology of Longtermism

As more research emerges from intersections of caste and race, especially in the context of overseas populations, a pattern seems to be emerging wherein we see Savarna-interests aligning with White conservative agenda at the cost of racially oppressed minorities.

Dating like a Savarna

Above all, Francis Galton revealed how surveying a mass of people makes recognising – and targeting – the individual possible. Lots of data about lots of people allows scientists, marketers, militaries, spies to better know you – ​and target you. 

From Eugenics to Targeted Advertising

The move towards eco-friendly deathcare practices like human composting is seen as a potential shift in the $20 billion deathcare industry. It addresses environmental issues posed by conventional deathcare practices, such as the release of carbon dioxide and other pollutants from cremation and the use of nonbiodegradable materials and harmful chemicals in burials.

Returning to Our Roots

JOURNALISM

Democracy and capitalism are strange bedfellows, and the continuing growth of globalization has often caused the intricacies of this relationship to be brought into question. But what happens when democracy itself is sidelined in favor of free-market libertarianism?

The Market Radicals Escaping Democracy

To be queer and communist at a time when the Communist Party in the US banned LGBT people was tricky and often perilous. The guest profiles Lorraine Hansberry, Harry Hay and other figures with radical sensibilities and closeted sexualities.

Queer Communists

Discussing how Weil inspired her contemporaries – like Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir – and how her revolutionary ideas have remained relevant and important.

Simone Weil’s Radical Philosophy of Love and Attention

Discussing the (vanishing) architectural heritage of the time when coal and coal miners in British society had the leverage that made them recipients, sometimes after actively canvassing for it, of goods and services, and especially services to do with their lifestyle, and that includes ideas of hygiene, ideas, ultimately, of housing, and also caught cultural and social pursuits. How was this reflected in architectural interventions?

Coal, Architecture and Modernity

Exploring big oil’s methods of shaping public opinion and legal rulings in its favor and crab fishermen who brought the first major oil lawsuit after they realized climate disruption would threaten their livelihood. 

Drilling, Denial and Disinformation

Brett Christophers peels back the veil on ‘asset manager society’. Asset managers are unlike traditional owners of housing and other essential infrastructure. Buying and selling these life-supporting assets at a dizzying pace, the crux of their business model is not long-term investment and careful custodianship, but making quick profits for themselves and the investors that back them.

Our Lives in Their Portfolios

A massive new road across Paraguay threatens a fragile ecosystem. Will its impact on the indigenous and Mennonite communities – and the environment – be worth the benefits?

Gran Chaco: Paraguay’s Vanishing Forest

How do contemporary border policies and technologies reanimate histories of racialised and imperial violence? How are climate and environmental change affecting borders and their crossing? What are the possibilities and limits of humanitarian and human rights discourses on migration and refugees? What forms of dissent, becoming, and belonging are taking shape at borders?

The Struggle over Political Imagination

Does gentrification lead to increased displacement of vulnerable low-income households? To date, research findings have been surprisingly mixed. This episode discusses a new study that persuasively finds that gentrification does lead to more household moves — and importantly, more downward moves.

Geographies of Gentrification

What is the relationship between archiving and collective visions for liberation? Where does the practice of archiving fit within contemporary subaltern struggles? This episode reflects on archival projects from the Middle East and North Africa, with a focus on those that emerged in the 2000s in Syria, Algeria and Lebanon.

Collecting Traces for Future Struggles

PODCASTS

What can our several-thousand year history with psychedelics teach us about how they can be used in a modern society? What legal and cultural frameworks can be used to increase access to these substances, and what are the potential downsides of these frameworks?

Psychedelics: History at the Crossroads

As a core organizing principle for information in the digital age, recommendation has also become a pivotal social phenomenon. Recommendation systems, which are shaped by design choices and competing goals, thus raise pressing ethical and political questions.

Feed Me Right: The Ethics and Politics of Recommender Systems

What, exactly, is so scary about gender? The speaker examines how ‘gender’ became a convenient catchall boogeyman – a phantasm – for myriad overlapping, and often contradicting, anxieties.

Who's Afraid of Gender?

This lecture takes the example of one (not very well known) Roman emperor and follows his presence in modern art to consider how these ancient figures continue to mean something to us.

Will the Real Emperor Vitellius Please Stand up?: Finding a Roman Emperor in Modern Art

The global Green New Deal presents a robust alternative to neoliberalism. This lecture reviews four major design features and challenges of a global Green New Deal and the potential outcomes that can result.

Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal

A wide-ranging discussion on philosophy of cycling and using it for self-creation; the business of cycling and why the sport no longer produces individual riders; whether American capitalism can be escaped by specific individuals; and more.

Cycling as Self-Expression

This presentation explores women’s independent and critical contributions to constructing the emergent Rastafari’s political objectives, and the colonial attempts to undermine the movement as a cult of outcasts using claims about women’s devaluation and exploitation by men.

Women and Rastafari Politics, 1934-1960

What does a cultural history of dementia reveal about commonly circulating ideas relating to the brain, personhood, embodiment, and normal/abnormal? What difference do 'labels' make – 'melancholy', 'lunacy', 'dotage', and 'senility', for example?

Dementia: A Cultural History

At the peak of Stephenson and the KKK's influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman – Madge Oberholtzer – who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees.

The Rise & Fall of the KKK in the 1920s

Since the 2016 campaign season, right-wing politicians and activists have made history and history education central to their campaigns and political action. What are the the ways in which conservatives have deployed imagined histories as models for their political projects?

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