Adam Curtis just cuts his ideas, rough hewn from the seam deep under ground.
Category: Economics
Latour on trains/travel/compression
Both quotes from Latour’s Aramis: which I skimmed a bit just now because I’ve spent so much time on trains and other transportation devices lately:
“At a time when efficiency has the status of dogma, we are all subject to its discipline, and in our stressed-out state, before and after work, we all have to put up with physically exhausting compressions in uncomfortable spaces and annoying waiting periods owing to breakdowns in the traffic flow. This is the paradox of antisocial behaviour in a society that would like to see itself as social.” p.31“Every time I was squeezed in the metro at rush hour, I now knew that this was the RATP’s way of adapting the supply of transportation to the demand. What an economic function its elasticity is the flexibility of my body!” p.95
Oh I nearly forgot!!
Critical Distance has a Patreon now and it’s great, the site’s gonna really go places.
I don’t think anyone really reads my blog anymore (least, not anyone who doesn’t come via weird google searches or my twitter) so I didn’t think to promote it here but just in case.
If you’re into games writing/blogging/criticism Critical Distance is worth supporting. Honest.
Watch the K Foundation burn a million quid
http://youtu.be/q33LPpx0QsY?t=10m
Watching this video makes me giddy. The world seems to peel back and the ground folds away beneath you, and if you concentrate on it in just the right way, you can step through the portal, temporarily, into a zone or region completely unlike anyplace you’ve ever been or ever will.
Chapter 5 – conclusions.
Varoufakis on ‘Ponzi Austerity’
With bonus quote about the intervention of the ECB into Greek politics. Technocracy, ho!
Unnoticed by almost everyone, this episode represented a sinister moment when the EU asserted the right of its executive to intervene directly in the democratic process of a member-state. Unelected officials in Brussels concocted a ‘right’ to suspend unilaterally an international and intra-European loan agreement, on the basis of their assessment of which political party was and which was not ‘acceptable’ to form government in a member-state.