Post-politics Post-politics refers to the critique of the emergence, in the post-Cold War period, of a politics of consensus on a global scale: the dissolution of the Eastern Communist bloc following the collapse of the Berlin Wall instituted a promise for post-ideological consensus. The political development in post-communist countries went two different directions depending on the approach each of them take on dealing with the communist party members. Active decommunisation process took place in Eastern European states which later joined EU. While in Russia and majority of former USSR republics communists became one of many political parties on equal grounds. Roots of the post-political consensus[edit] The global political landscape post-1989[edit] The disintegration of the Eastern communist bloc following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 announced the end of the Cold War era, and with it the great ideological stand-off between East and West, between the communist and capitalist worlds.
Thèses Swarmwise – The Tactical Manual To Changing The World. Chapter Two. Launching a swarm is an intense event, where you can get hundreds or thousands of new colleagues in less than a day. You have a very short window for appreciating their interest, or they will take it elsewhere. OK, so you have a provocative idea. You’ve done the math. A traditional method would be to go about an advertising campaign to generate interest. On the other hand, a swarm will form as long as you present a compelling enough idea that people feel that they can be part of. To traditional marketers, this sounds ridiculous. When I started the Pirate Party in Sweden, I took its website online and wrote two lines in a file-sharing hub’s lobby chat. Hey, look, the Pirate Party has its website up after New Year’s. The site had a manifesto which was rough and unpolished, but which came across as credible, tangible, inclusive, and world changing. The first website of the Pirate Party, translated for reference. And that’s it. Don’t worry about advertising.
The Collection 16 Government Types - Infographic Facts 16 Government Types The Way Governments Works Artefacts - Encyclopédie en ligne des petits objets archéologiques 'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism | Technology We’re living through the most profound transformation in our information environment since Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing in circa 1439. And the problem with living through a revolution is that it’s impossible to take the long view of what’s happening. Hindsight is the only exact science in this business, and in that long run we’re all dead. Printing shaped and transformed societies over the next four centuries, but nobody in Mainz (Gutenberg’s home town) in, say, 1495 could have known that his technology would (among other things): fuel the Reformation and undermine the authority of the mighty Catholic church; enable the rise of what we now recognise as modern science; create unheard-of professions and industries; change the shape of our brains; and even recalibrate our conceptions of childhood. Why choose 1495? That’s not for want of trying, mind. Which is why the arrival of Shoshana Zuboff’s new book is such a big event. The evolution did not stop there.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff review – we are the pawns | Books The alarm beside your bed rings, triggered by an event in your calendar. The smart thermostat in your bedroom, sensing your motion, turns on the hot water and reports your movements to a central database. News updates ping your phone, with your daily decision whether to click on them or not carefully monitored, and parameters adjusted accordingly. How far and where your morning run takes you, the conditions of your commute, the contents of your text messages, the words you speak in your own home and your actions beneath all-seeing cameras, the contents of your shopping basket, your impulse purchases, your speculative searches and choices of dates and mates – all recorded, rendered as data, processed, analysed, bought, bundled and resold like sub-prime mortgages. The litany of appropriated experiences is repeated so often and so extensively that we become numb, forgetting that this is not some dystopian imagining of the future, but the present. Zuboff is no stranger to this territory.
Henry A. Giroux | Beyond Orwellian Nightmares and Neoliberal Authoritarianism (Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)Those who fight against neoliberalism must not settle for reforming a system that is as broken as it is dangerous. Any viable, transformative struggle will need a boldly democratic vision; durable, longstanding organizations and strategies that make politics meaningful. To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.- George Orwell Central to George Orwell's nightmarish vision of a totalitarian society was a government so powerful that it not only dominated all of the major institutions in a society, but it also was quite adept at making invisible its inner workings of power. To read more articles by Henry A. The American Deep State, or what Colonel Fletcher Prouty called the Secret Team, is a structural layer of political intermediaries: non-governmental organizations (e.g. In addition, the left has to do more than chart out the mechanisms through which neoliberal authoritarianism sustains itself.