“Don’t Look Up” (part 1) – climate movie is kryptonite to the super villains
You know a satirical movie has hit its target when the mainstream reviewers call it “shrill” and “overblown.”
Media
What Could Possibly Go Right?: Episode 52 Douglas Rushkoff
Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. Rushkoff’s work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, money, power, and one another. He addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
Reflecting on the Modern Myth of Narcissus
As Postman argued in a speech-turned-book in the 1980s, the future will probably look more like Brave New World than 1984, as we willingly numb ourselves—with media rather than Soma—and become passive and oppressed without even realizing it.
Jason Kenney’s Government Denounces the Bigfoot Family
Jason Kenney’s spin shop the Canadian Energy Centre (otherwise known as the War Room) has stuck another foot in its oily mouth.
What Could Possibly Go Right?: Episode 28 Douglas Rushkoff
Rushkoff’s work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, money, power, and one another. Through this lens, he answers the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
It’s Never Really about the Bread
Corporate media often depicts major social upheavals as single-issue affairs — to see how movements and struggles connect we need to look beyond the headlines.
Fake news, algorithmic sentinels, and facts from the future
How easy is it to tell the difference between so-called “fake news” and real news? Could algorithms designed to do that exclude important stories about climate and environment?
How the Anti-Democracy Movement Used Media to Command the Narrative
As far back as 1835, perhaps our nation’s earliest and most astute observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, understood the power of the media. He described the press as “the chief democratic instrument of freedom.” But today our “instrument of freedom” seems to mean the freedom to enrich oneself privately, whatever it takes. How did we get to this sad state?
Climate Change, Global Media, and Neocolonial Storytelling
What I find interesting—and infuriating—about a self-proclaimed “global media” and its storytelling about Indian eco-awakening is a myopic diagnosis of and solution to global environmental crisis, aka climate change, through a perception of time seeped in historic amnesia.
The Creation of Society’s Shared Hallucinations
Our social reality is a combined construct of what we directly observe, what others tell us directly, and the parallel realities created by the media.