Posted inGeneralMediaTech

‘Westworld’: The shape of the future?

In a previous post I elaborated on an art exhibition at the Venice Biennale of 2017, which thematised the bio-technologies that are in the process of colonising the biosphere on Earth today, arguably with unpredictably deleterious consequences for humans and other living beings. The 2016/17 HBO bio-science-fiction television series, Westworld, based on a similarly-titled Michael […]

Posted inEnvironmentGeneral

‘Only when the last fish has been caught, will you realise that you cannot eat money’

‘Only when the last fish has been caught, will you realise that you cannot eat money’. We are moving perilously close to the actualisation of my paraphrase of these words from the well-known saying attributed to Alanis Obomsawin of the Abenaki tribe northeast of Montreal in Canada. The usual wording of the saying is: “When […]

Posted inEqualityGeneral

A commemoration of Nelson Mandela

By Zuki Mqolomba ”Bring back Nelson Mandela/Bring him back home to Soweto/I want to see him walking down the streets of South Africa tomorrow/Nelson Mandela” [Hugh Masekela, Bring back Nelson Mandela] ”The year 1963/The People’s President/Was taken away by security men/All dressed in a uniform/The brutality, brutality/Oh no, my black president/Him and his comrades/Were sentenced […]

Posted inGeneral

A novel that can teach us how to rebel against the colonisation of the mind

What do you get when you project the present media-saturated and media-sustained global economic-political hegemony into the future? You get a society where the kind of colonisation of the mind, brought about mainly through mainstream media’s incessant distribution of standardised discourses affirming the nonsense, that there is “no alternative” to neoliberal capitalism, is exacerbated to […]

Posted inGeneralMedia

Is this what our future looks like?

There have been all kinds of signs that the future of our societies will probably entail much higher levels of control than is the case at present. The National Security Agency’s illegitimate surveillance, not merely of American citizens’, but of other peoples’ private communications as well, is but one premonition of the shape of things […]

Posted inBusinessEnvironment

Climate change: Red alert in the Anthropocene

It is fitting that “Anthropocene”, the term coined just more than ten years ago by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist, denotes the new ecological period, following the end of the Holocene, when humans became the principal force driving changes in the planetary system. I say this because the Holocene (“New Whole”), or stable […]