Copenhagen is a beautiful city. It is also a financial black hole for South Africans. With a currency that is constantly edging lower against international currencies because of an inept and corrupt ANC government which cannot manage the country’s economic relations in such a way that its toxic internal political conflicts do not impact negatively […]
money
Posted inEnvironment, Equality, General, Lifestyle
The ‘happiest’ nations in the world – what do they have in common?
Some of you probably know about the so-called “happiness index” that has been published on a regular basis for some time now. It lists the countries of the world on the basis of their ‘happiness’ and obviously, the index has a way of establishing such ‘happiness’ – a number of criteria, that is. This is […]
Posted inBusiness, General
Brexit, capital as meta-body, and mytochondria
So it did happen in the end. Brexit. Against expectations, judging by the polls immediately before the referendum on 23 June. But looking back, it is not surprising that it happened. Most of those voting to leave are older voters, whose emotional ties to a Britain before the “free movement” immigration from European Union countries […]
Posted inGeneral, Tech
Disposable objects: The roots of global nihilism today
I have written on nihilism here before, and am returning to it now in light of a striking analysis of its causes by Bernard Stiegler in What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology (Polity Press, 2013, Kindle edition). While not ignoring the diagnosis of nihilism in western culture by Nietzsche, Stiegler takes its roots back […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Change is happening worldwide…
On October 15 and 21 2012 the Current Affairs programme on the BBC’s Radio 4 broadcast a documentary in the form of an interview with the most cited sociologist and social theorist in the world, Manuel Castells, at The London School of Economics on his (then) recently published new book, Aftermath: The Cultures of the […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle
How much money is enough?
A R12 500 a month salary, much discussed in business, economic and political circles at present, is the wage fought for by striking platinum miners in the longest and most damaging strike in our country’s history. The recent agreement puts that figure within sight. I couldn’t live on R12 500, and I’m sure most readers on this […]
Posted inLifestyle
A lesson from the zoo biscuit in declining quality creep
Do you still remember the zoo biscuits of your childhood, as I do? These were special treats, handed out as rewards for good behaviour or on special occasions. There was a ritual around their consumption, first a delicate negotiation among siblings as to who got the lion and who the ostrich. Then there was the […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
Keith Hart on money, memory and democratising the economy
Keith Hart begins his thought-provoking book The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World (Profile Books, London, 2000) with the statement: “Ours is an age of money. Half the world worships money and the other half thinks of it as the root of all evil. In either case, money makes the world go round. If […]
Posted inBusiness, Equality
A world where time replaces money as currency
Isn’t it amazing how a huge money-spinner of a film, made on a budget of millions, obviously in anticipation of making a sizeable profit in moviehouse-attendance and on DVDs, can tap into something that goes diametrically against the grain of its own production rationale? What it taps into, is the latent desire on the part […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle
An open letter to Money
Dear Money, We need to talk. I’ve been meaning to write this letter to you for a while, but I got side-tracked and spent a whole lot of time doing other stuff, and then I was busy starting a new agency and so it didn’t happen. But it turns out that open letters are the […]
Posted inBusiness, General, Lifestyle, Media
The shopping mall as consumer architecture
Referring to the moment, in Plato’s Symposium, where the lover supposedly beholds a completely disembodied, atemporal “beauty”, in the process conforming to the character of this abstraction, Kaja Silverman says (World Spectators, 2000: 10): “This deindividuation of the look represents a crucial feature of the process through which Socrates negates phenomenal forms. This is because […]
Posted inGeneral
Framing Romney’s big-money politics
In the October 1 2012 edition of TIME magazine, James Poniewozik wrote an incisive piece of journalism on the imminent US presidential election – more precisely on Mitt Romney’s aspirations and the occasion of his gaffe about “the 47%” although Poniewozik concentrates on a different, to my mind, more telling aspect of the donor banquet […]