Tag: Opinion
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On the Dignity of Withdrawal
There is a distinct, suffocating odour that hangs over the modern digital agora. It is not the scent of fresh inquiry or robust debate, but of stale, recycled outrage and the metallic tang of algorithmic manipulation. It is the smell of a civilisation that has forgotten how to speak to itself, preferring instead to scream…
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Linguistic Theatre
There is a new and particularly insipid form of superstition sweeping the West, a kind of digital animism that would have made the most credulous Victorian spiritualist blush. It is the conviction that the silicon chip has acquired a soul, or at least a conscience, and that we must now hold it accountable for the…
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Reality doesn’t require Apologists
It remains a source of great amusement to me that some people style themselves “religious apologists.” Religion certainly has much to apologize for – inquisitions, crusades, genital mutilations, the ongoing sabotage of science and education – but that is not what they mean. They mean that their job is to defend religion. This is already…
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How Europe is Betraying Its Own Values
A curious spectre is haunting Europe, though it is not socialism this time; it is the creeping, bureaucratic death of liberty. Across the continent, our political class is flirting with a proposal so flagrantly absurd and authoritarian that one almost wonders if they have read a history book: the mandatory scanning of every private message,…
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Abolish privacy
Sometimes you have one of those “What the hell did I just read?” moments. One of those moments for me was earlier this week when someone shared the manifesto “Abolish privacy” with me. People who read my blog, know that I have pretty strong opinions on privacy and I have addressed the topic here many…
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One-dimensional man
I recently came across an article which discusses the philosophy of Herbert Marcuse, a German philosopher of the Frankfurt school. Marcuse is surprisingly still very relevant today. In his book The One-Dimensional Man, he argues that modern, industrialized, democratic nations are actually totalitarian in nature. What struck me was the link I saw to the…