Drones are changing the way wars are fought, but they’re also changing the way we experience those wars. Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America — not on the battlefields of Vietnam. — Marshall McLuhan (1975) Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar… Read More »
Accusations that some big name musical acts have been miming their vocals raises some tricky questions. Popular music is in danger of becoming a parody of itself. Where once we dreamed of a fairer, more equitable landscape, big money is ever more concentrated in the hands of a shrinking group of artists and record companies.… Read More »
If your revenue model relies on misleading, impoverishing and gaslighting your customers, then you probably should rethink your model. That would seem to be a reasonable statement to make, and one most businesses might agree with. But the reality is that companies are falling over themselves to charge people for things they didn’t ask for… Read More »
This is the second in a series of pieces I am writing on dystopian movies — — broadly defined — and what they tell us, or could tell us, about our own condition and what prescriptions they might offer for a way forward. In this piece I offer a different interpretation of the two Blade Runner movies and the… Read More »
I finally braced myself to see Alex Garland’s Civil War earlier this month, unable to watch in more than 10 minute chunks, and so found myself flipping between fictional scenes of American carnage and real-world assaults on the Holiday Inn in Rotherham. I learned an unpleasant lesson Burning bin at Holiday Inn Express in Rotherham,… Read More »