Hyperculture, by Byung Chul-Han
Korean-German philosopher Byung Chul-Han is the quintessential postmodern figure. Having to come to Germany to study metallurgy, he switched fields and mastered the argot of German philosophy.(...)
Work Without the Worker, by Phil Jones
The robots are coming to take our jobs. Well, perhaps not universally. Truth be told, not everybody thinks it’s a bad thing.(...)
Time for Socialism, by Thomas Piketty
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” Penned towards the end of the Vietnam War by Hunter S. Thompson, in his 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the statement sounds truer than ever.(...)
Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy, by Adam Tooze
In Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy, Adam Tooze cites a fund manager’s assessment of the difficulties facing traders when the pandemic blew up in March 2020:(...)
The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy, by Chris Miller
The end of communism was meant to be a return to the “civilised” world of individualism and consumerism. It didn’t quite happen that way.(...)
Empire of Democracy, by Simon Reid-Henry
We are living in an era of challenges to liberal democracy that would have been comprehensible to previous generations. (...)
Breaking Things at Work, by Gavin Mueller
Technology is so thoroughly imbricated in our lives that questioning it has become taboo. Particularly on the left, where it's synonymous with the emancipation of labour.(...)
Foretelling the End of Capitalism, by Francesco Boldizzoni
Whoever said it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (Slavoj Žižek and Frederic Jameson are both blamed,) it’s a quote that has legs because it’s true.(...)
Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures
It’s tragically appropriate that Mark Fisher, whose work was so deeply engaged with the idea of hauntology, about the persistence of the past, should speak to us from beyond the grave.(...)
Young, Banerjee and Schwartz’s Levers of Power
Proportion explains a lot in life. This has become painfully obvious in the era of COVID-19 when the underlying sociopathy of the US president and of the party he leads can most clearly be seen in their signal failure to understand what the numbers mean.(...)