Daniel Rourke /stream

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When imagining civilizations on other worlds, we tend to stick to the familiar. Aliens in the popular imagination are not all that different from us — they often have eyes and ears, walk…

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From the militarization of social media to the corporatization of the art world, Hito Steyerl’s writings represent some of the most influential bodies of work in contemporary cultural criticism today.

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We’re Solarpunk because the only other options are denial or despair. —Adam Flynn1 By now, dystopia may have become a luxury genre. Indulging in miserable future scenarios is not something everyone…

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Language bends and buckles under pressure of climate change. Take the adjective ‘glacial’. I recently came across an old draft of my PhD dissertation on which my advisor had scrawled the…

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Limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius will not prevent destructive and deadly climate impacts, as once hoped, dozens of experts concluded in a score of scientific studies released Monday. A…

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Human extinction. The coordinated release of various strains of a human sterilization virus.

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An episode of The Simpsons called “The Computer Wore Menace Shoes” sums up the turn-of-the-century internet quite well. Homer builds a website, dubbed “Mr. X's Web Page” and populates it with…

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After Google was criticised in 2015 for an image-recognition algorithm that auto-tagged pictures of black people as “gorillas”, the company promised “immediate action” to prevent any repetition of the error.

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In the online art workshops of the white nationalist alt right, young neo-Nazis and neo-fascists trade simple aesthetic tips: Consider your color scheme in advance, build your image in sections of…

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Legacy Russell is a writer, artist and cultural producer. Her first book Glitch Feminism is forthcoming from Verso. A version of this interview first appeared in the chapter “Distracted to Attention: On Digital Reading”…

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Thank me for my free labor maintaining this list by making a donation to The Offing via Paypal, Crowdrise, or a monthly donation at Patreon.

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In 2006 a man walked into an internet cafe in Kassel, Germany, and shot dead Halit Yozgat, a 21-year-old member of the Turkish-German family who owned it. It was the ninth…

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Let’s talk about what it means to destroy yourself. In the relatively short time I’ve been alive, I have made an art out of self-destruction. I’ve placed myself in frightening situations…

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This review of Marvel’s Black Pan­ther is part of a forth­com­ing dossier on the polit­i­cal thought of Huey P. New­ton. It con­tains spoil­ers.

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“Join our team on this special voyage that equips leaders with resources and actionable solutions to become a part of a global force of change.” This isn’t the description for Doctors…

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In “Fragment on Machines,” Marx made the case that with investment in automated technology, which he called fixed capital, capitalism is able to reduce necessary labor time and increase both surplus…

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In 2016, Marshall University professor Jason Morrissette was playing Batman: Arkham Knight. While sneaking around the shadows, Morrissette stumbled upon a soda machine. Like many games, Akrham Knight doesn’t feature any…

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In cramped quarters at Russia’s Higher School of Economics, shared by four students and a cat, sat a server with 13 hard drives. The server hosted Sci-Hub, a website with over…

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In the current issue of Salvage journal, Sølvi Goard uses Ghost in the Shell as an entry point for a discussion of how capitalism shapes bodies, especially trans bodies.

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The following is an excerpt from Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy, by Lynne Segal (Verso, November 2017). This essay is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

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As a kid, I saw the 1968 version of Planet of the Apes. As a future primatologist, I was mesmerized. Years later I discovered an anecdote about its filming: At lunchtime,…

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Dale Baker was introduced to simulation theory five years ago as an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Iowa. The idea that our reality may be nothing more than a computer-generated…

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Preeminent scientists are warning about serious threats to human life in the not-distant future, including climate change and superintelligent computers. Most people don't care.

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Imagine a world where there is no food for us to feed on, and the only way to survive is to resort to cannibalism. A group of British researchers has envisaged…

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When imagining civilizations on other worlds, we tend to stick to the familiar. Aliens in the popular imagination are not all that different from us — they often have eyes and ears, walk…

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From the militarization of social media to the corporatization of the art world, Hito Steyerl’s writings represent some of the most influential bodies of work in contemporary cultural criticism today.

Bookmark

“It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been…

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Language bends and buckles under pressure of climate change. Take the adjective ‘glacial’. I recently came across an old draft of my PhD dissertation on which my advisor had scrawled the…

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Human extinction. The coordinated release of various strains of a human sterilization virus.

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My friend June Thunderstorm and I once spent a half an hour sitting in a meadow by a mountain lake, watching an inchworm dangle from the top of a stalk of…

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After Google was criticised in 2015 for an image-recognition algorithm that auto-tagged pictures of black people as “gorillas”, the company promised “immediate action” to prevent any repetition of the error.

Bookmark

In the online art workshops of the white nationalist alt right, young neo-Nazis and neo-fascists trade simple aesthetic tips: Consider your color scheme in advance, build your image in sections of…

Bookmark

Legacy Russell is a writer, artist and cultural producer. Her first book Glitch Feminism is forthcoming from Verso. A version of this interview first appeared in the chapter “Distracted to Attention: On Digital Reading”…

Bookmark

Thank me for my free labor maintaining this list by making a donation to The Offing via Paypal, Crowdrise, or a monthly donation at Patreon.

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In 1984, the BBC aired a TV movie so disturbing it would only repeat the broadcast once, a year later, on the 40th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan. That…

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Let’s talk about what it means to destroy yourself. In the relatively short time I’ve been alive, I have made an art out of self-destruction. I’ve placed myself in frightening situations…

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“Join our team on this special voyage that equips leaders with resources and actionable solutions to become a part of a global force of change.” This isn’t the description for Doctors…

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I lived in Atlanta for six years after college. I only went back to St. Pete twice in that time, and both times I stayed with my aunt Linda. Mom would…

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In 2016, Marshall University professor Jason Morrissette was playing Batman: Arkham Knight. While sneaking around the shadows, Morrissette stumbled upon a soda machine. Like many games, Akrham Knight doesn’t feature any…

Bookmark

In cramped quarters at Russia’s Higher School of Economics, shared by four students and a cat, sat a server with 13 hard drives. The server hosted Sci-Hub, a website with over…

Bookmark

In the current issue of Salvage journal, Sølvi Goard uses Ghost in the Shell as an entry point for a discussion of how capitalism shapes bodies, especially trans bodies.

Bookmark

The following is an excerpt from Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy, by Lynne Segal (Verso, November 2017). This essay is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

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Anatoly Karpov, the 66-year-old former World Chess Champion, was comfortable playing chess underneath the bright lights and in front of the cameras on a television studio set. His opponent, Mikhail “Misha”…

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Dale Baker was introduced to simulation theory five years ago as an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Iowa. The idea that our reality may be nothing more than a computer-generated…

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Imagine a world where there is no food for us to feed on, and the only way to survive is to resort to cannibalism. A group of British researchers has envisaged…

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When you are the first person to arrive in a meeting room, do you think of it as being empty or full? If you were raised in the West, a meeting…