“Science substitutes itself for religion and is all the more despotic, obtuse and obscurantist.” – Jacques Lacan, in a 1974 Interview.

There are many people who discuss Artificial Intelligence, the Singularity etc in a sense which parallels an all-powerful deity, or the Christian God. Feuerbach argued that “What man calls Absolute Being, his God, is his own being”. That is to say, God as conceived by Christianity is a projection of human nature but purged of its imperfections.

Religion, as Feuerbach conceived, is: “man’s consciousness of his own essential nature”. Or, as Feuerbach elaborates:

“What man calls Absolute Being, his God, is his own bein...

David Graebar’s thesis of “Bullshit Jobs” is one which incites much disagreement. Essentially, Graebar’s idea is that many of the jobs which exist in the 21st century are pointless, or meaningless. A YouGov poll of British workers in 2015, inspired by Graeber’s essay on bullshit jobs, found that 37% of British working adults did not think their job made a meaningful contribution to the world. ...

As the cost of material goods, such as basic clothing or bread, has fallen far below its average cost in the early 20th century, at least in the global north, due to industrialisation, we see an equal movement against these commodities, at least in terms of social cache. Mass production removes the necessity for the worker to understand the commodity in its totality, as only the knowledge of t...

For both Debord and Adorno, the Society of the Spectacle and The Culture Industry, respectively, both focused on the passivity of the consumer subject to the producer. As Adorno says: “For the consumer there is nothing left to classify, since the classification has already been preempted by the schematism of production”. We now see a dialectical reversal of this paradigm. For Adorno, there was...

Sometimes, when reflecting upon the type of society we live within, certain people find it fruitful to declare that “human beings were not designed to [x]”. X is the specific facet of society which the speaker in question is refusing. Often it’s “human beings were not designed to stare at screens all day” for example, or they may claim “human beings were not designed to live in a population th...

A “Monoculture” generally refers to the idea that a society shares a singular cultural experience. A monocultural society is one in which an individual can be relatively certain that their friends, colleagues and family will have experienced the same cultural artifact as they did at a similar time. The clearest example to give here is that of broadcast television. In 1964, the United Kingdom h...

We are witnessing and have witnessed, at a breathtaking pace, the dissolution of traditional cultural and cognitive structures in society. Capitalism abhors limits, and will take up any means or method in order to overcome them. Whether that limit be class antagonism, the gold standard, human bodies, or families. The result of these overcomings is a shockw...