Progressive culture since 1954
For the past fifteen years I’ve been more engaged with the violence of capitalism than ever, and I realised that David Graeber was part of the company of people I think of as being my own personal squad of invisibly-present comrades. Graeber was living, now, doing the work, thinking about it, talking about it, writing about the things I was thinking.
Shastra Deo reviews new work by Rebecca Jessen, Cham Zhi Yi, David Stavanger and John Mukky Burke.
Perhaps we must become reconciled to the fact that, as much as we would like to see ourselves as part of nature, to look at a tree and see it as one of us, the fact remains that to entire ecosystems it is we who are the octopus. We are Cthulhu, the primordial horror and existential threat.
If I am to survive in the new Commonwealth, I must convince the AI that I exist. Last time I got a letter which just said ‘Not enough information’. A growing invisibility has been creeping over me. I have passed beyond the Test Pattern to that small white dot at the end of transmission, where there is a noise only dogs can hear.
Over the last few months, we’ve seen the beginnings of an anti-racist reckoning in Australia’s media, arts and entertainment sector, nourished by the Bla(c)k Lives Matter movement. I am sceptical that it will lead to any real change in Australia. Diversity and inclusion initiatives are usually a way for a company’s management to abdicate responsibility to a junior colleague who doesn’t have authority to challenge structural racism. Maybe there’ll be a couple more of us in the room. But what happens when we get there?
Government subsidies for Airbnb owners impacted by COVID-19 expose how speculative property investment is now expected to return a guaranteed economic reward.
One of the starkest and potentially lethal failures exposed by the pandemic is the broken and bloated prison industry, filled with the people successive governments have let down, from ten-year-olds to the elderly. Prisons were failed, overburdened institutions before the pandemic, and they are even more dangerous now.
True security and safety only comes through people acting together. Legal rights and entitlements are the shadows, the remnants and echoes of the great motor of history: workers uniting in the struggle for safety, dignity and democracy.
Because climate activism is based on a trust in scientific consensus, the claim that climate activists are religious fanatics is a particularly effective way to delegitimise their cause. Yet ultimately those who deploy this strategy struggle to put together a credible case for why climate change shouldn’t inspire a fanatical, even religious, passion for justice.
Our point isn’t just that Folklore feels super-queer, though of course it does. Rather, what we see in Folklore is a particular pattern of queer devotion and queer eroticism: the cherished bond between two girls that’s not visible to outsiders (or not at first), not supposed to be erotic (but it is), not supposed to last until adulthood (but it does).
The importance of the university hinges on its ability to exist as a space separate from other institutions. By protecting the unique character of this space, we demonstrate that there are different ways for society to function and therefore challenge people to imagine different futures.
there is a place more real than desire as real as a train or a brick or a sarcoma, words are cleaner there, swaying whitely like feathers in warm air, where dignity whispers like silk skirts.
Camp’s triumph is that the people who developed it did so to make fun of a society that shunned them and now that society seems more camp than ever. The world seems to take itself a little less seriously than before. This is not always a good thing, but then neither is camp.