Categories
Philosophy

Techno-populism Aggressively Consumes Our Collective Future

Technology at scale preferentially industrialises the parts of human nature that are easiest to measure, repeat, monetise, automate, and weaponise. Those parts are rarely our best ones.

Categories
politics

Power Without Responsibility: Political Incompetency Down Under

Institutional incompetence fuels political opportunism. Social media rewards outrage, nobody accepts responsibility, and democracy inherits the bill.

Categories
politics

Students Walk Out Against One Nation

The student walkout against One Nation points to a larger problem: the affective politics of cultivated antagonism that has become disconcertingly effective as a technologically-mediated, commercially-leveraged narrative system.

Categories
cybernetics

One Nation: A Note on Unity, Division and Australia

A nation cannot be unified by dividing a people against themselves. The danger begins when that contradiction becomes a political method.

Categories
Philosophy

how wealthy sponsors reshape populist politics

A movement founded on representing those with the least power increasingly depends upon support from those with the most.

Categories
politics

populism down under

The appeal of populism is that it makes complexity feel unnecessary. The cost is usually discovered much later.

Categories
politics

political speed-dating down under: the golden bulldozer

Australia’s political speed-dating with One Nation suggests that what has happened in the USA is not an exception, it is a franchised political method.

Categories
politics

please explain: xenophobia

Xenophobia does not stop a changing world. It converts psychological vulnerability into political power.

Categories
politics

one notion politics

Populism turns complex national problems into kindergarten theatre, then sells the applause as policy.

Categories
Philosophy

populism, unmasked

Populism is not an opinion. It is a phase dynamic.

Categories
politics

political theatre

One Nation raised millions for political theatre while a Queensland hospice had to beg for palliative care funding. This is clearly ridiculous but is also hardly an isolated incident of misplaced priorities and dodgy reasoning in sociopolitical systems.

Categories
cybernetics

populist capture: one nation 

A society overwhelmed by complexity eventually stops seeking explanations and starts seeking certainty; that is when political movements such as One Nation cease to be anomalies and become warnings.