Our Times

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” — Zora Neale Hurston

The British writer Robert Colville says we are living through ‘the Great Acceleration’, and like Sune, he argues it’s not simply our tech that’s getting faster – it’s almost everything. There’s evidence that a broad range of important factors in our lives really are speeding up: people talk significantly faster now than they did in the 1950s, and

The dawn of the third millennium is characterized by an enormous difficulty in imagining the future. We fear the worst. There is no longer expectation, or an opening to the future. Rather, the future seems closed: in the best-case scenario, it is destined to reproduce the past, reiterating it in a present that appears in the trappings of a future

In a recent newsletter, “The Shopping Cure,” Anne Helen Petersen explored the compulsion to buy and accumulate stuff that’s been fostered by technologies of frictionless consumption. Every conceivable activity or hobby one sets out to enjoy becomes an occasion to buy stuff: “They transform from sites of actual pleasure and diversion to means of

In Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton includes in his concise definition “the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external.” The myth of Russian humiliation at Western, especially American, hands fits the victimhood model perfectly. The

Die technologischen Möglichkeiten der digitalen Protokollierung von immer mehr Lebensspuren laden heutzutage dazu ein, ein auf das Individuum zielendes diagnostisches Instrumentarium der Risikoklassifikation anzuwenden. Der über uns schwebende Datenschatten, der unser soziales, politisches und ökonomisches Leben beschreibt und nachverfolgt, kann