A Tome of Forbidden Technologies

Once again we’re near the end of a month with five Wednesdays, and as regular readers of this blog know well, that means that readers got to nominate and vote on the subject of the fifth Wednesday post. This time the theme that won the contest was a glance back over the landscape of rejected…

Situationism: The Art of Détournement

It’s been a while since we last talked about Situationism, that giddy fusion of radical politics and performance art that seized the imaginations of a certain fraction of the European avant-garde in the 1960s. (Readers who missed those discussions the first time around, or simply want to review what’s been covered, will find those earlier…

The Subnatural Realm: A Speculation

One of the great ironies of the history of ideas is the way that cultures and civilizations go out of their way not to follow up on their greatest intellectual achievements. Look at the trajectory of every great culture, and you’ll find that the supreme breakthroughs of its thinkers don’t happen at the beginning of…