NOTE: this is the second chapter of my book, Cull of Personality. The book builds on themes that this chapter opens with, so, as it is a book and this is how books work, the chapter alone is an excerpt and its larger context is the entire book. The book…

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future James Bridle Verso, 2018 Like an air control system mistaking a flock of birds for a fleet of bombers, software is unable to distinguish between its model of the world and reality — and, once conditioned, neither are we. (39–40) …

The End of the Myth By Greg Grandin Metropolitan, 2019 Whether that wall gets built or not, it is America’s new symbol. It stands for a nation that still thinks “freedom” means freedom from restraint, but no longer pretends, in a world of limits, that everyone can be free —…

This is the title essay of my 2018 book, Gathered Remains. Out there walking round, looking out for food, A rootstalk, a birdcall, a seed that you can crack Plucking, digging, snaring, snagging, Somehow getting by. No good out there on dusty slopes of scree — Carry some — look for some. Go for a…

Originally written in 2014 and appeared in Black and Green Review no 1, Spring 2015. The execution of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18 year old, by a white police officer on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, MO, was sadly not an anomaly. The response, however, has been. Within hours…

In following the story of the killing of American missionary John Chau, I had the pleasure of being introduced to Sita Venkateswar. Rarely have I been so impressed by the thoroughness and depth of someone’s work and insights while also being completely shocked that I hadn’t come across it earlier…

“Collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.” -Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies[1] Agency is a tricky thing. Long before the Pulitzer Prize-winning multi-disciplinarian Jared Diamond threw his hat in…

­­­­It would be imprudent to deny, or even to play down, the profound change which the advent of ‘fluid modernity’ has brought to the human condition. The remoteness and unreachability of systemic structure, coupled with the unstructured, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics, change that condition in a…

There’s nothing we can say about technology that isn’t true for civilization in general. If you have social and economic power, you can do pretty much anything and say just about any kind of lie about it now. Maybe, just maybe, in time someone might question it. Today’s empire, tomorrow’s…