I just came across British comedian and activist Rob Newman‘s show “The History of Oil” – it is an enlightening, provoking and funny view on the role of oil in global politics in the past century and what role it’ll be playing in the future, what with the Crisis in the Middle East, Peak Oil [...]
Fundamentally, political conflict can be reduced to two opposing world views. There are those who believe that given the opportunity, all men will prove to be inherently social and thus understand that in order to live well, those around them need to live well as well and act accordingly. We can call these people “socialists”. [...]
There aren’t any heroes anymore, it seems. According to some, this is much to the loss of today’s youth who are in sore need of heroes and heroism to inspire them. Media critic Thomas de Zengotita explains it like this: The favoured explanation says that real heroes have been replaced by sports and entertainment stars. [...]
The recent eviction of the Youth House has envigorated the Danish debate of what democracy actually is and on which premises democracy works – a debate that long-time readers of this blog will know I find very interesting. Especially since people tend to use democracy as a value in it self, to be exported to [...]
Since Thursday morning, Copenhagen has been a pretty interesting place to be. Thursday morning was when the police forcefully and effectively evicted the activists of the Youth House which had been in the hands of several generations of young punks and squatters for the past 24 years – most of this time with a legal [...]
I was sent a link to this interesting presentation on “the lack of collapse-preparedness here in the United States” by Dimitry Orlov, a Russian ex-pat in the US. The presentation is simply a comparison of political and economical factors shared between the Soviet Union before its collapse and the present-day United States, arguing that not [...]
A long time ago, I wrote a fictional news article of an election in the East-european state of Syldavia and how they dealt with the continuing problem of having two similar political blocs fighting over a small decisive vote to win political power for the next term – as is seen in so many of [...]
I tried hard to find a better title for this blog post, but I guess I failed. Having been a long-time fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, I remember watching the first of the “Lord of the Rings” films and being sorely disappointed, even somewhat angry at how badly the film’s art directors had concretized many [...]
Some time ago, Anne Galloway posted an excerpt from a talk by designer and HCI theorist Brenda Laurel on her concept of culture work which caught my interest. Laurel’s main concern is design which focuses on the bottomline, the way that most of the products we buy are designing with buying and consumption in mind, [...]