Is it just me, or is this profoundly disturbing? No, it’s not just me. From the Long Island Press, May 14: The manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects offered the nation a window into the stunning military-style capabilities of our local law enforcement agencies. For the past 30 years, police departments throughout the United…
Tag: Dystopia
Boston and the age of surveillance: “It was like a science fiction movie”
Neil M. Richards, law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education: We were living in an age of surveillance before the Boston Marathon bombing, but the event and its investigation produced calls for much greater monitoring of our cities and our lives. The media narrative of the investigation,…
Collapse and awakening: Thoughts on the American apocalypse
“When we get past the chaos, the horror, and the paradoxical hope of all that’s unfolding, what we’re talking about and living through is apocalyptic collapse as a spiritual path.” Last Thursday I noted that we were then living through a week of apocalypse here in America. The very next day saw the first-ever police…
Downgrading humans in the age of robots
From a recent essay by University of Toronto philosophy professor Mark Kingwell, writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education about “the dream-logic of all technology, namely that it should make our lives easier and more fun,” and the dark side of the age-old science fictional — and now increasingly science factual — vision of creating…
A new flood of apocalyptic cinema, where art imitates life
From an unexpectedly meaty piece published by — of all sources — NBC, on the current upsurge of apocalyptic cinema and its real-world meanings and implications: Ready for the end of the world as we know it? The popular culture certainly is. When “Defiance” arrives Monday night on the SyFy channel and “Oblivion” hits theaters…
A surveillance state beyond Orwell’s wildest dreams
Bruce Schneier is the unofficial dean of security experts in the digital age: an “internationally renowned security technologist,” a TED speaker, and the author of a popular newsletter plus 2012’s Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive and a huge library of additional books, blogs, and essays. “The closest thing the…
The NDAA and America’s looming totalitarian dystopia
Chris Hedges has brought a lawsuit against President Obama for signing into law Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Here’s his explanation of what’s at stake. Read slowly and carefully, the better to take it in. The section permits the military to detain anyone, including U.S. citizens, who âsubstantially supportâ — an…
Financial dystopia: “The giant Wall Street firms have taken on lives of their own”
In a review of Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story, the new (October 2012) book by Greg Smith — who also wrote last year’s bombshell piece “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs” for The New York Times — Michael Lewis makes the following cogent, riveting, and frightening observation about the current world…
Orwellian America and spiritual sickness
A decade into the “War on Terror,” things have started to get truly Orwellian here in the U.S. And you don’t have to be one of the wanton fear-mongers yammering on both ends the political continuum to recognize it. Consider: last week a U.S. federal judge in Manhattan ruled that President Obama is not required…
My Own Personal Tesseract: Reflections on ‘A Wrinkle in Time’
Although my work as an author has been overwhelmingly centered in realms of darkness and horror, as cross-fertilized by my deep and personal focus on matters of religion, philosophy, and psychology, I have also been a lifelong lover of fantasy and science fiction. So perhaps it’s not surprising that one of the foundational books…