Executive Orders, Offices, and Laws: Democratic Conundrums in Ancient Greece and Modern America
An executive order is issued by the new ruler of a country. A woman defies the order in the name of higher laws. How...
Technofascism and the AI Stage of Late Capitalism
Technologies produce disorientation
Since the release of ChatGPT 3.5 in November 2022 and the extraordinary AI hype that has followed in the last two years,...
Life in Plastic: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Barbie Movie
2024 has ushered in yet another wave of big-budget nostalgia. From the film adaptation of Wicked to the unstoppable Barbie juggernaut, it seems Hollywood...
Terrence Malick, or, Philosophy by Other Means
Given the chance to become a movie director in Hollywood or a professor of philosophy at Harvard, I imagine very few of us would...
Elon Musk vs. the Bureaucrats: A Paradox of Democratic Authority
Elon Musk’s conquest against the bureaucrats is based on two contradicting ideas of democratic authority.
The last months have been a non-stop flood of news...
To Protect Democracy from Oligarchy We Must Fight Inequality, but also Hierarchy
The problem of oligarchy is a problem of undue influence of wealth on politics. This problem takes a specific form in liberal-democratic, capitalist regimes....
Rebelling or Revelling?: Humor as a Sisyphean Task in Mystery Science Theater 3000, Part...
The now classic movie-riffing series Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K), and its spinoffs such as Rifftrax, can tell us something about how to deal...
Tyla, Coloureds, Color, and Culture Part III
American YouTuber Armon Wiggins went viral on X after referring to Tyla as an “uppity African,” an insult with which the broadcaster and rapper...
Hamilton’s Folly: The U.S President’s Pardoning Power and Questions of Forgiveness
“The benign prerogative of pardoning”
At the birth of the United States, Alexander Hamilton argued in Federalist 74 that “Humanity and good policy conspire to...
From Human to Cyborg: Art, Technology, and the Redefinition of Human Identity
Throughout the past century, technology's integration into the human body has redefined our understanding of identity, autonomy, and what it means to be human....