Submarine state: On secrets and leaks

It’s not answerable to anyone, given it doesn’t exist in law; no minutes are kept; and it’s confidential. No citizen ever knows what is said within… These are decisions of almost life and death, and no member has to answer to anybody. – Yanis Varoufakis, description of the Eurozone [1] Recently in this journal Maïa […]

Big data, small freedom?: Informational surveillance and the political

Dossier: Data & Surveillance

Big data, smal freedom? Informational surveil ance and the political Burkhardt wolf In 2010, ‘big data’ was described as ‘datasets that could not be captured, managed and processed by general computers within an acceptable scope’. [1] Today’s definitions boil down to three Vs: Variety, Volume and Velocity. Big data deals with mostly un structured, heterogeneous […]

Surveillance and class in Big Brother

Surveillance and class in Big Brother Mike wayne The television series Big Brother, for which Channel Four has contracted the rights until 2006, is in fact rather more than a television programme. It is better understood as an evolving multimedia, multiplatform technological experiment, trailblazing free terrestrial television into the brave new world of what Dan […]

On Rem Koolhaas

and fleeting; the city as empty spaces, panic, insecurity, screams and rags, infrastructural parasitism, and so on. The postmodern, a fundamental category in regard to Koolhaas, which he had already inaugurated in his retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, Delirious New York, is here defined as an irreversible category and as a way of seeing the present. […]

Lash out and cover up: Austerity nostalgia and ironic authoritarianism in recession Britain

Commentary Lash out and cover up Austerity nostalgia and ironic authoritarianism in recession Britain Owen hatherley Britain has reacted strangely to the crisis of neoliberalism. The country’s seemingly endemic nostalgia, particularly for the Second World War, has long been exploited by Thatcherites and Blairites; but its recent political use shows, in an especially acute form, […]