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Brave New Screens: Soma, FOMO, and Friendly Fascism after 1984

Super Bowl commercials teach us how to conceive of surveillance. While Apple promises to fight Big Brother with a personal computer, Coca-Cola invites us to think different, i.e. positively about security cameras. The whitewashing of surveillance accompanies the ‘big brotherization’ of Apple. However, the whitewashing may only be a distraction from another more subtle, more effective (and after all more amusing) progression towards a dystopian future: the constant sharing without friction and language and thus without the distance that would allow for reflection and critical thinking. In this essay, I discuss the symbolic value of the year 1984 and its link to the ongoing move from lingual to visual communication. It underlines that the television screen or smartphone is the sibling of the surveillance camera and shows why the dystopian future we fear won’t be like George Orwell’s 1984 or Anthony Burgess’ 1985.

Distraction and its discontents

Disillusion with social media only stimulates the search for ever more refined techniques of manipulation. Detoxing won’t help, writes Geert Lovink: it is collective action, not will power, that can free us from the permanent state of distraction.

Rethinking Design Thinking: towards High Design 4.0, or Design beyond Design

Job guarantee as model for strengthening the welfare state: the case of the Netherlands

Two digits: digital materials against dystopias of replacement and utopias of participation

COVID-19 and sustainable transformation