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Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise. Help us break the corporate media monopoly before it kills us all. The ruling oligarchy depends on its disinformation machine to maintain its power. Please consider a donation today!] By Edward Curtin “Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.  Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style.”    – Albert Camus, The Fall Propagandists are smart people. They begin their devious ma...

By Edward Curtin mon cher , for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.  Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style.”    – Albert Camus, January 24, 2021 " Information Clearing House" -  Propagandists are smart people. They begin their devious machinations with the premise that people need to believe in something rather than remaining suspended in doubt or forced to accept the existential courage of despair that lea...

Our collective “liberation” from the intractable and indifferent realities of the world is being ceaselessly spun out by our devices and their algorithms. This process is plunging many of us into a kind of political solipsism, whereby we’re increasingly intolerant of any state of affairs that doesn’t express and execute our own desires.

Among the more influential truisms about science today is that it is essential for technological — and thus economic — progress. It is fitting, then, that the apparent slowing of American innovation has fueled a debate about the importance of science and the need for the federal government to support it. Indeed, there is growing interest across the political spectrum in revitalizing American innovation, raising questions about how best to allocate scarce resources. What kinds of research should we support? Who should decide — government or industry or the scientific community? Should we...

In the 1950s and 1960s, a series of thinkers, beginning with Jacques Ellul and Marshall McLuhan, began to describe the anatomy of our technological society. Then, starting in the 1970s, a generation emerged who articulated a detailed critique of that society. The critique produced by these figures I refer to in the singular because it shares core features, if not a common vocabulary. What Ivan Illich, Ursula Franklin, Albert Borgmann, and a few others have said about technology is powerful, incisive, and remarkably coherent. I am going to call the argument they share the Standard Critique of...