First Things First… again

The launch of the manifesto “First Things First 2020” is only the most recent example of the “ethical design” ideologues’ anti-design impulse.

Infrapenny Infrastructure

The relics of disused Victorian railway lines scattered across the landscape attest to a creative spark that demanded progress and bore no sentimentality, a recognition that reaching the future required risk, demolition, casualties.

Chernobyl Fallout

The virus thrives on the essential elements of social life, such as the need to socialise, the importance of proximity, or the desire to comfort. To defeat the virus, we are told that we have to become reclusive.

Post-Brexit (de)regulation

Fewer, simpler or looser standards doesn’t necessarily mean more cavalier, indeed it ought to mean that we could propose more efficient and thorough standards and regulation. Setting national standards in a global context should be liberating.

Coronavirus

The recent outbreak of coronavirus in the central city of Wuhan has created something resembling mass hysteria in the newsrooms of Western broadcast journalism This article explores some of the myths and realities.

Book Bites: Mark O’Connell’s “To Be A Machine”

Some of these futurists have taken Enlightenment reasoning and twisted it to a quasi-religious adherence to a technological future… as redemption. Distorted in a post human mind-set which condemns humans to be inferior, presented as a kind of system failure or flaw that only technological superiority can correct.

Home and Huawei: 5G tech and international security

This is a call-to-arms to America’s allies in a shifting geopolitical world in an attempt to instil some loyalty and solidarity.

Blade Runner’s Retro Futures

by Dr. H J McCracken

We are now only two years from the dateline of the original Blade Runner. Ray Bradbury’s melancholic future of Martian settlement and abandonment, The Martian Chronicles, has since long passed, and along with it of course, 1984.

Film Review: ‘City Visions’ #3

Josh Broomer | 7 October 2014 ‘Ecopolis China’, Directed by Anna-Karin Grönroos Anna-Karin Grönroos’s insightful documentary is dedicated to exploring two possible Eco-City projects; a state of the art eco-research city and an Eco-City in a single tower.Both are intended to accommodate 20,000 people and share the aim of creating, in the jargon, a cleaner, brighter and more sustainable future. Yet in their design and construction...

Book Review: The Writing on the Wall

by Martin Earnshaw | 7 June 2014 If you’ve ever wondered how much of your life you have wasted on Social Media, Facebook will tell you with its new app. Despite the widespread assertion that time spent on the internet is time wasted, enthusiasts of new technology stress its benefits. What both sides don’t realise, according to Tom Standage’s recent book, is that these debates have raged for longer than most people think. According to...