Category: Religion

Anonymous, Identity, internet, Moral Authority, Philosophy, Religion, Zizek

Zizek’s Technological Post-Humanism and Anonymous
anonymous
Anonymous: Abstract Technological Representation of the Excluded

As mentioned in my last post, Zizek identifies four apocalyptic antagonisms that threaten the liberal democratic status-quo.  They are ecology, technology, property and equality.  In relation to the technological post-human dystopia, Zizek attributes a leadership role to Ray Kurzweil, a noted thinker in technology futurism.  There are two kinds of post-humanism, it appears – a kind of robotic, artificial intelligence future as described in the fiction Asimov and the Terminator movies, and a bio-genetic technological Armageddon  of which I’m less familiar.

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Church, MNC, Multi-National Corporation, Religion

The Competitors for State Legitimacy

In many ways, the question of whether State Legitimacy is being eroded is a question about the future of the Nation State.  This is not a new question, and many writers have had various points of view (like Bobbitt and his Market State, for example).  Many writers go back, instead of going forward – I’ve recently been reading Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel; Acemoglu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail; and Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order in some way all address the history of civilisation, and the state and its attendant social order.  There’s usually an epilogue or final chapter on future vision, or what this means, but generally speaking these books and their writers offer a historical framework for thinking through how States, and civilisations, evolve.   Continue reading “The Competitors for State Legitimacy” →