Surveillance Capitalism’s Discontents

Shoshana Zuboff’s 2017 tome, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, is a detailed denouncement of a growing infrastructure of data mining as a means of behavioral modification, orchestrated by technological entities she cumulatively refers to as “Big Other.” The book is one for our era: replete with chilling accounts of Big Other’s infringement upon the privacy,

The Problem of the Mainframe

The problem of the mainframe is one of perfect knowledge and total control. For many, it represents the dissolution of a range of rights taken for granted in the private realm: sovereignty, privacy, security, and comfort, to name a few. For a select few, it is a solution to an early problem: perfecting the function

Yoga and the Politics of Self-Care

The year 2020 has confronted the American body politic with myriad mass, affective events. We have witnessed plague, pestilence, protest, and inferno. We are on the brink of a national reckoning, with the general election mere weeks away. In response to these and other affective experiences, self-care discourse has occupied and taken hold in our

Philosophy as Equalizer

In a lecture on Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, Professor Michael Sugrue calls philosophy “the great equalizer” because the two most notable stoic philosophers were Marcus Aurelius, an emperor, and Epictetus, a slave. The sentiment of this statement can be traced to Seneca, a stoic who wrote that philosophy “has no regard for geneaologies” and that “excellence

Covid-19 and Political Control

As someone who has always loved apocalypse scenarios, I must admit the Coronavirus is an intriguing subject for rumination. The most interesting thing about the end of the world, to me, is the way the social and political norms that we take for granted are disrupted or even decimated. These norms include freedom of movement,