civil Society

Created
Thu, 05/03/2026 - 12:33
THERE WAS A popular gotcha back in the day for which tech utopians showed a special fondness. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, with conservative critics still noisily alarmed at the internet and social media, proselytisers for the new technology would dip back into history and unearth some comparable commentator whose own example was comically self-defeating.
Created
Sun, 01/03/2026 - 16:04
Superficially, at least, David Rieff seems well placed to write a book about woke culture. For one thing, cultural criticism runs in the family: his parents were Susan Sontag and Philip Rieff – both intellectuals with a keen understanding of how subjectivities are shaped by social change. For another, his own work has often displayed an astute grasp of the fraught relationship between the historical, the political and the psychological.