Society

As we become ever more remote from ‘meatspace’, it’s worth considering the role the scalpel and the needle may play in that development.

In 1741, the exalted members of the Bordeaux Royal Academy of Sciences met to consider sixteen essays written in response to the following question: ‘What is the physical cause of the Negro’s color, the quality of [the Negro’s] hair, and the degeneration of both [Negro hair and skin]?’

‘They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence’, rasps Kyle Reese in The Terminator, referring to the Skynet computer system that launched a nuclear attack against humanity in the catastrophe known as Judgment Day. The trope is as old as science fiction itself, and shadows the genre with all of the tenacity of an Uzi-toting T-800.

In 2021 the National Film and Sound Archive released new footage of the last known thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger.

In How to Rule Your Own Country, Harry Hobbs and George Williams consider the phenomenon of micronations, which is to say territorial entities whose members claim independence or sovereignty but which lack diplomatic recognition.

Towards the end of Dreamers and Schemers, his ‘political history of Australia’, Frank Bongiorno tells us that the term ‘democracy sausage’ first entered public discourse in 2012. The date, he suggests, is significant, for while the coinage seemed on one level to speak to the relaxedness and egalitarianism of the Australian electorate, and even to a sense of celebration and fun as regards the institutions of democracy, its introduction coincided with a sharp decline in public trust in politicians and the political process.

There is an interesting recent article on buses from the ‘I’ Newspaper pointing out the disastrous consequences of Thatcher’s deregulatory regime, which has led to a decline in bus passengers everywhere except where the deregulation didn’t happen – which is London, such that London now accounts for almost half of all bus passengers in the... Read more