Activity

Discussing CA’s signature technique of ‘psychographics’, one contributor warned urgently that the company was ‘using psychological techniques to change people’s thoughts and behaviour’. Of course, this could be read as a thoroughly banal description of everyday PR – or as crude apocalyptic warning …

When reality fails the model, the electorate refusing to do what they are told, the result is an epistemological crisis which throws up various and variously wild speculations. The Russians are said to have ‘hacked’ the election, and there is a useful elision in the verb between meaning literal IT …

with the crisis of their project in a destablising world, liberals’ obsession with norms of appearance, trappings and proprieties of a collapsing system, may grow, in glum aspirational metonymy

The culture industry’s hagiography (Barry, Southside with You) is accompanied by a torrent of schmaltzy and lachrymose words

The implied obverse, an unbroken culture, would be a more civil form of class and imperial rule.