Louis-Ferdinand Céline based a literary reputation on transgression. He was a prototypical troll, contemptuous of the truth, indefatigable in saying the unsayable, and couching his hatred in irony. And like trolls, he poses a dilemma: engage or ignore?
Can we rethink bots and algorithms so that they become tools that work for us, instead of an invisible, oppressive system that tries to deceive us? How can we redesign the ‘social’ in a way that doesn’t allow trolls to permanently disrupt our thinking and behaviour?
Finnish politics today is dominated by women, many under the age of 35. This is a result of long-standing efforts to include more women in leadership. But the failure of the previous rightwing government has also helped pave their way, as have the internal fractures in the social democratic and centre parties. Now they must clear up the mess they have inherited.
This decade brought us revolutions, crises and strong backlashes too. But although it’s easy for authoritarians to prey on societies in turmoil, the popular demand for equality and a liveable future do not dissolve, even under tyranny.
Boris Vezjak looks into Peter Handke’s controversial Nobel Prize using the analogy of a pizza: whether one should only care if it tastes good and not about the morals of the chef. Isolationists only refer to tastiness, while holists’ criticisms don’t necessarily invalidate the award.
Like a prophet, Mahmoud Darwish is positioned between the tragic past of the Palestinian nakba, the present of occupation and exile, and hopes for a liberated future. Zeina G. Halabi places him in the context of the Arab enlightenment and the post-Arab Spring world to offer Palestinian liberation as a way of redeeming all humanity.
Sex workers and prostitutes are subject to extreme discrimination and violence. Most of those living from commercial sex have no other choice, and all of them face a social stigma. To honour the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, 17 December, we collected reads on the topic from the Eurozine archive.
The Conservative victory in the UK election was driven by hatred of a broken political process inflamed by disinformation and media cynicism, argues Adam Ramsay of openDemocracy. Britain’s prime minister made politics awful, then asked people to vote it away.
In response to political pressure, digital platforms are abandoning their laissez-faire approach to content and allying with legacy media to provide ‘reliable’ news and information. But this is the wrong way to create the conditions in which disinformation becomes vulnerable to challenge.
A vaudeville figure has been reinstated to lead Britain through Brexit, while in the US a reality-tv star is being impeached for trying to blackmail a comedian in Ukraine. Comedy seems to have taken over the wheel in political leadership. But the quality of this entertainment varies greatly.
Russia as the liberal unconscious, source of all that the West finds abject and unsettling? There is something to be said for this theory, says Peter Pomerantsev in conversation with his father Igor, the émigré dissident and poet. But where does it put the myth of central Europe as ‘kidnapped West’, not to mention contemporary Ukrainian occidentalism?
Vast regimes of cultural practice serve to transcend one’s physical existence and ensure living on symbolically through language, culture, and nationhood. While some fear the eradication of minority languages, others dread losing their group’s hegemony. But all run into trouble when faced with the apocalyptic rhetoric of climate activists.
Volodymyr Zelensky’s rise to power in Ukraine has left many observers confused. An influential cultural operative for decades, he has been written off as a clown, despite strong popular support and his rapid first reforms suggesting otherwise. Now the task for the Zelensky team is to deliver on the high hopes they have built their campaign on.
In eastern Europe, neoliberalism’s loss of legitimacy after 2008 benefits coalitions of rightwing populists, whose promise of stability addresses the psychological impact of the crisis on younger voters. These are citizens who have never experienced a shortage economy and who still aspire to a western quality of life.
Feminist historian Christelle Taraud talks about the patriarchal system for regulating prostitution in France’s colonial empire, a system made by men for men to reserve indigenous women for their own use and control the ‘unruly’ sexuality of men from honour cultures. These issues are covered in ‘Sexe, race, et colonies’ (2018), co-edited by Taraud, which has proved controversial in France for its unsettling imagery.
‘Sweatshops’ are usually associated with labour outsourced to east- and south-east Asia, but they exist inside the EU too. Gruelling working conditions in Romania’s low-pay garment industry, which supplies clothes for mid-market and luxury retailers alike, force many people to go abroad in search of a real living wage.