‘Everything that we’ve been sold about the democratic nature of the internet has always been a marketing pitch.’ Yasha Levine on the military origins of the internet, on data modelling and technocratic government, and why the Cambridge Analytica scandal was good for Facebook.
Earlier this month, Romania’s PSD-led government succeeded in having the country’s leading anti-corruption prosecutor fired, and then launched a violent crackdown on street demonstrations that had been going on for more than 20 months. Roland Clark surveys the fractured state of Romania’s democracy.
Moscow’s House on the Embankment was home to many of the first generation of Russian revolutionaries. Historian Yuri Slezkine, who has written the definitive account of the building, describes how it embodied the lives, hopes and fate of the Soviet project and its elite.
A 30-hour train journey from Vienna to Moscow offers the chance to connect with the Russian past: contraband, bribery and all. Alexei Korolyov returns to the place of his birth.
Fifty years ago, Warsaw Pact forces led by the Red Army invaded Czechoslovakia. The socialist reforms of the Prague Spring were suppressed and Czechoslovakia was subjected to more than 20 years of stultifying ‘normalization’ under Soviet occupation. Revisiting his essay of 10 years ago, Ukrainian writer Mykola Riabchuk explains why his solidarity with the victims endures.
The memory of Stalin’s Terror is now receiving more attention in Russia than at any time since the 1980s. However, the scope of the debate needs to be widened still further, argues Daria Khlevnyuk.
The feminist cause is the cause of civilization and, at the same time, is now a cultural trend, writes Aloma Rodríguez. She calls on us to embrace its heterogeneity: there is – and should be – room for many different points of view to co-exist.
Oleg Sentsov’s hunger strike has reached a critical stage. Sentsov is calling for the release of all Ukrainians imprisoned in Russia on political grounds. The human rights initiative OVD-Info, in collaboration with the Memorial Centre, has compiled documentation on the 88 prisoners, most of whom are from Crimea.
China’s digital Social Credit Systems operate a form of gamified control, rewarding users while rating them according to online and offline behaviour. By 2020, the Chinese government plans to introduce a nationwide system. Western observers are appalled, but are our own social media essentially all that different?
Critique of social media tends to focus on the content of online discourse, particularly the impacts of fake news and hate speech. But how do social media platforms themselves determine interaction, and how can users adapt to default functionalities in the interests of constructive debate?
The ties between liberalism and democracy are under strain, challenged by self-styled illiberal ideologues from Budapest to Washington DC, and by the liberal-economic but undemocratic example of China. Romanian economist Daniel Dăianu makes the case for liberalism, and why it is worth fighting for if democracy is to thrive.
Germany’s altered party landscape is the culmination of the misfit between political centrism and the national-conservative groundswell catalysed by the refugee wave of 2015–16. Not only does the AfD pose major challenges to the other parties, it throws up uncomfortable questions about the role of the media in the dynamics of polarization.
Cultural journals have played a crucial role in the formation of the public spheres in Europe and beyond. Yet their future form and sustainability is by no means clear. Looking at journals’ history helps understand where they are headed. Introducing a new Eurozine focal point in collaboration with the Working Group on Periodicals Research.
Struggle in the street was combined with otherworldly utopias in the low budget, small circulation architectural magazines of the 1960s and 1970s. Free of the constraints of finance and convention, the genre served as an international platform for experimental design and discourse and was instrumental in the progress of architectural modernity.
Ord&Bild, Sweden’s oldest cultural journal, first appeared in 1892. Speaking at the 125th anniversary event in Gothenburg on 4 November 2017, long-time contributor Sven-Eric Liedman recalls Ord&Bild’s programme and personnel between the counter-cultural revolution of the 60s and the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s.
The Lebanese journal ‘Mawaqif’, published in various incarnations between 1968 and 1994, was one of the leading cultural journals of the Arab World. Its seventy-four issues reflect the intellectual upheavals brought by the Six-Day War, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Iranian Revolution, as well as far-reaching processes of modernization in Arab literary culture.