An interview between Johnny Flynn and Ciarán O Rourke, author of a new collection of essays on art and politics JOHNNY FLYNN: Will we start with that quote from your essay on Martín Chambi? You say that what most attracted you to artists in particular, and their techniques, is that they “draw on their chosen […]
The social impact of artificial intelligence
Novelists have been kind to artificial intelligence in recent times. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 book, Klara and the Sun, Klara is an AI designed to be a child’s companion and she is by far the most compassionate and self-sacrificing character in the book. In the rather darker Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan (2019), the […]
THE SYRIAN REVOLUTION 2011
Socialists and the Syrian Revolution The Syrian revolution 2011 was a genuine people’s uprising: one that was crushed by the al-Assad regime; a corrupt neo-liberal clique backed by Russian imperialism; and Iranian clerico-military oligarchy. The intervention of the US and its Saudi and Gulf allies also undermined the revolution and bolstered reactionary fundamentalist forces. Socialists […]
William Carlos Williams’s poetry was of and for the proletariat
‘It’s as if no other poet except Williams had really seen America or heard its language’, wrote Robert Lowell in 1962, near the end of the elder bard’s life: ‘His flowers rustle by the superhighways and pick up all our voices.’ Some decades earlier, Mike Gold, the editor of New Masses magazine, predicted that ‘[w]hen […]
Capitalism and Gaming
How Monetisation Destroys Good Games Eoghan Ó Nia interviewed by Conor Kostick Conor: We’re going to talk about capitalism and gaming. And I suppose we’re framing the discussion by saying that we live in a strange world where whenever there’s anything that human beings do that’s fun, somebody thinks, ‘oh, I could make some money […]