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The Contradictory Vaudeville Of Post-Modern Politics Video ADAM CURTIS, BBC: So much of the news this year has been hopeless, depressing, and above all, confusing. To which the only response is to say, 'oh dear'. What this film is going to suggest is that that defeatist response has become a central part of a new system of political control. And to understand how this is happening, you have to look to Russia, to a man called  Vladislav Surkov , who is a hero of our time.  Surkov is one of President Putin's advisers, and has helped him maintain his power for 15 years, but he has done it in a very new way.  He came originally from the  avant-garde  art world, and those who have studied his career, say that what Surkov has done, is to import ideas from conceptual art into the very heart of politics.  His aim is to undermine peoples' perceptions of the world, so they never know what is really happening.  Surkov turned Russian politics int...

Who’s the true enemy of internet freedom - China, Russia, or the US? Evgeny Morozov, The Guardian.com However, Russia, China and Brazil are simply responding to the extremely aggressive tactics adopted by none other than the US. In typical fashion, though, America is completely oblivious to its own actions, believing that there is such a thing as a neutral, cosmopolitan internet and that any efforts to move away from it would result in its “Balkanisation”. But for many countries, this is not Balkanisation at all, merely de-Americanisation. US companies have been playing an ambiguous role in this project. On the one hand, they build efficient and highly functional infrastructure that locks in other countries, creating long-term dependencies that are very messy and costly to undo. They are the true vehicles for whatever is left of America’s global modernisation agenda. On the other hand, the companies cannot be seen as mere proxies for the American empire. Especially after the ...

Who pays for us to browse the web? Be wary of Google’s latest answer Evgeny Morozov , The Guardian.com Google has quietly la unched a new service, Google Contributor, and it’s based on an intriguing proposition: for a small monthly fee, you won’t see any ads on the websites of its partners. The fee, naturally, is split between Google and those sites – but only if they are actually visited. As Google puts it, this is all “an experiment in additional ways to fund the web”. More on Google Contributor Do we really read/watch/consume advertising? The imagined community argument may be useful if one wished to challenge these views.