#120: Scorched Earth - Beyond the digital age to a post capitalist world (ft. Jonathan Crary)

"This polemic dismantles the presumption that social media could be an  instrument of radical change and contends that the networks and platforms of transnational corporations are intrinsically incompatible with a habitable earth or with the human interdependence needed to build egalitarian post-capitalist forms of life."

This week we are joined by Jonathan Crary author of 'Scorched Earth: Beyond the digital age to a post capitalist world'.

Jonathan presents the unsayable reality: our ‘digital age’ is synonymous with the disastrous terminal stage of global capitalism and its financialization of social existence, mass  impoverishment, ecocide, and military terror. We discuss the estrangement of perception from a living world, environmental and community destruction, EMDR and consumerism, the various claims of digital products as 'here to stay' and the capacity for refusal, how 'hopium' allows things to just stay the same, the American Dream of leaving others behind, the gun as a sanctioned weapon of fate, and what is still recoverable from a Scorched Earth.

Jonathan Crary is an art critic and essayist, and is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University.

References:

Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60299346-scorched-earth

Stone Age Economics: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28254.Stone_Age_Economics

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Harriet’s other shows:

WBAI Interpersonal Update (Wednesdays): https://wbai.org/program.php?program=431

Capitalism Hits Home: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPJpiw1WYdTNYvke-gNRdml1Z2lwz0iEH

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