Then & Now: Philosophy, History & Politics

Selected Bibliography: Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation Adam Alter, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology David Courtwright, Age of Addiction Morse, S. (2012). Legal Regulation of Addictive Substances and Addiction. Retrieved from https://repository.upenn.edu/neuroeth... Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Mark Andrejevic, Automated Media Brian McCullough, How The Internet Hap...

Some Sources: Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads Adam Alter, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Mark Andrejevic, Automated Media Brian McCulloug...

I look at the history of the internet, from ARPANET & NSFNET, through privatization, to Tim-Berners Lee, Yahoo, Netscape, Google, eBay, and Facebook, examining Microsoft's antitrust court case and their battle against Open Source and Free Software, Bill Gate's Open Letter to Hobbyists and the leaked Halloween Documents. Then we take a look at the emergence of Surveillance Capitalism, and how p...

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A look at the first critics of modern life during the 18th and 19th centuries; those who worried about factories, pollution, capitalism, and modernity. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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A look at the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, exploring why his ideas matter, and the context they arose from. It looks at the Critique of Pure Reason and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of morals, explaining concepts like transcendental idealism and the Categorical Imperative. Born in 1724, he wanted to make us a truly scientific species – he wanted to bring together reason – how we think - and ex...

What the Evidence on Immigration Says by Then & Now Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I look at Tucker Carlson's conspiracy theory-riddled mind, where it comes from, and why he does it. I draw from Richard Hofstadter's 1964 The Paranoid Style in American Politics, review Carlson's book, Ship of Fools, and look at his Fox News show, the Fedsurrection, Patriot Purge, and the Great Replacement. Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http:...

A dive into the long history of television news in America to understand what the conditions were that made Fox News’s emergence possible. We look at what Fox’s underlying social, cultural, and philosophical toolkit and formula looks like. What it’s predecessors were (TVN, Roger Ailes’ consultancy, Nixon’s adverts), Reagan’s rolling back of FCC regulation and the fairness doctrine, the stories tha...

I explore our consumer society, looking at the history, philosophy, psychology, and sociology of what consumerism really means. Is it a useful concept? Where did it appear from? Are there alternatives? How is the desire that drives consumption manufactured? Are we shallow? Is there any possibility of ethical consumption? To help answer some of these questions I draw from thinkers including Jean Ba...

Free Will – Our Freedom to choose for ourselves – is at the heart of our sense of being human. How we think about free will effects everything from responsibility and criminal justice to laziness and poverty to seemingly ordinary choices like what I’ll have for dinner. Free Will is of course the power to select from options, for ourselves, unencumbered, unrestrained, uncaused – to be the author of...

A long view on the sense of Russian history that Vladimir Putin has inherited and draws from culturally. Looking at the roots of Russian anti-westernism, its response to Europe during the Enlightenment and Peter and Catherine the Great's modernizing projects. From Rousseau and the influence of the Romanitics through to Dostoevsky, Carl Schmitt's influence, and Ivan Illyin today. Then & Now is FAN-...

Nuclear Weapons changed us. One author said we have a ‘nuclear consciousness’ If so, how specifically did it develop? What shapes did it take? I’ll look at some surprising consequences of the discovery of Nuclear power, how it changed our ideas about fear and irrationalism, about world government and philosophy, how it changed literature and cinema and comics, religion, science, and our idea of pr...

A look at the darker side of MrBeast’s philanthropy and the wider philanthrocapitalist model it's a part of. Looking specifically at #teamseas and a partnership with Jennie-O, I attempt to untangle how corporations and conglomerates like Coca-Cola, chemical and oil companies, and big meat monopolies all have a vested interest in financing certain ‘philanthropic’ projects while side-lining others....

Let's think difference. Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Anger, rage, fury: it seems like everywhere we look right now, we see rising temperatures, smoldering resentment, blood boiling, floods of emotion. From Trump to Brexit, Hindu Nationalism to Black Lives Matter, from Hollywood me too to Pandemic Protestors, ISIS to white nationalists, Ukraine to Fox News, to my ongoing conflict with my unreasonably slow computer, it seems, as the historian Pankaj M...

Robotics, automation, and the information age are going in a strange direction. We look at extended selves, farming drones, Tesla sensors, Facebook and Twitter feeds, Amazon, Tinder, and Deleuze and Guattari's bodies without organs. Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more...

If you’ve ever wanted a complete scientific roadmap for how to live, a modern philosophy to go by, a lens through which to understand a complex world, a foundation, the 17th century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza is as good as you'll find. He asked questions like: why are we so dogmatic? What makes us irrational? Why do we live as slaves to our emotions and others opinions. He was one of the fir...

Why Hasn't the Internet Fixed Democracy? How can we fix it? I use the latest 'drama' with Ethan Klein, Joe Rogan, Tom Pool, Vaush etc to see if we can find out...Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The nature-nurture debates inform almost every area of human life – from biology and botany to economics, literature, and history. To simplify, thinkers on the nature side have, in varying ways, argued that at least parts of your body and mind are behind an impenetrable skin, cannot be gotten to by upbringing, education, politics, or culture. Imagine a one-way street. For example, you have an inna...

What does 'meta' really mean? What can we make of Facebook's change to 'Meta'? Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote about the decline of metanarratives in 1979's 'The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge'. Can we learn anything about Zuckerberg's aspirations from this classic postmodern text? Lyotard was prescient. He noticed in the 70s that quote ‘the miniaturization and commercialization of machin...

Mary Douglas wrote that:‘There is no such thing as absolute dirt; it exists in the eye of the beholder. Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organize the environment. In chasing dirt, in papering, decorating, tidying, we are not governed by anxiety to escape disease, but are positively re-ordering our environment, making it conform to an i...

There were several reasons lynch mobs in Jim Crow America and soldiers and police officers in Nazi Germany were motivated to kill African-Americans and Jews. Historical forces like a sense of victimhood – both having lost wars – cultural forces and propaganda that depicted the victims stereotypically as inferior, greedy, or a threat, and economic forces – ‘the frustration of basic needs’ as social...

Between 1889 and 1930 there were around 3,700 known lynchings in the US. The perpetrators ranged from single people to small mobs to huge crowds of 15,000. The reasons given were broad. While most were accused of murder of rape, many were lynched for simply being rude, for arguing, for taking the wrong job or having the wrong beliefs. Like during Holocaust, as I explored in a previous video, these...