Technology

1 December 2003Feature

Rasmus Grobe from X-tausendmal quer media team reflects on their experiences of using mobile phone technologies for non-violent protests against nuclear transports in Germany.

In recent years the German anti-nuclear movement has been quite successful in organising nonviolent actions against Castor-transports en route to the intermediary storagehall for nuclear waste in Gorleben/Wendland. This November the German government has again needed 13,000 policewomen and men to guard this eighth transport, containing 12 carriages of nuclear waste. About 3000 anti-nuclear protesters have again succeeded in showing that the struggle over nuclear energy is by no means over.…

1 December 2003Review

Routledge 2002; ISBN 0 415 91978 9; US$19.95

This book is fascinating, funny, at times truly hopeful - and at others pretty despairing - and certainly provocative. It took a year for the publishers to send it to us, and a further six months for me to find the time to read and review it. However, it has been worth the wait. If you are interested in the politics of technology in any way - read this book. It will stimulate your mind and make you ask questions.

 

Its author is frequently referred to as a “guru of cyborg…

1 September 2002Review

Reaktion Books 2002. ISBN 1 86189 122 9, 164pp, £12.95

A familiar subject by now for this slim new volume in the sharp, intelligent publisher's personal and polemical strand FOCI (Focus on Contemporary Issues) it maybe, but Open University social scientist Tim Jordan's exploration of alternative ways of being, interacting, protesting and resisting is heartfelt and wide-ranging.

Employing a global reach, he considers the actions of groups as diversely motivated as eco-activists, squatters, anti-vivisectionists, neo-fascists and anti-…

1 September 2002Review

Pluto Press 2001. ISBN 0 7453 1774 X, 180pp, £10.99

In his novel Slowness, Czech writer Milan Kundera makes the astute remark that we slow down to remember and speed up to forget. If this is true then, according to Norwegian Social Anthropologist Eriksen, we might be in danger of becoming an amnesiac species sooner rather than later, due to our fixation with acceleration.

His thesis here is simply and lucidly put: the exponential growth in “time-saving” communication technologies is leading paradoxically to less time being…

1 March 2002Feature

Is your utopia a technology-driven super-society or a simple land-based existence, or a combination of the two? Chris Hables Gray argues that we must all choose which technologies we want, so long as our choices don't compromise our freedoms, our communities, or the living nature that we are part of and that sustains us all.

Technology has only become important to utopian proposals recently, but they have always depended on instrumentalist and rationalistic thinking. Plato's Republic, Tommaso Campanella's City of the Sun, and Thomas Moore's Utopia were all based on regimenting and bureaucratic ways of managing people.

We have to notice how these early utopias are incredibly authoritarian and, to our eyes, are really dystopias. Consciously created dystopias based on technologies…

1 March 2002Review

second edition, Pluto Press 2001. ISBN 0745317707 300pp

This book provides a very readable approach to making film. It lays out in clear terms the technical process of filming, editing, and getting your work seen.

It covers the dynamics of working with both people and film in campaign groups with honesty, raising the debate of when to film, for what purpose, and when not to film. It highlights the importance of the video activist, dedicating their activism to creating footage or a finished film and looks at how the process can affect the…