Hables Gray, Chris

Chris Hables Gray

Alain Joxe, 'Empire of Disorder' and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, 'Empire'

1 December 2003Review Chris Hables Gray

Empire of Disorder, Semiotext(e), 2002; ISBN 1 5843 5016 4; 223pp. Empire, Harvard University Press, 2000; 0674006712; 504pp; US$19.95

Empire has never completely gone out of style, but now in the early 21st Century it has very become popular for describing the current international system. In particular, there is a growing recognition that the United States is an empire. 1 Of course, most of the world saw the US this way already, but it comes as a bit of a shock to the “homeland.”

Accepting the “new” US Empire is usually linked to the claim that the US is the only remaining superpower and that it…

Between technophilia and technophobia: cyborg citizenship

1 March 2002Feature Chris Hables Gray

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…