Post from Novara Media

A Palestine Action activist gave a defiant cry after being sentenced to six years in prison for criminal damage with a “terrorist connection”, after smashing...

YouTube

THE TIME OF MONSTERS

The neoliberal world order as we know it is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. But celebrations of its downfall are muted by the bleak reality of the world that is rising to take its place. Every day, our screens are flooded with images of war, genocide, and AI slop. And we all know we’re living in dark times.

So, what does this mean for us, and how do we move forward?

Video in English w English and Arabic subtitles

#SubMedia #Anarchism #Politics #Capitalism #Neoliberalism #Crisis #Resistance #Solidarity #DirectAction #Self-Organization #Anti-Capitalism #Society #Geopolitics #SystemCriticism #DarkTimes #MutualAid

https://kolektiva.media/w/sDi4fpHQm6FnqJvnfnzg5X

The Time of Monsters

PeerTube

Sunday Morning Reading

Back from spending time with the grandkids and back for some Sunday Morning Reading. There’s an interesting context to the many issues we face that evolves while watching the little ones grow and learn. Things are happening that will affect their lives in the years ahead. Yet there’s a blissful innocence cocooning them from it all. At the moment.

In my reading, and in my sharing of that reading, I find I’m doing so mostly for the thousands of tomorrows they have in their future, much more so than for anything that will happen in this week’s tomorrows that might affect me in the moment. Read on.

Neil Steinberg’s Meet My Metaphors #5: ConAgra is about so much more than the agricultural giant moving to Chicago years ago. If you like metaphors, it’s a must read. If you’re approaching the last leg of the journey, it’s a must read. If you’re concerned about what you may leave behind, well, it’s a must read.

JA Westenberg posits that it’s all a loop. Joke’s on us, I guess. Check out The Loop: Everything Has Happened Before, And Everything Will Happen Again. 

Ky Decker wonders, Do I Belong In Tech Anymore? I find if you’re asking that question about anything, you already know the answer.

Wesley Hilliard thinks we should Stop With The Tech Celebrity Worship. I concur. AND I’m for knocking down all the pedestals we erect for celebrities to ascend in any and all fields of human endeavor.

Timothy Noah takes a look at How The Tech World Turned Evil. Pop the bubbles. Tear down the pedestals. Endless loops.

Meanwhile, Makena Kelly examines how Palantir Employees Are Talking About The Company’s Descent Into Fascism. 

Follow that up with Jasmine Sun’s piece, Silicon Valley Is Bracing For A Permanent Underclass. 

The previous four links speak to a much darker future in one way or the other. Read them. Then go back and re-read the first two links by Steinberg and Westenberg. Looping context.

Closing out this week, here’s a couple of links that feel a bit more uplifting. First up, check out Mat Duggan’s Boy Was I Wrong About the Fediverse. 

Then follow that up with David Todd McCarty’s Becoming A Local. Sometimes the horizon is much closer than you think.

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. This site does not use affilate links. 

 

#ai #ArtificialIntelligence #Chicago #Culture #DarkTimes #Fediverse #Politics #SocialMedia #SundayMorningReading #Tech
Meet my metaphors #5: ConAgra

The blog of Neil Steinberg

#iphone forçando usuários a se identificar. Aqui no #brasil essa #leifelca tem que ser modificada.

"Verificação de idade tem se tornado uma desculpa universal para obrigar que todos os usuários se identifiquem, uma injustiça para usuários de qualquer idade."

https://stallman.org/archives/2026-jan-apr.html#1_April_2026_(iMonsters_in_UK_demanding_proof_of_age)

#ageverification #1984 #darktimes #evilcorp #eviltech

2026: January - April Political Notes

Миленький текст про не-проблемность и удобство для власти современного искусства, про музейный маркетинг, про риторику о «тёмных временах» и про снисходительное отношение к зритель:ницам: https://kunstkritikk.com/the-end-is-nigh-ish/ #NoraArrheniusHagdahl #artcriticism #museums #generalpessimism #darktimes #condescending #press #KarolRadziszewski
The End Is Nigh...ish - Kunstkritikk

Contemporary art’s rhetoric of doom has become a comfortable cliché, as the scramble for relevance turns resistance into a risk-free, legible aesthetic.

Kunstkritikk
Guarda il testo della canzone “Dark Times” di The Weeknd
#TheWeeknd #DarkTimes
https://daletra.online/the-weeknd/testi/dark-times.html

Illumination in dark times
A genealogy of modern Western selfhood and a post-Western world

"Smith ... outlines a genealogy of modern Western selfhood: a radically individual, hypermasculine character that was formed during the rapid nineteenth-century expansion of the white man’s world. “Bold, conquering, and altogether assertive,” it was “dedicated to action,” hostile to reflection, indifferent to community and the environment, and guilty of possessing, Smith writes, an “undeveloped heart,” a term borrowed from E. M. Forster’s assessment of the British elite." "

" “We must alter our very relations with the world around us.” This means giving up the exalted and exaggerated idea of the West that boosts a masculinist self-image but severely constricts thought and feeling. “We should welcome our era’s uncertainties,...the not-knowing of how the post-Western story will come out.” Smith’s final warning—that “we will not survive the Western notion of the individual much longer”—should resonate today, as nineteenth-century individualism reasserts itself in the degraded Nietzscheanism of Peter Thiel and Stephen Miller." >>

* Mishra, P. (2026, April). "The Authority of Thought". Harper's Magazine.
https://harpers.org/archive/2026/04/the-authority-of-thought-pankaj-mishra/

* Somebody Else's Century: East and West in a Post-Western World by Patrick Smith. 2010 >>
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/169395/somebody-elses-century-by-patrick-smith/
#TheWest #WhiteSupremacy #masculinity #ImpulseControl #EthnoNationalism #WesternCivilization #AngloAmerican #parochialism #individualism #subjectivity #SettlerSociety #Culture #RacialInequality #war #EastWest #PostWesternWorld #DarkTimes #illumination #narrative #environment

Image: Double Bay War Memorial, Steyne Park, Sydney

A dawn of new times

Do you see the light on the horizon?
Through all the gloom and all those clouds,
a tender ray of hope breaks through -
can’t you feel that spring is coming?

As deep as this winter seems to be,
its darkness milked from our blackish sorrow,
still - a gentle string of hope remains,
uniting you and me with others.

However violently this sadness
tears at our hearts with its claws,
biting into our souls with its teeth;
it will not remain this way for all eternity.

No matter what has been and what is yet to come,
today we are setting out for better times,
letting ourselves be guided by our love
and facing each new day with it.

#TranslationThursday #translation #poetry #poetryisnotdead #weltschmerz #darktimes #hope

Translation of my poem 'Aufbruch zu neuen Zeiten' from yesterday. Self-translated. Tried to capture the essence of the feeling.