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Dominique Routhier

Routhier is a regular critic of Ny Tid.

In the hands of the state?

CAPTURE: Who has the right to move "freely" on the digital highways, and who is waved to the side by the police or the state intelligence service because their data profile appears on the radar?

The increasingly extensive brutality of the police

VIOLENCE: "Security" is a highly profitable industry in which large French private arms manufacturers are increasingly developing and selling security technologies – stun guns, tear gas, water cannons, lightning grenades and drones. Two new books look at French police violence and brutality.

Now the robots may no longer be called Frankenstein or R2D2, but Siri, Alexa, AlphaGo or Yaskawa Motoman

GROWTH: Through "creative destruction" and technological disruption, capitalism created the conditions for a new cycle of economic growth. But now the trend seems to continue towards zero. Is it a vicious circle of global competition, falling prices, overcapacity, technological inertia (rather than innovation) and falling incentives to invest – which is the cause of capitalism's protracted crisis?

Racism is written into the codes, protocols, and algorithms of the Internet

AUTOMATION: The Internet is far from just a direct information highway towards freedom

The «smart» interior of everyday life

GIMMICK: Sianne Ngai is one of the most original Marxist cultural theorists of her generation. But she seems keen on pulling the aesthetics down into the mud.

An agricultural cluster – a state-of-the-art industrial complex

FOOD: The problem is access to food. Everyone must eat to live. If we are to eat, we must buy. To buy, we must work. We eat, digest, and shit.

The question of technique

Things are starting to behave. But the fact that things around us are getting smarter does not necessarily mean that we ourselves are getting smarter, quite the contrary.

The destruction, death and militarization of everyday life

NECROPOLITICS: To leave millions of people to hunger, epidemics, war and escape.

«The disciplinary community was born out of the great plague epidemics»

CONTROL: Today, millions of racialized bodies have become redundant in relation to capital's metabolism and enrolled in a digitally mediated nexus of exclusion, control, and destruction technologies. MODERN TIMES here goes into the theme via author Achille Mbembe in three articles.