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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.