Month: December 2018

‘New World Ordure’: Burroughs, Globalization and the Grotesque

“The scion of a well-known banking family once told me a family secret. When a certain stage of responsibility and awareness has been reached by a young banker he is taken to a room lined with family portraits in the middle of which is an ornate gilded toilet. Here he comes every day to defecate surrounded by the family portraits until he realizes that money is shit. And what does the money machine eat to shit it out? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and above all it eats creativity.”
—William S. Burroughs (Job 73–4)

Christopher Wylie: The Man Who Was Deleted From the Internet

When I went public with revelations that Cambridge Analytica had harvested 87 million profiles using an app that Facebook had authorized, Facebook’s first reaction was to immediately ban me — not only from Facebook but also from all the other companies that Facebook owns. That means I couldn’t even go on Instagram. All the apps that used Facebook authentication just showed errors — so my Tinder, Uber and countless other apps stopped working.

Within a day of coming out as “the first Millennial whistleblower,” I was deleted from the Internet.

LINK: http://www.papermag.com/christopher-wylie-break-the-internet-2621783738.html

Portrait of a planet on the verge of climate catastrophe

As the UN sits down for its annual climate conference this week, many experts believe we have passed the point of no return

LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/02/world-verge-climate-catastophe