Телеграм канал «Политическая теория и философия (Political theory and philosophy)»

Marco Briziarelli - Finding Closure: Epistemic Rent and the Exploitation of Interpretation

This paper examines how digital platforms reorganise the circulation of meaning. It argues that platform infrastructures systematically privilege interpretations that minimise cognitive effort and maximise transmissibility, thus transforming epistemic closure into a site of rent extraction and differential value appropriation. By introducing the concepts of interpretive friction and epistemic rent, the paper shows how platforms function as rentier capitalists: they privatise the gains of accelerated meaning-making while socialising the costs of contextualisation, verification, and sustained ambiguity. The paper points out how the resulting closure economy represents a structural deskilling of interpretive labour under platform capitalism.

https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/download/1867/1714

Yi-Ling Liu - The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet

In the late 1990s, as the world was waking up to the power and emancipatory promise of the internet, Chinese authorities began constructing a system of online surveillance and censorship now known as the Great Firewall. But far from being a barren landscape, the digital world that sprouted up behind the firewall brimmed with new subcultures and tech innovations, offering many Chinese citizens previously unimaginable connection and opportunity.

Today, as the country’s leadership intensifies its control of public discourse and Western headlines reduce the Chinese public to a faceless monolith, journalist Yi-Ling Liu presents an intimate portrait of China’s online ecosystem and a crucial lens into the on-the-ground reality of life there. Tracing the last three decades of the Chinese internet’s evolution from its lexicon to its memes to the precise nature of its censorship she equips readers with a critical tool to assess the past, present, and future of a global power.

Drawing on years of firsthand reporting, The Wall Dancers weaves together the stories of individuals navigating China’s transformation into both the world’s largest online user base and one of its most populous authoritarian states. As these entrepreneurs, activists, artists, and dreamers experience the internet’s power as a tool for both control and liberation, they grapple with universal questions of success and authenticity, love and solidarity, faith and resilience. The Wall Dancers is at once an unforgettable work of human storytelling and a vital exploration of what it means to live with dignity and hope within the technological systems that now shape all our lives.

Benjamin Kunkel - The New National Question

As globalization stalls, what possibilities might national-economic policy open up for the left? Benjamin Kunkel weighs the claims of its Marxist, Polanyian and psychoanalytic interpreters, asking whether the re-politicization of the economy might be joined to a renewed internationalism, adequate to ecological crisis.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii160/articles/benjamin-kunkel-the-new-national-question

Jordi Maiso - From Damaged Life: The Critical Theory of Theodor W. Adorno

This certainty that the conditions governing existence in contemporary societies generate irretrievably damaged lives lies at the heart of Theodor W. Adorno's critical theory. Emerging from the historical experience of fascism, Auschwitz, and the consolidation of advanced capitalism, Adorno's thought articulates critique from within a damaged reality. Under the coercion of overwhelming social powers, individual character is constituted as a “system of scars”. This notion of “damaged life” stands at the center of this book, which frames critique as emerging from a reality scarred by systemic coercion. It reconstructs Adorno's critical theory as an analysis of the new state of unfreedom linked to total socialization, the anthropological reshaping of subjectivity under advanced capitalism, and the very possibility of critique.

Jordi Maiso's analysis spans key themes: the constellation of fascism and advanced capitalism, the culture industry's role in shaping consciousness, and the persistence of authoritarian potential in everyday life. Revisiting Adorno's conception of critique as a “science of mourning” and his insistence on determinate negation, the book shows how critical thought confronts a historical moment in which emancipatory horizons appear blocked yet remain necessary. Both historical and urgent, From Damaged Life: The Critical Theory of Theodor W. Adorno interrogates the persistence of fear, heteronomy, and avoidable suffering. It asks whether, under conditions marked by authoritarian regression and damaged subjectivity, critical theory can still resist resignation and keep the possibility of transformation alive.