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

Greg Grandin - Fordlandia. The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets. Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Ford's early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia's eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest.

More than a parable of one man's arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly observed history, Ford's great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained. Fordlandia is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

‘If he can make money in a tyranny, that’s fine by him’: Francis Fukuyama on Trump, democracy - and changing his mind

The political thinker became famous for declaring the triumph of liberal democracy. Thirty-seven years on, he explains what he really meant and why he made the rare journey from right to left

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/sep/02/francis-fukuyama-interview-memoir-book-end-history-last-man

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