Politics

Only a few short decades ago, we may have only felt their stealth and thought of them as understudies to real villainry. With bodies littering roads around the world and no end in sight, their presence is unavoidable, the existential questions they pose real. It has been a blockbuster season in Australia.

For me, the easiest way to demonstrate the uniqueness of the blog medium is to think about why the k-punk book instantly and overwhelmingly prompts that question of its migration across media, a question which would not even arise for an anthology of newspaper or journal articles.

These two books are the work of a critic out of temper with the times. They contain some unfashionable opinions argued with undisguised rancour; and for that reason, there’s a conviction to be formed and tested on almost every page.

There’s been a lot written already about the work of the late English writer, blogger and cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who died in 2017. Last year, a substantial anthology of Mark’s blog writing — together with interviews, reviews, and an unfinished manuscript fragment — was published as k-punk (Repeater Books), which was also the name of his highly influential blog.

Our dependence on the environment is the ultimate proof that there is such a thing as the common good.

‘Writers and metaphors might not lead us directly to a change in policy. But that is not to say that writing cannot do things in the world. It can shift our frame of reference, for one.’

The Colonial Fantasy could have been a book that shaped how future settler publics saw their predecessors – it’s what I hoped for when I opened it – but that ambition falls flat. And as she asks her peers to pull out of governing us, is Maddison not doing her own supplanting?

It has become more unusual in recent years for presidential candidates not to have written books, usually in the form of memoirs, policy works, or some combination of both.

Yet labour’s role in the establishment of neoliberalism in Australia marked both the union movement and the ALP, leaving both of them shells of their former selves.

How exceptional can a region that produces so much of the energy that powers contemporary capitalism be?