Bedsit, with three clowns, and a rottweiler

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism  Shoshana Zuboff I pored over this book, stayed with the words. Read and reread them. Drank deeply from their wisdom.  It was not an easy read, but ultimately it gave far more than it took. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a seminal text for our age.  Zuboff's account of surveillance capitalism is elegant, poised and persuasive. Yet for all her brilliance, Shonanna’s central thesis suffers a number of fundamental flaws.   Where the Age is at it’s strongest is in the articulation of surveillance capitalism.  Consider this, ‘Who owns your face?’, ‘Who owns your behaviour?’  What you do, where you go, who you know, all this has value and extracting value from these data is the business model of the surveillance capitalist.  But this is only the description, where Zuboff’s account takes a darker turn, is in the control. Once Surveillance Capitalists have provided a d...

In 2008, I was 31 years old, recently married, and we had just welcomed our first baby boy into the world. That year, the bankruptcy of Ireland shook the nation, resulting in devastating consequences that we continue to live with. People lost their homes, their dignity, and their hopes for the future. Some took their lives, and many fled the country. Reflecting on Ship of Fools, a searing history of that period, is a difficult experience that cannot be separated from the events it describes. Revisiting this book in 2020, I am disheartened to see that little has changed in Irish society over the past twelve years. While O'Toole's subsequent book, Enough is Enough, offered a path to reform, to my mind no substantive change has been achieved. What we have learned is that the so-called "great and the good" are neither great nor good. O'Toole accurately depicts a peculiar characteristic of the Irish people, where we know that our politicians are corrupt but still vote ...

Ireland has a home crisis, construed as a homelessness crisis.  O'Brion shows us what we already know, we inhabitants of this damp rock are pissing our last away in the teeth of squalor and growing out of damp dereliction.  Those who fail to cling on become The Homeless. The reason? Money can rest and gain value in The Land.   In a delightful affectation, O'Brion's book is presented in Musical Movements, with the introduction being an Overture and the text divided into Three Movements. O'Brion tells the tale of the radical idealism that founded the nascent state, of how the democratic programme of Dáil Éireann 1919 committed that the interests of private property must be subordinate to the public right and welfare.  It's a story of how solutions are bountiful, solutions created by and placed in our own communities. Yet at each step the lusty embrace between the monied interests and the political class colluded to subvert the public right and welfare.  Ther...