“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, July 8, 2011

Why You Must Follow the Demise of the Murdoch Empire Now


This is a huge huge story. I'm not convinced most Americans understand how big this is. This is like the decisive moment of Watergate or the first big damaging story in the Enron scandal. It's about Rupert Murdoch, it's about the society of the spectacle. It's about news outlets that have done their best, among other things, to put the skids on meaningful approaches to global warming.

Therefore it's about you.

I've always enjoyed reading The Guardian. See their liveblog of events as they unfold.

3 comments:

the Internationale said...

I wish i could be as optimistic as you, Tim. In a couple of weeks we'll have The Sun on Sunday with a similar diet of anti-working class, little England neo-racist, sexist, homophobic, head in the hot sand stories. The journalists will be reemployed on lower wages and worse conditions. The advertisers will breathe a sigh of relief and the tide of protests about BSkyB will allow the Libcons to delay approving it until the fuss has died down.
The politicians will still pander to what they see as big meeja's power until we (object-oriented-style) reconnect media and journalism objects in new ways. Media protocols, like software protocols can be open to Galloway/Thacker exploit and so created new nested objects. It is only when that object landscape is opened up that Murdoch's Empire will not fall but be rendered as redundant as the hack at Wapping.

Timothy Morton said...

I know what you mean--mind you this is a Watergate level of wrong. See this http://goo.gl/X1zKW

the Internationale said...

Absolutely. Watergate is an interesting 'well-what-really-changed' sort of example. I'm always telling my students that Murdoch and even News Corp are not the issue. It is the 'hyperobjects' that are important. That's where my (critical) interest in the political potential or OOO comes in.