The Nightmare Artist – Zdzislaw Beksinski was a Polish horror painter that reacted to the horrors of war that he saw around him, and today we are going to take a look at his career.

Video by In Praise of Shadows: Patreon.

Walking Around Shukunegi Village on Sado Island（Niigata, Japan) by Anna Film Production.

Shukunegi is the name of the town at the southernmost tip of Sado City, Niigata Prefecture. It is a port town that developed as a port of kitamae-bune (cargo ships that sailed the Japan Sea during the Edo period) . This town reached its heyday from the late Edo period to the early Meiji period. In 2017, the rows of houses in Shukunegi are designated as a National Important Preservation Area for Traditional Buildings and Architecture.

TR/ST + Geotic + Combination lock + Adham Safena 6.

Our dependency is at the heart of the commercial surveillance project, in which our felt needs for effective life vie against the inclination to resist its bold incursions. This conflict produces a psychic numbing that inures us to the realities of being tracked, parsed, mined, and modified.

It disposes us to rationalize the situation in resigned cynicism, created excuses that operate like defense mechanisms (“I have nothing to hide”), or find other ways to stick our heads in the sand, choosing ignorance out of frustration and helplessness.

In this way, surveillance capitalism imposes a fundamentally illegitimate choice that twenty-first century individuals should not have to make, and its normalization leaves us singing in our chains.

S.Z.

Invisibles – exploitation in the digital world of work | DW Documentary.

Services from Amazon, Uber and Airbnb are available at the touch of a screen. Yet who are the workers who fulfill our wishes when we click? How much do they earn? Do their jobs have benefits? This documentary delves into the world of workers behind the apps.

Companies like Facebook, Amazon, Deliveroo, Booking.com and Tinder all have in common that their employees are forming a new, exploited class of digital economy labor. The tens of thousands of people who work in the app sector earn low wages. The filmmakers look at the daily lives of “clickworkers” – the men and women who deliver packages and food, or work high-stress content management jobs for little money.

Right now, however, the extreme asymmetries of knowledge and power that have accrued to surveillance capitalism abrogate these elemental rights as our lives are unilaterally rendered as data, expropriated, and repurposed in new forms of social control, all of it in the service of others’ interests and in the absence of our awareness or means of combat.

We have yet to invent the politics and new forms of collaborative action—this century’s equivalent of the social movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that aimed to tether raw capitalism to society—that effectively assert the people’s right to a human future.

And while the work of these inventions awaits us, this mobilization and the resistance it engenders will define a key battleground upon which the fight for a human future unfolds.

S.Z.

Ramón García, Madrid, Spain.

the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone- remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygenic design- but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness.

J.B.