RafaelFajardo

Bittanti says that it’s impossible to distinguish between videogames and America in the same way that Jean Baudrillard thought it was impossible to distinguish between Disneyland and America. The book, he told me, is about simulation and its discontents, the unexpected convergence and collapse between reality and simulation. “To me video games are the so-called…

In a new interview with Paradoxa, Pulitzer-winning author Junot Diaz speaks at length with Taryne Jade Taylor about the allure of genre fiction, colonialism disguised as sci-fi, writing, and immigrating to the U.S. at an early age (he refers to it as “a profound fracture of my reality, a temporal and spatial anomaly”). During the…

Mckenzie Wark: Bartleby is about a certain kind of labor: You can force people to do physical labor, but it’s very hard to get people to do mental labor. They have to be engaged. As someone who has gone to the dark side, who has been a manager for the last year, I really identify…

The fact that colonialism is so central to science-fiction, and that science-fiction is so central to our own pop culture, suggests that the colonial experience remains more tightly bound up with our political life and public culture than we sometimes like to think. Sci-fi, then, doesn’t just demonstrate future possibilities, but future limits—the extent to…

Don’t wait for permission. If you’re doing creative work for the right reasons, you don’t’ need the validation of others to put yourself out there. That’s what the internet makes possible. Lest we forget, TNI started as a Tumblr. And love other women. The world wants you to find extraordinary women threatening. Undo that training.…