Books Indexed
- Author: Gary Bunt
- Publisher: C Hurst & Co
- ISBN-10: 1850659508
- ISBN-13: 978-1850659501
The internet: made for Islam?
But what of the ostensible contradiction between Islam and modernity? Far from being in antithesis to Islam, the internet is entirely germane to a religion that has always been ‘wiki’ in its nature.
- Author: Clay Shirky
- Publisher: Allen Lane
- ISBN-10: 1846142172
- ISBN-13: 978-1846142178
Facebook, freeware and working for fun
The dirty secret of free software and services is that they imply free – read unpaid – labour. While this may be difficult for certain business models to accommodate, such as the print media and the music industry, which now have to compete with free alternatives, it is far from clear that it is difficult per se for capitalism as a social system.
- Author: Daniel Ben-Ami
- Publisher: Policy Press
- ISBN-10: 1847423469
- ISBN-13: 978-1847423467
Goods are good
The implication of Ferraris is that the incessant focus on limits of all kinds today is about the idea of, the necessity for, limits per se rather than specific limits themselves. Any attempt to argue that such and such a particular limit – the ‘tyranny of oil’ – can be overcome – with biofuels - will be countered almost immediately with another limit – a claimed shortage of land.
- Author: Matthew Crawford
- Publisher: Viking
- ISBN-10: 0670918741
- ISBN-13: 978-0670918744
Gets your motor running
Crawford’s well-aimed blows at scientific management principles, staff team-building exercises and the resistance of modern machinery to home servicing will strike chords with many, and he synthesises a fresh and thought-provoking outlook from his experiences. However, alongside the ambition of his remit, his basic argument - that we can make the world a better place by fixing stuff - is pretty modest.
- Author: Pascal Bruckner
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- ISBN-10: 0691143765
- ISBN-13: 978-0691143767
Guilty fantasies
Moreover, it’s noteworthy that for all his shrewd criticism of the way the left projects its fantasies onto the Israel-Palestine conflict, Bruckner himself was a keen supporter of the break up of Yugoslavia and the punishment and demonisation of Serbia during the 1990s. Bruckner failed utterly to understand that the left (and indeed many on the right such as himself) were projecting a fantasy onto the Yugoslav break up and war.
