Almost Magic

2020 ◽  
pp. 123-148
Author(s):  
Dan Sinykin
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
General Condition ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Infinite Jest ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
The Future ◽  
Unlimited Growth ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Governmental Form

As a teenager growing up in the Minneapolis suburbs in the 1990s, I believed the economy was strong, that liberal democracy, after the Cold War, was the final governmental form, and that the future was a place of unlimited growth. But this self-congratulation obscured the persistence of the long downturn and capitalism’s structural limits. Finance was an engine for creating personal debt and harvesting profits from America’s debtors. Neoliberalism collapsed the citizen into the consumer. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest satirizes this America. It reveals addiction as a general condition within the debt economy. In anticipation of collective self-destruction, it hopes to save its readers from the pains of addiction and loneliness, but proves incapable of resolving the tension between the personal (addiction) and the structural (the economy), and so, instead, spills out toward infinity.

scholarly journals The East Lost the Cold war, but did the West Win?

2008 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Curtis Bauer
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Economic System ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
The West ◽  
End Of History ◽  
The Future ◽  
Fragile Environment ◽  
The End Of History ◽  
The Cold War

Clearly the East lost the Cold War to the West, suffering total economic and political collapse by the late 1980s. Yet it is not entirely clear if or what the West won. Western economies continue to labor under the extensive military commitments. The ideology of liberal democracy, although laudable, is difficult to implement. Capitalism, as an economic system, is torn between the need for perpetual growth and the protection of a fragile environment. Was the end of the Cold War truly "the end of history" as some suggest, or do the lessons of the period stand instead as a cautionary for the future?

The Futurists. Experts in World Futures

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Other ◽  
Futures Studies ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Images Of The Future ◽  
The Way

Alvin Toffler’s writings encapsulated many of the tensions of futurism: the way that futurology and futures studies oscillated between forms of utopianism and technocracy with global ambitions, and between new forms of activism, on the one hand, and emerging forms of consultancy and paid advice on the other. Paradoxically, in their desire to create new images of the future capable of providing exits from the status quo of the Cold War world, futurists reinvented the technologies of prediction that they had initially rejected, and put them at the basis of a new activity of futures advice. Consultancy was central to the field of futures studies from its inception. For futurists, consultancy was a form of militancy—a potentially world altering expertise that could bypass politics and also escaped the boring halls of academia.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Critical Systems Thinking ◽  
Critical Systems ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Future Visions

The book proposes that the Cold War period saw a key debate about the future as singular or plural. Forms of Cold War science depicted the future as a closed sphere defined by delimited probabilities, but were challenged by alternative notions of the future as a potentially open realm with limits set only by human creativity. The Cold War was a struggle for temporality between the two different future visions of the two blocs, each armed with its set of predictive technologies, but these were rivaled, from the 1960s on, by future visions emerging from decolonization and the emergence of a set of alternative world futures. Futures research has reflected and enacted this debate. In so doing, it offers a window to the post-war history of the social sciences and of contemporary political ideologies of liberalism and neoliberalism, Marxism and revisionist Marxism, critical-systems thinking, ecologism, and postcolonialism.

Onopvallend turen naar de Russen

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-31
Author(s):  
SANDRA VAN LOCHEM-VAN DER WEL ◽  
HENK VAN LOCHEM
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Observation System ◽  
Existing Buildings ◽  
Aircraft Observation ◽  
The Future ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War

Secretly watching the Russians. Cold War aircraft observation posts on existing buildings During the 1950s a network of aircraft observation post was built in The Netherlands, as a detection/observation system against low-flying hostile aircraft during the Cold War. Preferably, these were placed on highrise buildings. 134 of these 276 observation posts were built on existing buildings, on factories, mills, water towers, monasteries, government buildings and bunkers. Since their decommissioning in 1964-1968, many posts have been demolished. Approximately 37 posts on existing buildings remain, but mostly go unnoticed and many risk demolition in the future. These remaining aircraft observation posts are remarkable relics of our military heritage from the Cold War.

Changing the Approach to Deterrence in Cyberspace While Protecting Civilians From Cyber Conflict

2019 ◽  
pp. 304-330
Author(s):  
Metodi Hadji-Janev
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Security ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Cyber Conflict

Many incidents in cyberspace and the response to those incidents by victim states prove that the cyber conflict is a reality. This new conflict is complex and poses serious challenges to national and international security. One way to protect the civilian populace is by deterring potential malicious actors (state and non-state) from exploiting cyberspace in a negative way. Given the changed reality and complexity that gravitates over the cyber conflict classical deterrence that have worked during the Cold War is not promising. The article argues that if the states are about to protect their civilians from the future cyber conflict by deterring potential attacker they need to change the approach to deterrence.

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