Darts and Letters

Last episode, we looked at the technocrats of the industrial age: Thorstein Veblen, Howard Scott, and the “industrial tinkerers,” as Daniel Bell put it. But Daniel Bell went on to say we were entered a new age — a …

Technocracy is the idea that experts should govern. For the common good, presumably. It makes a certain amount of sense, given how irrational our politics seem to be right now. So, technocracy is seductive. In fact, it's an idea as old as politics itself. We begin the first of three-part series telling stories of technocracies past, present, and future.

Technocracy is the idea that experts should govern. For the common good, presumably. In fact, it's an idea as old as politics itself, and it emerges just about everywhere across the ideological spectrum. next episode, we begin a three-part series telling stories of technocracies past, present, and future.

Researchers with the best of intentions still get things wrong. So what does it look like when the old paternalistic ways are dispensed of? We talk to Garth Mullins, who is both researcher and subject in Vancouver's downtown east side and also to Michelle Fine, a leading proponent of critical participatory action research.

Recently a major outage took nearly a third of Canada offline. No phone, no internet… even access to 911 got shut down in some places, all thanks to Rogers Media Inc. But why does one company get so much control over a vital service like the Internet in the first place?

The term "metaverse" comes from a 1993 science fiction novel. Since then, it's grown from a dystopian literary concept to a reality that corporations want to sell you. Strap on some VR goggles and escape your tired analog life! Except that the systemic issues we already have seem to be creeping into the metaverse, too.

Canadian media is full of galaxy brain columnists. Luckily there is a show who reads their crap so that you don't have to: Big Shiny Takes, aka Jeremy Appel, Eric Wickham and Marino Greco. We're featuring this episode because your esteemed host and editor Gordon Katic made an appearance to discuss the latest unfathomably smart take: Matthew McConaughey has a moral obligation to run for president of the United States. It's stunning intellectual work like this that has led Big Shiny Takes to become the world's first anti free speech podcast. They're also our colleagues, as part of the Harbinger Media Network It's a different vibe to our usual programming, but we think you'll like it because Big Shiny Takes is witty and anarchic and smart. The team really deserve a lot of recognition for doing the lord's work: shit-talking columnists.

Canadian media is full of galaxy brain columnists. Luckily there is a show who reads their crap so that you don't have to: Big Shiny Takes, aka Jeremy Appel, Eric Wickham and Marino Greco. We're featuring this episode because your esteemed host and editor Gordon Katic made an appearance to discuss the latest unfathomably smart take: Matthew McConaughey has a moral obligation to run for president of the United States. It's stunning intellectual work like this that has led Big Shiny Takes to become the world's first anti free speech podcast. It's a different vibe to our usual programming, but we think you'll like it because Big Shiny Takes is witty and anarchic and smart. The team really deserve a lot of recognition for doing the lord's work: shit-talking columnists.

The January 6th hearings continued this week, so we took it as an opportunity to revisit how academics tried to explain the events. Many likened it to a kind of psycho-social pathology; terms like deindividuation, psychosis, groupthink, and mob mentality were thrown around liberally. This is basically crowd theory, a line of thought developed in … Read More Read More

The suspect in the Buffalo shooting had a manifesto, as mass shooters often do. However, this one was different. It was littered with references to peer-reviewed scientific research that, he purports, supports his white supremacist beliefs. It's part of a broader far right subculture, with ‘journal clubs' and the like, in which research is read … Read More Read More

The pickup truck is the symbol of rural conservative masculinity. So, it often takes centre stage in the tired culture wars between reactionary neo-populists and liberal moralists. Like today, with Canada's right crudely embracing the truck–and tweeting furiously about those ‘Laurentian elites,‘ and ‘Toronto columnists‘ who thumb their nose at it. But, if you really want … Read More Read More

Why does the democratic establishment always avoid turning left, even when it might mean a political win? Gordon asks David Sirota. Sirota is behind the smash-hit Netflix movie Don't Look Up! He is also host and co-writer of an excellent podcast series called Meltdown, which documented how Obama's lacklustre response to the financial crisis set … Read More Read More

The war in Ukraine has brought nuclear technology to the forefront. There's the threat of nuclear weapons, and the danger of nuclear power plants melting down under military fire. Yet, the nuclear industry also promises to deliver us from our dependency on fossil fuels. It's an interesting duality with nuclear: is it the end of the … Read More Read More

We look at the mind behind Russia's imperial vision, Aleksandr Dugin. Political theorist Matt McManus walks us through this far-right thinker's strange and often contradictory ideas, from: his geopolitical clash-of-civilizations narrative, his flirtation with left-wing postmodernism, his Nietzschean great man-visions, his rejection of all things liberal, and his more ancient and mystical imagination. ——————FURTHER READING … Read More Read More

Can genetics play a role in crafting left social policy? Or should we not touch those ideas ever again–even with a 10 foot pole? Paige Harden's new book, “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality” makes a forceful case for an egalitarian politics informed by DNA.  However, geneticist Joseph Graves critiqued the book … Read More Read More

DNA offers us the promise of an objective forensic science. Rather than following our own racially-biased hunches, technology can deliver us the unvarnished truth. Yet, we always interpret technology through our own particular lens, and within a society that produces technology in a particular sort of way.  In this episode, we look at how forensic … Read More Read More

Imagine reading or watching The Minority Report and thinking of that as a model for the criminal justice system. Well, plenty of forensic types are doing just that. Can you figure out if you are a criminal by scanning your brain? On this episode of Darts and Letters, guest-host Jay Cockburn and our guests explore … Read More Read More

*Programming note: This is a rebroadcast. You can learn much about a media and political culture by examining when it panics, and who it panics about. And we've always panicked about video games, from the early arcades until this very day. Whether you are a prudish Christian conservative, or a concerned liberal-minded paternalist, demonizing video … Read More Read More

Guest host (and regular lead producer) Jay Cockburn gets ready to enter the world of e-sports, with a lesson in Super Smash Bros from a top player and professional coach. Find out why he won't make it (spoiler alert: he doesn't have that reaction time he used to); but also, find out why he might … Read More Read More

College athletes are workers, and they deserve to get paid. They put their bodies and futures on the line for the profit of their schools,  without seeing real compensation for their labour. However, things are changing. For instance, a 2021 Supreme Court decision upholding a lower court decision that found the NCAA were being anti-competitive … Read More Read More

Has the pandemic taught us anything? As we look forward and imagine what the future might look like, we like to think ‘next time will be different.' But, if we don't take a serious look back, it won't. Not as long as the people who made this pandemic so bad face zero consequences. In this … Read More Read More

Welcome to 21st century  techno-utopianism. Driven by a new tech-bro/crypto culture, supported by online hordes of true believers, and couched in philosophies of meritocracy and technocracy, techno-utopianism is born anew. But this thinking, while different, is not really new. As Darts and Letters sets out on a series of episodes to explore the persistent belief … Read More Read More

Last year was a rough one for academia – inauspicious, to say the least. The Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on students, universities lurching between open and closed, leaving students strained and uncertain about their futures, and stuck in Zoom classrooms. Meanwhile, mental health struggles soared. Students paid full tuition price for this cut-rate experience. On … Read More Read More

Happy new year! We're a few days behind, but as we catch up after the holidays and prepare to enter the third year of the plague, we wanted to bring you a few resolutions from, and for, the left by way of the Darts and Letters team and a handful of our past guests. This … Read More Read More

Note: As the one-year anniversary of the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol approaches, we are revisiting an episode on Steven Bannon and traditionalism with a rebroadcast of this bonus episode from late January 2021. In this bonus episode, host Gordon Katic speaks with Ben Teitelbaum, author of a fascinating new-ish book called … Read More Read More

Setting goals for the new year? Learning a language? Going for a run? Delivering food? Picking packages off a warehouse shelf for delivery? There's a game for that. Or, at least, a gamified system designed to nudge you in a series of pre-programmed directions in the service of the state, techno-capitalist overlords, or any number … Read More Read More

As we prepare for a series of 2021 retrospectives looking at the highs and lows of the year, the bests and the worsts, Darts and Letters is embracing the chaos, looking to the printed word, and scouring the stacks to find the dumbest books that found their way to print. We did not have to … Read More Read More

For years, abortion rights advocates have worried about the United States drifting towards abolishing Roe vs. Wade. Could this be the moment? The Trump-heavy, right-wing, partisan Supreme Court is hearing a challenge to Mississippi's ban on abortion after 15 weeks in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The court may overturn two decades'-old decisions–Roe v. … Read More Read More

Canada's intellectual culture is now like a barren soil that struggles to give life to even the simplest flora. They're just not that smart. We make too many right wing cranks, self-help charlatans, blood-thirsty reactionaries, insipid centrists, and third-rate Hayekians. But which are our worst? We invite our new friends from the Harbinger Media Network … Read More Read More

Note: Hey all, We're on break this week as we rest up and prepare for more top-notch programming, so this week's episode is a rebroadcast of one of our favourites. It's stardate 99040.01 and lead producer Jay Cockburn is temporarily taking over command of Darts and Letters for an episode. This week we enter the … Read More Read More

Why are there so many war games? They exploded in popularity post 9/11. Maybe you've played some of them. Or all of them. SOCOM: US Navy Seals. Call of Duty. Battlefield. Splinter Cell—and the entire deep library of Tom Clancy games. There's plenty more, too. This ain't just a story about the free market and … Read More Read More

If you eat, use a cell phone, connect to the internet, open a bank account, down a pint, or pick up a prescription in Canada, you're probably experiencing the country's familiar brand of oligopoly and monopoly. It's arguably worse than the US. We're basically three corporations in a trenchcoat. This arrangement means we unfortunately have … Read More Read More

You can't have a functioning democracy without a trusted media. That fact explains the state of U.S. democracy, at least in part. The United States has the lowest rate of media trust in the industrialized world, with just under a third of respondents in a 2020 Reuters poll saying they trust the media they consume. … Read More Read More

We'll save the Moby Dick puns for the episode itself, but suffice it to say that sinister game developers are on a whale hunt. This episode is about the sophisticated psychological tactics they use to hunt and capture their prey. Free to play mobile games as glorified slot machines, in-game purchases even for triple-A titles, … Read More Read More

Right wing money in academia is pervasive and influential. Libertarian-minded billionaires like the Kochs and their partners have funded scholars and think tanks across the US, and similar things go on in Canada too. The money shows us that the right spends it because they care about education. Maybe not in the classic way—higher learning, … Read More Read More

Programming note: It's Major League Baseball postseason and Darts and Letters is (coincidentally) on a break this week. In honour of the playoffs, we're running one of our favourite episodes — one fit for the season. America's national pastime is being taken over by a woke mob and a global communist cabal. So say the … Read More Read More

There's a foreign policy intellectual blob that serves as the architects for empire. They're at academic departments, quasi-academic think tanks, and places like the RAND Corporation–famously lampooned in Dr. Strangelove as the BLAND Corporation. These boring calculator men are part of why we have forever war. These people are part of a long tradition that … Read More Read More

Canada's federal election is over. And if you were expecting a boring, uninspired contest followed by a return to the status quo, you weren't disappointed. Zombie politics shuffles along trailing dead ideas and dead dogmas. On this episode, host Gordon Katic sits down with independent journalist, author, and podcaster Nora Loreto for a wide-ranging conversation … Read More Read More

Canada's 44th general election was a mess from the start. From wondering why it was called in the first place, to culture war wedge politics, the rise of the extreme-right People's Party, and along to literal stone throwing–or gravel throwing, anyway. You might want to call that a new low. It's definitely low. But it's … Read More Read More

School's back. Alongside the usual challenges of managing college and university life comes sorting out how to keep people on campus safe during the Covid-19 pandemic. Colleges and universities are trying to find their way forward after a rough 18 months, with more difficult times to come. But while the pandemic has affected higher education, … Read More Read More

Writing in 19th century Europe, Karl Marx was reflecting a time and place: Europe in the wake of the closing years of the Industrial Revolution. Marx himself, later in life, recognized that his crowning work, Das Kapital, had a limited scope, fitted for Europe but not for the rest of the world. In the 21st … Read More Read More

You can learn much about a media and political culture by examining when it panics, and who it panics about. And we've always panicked about video games, from the early arcades until this very day. Whether you are a prudish Christian conservative, or a concerned liberal-minded paternalist, demonizing video games has long been good politics. … Read More Read More

This week, Darts and Letters brings you a summer bonus episode with the host of one of our favourite podcasts, The Dig. Dan Denvir joins us to talk about his podcast, the place of academia and intellectuals on the left, radical media, ideas and political change, and more. Then, we air an extraordinary interview from … Read More Read More

Universities and colleges are often caricatured as hotbeds of radicalism. In reality, they're institutionally conservative and elitist — especially Ivy League schools. What happens when folks push back against that? What happens when Black scholars, activists, and others demand better? On this summer bonus episode of Darts and Letters, we speak with Stefan Bradley, Professor … Read More Read More

Note: Hey all, We're on break this week as we rest up and prepare for more top-notch programming, so this week's episode is a rebroadcast of one of our favourites. You know McKinsey and Co. They worked for a company that was fixing the price of bread in Canada.  They helped on Trump's immigration policies, … Read More Read More

Note: Hey all, We're on break this week as we rest up and prepare for more top-notch programming, so this week's episode is a rebroadcast of one of our favourites. Lately, things have been a little too heavy on this show. Insurrections, fascism, proto-fascism, weird apocalyptic visions. That stuff is important, but let's get serious. … Read More Read More

In late June, the Pacific Northwest experienced extreme weather by way of a heat dome that settled over the region, driving up temperatures, and setting heat records. In Portland, the temperature reached 112F (44C) while Lytton, B.C. broke Canada's heat record three days in a row before burning to the ground on the fourth day. … Read More Read More