This website is intended to create a space where the political and philosophical writings of Timothy Erik Ström can be collected in one place, accessible to anyone with a sufficiently advanced networked computing-machine, money to spend on an internet service provider, electricity to burn, and appropriate levels of literacy, both linguistically and technologically. This is to say: welcome.
2024: Los Almos to Neuralink
“Albert Einstein issued a dire warning: that we were living under threat not only from the atomic bomb and the spectre of extermination in nuclear war, but also from a second weapon, one he considered just at dangerous for humanity and the planet—‘the Information Bomb.”
This article was published by Arena in Issue #17, ‘Prometheus Unhinged’ (pp.60-71) and it can be read in full there.
2023: Blasted Sea
“At the cutting-edge of science and using some of the world’s most powerful calculation engines, the technique is as rationalised as it gets. Yet the blasting of an atomic bomb of sound every ten seconds is belligerent in the extreme toward the oceanic ecosystems, while the aim of expanding the frontier of fossil fuel extraction at a time of increasingly acute climate crisis is nothing short of demented.”
This short commentary piece was published by New Left Review’s Sidecar and can be read in full there. You can also read it in Swedish here.
2022: Capital and Cybernetics — New Left Review
“There is no shortage of epithets aimed at grasping the transformations taking place within global capitalism under the impact of the ongoing technological revolution. Algorithmic capitalism, cognitive capitalism, communicative capitalism, data capitalism, digital capitalism, frictionless capitalism, informational capitalism, platform capitalism, semiocapitalism, surveillance capitalism and virtual capitalism have all been proposed, to name but a few.”
New Left Review made this article one of their free-access pieces, so you can continue reading there… New Left Review 135 – May/June.
Book: Globalization and Surveillance
In February of 2020, my first book, Globalization and Surveillance was published by Rowman and Littlefield. Here’s a nice endorsement of the book:
With a breathtakingly wide brush—both historical and geographical—Tim Ström paints a compelling picture of surveillance as a crucial companion of colonization, capitalism, and war in the modern world. Thankfully, he also offers clues as to how things could be otherwise.
David Lyon, Queen’s University, Canada
For more on Globalization and Surveillance, please see here.
For more work, please see Writings.