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.
2023: Preparing for the Next War: Subordination, escalation and the Battle for Ukraine
“The US and its allies are backing Ukraine to the hilt in order to further subordinate Europe to NATO in preparation for a possible war with China.”
This short commentary article was written for the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The article can be read via Arena.
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.
2021: Meta-Facebook: The Quest for the Infinite Office
“Zuckerberg describes the metaverse as ‘an embodied internet’. In this, he could not be more wrong: the metaverse is precisely about deepening the forces of disembodiment.”
This short commentary article was published about a day after Facebook made the announcement that they were reorganising themselves into the conglomerate now known as ‘Meta’… The article can be read via Arena.
Antennas Aflame: Cybernetics, Conspiracies and 5G
Much of mainstream liberal commentary on the 5G conspiracy consists of snide dismissals that blame credulous individuals for inaccurate beliefs. Yet, given how widespread the 5G conspiracies have become, it is not enough to dismiss them…
This article digs into the 5G conspiracy in the time of coronavirus, looking to take it seriously, not on a factual level – as plainly there are many false components – but rather to see how the incredible spread of such conspiracies is bound up with our strange and terrible historic moment and what this means more generally.
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.
Article Series: 20 Years of Google
In 2018, the tech-titan commonly known as Google turned 20. In that two decades, it went from a dorm room project to a global institution with tremendous power over the everyday life of billions of people unevenly scattered around the world. In this anniversary year, I published three articles in Arena Magazine that critically reflect on these developments and what they mean for the world. They can be downloaded and read as PDFs via the below links, or the full version is read a web version below.
For more work, please see Writings.