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Has there ever been a more magnificently paranoid vision of intellectual activity than that offered by the Italian leftist thinker Pier Paolo Pasolini in one of his final texts, “Is this a Military Coup D’Etat? I Know…”?

In these troubling times, we should return to Stuart Hall, a remarkable political thinker and cultural analyst.

We live in ahyper-factualage, where we know more, with greater speed, about more things than ever before in history.

“We’ve had enough!” — “There’s no more room!” — “They’reto blame for the housing shortage!” — “They’ve taken all our jobs.” — “Our country isfull.”

Gaza is being decimated. There are reports ofpolio virusfound in Gaza’s sewage by the World Health Organization (WHO).Mountains of garbageare piling up as basic services have collapsed. The UN reports thatclearing 40 million tons of rubblemay take 15 years, with housing stock not rebuilt until 2040...

Photo:CNN Presidential Debate, 27 June 2024 (WSJ.com/CNN)

Slavoj Žižek. Freedom: A Disease Without Cure. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. 320 s.

Reviewing a Žižek book is a bit like “dancing about architecture,” to borrow a Frank Zappa quotation. Ideally, a review ought to provide a rational overview of a work’s contents and form. But Žižek unusual prose style resists simplified summary, and many of his most recent works are, if not formless, then at least formally idiosyncratic—more like patchworks of loosely interwoven textual fragments than formal or even sustained argument. With strands of text that have been recombined, reused and (occasionally subtly) rewritten, his texts at times seem to draw more upon Burroughs’ “cut-up” collage technique than the Western canon of philosophy, redolent of the free-associating analysand on the couch giving free rein to their thoughts: One idea succeeds the next, certainly, but the sum of it all is naturally quite fragmentary.

It is increasingly recognized that large language models (LLMs) are prone to erroneous outputs, a phenomenon known as hallucinations. As AI spreads ever wider into the technological substrate of late modernity—summarizing news stories, synthesizing search results, condensing research papers, speeding up office worker productivity, and so on—the hallucinatory effectsof AI are only likely to grow more consequential.

To give just one relatively innocent example: In 2022, Google announced that it was deploying its Multitask Unified Model (MUM) to produce “snippets,” or brief summaries, of search results. So how’s it faring? Say you want to learn whether Switzerland is a member of the European Union. You might plausibly search for a phrase like “Switzerland EU.” As of May 2024, the phrase results in the following Google-manufactured summary of a Wikipedia page devoted to Switzerland-European Union relations: “Switzerland is a member state of the European Union (EU).”

Social democracy may be the solution to the problems of some fortunate subset of individual nations, but it is not a solution for the world as such—that is, tocollective global problemsand to theproblems of poorer nations around the globetoday. Instead, social democracy—so Iargue in a forthcoming...

I have just completed writing a chapter destined for an edited volume published by an academic press. Because the topic is a specialist one, unlikely to attract a general readership, I won’t delve into the details of the argument (though interested readers can consultthe draft here)[1], which is...