How do ordinary citizens become the foot soldiers, the automatons, the purveyors of evil? How does barbaric cruelty become a civic norm? In her controversial classic Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt gives us a way to understand this pervasive degeneration of our time. She calls it the banality of evil. And it is this banality given democratic license; this turning of neglect into a legitimate doctrine of governance; this virtuosity of brutalism without bloodshed, that Aishwary Kumar identifies as a new mutation in the structure of liberal democracy. Neodemocracy is this political mutant, born at the intersection of cruelty and the constitution.
It is undeniable that technology has disrupted democracy, that algorithms have begun to threaten human agency and deform identity, and that artificial intelligence, deeply...
What does it mean to be human? This is a question at once timeless, yet often posited as an abstraction: as though being human...
"Annihilation is refusal of the world as it is. Annihilation is destruction of the world as it is. Annihilation is an act of faith....
