Even more than a flesh-and-blood bureaucracy, Wiener understood, an inscrutable bureaucracy-in-a-box, issuing decisions and edicts with superhuman speed and certainty, could all too easily be put to totalitarian ends. The box might seem autonomous, its outputs immaculate, but it would always serve its masters. It would always be an instrument of power. “The modern man, and especially the modern American, however much ‘know-how’ he may have, has very little ‘know-what,’” Wiener wrote. “He will accept the superior dexterity of the machine-made decisions without too much inquiry as to the motives and principles behind these.”

Governos burros acham que a economia não pode parar. Mas a economia é uma atividade que os humanos inventaram e que depende de nós. Se os humanos estão em risco, qualquer atividade humana deixa de ter importância. Dizer que a economia é mais importante é como dizer que o navio importa mais que a tripulação. Coisa de quem acha que a vida é baseada em meritocracia e luta por poder. Não podemos pagar o preço que estamos pagando e seguir insistindo nos erros.

A derrubada de estátuas é saudável e um símbolo de sociedades democráticas. A queda da ditadura soviética e do autoritarismo assassino que colonizou boa parte da Europa Central e do Leste Europeu costuma ser marcada pela derrubada das estátuas de Lênin. Em nenhum momento se propôs proibir seus livros ou se vilanizou o personagem histórico. Quem foi “apagado” não foi o pensador bolchevique, o líder da Revolução de 1917 e o chefe de Estado, mas o mito leninista que conferia legitimidade ao regime de terror que governava aqueles países. Não se trata de revisionismo histórico ou de julgamento moral de figuras do passado, mas sim de mitos sobre os quais poderes fáticos do presente justificam seu exercício de poder.

Race (like gender, sexuality and other markers of identity) shapes travel – and backpacking especially – in such palpable ways. As a black woman, I find there arespaces where my race and gender make me invisible, which means that I can immerse myself more fully into the lives of those around me. I can take a series of public buses from Cape Town to Nairobi over a month and have no one notice that I am thousands of kilometres from home. And there are spaces where the colour of my skin makes me hyper-visible, like taking the train from Vienna to Berne and being the only people in our carriage to get their identity documents checked.

Yet at the same time, Melville’s book subverted those ideas. It tacitly addresses slavery and struggle; it is not a coincidence that one of its most extraordinary chapters, “The Whiteness of the Whale” overturns a notional purity. “It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me,” Melville writes, and cites images of the “higher horror in this whiteness of . . . woe”. Among many contemporary artists inspired by the book is the internationally celebrated Ellen Gallagher – New England-born, of Cape Verdean and Irish parents – who subtly interrogates the implicit themes of race in Moby-Dick through her Watery Ecstatic series. Add to this Melville’s astonishingly overt homoeroticism (not least the “marriage” of Ishmael and the tattooed South Sea islander Queequeg, one of the first persons of colour to appear in western fiction), and you have a book almost postmodern in its elegant ellipses.

Mas continuo sendo coveiro porque aqui já aprendi muito sobre o ser humano. Quando você está na parte de cima da pirâmide social, todas as coisas que você olha são iguais. É como quando você está no avião e todos os pontinhos lá embaixo parecem a mesma coisa. Mas de onde eu estou, aqui embaixo, consigo enxergar o detalhe. Como coveiro, vejo a dor e a morte em tamanho natural. E foi durante a pandemia que eu vi as coisas mais sombrias da minha carreira, em mais de trinta anos que faço isso.

Western values. The free world. The liberal order. Over the three weeks since Putin declared war on ordinary Ukrainians, these phrases have been slung about more regularly, more loudly and more unthinkingly than at any time in almost two decades. Perhaps like me you thought such puffed-chest language and inane categorisation had been buried under the rubble of Iraq. Not any more. Now they slip out of the mouths of political leaders and slide into the columns of major newspapers and barely an eyebrow is raised. The Ukrainians are fighting for “our” freedom, it is declared, in that mode of grand solipsism that defines this era. History is back, chirrup intellectuals who otherwise happily stamp on attempts by black and brown people to factcheck the claims made for American and British history.

“The fossil fuel industry’s so-called solution to this crisis is nothing more than a recipe to enable fossil-fueled fascists like Vladimir Putin for years to come,” said Jamal Raad, executive director of Evergreen Action. “As long as our economy is dependent on fossil fuels, we will be at the mercy of petro-dictators who wield their influence on global energy prices like a weapon.

Lindsay Ellis’ video “Mel Brooks, The Producers and the Ethics of Satire About Nazis” argues convincingly that a seemingly lightweight approach can be more subversive than treating Nazis as demonic villains with a coherent ideology that need to be fought on its own ground. She makes a case that the apparent bad taste of depicting neo-Nazis as laughable buffoons in The Producers has proven resistant to co-option by fascists, while the way Edward Norton’s neo-Nazi character is framed by director Tony Kaye and the articulate nature of his racist arguments in American History X upend its intended message, leading it to find a cult following among contemporary fascists. Raiders is shallow by design, with no reflection on how Indiana might share elements of the ideology he’s fighting, but it cedes no ground to the aesthetic of “fascinating fascism.” Named by Susan Sontag in a 1974 essay, the concept suggests, in films like The Night Porter and The Damned, that Nazism was a playground of kinky sex.

Moreover, billionaires’ extravagant wealth is by and large not spent, as Zuckerberg suggests, on cutting edge research and philanthropic efforts. After they’ve bought up enough yachts and private jets they mainly invest in making themselves richer through casino-style financial speculation and in luxury real estate in starkly unequal cities like San Francisco, Miami and New York, where mostly vacant homes act as safety deposit boxes to shield wealth from taxation. Their money might also end up in tax havens like the Cayman Islands, where it can sit undisturbed by the long arm of the state. Very little of that ever trickles down to the 99%, where inequality has skyrocketed and wages have stagnated.