Imagining the Boomer world straying into suffocating moralism during the Pop Revolution would have seemed like a grotesque, if not outright ridiculous, mind game. Actually, it is a first-order puzzlement how such a terror of virtue could take hold of our political discourse and institutions. It is precisely this question that cultural theorist Catherine Liu addresses with the rise of the new ruling caste of the Professional Managerial Class—also known as the PMC. This caste is characterized by how it claims social privileges for itself in a sharp demarcation against the lower classes – or the deplorables, as Hillary Clinton referred to them. As an excellent stratagem, this hidden class struggle makes excellent use of symbolic currency as the capital Pierre Bourdieu so aptly described in his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. However, as ever-larger sections of the population fight for positions, privileges, and scarce resources, the question of how to succeed in the moral economy is brought into relief. An excellent way out of this dilemma is declaring oneself a victim or behaving as particularly virtuous – a role description that Catherine Liu so aptly analyzes in her Virtue Hoarders. What was so refreshing in our conversation with her was that she never risks losing herself in moral indignation – but instead carries out a class analysis in good Marxist fashion. Thus, she reveals the basic features of the moral economy while also showing the blind spots of this ideology of domination.

Catherine Liu teaches film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, where she has also served as director of the UCI Humanities Center. Her 2021 book Virtue Hoarders was widely acclaimed, and she’s currently working on a book exploring the significance of trauma for the moral economy.

Catherine Liu has published

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One might call Benedict Evans an anthropologist of our digital age, as he’s been observing and analyzing its technological changes for over two decades. Before deciding to become an independent observer, he started his career at various venture capital and equity firms, such as Andreessen Horowitz, Entrepreneur First, and Mosaic Ventures. Now, he provides over 175,000 readers with his observations of the technosphere’s pulse as he interprets which of its often disruptive changes actually matter in his weekly newsletter. As a graduate of the University of Cambridge, where he studied history, Evans' perspective is imbued with observations that aren’t limited to technological innovations but also include all the fantastical hopes from which they spring – and their more practical meanings in our everyday world – giving his view of reality that human touch which is often far more potent than the code itself. In any case, a conversation with him can take many marvelous, surprising turns: From one moment to the next, you jump from an industrial-ecological look at a Billy Wilder film (The Apartment with Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon) to the question of why saying hello in English lifts and American elevators is experienced as inappropriate, whereas in Germany it is good manners – and this in turn is only the prelude to the question of how accounting is changing under the influence of digitalisation, among many others in our conversation with him.

Benedict Evans lives in New York. In addition to his newsletter and regular essays on his blog, he also presents his insights to major corporations such as Alphabet, Amazon, AT&T, Axa, Bertelsmann, Deutsche Telekom, Hitachi, L'Oréal, LVMH, Nasdaq, Swiss Re, Visa, Warner Media, Verizon and Vodafone.

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While the harbingers were already visible long before, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has made it clear that the days of the comparatively peaceful post-war order are numbered. Nevertheless, the calculations leading to all of this remain largely mysterious. How could a society such as the Russian one embark on such an adventure in which it reveals itself to the world as a terrorist state? The historian Sergei Medvedev, who saw the approaching catastrophe coming with his The Return of the Russian Leviathan, goes back deep into Russia's history to explain Putin's motivation - to figures such as Ivan the Terrible, the Golden Horde and the Chekists, who personify the legal State of Emergency. Medvedev's diagnosis, which sees Russia as the unconscious of a spiritually eroding postmodern age, is extremely dark. According to him, the invasion of Ukraine marked the beginning of World War III, which began with the invasion of Ukraine.

Sergei Medvedev is an Affiliate Professor at Charles University in Prague. Born in Moscow, he studied at Moscow University and Columbia University in New York City. He specializes in political history, international affairs, and Russian studies. After over 15 years as a Professor and Associate Dean at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, he left Russia in March 2022. For many years, Sergei Medvedev was a contributing columnist to Russian Forbes, Vedomosti, and The Republic and filmed programs on history and culture for the Russian Kultura TV and TV Rain. Since 2015, he has been working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, where he hosts the intellectual talk show Arkheologiya.

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