Backlight

Bullshit Jobs

What is a bullshit job and who has a bullshit job? Do you think that your work has no sense? Than it is likely that you have a bullshit job, that does not bring any satisfaction or any other benefit. In this documentary vpro and American anthropologist David Graeber look more closely at bullshit jobs, why they exist and what they do with us.

The space waste lab

Dear Passengers

You’ll no longer hear the announcement 'ladies and gentlemen' when travelling through a train station in the Netherlands. This has been replaced with 'dear passengers' to include all travelers: ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and everyone who does not feel comfortable within that traditional binary. Even before we are born we are pigeonholed. From then on we are socialized to understand ...

Paul Kingsnorth, Portrait of A Recovering Environmentalist

Former environmentalist and author Paul Kingsnorth has withdrawn to Ireland, to a rare and unspoilt part of the planet. You could say: to the end of the world. A portrait of an apocalyptic thinker who, nevertheless, never gives up hope and continues to have faith in the power of nature. Thinker and author Paul Kingsnorth climbed the barricades as a nature conservationist at an early stage. ...

The kids are alt-right

Donald Trump and Thierry Baudet were both portrayed with the green head of Pepe the Frog. The frog grew from being a fairly innocent comic book character into a controversial internet icon. During the American presidential elections Pepe was even officially named as being a symbol of hate. Pepe now stands alongside the logo from the Ku Klux Klan and the swastika. How can a frog with ironic ...

Radical Right-Wing Vanguard

Members of the radical right-wing group Identitarian Resistance recently stood in Amsterdam across from failed asylum seekers. All across Europe the sound of the radical right is becoming stronger. People feel threatened by the arrival of migrants and are searching for unity and Heimat (homeland), old values placed in a new jacket. Meanwhile there is evidence of an assertively operating ultra ...

Slave to the algorithm

Whether you will get a job or a mortgage, even who will be released from prison: algorithms are taking over a growing number of the big decisions in our lives. Because algorithms are faster and more efficient than humans. But do they also always make better decisions? And what does a society look like in which we are being steered by big data and computer codes? Businesses, and to a growing ...

Politics of belonging

How can we overcome the ever-increasing alienation, loneliness and ecological catastrophe? A new story is needed to free the population from the overpowering efficient thinking. The influential British thinker George Monbiot has the answers to tell us how to get out of this chaos. We must reinvent our relationship to nature, our fellow human beings, society, politics and especially to ...

Hungary and the open society

No immigrants, restricting the media and declaring that a university is an enemy of the state: this is the Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. In Budapest there is a university, founded and financed by billionaire George Soros, to propagate the values of an ‘open society’. But it is precisely those propagated West-European values such as separation of power, free media and the freedom ...