This text, written by a professor of Media Philosophy at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, and research group coordinator into Artificial Intelligence, traces the history of algorithmic processes and shows that its history started well before the so-called Information Age. The writer discusses binary codes, algorithms, and digital calculus among other areas and concepts that have now become familiar to many people, despite the fact that only a few understand what they represent and mean.

Fake news, disinformation, a weak and shifting culture, the impossible task of regulation, private interests: Carla Baptista, lecturer and researcher in media history and the relationship between journalism and politics, looks at the factors behind the decline of journalism.

Yves Citton, a leading author on the ecology and economy of attention, follows a path in this article that is not the usual lament about the scarcity of attention in the face of an overabundance of information. Moving towards curiosity and subjecting it to a political re-evaluation, Citton creates an alternative theoretical discourse that is no longer focused on the problems of the crisis and the scarcity of attention.

This article by Margarida Abreu, economics lecturer at ISEG, Lisbon, focuses on theories of money and the monetary and financial system, in its complexity and the way that it involves a subjective dimension – trust. Among other things, we learn about how cryptocurrencies work and how we are moving towards a society in which hard cash is becoming obsolete.

To think about the media and journalism today is to think about a world that is changing every day much more than the world itself. And it is to think about it in the certainty of uncertainty.

These days, when all powers are threatening each other like ferocious mythological animals and devouring each other in their love, the Fourth Estate or, in a more radical idealistic version, the acclaimed “counter-power”, has talked a lot about what it expected to happen and very little about what has been happening to itself.

A recent exhibition of works by Gaëtan (1944–2019) in Lisbon, prompted Gillian Sneed to write about this collection made up of serially obsessive self-portraits. They attest to all the ways that a person can look at oneself, and range from tragic realisation of the passage of time to a sad, ironic smile at this fugue-loss. Sneed is a writer and art historian who specialises in contemporary art. She has lectured at City College New York and MoMA. In her critique, she says: ‘Though critical methodologies informed by queer theory are perhaps new in Portuguese art discourse, I would like to suggest that Gaëtan’s work provides an apt opportunity to explore this mode of visual analysis.’

The interview with Yves Cabannes that we publish here focuses on a concept that is already one hundred and twenty years old, but that is of renewed current interest as a result of both the pandemic and climate change: the concept of the ‘garden city’. As an urban planning specialist, he has contributed to the reactivation of this concept, in particular through a manifesto in favour of 21st century garden cities, which he published in 2014 with Philip Ross.

Written by a renowned sport sociologist and consultant to several institutions, such as the Football Museum, in São Paulo, this article examines the social-racial divide between various Brazilian football teams. Overviewing several aspects of the mythology of football in Brazil, José Paulo Florenzano focuses specifically on the case of Garrincha, the ‘bow-legged angel’.

Beginnings still exist. Electra began a year ago and since then we have published five issues of this magazine dedicated to thought, art, literature, science and cul-tural criticism. Each one is a stroke that gradually draws the full face. This face is moveable and mutable, made of positions and oppositions, juxtapositions and superimpositions. It reveals itself in plural planes and variable geometries. It has diverse and complementary points of view. The more it changes and moves, the more it defines and affirms itself.

The work of the Italian sociologist Alessandro Dal Lago includes a contentious book entitled Genocidi animali (2018). Written with two friends, Massimo Filippi and Antonio Volpe, the slim volume caused controversy for using the word ‘genocide’. This article, beginning with a biographical narrative, looks at the “history of philosophers’ indifference towards the animal world”.