The FN MAG Machine Gun
The FN MAG Machine Gun

Author: Chris McNab

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-07-26

Total Pages: 81

ISBN-13: 1472819691

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For six decades, the 7.62mm FN MAG has been a dominant general-purpose machine gun (GPMG) in worldwide arsenals. Three qualities have guaranteed this enduring status – reliability, ease of operation, and firepower. Several nations have license-produced the weapon as their standard GPMG, including the British (as the L7) and the Americans (M240), and in total more than 80 nations have adopted the FN MAG. The machine gun has also been modified extensively for vehicular, naval, and aircraft platforms, demonstrating versatility in the air, on sea, and on land. In this book, Chris McNab charts the technical evolution of this extraordinary weapon, created by Belgian company Fabrique Nationale d'Herstal. From the jungles of South East Asia, to the deserts of the Middle East, and the icy battlefields of the Falklands, this study explores the origins, development, combat use, and legacy of the FN MAG machine gun, a dominant weapon in its field for more than a half-century.

The Twittering Machine
The Twittering Machine

Author: Richard Seymour

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2020-09-22

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1788739310

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A brilliant probe into the political and psychological effects of our changing relationship with social media Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience. The Twittering Machine is an unflinching view into the calamities of digital life: the circus of online trolling, flourishing alt-right subcultures, pervasive corporate surveillance, and the virtual data mines of Facebook and Google where we spend considerable portions of our free time. In this polemical tour de force, Richard Seymour shows how the digital world is changing the ways we speak, write, and think. Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into. Social media held out the promise that we could make our own history–to what extent did we choose the nightmare that it has become?