Manuel de Landa: Right now, everybody and their mothers call themselves ‘critical’. You go to New York City bookstores and there are huge sections of bookshelves called Critical Theory. Of course, those theories are the most uncritical in the whole world. They call themselves critical but in the end are so uncritical because they take for granted all kinds of assumptions, they don’t really criticize themselves, and so forth. What I meant when I said ‘criticism as an antidote to propaganda’ would be a new type of criticism that is much more theoretically grounded and goes beyond the fake kind of criticism, or dogmatic criticism, that we have become used to. If we criticize the Internet by simply calling it a ‘capitalist tool’ or a ‘bourgeois tool’. That was a standard way in which Marxists criticized things in the past, attaching ‘bourgeois’ to everything they wanted to criticize and, bingo, you had instant criticism like you had instant coffee. Obviously, that kind of criticism is not going to do anything, and indeed has become a kind of propaganda itself. I mean, you criticize to propagandize your own idea. The question in front of us now as intellectuals is whether we’ve inherited so much bullshit and therefore our criticism is bound, is condemned to be ineffective, or whether we can find ways out or escape routes out of this and create a new brand of criticism that recovers its teeth, its ability to bite, its ability to intervene in reality in a more effective way. Again, it would imply a collective effort of a lot of intellectuals who are fed up with what had been labeled as criticism in the past and is nothing but dogma and repetition, and come up with a new brand of criticism that is capable of fighting propaganda. (source; emph mine)