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It’s not sneaky data firms, it’s the fundamentals of how the U.S. apportions power. It is extraordinarily unlikely that the casual reason Trump became president was voter manipulation. But when tech-interested writers can simply say “intimate user-profiling swung the election in 2016” without any critical analysis or support except vibes and the “we’re better than this” national narrative, it will continue to enshrine the strength and power of surveillance capitalism. People will pay FB more money for more useless data, more useless data will be tracked, and everyone will continue to believe everything they look at online, in the aggregate, is precious
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Girl Online A User Manual
There is no ‘end of shift’ to looking like a pretty wood elf bard. There is no “just let me adventure on my own” when you’re a girl character online in 1999. Does this speak to presenting as female out in this wide world of reality? Is this the sense of female dread that I have read about, that even when interactions are not malicious, they are incessant? You cannot inhabit a female form in an MMO in 2023 and be “treated like a girl” because it is known that players are not their avatars. That’s simply sad, that it required the possibility of “meaning male” to allow female characters free rein in online games.
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Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media
Habit produces freedom for thought beyond immediacy—how much time would I waste, in my daily life, if I had to think about every breath I took?—but habit can force us down paths that are no longer beneficial. Once habits become unmoored from the goals they supported, their vestigial remains can haunt us, warp the way we approach the world:
Although goals can be satisfied in various ways, there is only one way to satisfy a habit: by repeating it exactly.
After a generation of watching images on a screen and being told over and over, “This isn’t real, this is just entertainment,” the habit of dismissing the flickering shadows projected into our lives has become our reality. We don’t believe what we see, nor do we even believe what we say—the always-on nature of the network means your “brand” can never waver: always be riffing; I’m just kidding. Unless…; say whatever gets the most likes. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to retweet it, does it make an impact?
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The Discrete Charm of the Machine
Presented as abstract math, I hate it. Given as “potential savings in concrete usage to construct roads,” I don’t particularly care. Given as “the movement and time for a robotic drill to travel around a circuit board to punch discrete holes,” I’m starting to be mildly intrigued. Given that it can be any or all of these together and at once, I’m on (circuit)board. The practical applications of this abstract equation have expand out before me. Is this the moment when I realize math is actually super cool?
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Everything I Need I Get from You
“The experience of bodily joy is an invitation to reconsider the conditions that hold you away from it most of the time.” As far back as college, I was teased for saying about a scene from a movie or a line from a book, “[blank] was so good, it made the whole experience worthwhile.” I am my own cliché, but here it is. “The experience of bodily joy is an invitation to reconsider the conditions that hold you away from it most of the time.” Excerpted, this line does work. It crashes hard into the mind, and it sits there. In the context, it is heartbreaking. Imagine hundreds of thousand of people—perhaps mostly women—enjoying themselves fully in front of One Direction or Bruce Springsteen or ICP or whatever they like. And then the screaming stops, and they are subsumed by the role of mom, wife, daughter, lady, girl, woman.
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Lurking: How a Person Became a User
What a heavy curtain that single year was: the Sophomores, Juniors, and Seniors above we millennial Freshman lived lives so untethered from the great pulsating mass of technological connection as to be a fundamentally different experience. Did they go home the summer of 2000 and sweat with anxiety because they were no longer connected to the wider world? That feeling of loneliness—not being surrounded by peers physically, and not even being surrounded by their digital ghosts—was heartbreaking to me, a feeling I can still remember more than twenty years later. Was that the first itch of internet addiction?
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How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
The riptides of the attention economy are strong enough to yank down anyone who wades into the waters. I am not safe and clean on the shore: I love to write these reviews, like to know people read them, recognize I launch for free what used to be paid labor into the stream of commerce. What I want isn’t a life of technological hermitage but one of acknowledgement: recognition that speed and volume cannot replace depth. If I hear a hundred birdsongs a day but remember not a single thing beyond that I hit my hundred-bird goal, what joy is there in making sure I hear a hundred and five tomorrow?
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The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is
I want to continue to go hard at this book as a sort of personal catharsis. I will rein it in, though, because there is a lot of value in the text outside of being the subject of an AVGN reaction video. I like the general concept of the book a lot. It’s sort of like a smarmy version of Jenny Odell’s How to do Nothing, though its tone is so…abrasive…that picking at the text is like scratching an itch—I know it actually makes things worse, but it just feels so good in the moment. The first chapter and intro are, as I’ve said, preachy and out of touch. I’ve rarely had a text that is so basic in its thesis—that of the general zeitgeist of the internet in the last decade is “dumpster fire”—talk down to me so viciously.
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Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing
The book is important because the book gives historical context to technology without sanctifying or demonizing its use. Knowing what happened and why divorced from overt ideological leanings leads to recognition of the word processor as both artifact and deconstructed synecdoche for writing en masse. And due to the format choice of reverse chronology in Track Changes, even unintentional technological-utopian futurist ideologies are removed.
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Coming of Age in Second Life
So while I have never played Second Life, the chance to read scholarly work that takes the subject of virtual worlds seriously was too good to pass up. And Second Life does bring me back to my law school days of trying–and failing–to get any of my cybersecurity professors to engage with the wild things happening in virtual worlds. If I had 2006 back again, I would do more than just bring printed-out Something Awful forums about flying phalluses to office hours and play at issue-spotting with people who couldn’t possibly care less.
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Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell
Anyone with even the slightest interest in communications technology—or modern infrastructure; or the analogue-to-digital transition; or counter-culture; or regulatory history—should jump all over this book. And if you’ve never heard of “Ma Bell,” well, this is a wicked place to start learning.
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Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
There is as much detail packed into every page of Because Internet as there is meaning packed into a period at the end of a short text message. Sometimes having information bursting at the seams means there is little room for authorial voice, quirky digressions, or the myriad other pleasantries that make modern non-fiction fun to read. Not so Because Internet. Maybe because I love Internet Culture Books (note the capital letters? I used to assume this was a convention of SFF [double brackets, but I won’t make you play my twitter game if you don’t know SFF is Science Fiction & Fantasy] genre when talking about Talents or Powers or Magic, but it tends to be deployed in writing across styles to convey impact!), but the author finds a way to push voice and appealing examples on every page.
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Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System
Video games aren’t a given—they didn’t have to happen—but they are so ubiquitous now that I am very surprised that stories about their origins aren’t more popular. Changeable software cartridges connected to a hardware platform that piggybacks off of a preexisting and console-agnostic television is an insane idea in a world of closed units like arcade machines. Pulling a piece of software from dedicated hardware that was designed to do nothing else and shoving to into a generic platform while trying to retain the original shape seems herculean:
To draw the four pursuers, programmer Tod Frye relied on a technique called flicker. Each of the four ghosts is moved and drawn in sequence on successive frames. Pac-Man himself is drawn every frame using the other sprite graphic register….
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Heteromation, and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism
Heteromation, and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism is the type of academic text that can admit low culture has high influence, that knows Let’s Plays are a thing, that cites twitch.tv—the mother of all heteromated sites (that also got scooped up by Amazon.com) —is the way online entertainment is moving. We’ve jumped from questioning the legality of deeplinking past a website’s homepage to remix culture, to influencers showcasing themselves interacting with other media while relying on niche audience participation in, what, twenty years? The acceleration of the consumer doing it themselves—with it covering self-checkout, self-entertainment, self-exploitation—showcases heteromation as the cancerous growth frontier au courant of exploitation capitalism.
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The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business
If you want technology to be the driving force emancipating the downtrodden and shattering the shackles of ignorance, it merits explanation why the onus is on the end user to start out as a sophisticated consumer on par with a multinational conglomerate. But we never get any more discussion about how to square the idea that technology can free the teeming masses from their ignorance but only after the “I accept” button has been clicked. It smacks vaguely of colonial imperialism or noblesse oblige; a Digital Man’s Burden. A digression—what fascinating data-scraping algorithms might distinguish between the EULA-proof proto-technological naïf and the tech-savvy wunderkind—never materializes. Or even recognition that to begin distinguishing between the layman and the laity, data-scraping would have to pick apart personal information. No machine solutions can “assist” without first accessing information; so how then, can machine solutions be the answer to how and what information to share?
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More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technologies From the Open Hearth to the Microwave
There are many more examples, each interesting in their own way. White flour was surprisingly and particularly interesting from a historical standpoint: the steam engine unshackled mills from rivers and shifted industrial concentration to centralized factories, allowing the growth of urbanization. White flour “…is composed of very small particles of the endosperm of the grain, and lacks the germ and the bran.” It didn’t spoil as quickly as the whole grains ground at the local grist; it fact, it keep long enough to be shipped overseas to feed the foreign armies of the Napoleonic Wars. Once those wars were over, the industrial mills—created and optimized to grind ultrafine white flour—flooded U.S. markets with cheap white flour, which used to be the province of socio-economic posturing between the wealthy; cakes and fluffy breads became de rigueur.
That’s pretty great, right? Cheap flour! No more need for the laborious work of hauling grains to the gristmill, a task typically relegated to the physically stronger male of the household. No more need for hand-grinding grain, a tedious task usually left for children! Everyone has more time thanks to white flour! Oh, but...well, everyone but mother.
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Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
…[t]his is thoughtful, fascinating, insightful details into a theoretical realm of possibility that should excite every living person on the planet. What a trip, just to consider the subjective time-dilation increased mental processing speed would engender; that near light-speed travel might feel to an AI what air travel does to me and you gives me chills.
This is what I mean when I call Superintelligence an impressive feat; I cannot name another book that spits out so much irksome social theory that I would still recommend without caveat. The chains of logic are so clear and smart; it crafts a space to dislike the premise yet love the process. And—as the book itself makes clear—it may believe what it posits, but it doesn’t need you to; Superintelligence just wants people to start talking about the issue.
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You Look Like a Thing and I Love You
This paragraph took about...six hours of tinkering to create. I will say that, at the point this was being spit out, I did not think my grand experiment was worth it. I mean, I was thrilled i got anything to work (see above, wherein I produced nothing but sequential numbers), but this sample of my trained model was pretty raw. Perhaps you could separate out some of the parts about “pizza,” “burgers,” and “my tights” to tell a story. But it wouldn’t be a very good one. I want you to see, warts and all, the nonsense I had to pick through to dredge up a few good lines. Context, thy name is not Machine Learning.
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This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture
This is Why didn’t teach me about trolling as an act unto itself. It gave me a reason to think about trolling as a reactive impulse to a society that sells its own cruelty back to itself. That’s a real cognitive framework to make trolling comprehensible as a part of culture, rather than as the aberration that people pretend it to be.
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Twitterbots: Making Machines that Make Meaning
Engagement with and understanding of more than just technical breakdowns makes for text that is often engaging regardless of your proximity to bots, AI, or ML writing. It is interesting to see how tech-minded people with a firm grasp of the humanities—rather than the near-exhausted trope of the literary stodge trying to make sense of technology—engage with cultural source. The written word isn’t treated as mere grist for the GPT-2 mill.
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