All Things are Too Small has way of traveling through the world where it is both above and within the muck: “The best sex, probably, was the sex people had when they really believed they would got to hell for it–but craved it so badly that they had it anyway.” Its gentle gripes and alluringly pointed suggestions on how to survive in the muddled swamp of modern existence make for time well spent—you might find your own way through on your own, but this way you get a local’s expertise.
So it is with Rigor: the author does the best Kant/Borges/Heisenberg Let’s Play because they’ve already mastered all the other games in the series. I don’t have a lifetime spent with the physical underpinnings of microreality, but I sure can listen to someone who does understand it talk me through some existent and comprehensible philosophical texts that bump against the thornier issues:
Read MoreIt’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
Read MoreThere 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.
Read MoreHabit 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?
Read MorePresented 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?
Read More“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.
Read MoreWhat 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?
Read MoreThe 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?
Read MoreI 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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreSo 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.
Read MoreAnyone 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.
Read MoreThere 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.
Read MoreThe underpaid office worker bildungsroman hits too close to home for me. It probably strikes the majority of my age demographic. Any book burnished by The New Yorker’s indelible house style has space in my heart. Whatever the case, I went into Uncanny Valley thinking it was a book for me, and as I read each page they proved that assumption, 200 times over:
I was perhaps still afflicted by the shortsightedness of someone whose skill set was neither unique nor in high demand. A sense of my own disposability had been ingrained since working in the publishing industry, and quitting without a plan was unfathomable. Every month since graduation was accounted for on my resume. Sabbaticals, for anyone other than a college professor, were a novel concept, and one I could not trust.
When it moved away from the intensely relatable and started branching wide in what felt like an attempt to carve out a cultural moment writ large, it lost the unique voice in favor of demotivational poster clichés:
Read MoreNobody was guaranteed any future, I knew. But for those who seemed to be emerging from the wreckage victorious--namely, those of us who had secured a place in an industry that had steamrolled its way to relevance—the meritocracy narrative was a cover for lack of structural analysis. It smoothed things out. It was flattering, and exculpatory, and painful for some people to part with.
Based on past years of detective work, CrowdStrike tied Fancy Bear to the Russian military intelligence agency known as th GRU. Cozy Bear, it would later be revealed, worked within Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence agency.(The two “bear” names derived from CrowdStrike’s system of labeling hacker teams with different animals based on their country of origin--bears for Russia, pandas for China, tigers for India, and so on.)
These are cool little facts that add depth to general interest readers. Cybersecurity people would know this naming convention, but I definitely didn’t. It’s a nice peek behind the curtain, and something I appreciate being explained; a lot of books that focus only on their core demographic might elide this part to make sure they don’t bore or insult their intended audience.
Read MoreVideo 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:
Read MoreTo 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….
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.
Read MoreIf 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?
Read MoreThere 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.
