Posts tagged History
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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A Prehistory of the Cloud

Without knowing how we got to the cloud, there is no context with which to begin parsing what tech studies in the late twenty-tens should even look like. A Prehistory of the Cloud reminds the reader that for every software-as-solution, the hardware has to be somewhere. The only reason to give away this storage—shroud it with the cloud metaphor and make it appear limitless and eternal—is to incentivize each user to upload everything without thought.

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