Non-fiction — Culture & Technology

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.

David DinaburgJune 12, 2022MMORPG, Non-fiction, Anthropology

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.

David DinaburgJune 5, 2022Non-fiction, Tech, Telephone

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.

David DinaburgMay 11, 2020Non-fiction, Tech, Computers, The Cloud, History

I AM ERROR

I AM ERROR elucidates the functional, physical aspects of the Famicom and applies that knowledge onto the end product; it is why Mario looks the way he looks, or moves the way he moves; why the bushes and clouds in Super Mario Bros. are made from the same tiles.

David DinaburgMay 11, 2020Nintendo, Non-fiction, NES, Platform Studies