Calls to Limit the Use of Bad Technologies Only by Law Enforcement and Governments, Largely Via “Ethics” and Self-Regulation, Exacerbate Rather than Ameliorate the Anti-Democratic Harms of Digital Technology Recently, more of us have started to realize just how destructive digital technologies can be. That’s good. As someone who has been nearly screaming about the […]
It may seem improbable at first glance to think that there might be connections between the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and white supremacy. Yet the more you examine the question the clearer and the disturbing the links get. Inspired in part by some recent work mentioned below, conversations with Chris Gilliard, a Twitter […]
A few weeks ago we got a nice object lesson in the rhetorical strategies the right tries to rebut arguments about itself. Whether these are deliberate trolling strategies or just ones that propagate among the right in a more-or-less organic fashion, they are still fascinating to observe. My point here in collecting them, beyond the […]
Thanks in part to ongoing revelations about Facebook, there is today a louder discussion than there has been for a while about the need for deep thinking about ethics in the fields of engineering, computer science, and the commercial businesses built out of them. In the Boston Globe, Yonatan Zunger wrote about an “ethics crisis” […]
I have an article in the latest boundary 2 titled “The Militarization of Language: Cryptographic Politics and the War of All against All.” It is my most sustained attempt to locate and critique a political philosophy in the discourse of encryption advocates, a project I’ve addressed as well in pieces like “Code Is Not Speech” […]
In what purport to be responses or rebuttals to critiques I and others have offered of Digital Humanities (DH), my argument is routinely misrepresented in a fundamental way. I am almost always said to oppose the use of digital technology in the humanities. This happens despite the fact that I and those I have worked […]
I’ve argued for a long time along different ways that despite its overt claims to creativity, “building,” “democratization,” and so on, digital culture is at least partly also characterized by profoundly destructive impulses. While digital promoters love to focus on the great things that will come from some new version of something over its existing […]
Production constraints and editorial guidelines required The Politics of Bitcoin, in both its print and electronic versions, to include only the base URLs of online materials referenced in the book, and even in the electronic version these aren’t live links. In addition, space constraints meant that some work valuable to me in composing the book […]
My new book, The Politics of Bitcoin, is not directly about electoral politics, but rather the political and political-economic theories that inform the development of Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain software. My argument does not require that there be direct connections between promoting Bitcoin and supporting one candidate or party or another. Rather, what concerns […]
The word “neoliberalism” comes up frequently in discussions on and of digital media and politics. Use of the term is frequently derided by actors across the political spectrum, especially but not only by those at whom the term has been directed. (Nobody wants to be called a neoliberal and everyone always denies it, much as […]