A colleague asked if I had any links to writings about Google Glass, so I dug around in my files and found quite a few things. I thought they might come in handy for others doing research on the topic. I have even more, but this is overwhelming enough as it is. The final pair […]
One of the most dangerous canards of the digital revolution is the one according to which distribution, decentralization, and democratization are the characteristic hallmarks of contemporary mass computerization. To writers of earlier ages (Huxley, Orwell, Lem, Weizenbaum, Wiener, Mumford, Ellul, Roszak, just to name a few), such sentiments would seem shocking, because what they understood […]
<rant name=”my real thoughts about wikileaks” sentiment=”please don’t hate me” causeofdelay=”trying not to get into flame war” >In recent interviews (e.g., with Time, Forbes, and The New Yorker), Julian Assange demonstrates repeatedly how little he knows about world politics, about the open-source information already available regarding the topics he claims to be “revealing,” or even […]
Just in case anyone was still wondering whether the internet inherently “dissolves state borders” or makes “information free,” the UK “Biting the Hand that Feeds IT” blog The Register today reports on that well-known authoritarian country, New Zealand, applying state-level filters in a manner that can at least be called “quiet”: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/12/new_zealand_internet_filter/. I have no […]
This nightmare scenario appeared as news in the Toronto Star recently, despite being pretty much just an op-ed. Some of the things he says strike me as not off the mark, and not quite what anyone else has said recently (though look at what the kids are up to in 1984… for some similar concerns, […]