Tag Archives: 1984

Glasslinks: Privacy, Glassholes, Panics, & Take-Backs

google glass

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 […]

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Computerization, Centralization, and Concentration

uranium enrichment centrifuge

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 […]

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Real Thoughts on WikiLeaks; or, How Howard Roark Became a Hero of the Left

<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 […]

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How to Constrain ‘Absolute’ Freedom

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 […]

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Morozov on the “Digital Dictatorship”

Sometimes, the truth is just out there. I’ve been learning a lot from Evgeny Morozov for a while and i’d like to think that his work fits with a slightly disturbing clarity with my recent book The Cultural Logic of Computation and the recent work of a number of other second (third?) wave digital theorists […]

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One Generation Is All They Need (What Are Computers For? #4975)

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, […]

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