Tag Archives: china

Leaving and Not Leaving China

By David Golumbia | Published: March 25, 2010

In the latest skirmish in the Google-China information war–but is really more like a US-China war, it seems to me, in which we have been drafted by a private corporation with what I can’t see as consent–Google has shut off its mainland china servers and redirected traffic to google.hk. It’s another remarkable example of the […]

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Morozov on the “Digital Dictatorship”

By David Golumbia | Published: February 20, 2010

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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More Popular than Avatar

By David Golumbia | Published: February 13, 2010

The following hour-long satirical Chinese machinima video quickly garnered 10 million or more viewers. “New York City based trends research and innovation company” PSFK quotes this description from Chinese media blog DigiCha: The film tracks the fight between The9 and Netease over the renewal rights to Activision Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, the requirement that skulls […]

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Neoliberalism, Info-determinism, Expressive Absolutism

By David Golumbia | Published: January 23, 2010

One of the central and most symptomatic of computational slogans is “information wants to be free.” Like most computational ideologies, it’s willfully techno-determinist, almost vitalist, with regard to “what information does,” even if many who recite the slogan may find ways to construe it otherwise. Like many pieces of “wisdom” that circulate in the digital […]

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Searching Every Text Message (We Are Building Big Brother #1)

By David Golumbia | Published: January 20, 2010

It’s long been rumored that US intelligence agencies are capable of monitoring every form of electronic communication. In recent stories about Chinese internet and wireless surveillance, it’s become clear that this technology exists and is widely used. Is it used just to prevent “terrorist attacks,” however we define that? thanks to the national security state, […]

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