Tag Archives: information politics

The Terribly Thin Conception of Ethics in Digital Technology

robot teacher fooled students

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” […]

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Please Consider Supporting Our Legal Challenge to Cambridge Analytica’s Role in the Trump Election

Crowd Justice campaign header

Since December of last year, I have been part of a small group of concerned citizens engaged in a series of actions against Cambridge Analytica (CA) and its parent corporation, SCL Group. I am writing this post in the hopes of gathering support (that is, funds) we need to continue this action. You can support […]

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The Politics of Bitcoin: Expanded Bibliography with Live Links

Politics of Bitcoin

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 […]

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Right Reaction and the Digital Humanities

UKIP

A while back, I had an encounter that struck me at the time, and continues to strike me, as perfectly emblematic of the Digital Humanities as an ideological formation. While it includes a kind of brutal incivility that I associate with much of the politics that persists very near the “nice” surface of DH (of […]

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Crowdforcing: When What I “Share” Is Yours

a crowd

Among the many default, background, often unexamined assumptions of the digital revolution is that sharing is good. A major part of the digital revolution in rhetoric is to repurpose existing language in ways that advantage the promoters of one scheme or another. It is no surprise that while it may well have been the case […]

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Tor, Technocracy, Democracy

freedom is slavery

As important as the technical issues regarding Tor are, at least as important—probably more important—is the political worldview that Tor promotes (as do other projects like it). While it is useful and relevant to talk about formations that capture large parts of the Tor community, like “geek culture” and “cypherpunks” and libertarianism and anarchism, one […]

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Completely Different and Exactly the Same

I was flattered to see Nicholas Carr picking up on a blog entry I wrote about the Cartesian dualism underlying most thinking about the Singularity. I was equally pleased to read this comment on Carr’s post from CS Clark, who is otherwise unknown to me: I’m reminded that many tech/law debates depend on the new […]

Posted in "social media", cyberlibertarianism, google, materality of computation, privacy, rhetoric of computation, surveillance | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Responses

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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United States of America® & Twitter® Announce Global Ad Parternship

http://gawker.com/5826066/barack-obama-is-tweeting-like-a-monster #gotohell

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More Unwise Commentary

Posted in response to a response by Michael Gurstein to his response to a critique by someone from an “open” organization of a very smart post by Gurstein in the first place that responds to his sage and well-observed discussion of the politics of “open source” in an earlier post: Michael, you are fighting the […]

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