Tag Archives: media

The Destructiveness of the Digital

EVE Online

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 […]

Posted in cyberlibertarianism, games, rhetoric of computation | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 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 […]

Posted in "social media", cyberlibertarianism, google, materality of computation, surveillance, we are building big brother, what are computers for | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Responses