Tag Archives: proprietary knowledge

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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Not Everything, But… (Toyotatron)

I don’t mean to blame every bad thing in the world on computerization–but I think it is crucial part of computationalist discourse that when a critique of computerization is offered, instead of rebutting the critique, the answer is usually to raise some putative good that computers do (this is a pattern I encounter in person, […]

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