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 […]
tl;dr The solution to the VW scandal is to empower regulators and make sure they have access to any and all parts of the systems they oversee. The solution is not to open up those systems to everyone. There is no “right to repair,” at least for individuals. Whether or not it deserves to be […]
Typically, those of us concerned about the widespread use of encryption and anonymization technologies like Tor are depicted by crypto advocates as “anti-encryption” or “freedom haters” or “mind-murdering censors” or worse. Despite the level of detail these people can bring to technological matters, they often portray the political options as very stark: either “encryption” or […]
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 […]
There may be no more pernicious and dishonest doctrine among Silicon Valley’s avatars than the one they call “permissionless innovation.” The phrase entails the view that entrepreneurs and “innovators” are the lifeblood of society, and must be allowed to push forward without needing to ask for “permission” from government, for the good of society. The […]
From “The ‘Sharing’ Hype,” an interview published today at In These Times conducted by Rebecca Burns with me, Neal Gorenflo, co-founder and publisher of Shareable Magazine, and the SolidarityNYC collective, which supports the growth of cooperatives in New York City. “Sharing” can be seen as a form of resistance to the capitalist economy. But the “sharing […]
The Electronic Book Review kindly published an in-depth review of The Cultural Logic of Computation (and of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, both Harvard UP 2009) by Brian Lennon titled “Gaming the System.” The editors of the journal ask all reviewed authors to respond; after far too […]