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Pensées: An Imaginative Thought Experiment
Imagine a not too distant future in which there exists a café of the sort that you would expect to find in a trendy urban district where young professionals and aspiring artists gather to work, to...
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Sex Sells Tech, Still
Yesterday, The New Republic posted “Baudrillard and Babes at the Consumer Electronics Show,” Lydia DePillis’ account of her time at this year’s Consumer Electronic Show. I found the piece slightly less...
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Macro-trends in Technology and Culture
Who would choose cell phones and Twitter over toilets and running water? Well, according to Kevin Kelly, certain rural Chinese farmers. In a recent essay exploring the possibilities of a...
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From Memory Scarcity to Memory Abundance
The most famous section in arguably the most famous book about photography, Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, dwells on a photograph of Barthes’ recently deceased mother taken in a winter garden when she...
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Illuminating Contrasts
Patrick Leigh Fermor was widely regarded to be the best travel writer of the last century. He lived what was by all accounts a remarkably full life that included, to mention just two of the more...
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Borg Complex Case Files 2
Alright, let’s review. A Borg Complex is exhibited by writers and pundits whenever you can sum up their message with the phrase: “Resistance is futile.” The six previously identified symptoms of a Borg...
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The Lifestream Stops
David Gelernter, 2013: “And today, the most important function of the internet is to deliver the latest information, to tell us what’s happening right now. That’s why so many time-based structures have...
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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Digital Archive
The future is stubbornly resistant to prediction, but we try anyway. I’ve been thinking lately about memory, technologies that mediate our memories, and the future of the past. The one glaring fact —...
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MOOCs: Market Solution for Market Problems?
Of the writing about MOOCs there seems to be no end … but here is one more thought. Many of the proponents of MOOCs and online education* in general couch their advocacy in the language of competition,...
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The Inhumanity of Smart Technology
I’m allergic to hyperbole. That said, Evgeny Morozov identifies one of the most important challenges we face in the coming years: “There are many contexts in which smart technologies are unambiguously...
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Borg Complex: A Primer
I coined the term “Borg Complex” on a whim, and, though I’ve written on the concept a handful of times, nowhere have I presented a clear, straightforward description. That’s what this post provides — a...
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Online/Offline/No Line
Nicholas Carr recently initiated a second round of discussion with Nathan Jurgenson over digital dualism and the IRL Festish, both terms coined by Jurgenson. Instead of rehashing the earlier debate,...
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Walker Percy on the Surrender of Our Experience
I’ve long had The Message in the Bottle, a collection of Walker Percy’s essays on my shelf. Over the years, I’ve dipped in it to read an essay or two here and there. Somehow I’d missed the second essay...
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Don’t Worry, You’ll Get Used To It
Last week I came across this image in a short post at MIT Technology Review titled, “Growing Up With Google Glass.” To be clear at the outset, this image was photoshopped to accompany the story. When...
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Home
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” – T. S. Eliot Home. It’s a mythic notion. Two of the...
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The Programmable Island of Google Being
Bill Wasik in Wired, on the emerging Programmable World: “Imagine a factory where every machine, every room, feeds back information to solve problems on the production line. Imagine a hotel room (like...
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The Transhumanist Logic of Technological Innovation
What follows are a series of underdeveloped thoughts for your consideration: Advances in robotics, AI, and automation promise to liberate human beings from labor. The Programmable World promises to...
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Resisting the Tyranny of Productivity
Briefly, an additional thought on the Programmable World (in which ubiquitous wireless sensors make objects and machines “smart”): The envisioned Programmable World, as Bill Wasik has called it, is a...
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The Ethics of Ethical Tools
In a passage I’m rather fond of, T.S. Eliot wrote of “the endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment.” How one reads those few words might reveal a good bit about that...
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Society of the Spectator
You’ve likely heard or read about Ingrid Loyau-Kennett. She is the woman who calmly conversed with the two men who had just murdered a British soldier on the streets of London for the nearly 20...
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