Here’s a pointedly stark and palpably fierce excerpt from art critic and essayist Jonathan Crary’s Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, which was published just this month: If there is to be a livable and shared future on our planet, it will be a future offline, uncoupled from the world-destroying systems…
Tag: internet
We’re all deep fakes now
Nicholas Carr at his (consistently essential) blog, Rough Type: Itâs revealing that, before the arrival of the net, people didnât talk about âauthenticityâ as we do today. They didnât have to. They understood, implicitly, that there was something solid behind whatever show they might put on for public consumption. The show was not everything. The…
“It’s an Alien Life Form”: David Bowie on the Internet’s Exhilarating and Terrifying Potential
There’s been a lot of ink spilled in the last thirty years, both physical and digital, explaining and exploring the phenomenon that is the Internet. From the enthusiastic optimism of such influential figures as Clay Shirky and Seth Godin, to the heavily cautious middle ground of such figures as Douglas Rushkoff, to the all-out pessimism…
The man who invented the Internet didn’t foresee our Neuromancer/Black Mirror future
The following insights are excerpted from a brief but engaging NPR piece that traces the cultural arc from Vint Cerf (the “inventor of the Internet”) and his early naive optimism about this new technology, to William Gibson’s uncanny prescience in forecasting exactly where the Internet would really take us (to a corporate-controlled cyberdystopia with sharply…
Orwell Meets Frankenstein: The Internet as a Monster of Mass Surveillance and Social Control
The following paragraphs are from a talk delivered by Pinboard founder Maciej CegĆowski at the recent Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference in Philadelphia. Citing as Exhibit A the colossal train wreck that was the 2016 American presidential election, CegĆowski basically explains how, in the current version of the Internet that has emerged over the…
Revised and Relaunched: MattCardin.com
After several months of deliberation and development, I have just launched a brand new version of my author site, www.mattcardin.com. The layout and structure are completely new, with easy navigation, a modern look, and an overall sleeker design. Have a look and let me know what you think.
Teeming Links – May 1, 2015
Don’t say you weren’t warned: artificial telepathy might turn out to be a nightmare. “Will the next generation of telepathy machines make us closer, or are there unforeseen dangers in the melding of minds?” (Aeon) What is the future of loneliness in the age of the Internet? “As we moved our lives online, the internet…
Why I’m fed up with Amazon
In the past I have both 1) praised Jeff Bezos for displaying what looks like a true love of books and reading, and 2) highlighted Amazon’s bullying and heavy-handedness in the publishing industry by linking to Steve Wasserman’s damning 2012 article “The Amazon Effect,” in which Wasserman, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times…
Teeming Links – May 23, 2014
Decline of religious belief means we need more exorcists, say Catholics: “The decline of religious belief in the West and the growth of secularism has ‘opened the window’ to black magic, Satanism and belief in the occult, the organisers of a conference on exorcism have said. The six-day meeting in Rome aims to train about…
Recommended Reading 35
This week, a more America-centric set of recommendations than usual, covering: the gargantuan crisis of America’s “health-care-industrial” complex, which is literally killing the nation with galactically inflated prices and substandard healthcare; the Alice-in-Wonderland nature of America’s “sequestration” debacle; how the “personalized” Internet experience created by user profiling and content filtering actually delivers up two different…