Category: internet
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The Internet Archive
See all photos For our final night in San Francisco before heading back to Canada, we saw the Lost Landscapes of San Francisco show which was put on to benefit the Internet Archive which suffered from a fire recently. The showing was inside the Archive and featured footage of SF from the 1920s to 1980s.…
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OKDG Discussion — Developers and designers as ethical gatekeepers
Photo c/o Shane Austin These are the resources for the discussion at OKDG tonight: codingfreedom.com by Gabriella Coleman IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black Adversarial Design by Carl DiSalvo The Real Privacy Problem by Evgeny Morozov How Designers Destroyed the World (video) by Mike Montiero The Battle for Power on the Internet (video) by…
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4 more horsemen — a review of Cypherpunks
Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet by Andy Greenberg NOTE: Originally posted on Medium. This book is really a footnoted conversation between Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann, some big names in the internet/activist/anarchist/online security communities. It would have been great to see this as a video, but in some…
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The New Banality — a review of The New Digital Age
The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen Since I read This Machine Kills Secrets first, this book seems particularly dangerous to the web as a whole. Universal User Registration? A supranational committee for quarantining non-conforming IPs? This is a company guy and a government…
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Smart Masses
In my last post I explored the characteristics of public intellectuals and pointed out that they are defined somewhat by their audience; which has recently become fragmented to the detriment of the occupation of public intellectual. Today I would like to examine the characteristics of a sophisticated, intellectually engaged audience. Does an audience that can…
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From Belletrist to Blogger: What progress, and the internet, has done to public intellectualism
Much like the cliché of society, the state of public intellectualism seems to be eternally in decline. Yet in the early 21st century, I think we have a legitimate claim to this omen. I propose two reasons: 1) the extreme specialization of knowledge, and 2) the method of public discourse. As the sphere of human…
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Peer Progressivism — a review of Future Perfect
To my knowledge, Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age is Steven Johnson’s first attempt at pamphleteering. The other books of his that I have read — The Invention of Air, Emergence and Where Good Ideas Come From — have been about telling the stories of complex concepts in an engaging way.…
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Organization of No Organization
Remarkable that two books released this month advocate eschewing hierarchy for network-based approaches to changing society. The books in question are: Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age A deep review of Brad Feld’s book is forthcoming, and I am only part way…