Category: politics
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Computing in North Korea
There has been a wave of information about the computing environment and networking capabilities of North Korea coming out in the past week. Vice reported on the the release of a torrent of RedStar OS, a North Korean fork of Fedora. Combined with heightened interest over the purported Sony hack, there have been a lot…
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Foreign Affairs: Cash but no plan
Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada announced $9 million dollars in funding in partnership with the Munk School of Global Affairs at U of T for something called the “Digital Public Square project.” The CBC dubbed the project an experiment in digital diplomacy. The Globe called it “direct diplomacy.” The coverage in the National Post,…
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“Political platforms: A list of technology platforms and the political ideologies they are associated with.”
[This is an imaginary appendix for my imaginary dissertation I will write someday.]
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Disruptive politics
As Silicon Valley becomes the economic and cultural center of the US (and everywhere else, considering how “software is eating the world”) it is only natural that it will seek to become a political center. Hiring lobbyists — like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Uber (and Netflix in Canada) have — is just the first step. In…
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Politics over politech
Evgeny Morozov’s intellectual assaults on “cyber utopianism” and “internet centrism” are well known — if often dismissed by the tech elite. I have been reading his new book To Save Everything, Click Here which so far is a pretty good exercise in skepticism and contrarianism. Yet it is in his most recent New Yorker essay…
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Cited — A review of Consent of the Networked
Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon I have owned this book for more than a year, and now that I have finally read it I have to say it was pretty boring. Wait! I am not saying it is a bad book, not by any means! Overall it…
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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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Towards an information-centric political philosophy
It took about 100 years of the Industrial Age before Karl Marx introduced a revolutionary new political philosophy centered on the most important issue affecting citizens of the day: labour. One hundred and fifty years later, nearly a half century into the Information Age, we have yet to move on. The increasingly numerous knowledge-worker proletariat…
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BC votes
In just over two weeks BC goes to the polls. Political franchise is one of those hard-won privileges that Canadians take for granted, choosing mere words over actions. This is the first time I have been an eligible voter in BC and I am taking my civic duty (and civic right) seriously. Voting is multidimensional.…
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Microcosmographia Academica
The Microcosmographia Academica is a satirical pamphlet on the bureaucratic politics of the “tiny academic world” published in 1908 by Trinity College, Cambridge professor FM Cornford. It is a short and savage excoriation of groupthink, inaction, sycophancy and other procrastinative tendencies found in academia or any group of humans finding themselves in a hierarchy. Cornford…