Tag
Technoculture
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To Counteract Apocalyptic Technoscience, We Need New Myths
If there is contentment on the artist’s face, it is because she knows that she has left Babylon behind and is on her way to Zion.
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The World Silicon Valley Made
A repairman at the Shenzhen electronic bazaar treks from stall to stall, gathering inexpensive camera modules, casings, glass displays, batteries, and motherboards, and then, with only a screwdriver and his fingernails, he pieces it all together to produce a tiny talisman capable of channeling the world’s intelligence. To consumers, the iPhone can seem hermetic, consummate,…
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Future Shocks
“The future’s not what it used to be,” sings Mickey Newbury in his 1971 hit of the same name. His song frames this witticism in romantically personal terms, but the insight has broad applicability, even if Newbury’s lyrics no longer appeal. According to the historian Reinhart Koselleck, “the future” became a topic for serious thought…
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Virtual Roundtable on “Future Sex”
On Emily Witt’s smart and sometimes menacing study of 21st-century intimacy.
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Being Data
In 1966, Der Spiegel interviewed Martin Heidegger: SPIEGEL: And what takes the place of philosophy now? HEIDEGGER: Cybernetics.1 Even before the mass production of personal computers, Heidegger saw the writing on the wall for the humanities. Today, STEM funding far outpaces institutional investment in philosophy, history, or literature departments. To some, the “digital humanities” offer…
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On Accelerationism
At a time when the future seems to belong to Chicago-school economists and the Internet to Google and the NSA, a new movement calls to re-imagine left politics from top to bottom.
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Imagining the Near Future: An Interview with Dexter Palmer
At a reading this past winter, Dexter Palmer introduced his latest novel, Version Control, by sharing private messages swapped between Rebecca Wright, the story’s protagonist, and her would-be suitors through an online dating site known as Lovability. The series of awkward exchanges met with gentle scoffs and knowing laughter from the assembled audience. As social…
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Afrofuturism: Everything and Nothing
Whence the “Afro” in “Afrofuturism”? In the 1994 interview with Samuel R. Delaney that inaugurated the term, Mark Dery defines Afrofuturism as “speculative fiction that treats African American themes and addresses African American concerns in the context of 20th-century technoculture—and, more generally, African American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.”…
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The Folly of Technological Solutionism: An Interview with Evgeny Morozov
Evgeny Morozov, a former denizen of the technology world, gained notoriety as a skeptic of that world with his 2010 book The Net Delusion, in which he argued that technology enthusiasts or “cyber …
