Tag
Privacy
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Infiltrating the Family
For decades in the UK, police infiltrated the radical social movements by insinuating themselves into the intimate, romantic, familial, and comradely spaces of those on whom they spied.
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Weeding Our Algorithmic Gardens
I’m usually not very worried about robots taking over the world. Skynet makes for entertaining science fiction, but the artificial intelligences we have now don’t …
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Privacy Cultures
In “USS Callister,” a much-discussed episode of Black Mirror, a reticent computer programmer collects DNA around his office from discarded objects like lollipops and coffee cups. He uses that DNA to …
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Clever Man Outs Female Author: A Drama in 3 Acts
This month, we witnessed a contemporary version of a drama that we might call “The Female Author’s Disclosure.” It features the following dramatis personae: • The Heroine: a female author who decides to publish under an incognito. • The Confidantes: friends or associates who know her real identity, and are begged to maintain the…
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Drone Poems
The protests of Hong Kong’s 2014 “Umbrella Revolution” were marked in early days by the intermittent appearance of a helicopter drone flying high above the crowds, looking rather like a pizza box with propellers. I heard a moment’s nervous murmuring from the crowd each time it went up. But the drone’s LEDs were swirling red…
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Miserable Ways to Make Money: An Interview with Jake Halpern
“Banks are not the good guys in this scenario. The banks are squeezing as much as they can out of people.”
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Terms of Service
In a comprehensive survey of how technological advances will “creep” into everyday life, computer expert and technologist Thomas Keenan guides the reader through a slew of increasingly ubiquitous and invasive technologies. How do fellow citizens feel about the prospect of airport security spraying you with “a fine mist” of GPS nanoparticles in the name of…
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Writing Technology
Read my blog, please, but don’t dare peek into my diary. Even though these two genres employ some of the same conventions—a diurnal relation to time, a preoccupation with subjective experience—one is a product of social media, while the other is not meant to be read by others. Donald Winnicott, the influential British psychoanalyst of…
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Pynchon’s Children
The work of Thomas Pynchon has long been synonymous with literary postmodernism, especially the version that involves manic overplotting and paranoid speculation about sinister systems whose names elude us. He has also always been understood to be broadly “countercultural” in some ’60s sense, championing the little guy against those sinister forces. While these characterizations are…
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Can Drones Have Ethics?
In this interview, Claire Richard and media studies professor Peter Asaro discuss the history of drone warfare and the troubling proliferation of new technologies that can surveil and kill from a distance. While we’re plenty familiar with drones thanks to the War on Terror, Asaro details the strategic rationale behind their use, along with the…
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The History of Secrets
Family Secrets by Deborah Cohen injects the marrow back into two centuries of skeletons locked away in household closets. A leading historian of modern Britain and Europe, Cohen has put together a rollicking read through the hidden land of cultural morality and its fundamental institution, the family. A son who prefers lipstick to lip balm…
