Category: Infrastructural Theory
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Justifications for critical utopianism
A strident argument for critical utopian discourse (and against technotopian solutionism) from David F Ruccio at Real-World Economics Review [via SyntheticZero]: [This] doesn’t mean utopia is irrelevant to the problem of climate change. On the contrary. The dystopian consequences of current trends clearly invite a utopian response. But it needs to be of a different…
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The device paradigm
The switch induced a new and modern space defined not by size, shape, structure, material, use, ornament, or any other conventional measure of architectural merit. Rather, it conjured a space distinguished by its instantaneous appearance, willed into visibility, as if volition alone were enough to make it so. Indeed, the very idea of a volitional…
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BAU infrastructure futures
Residents of Lebanon have three basic options: buy a generator subscription, own your own generator, or splurge for what’s known as an uninterruptible power supply. When you move into an apartment, you will most often connect with the local generator owner who will set up a subscription for 5 amps, 10 amps, 15 amps, or…
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Roamin’ roads, redux
The WaPo [via the good folk at Moving History] reports on some interesting research which comes to a conclusion that (I hope) no regular reader here would be surprised by: current geographical levels of population and prosperity in Europe correlate strongly with the Roman road network laid down around two millennia ago. Dalgaard and his colleagues…
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Cold equations in the care vacuum
In a nutshell, over-reliance on computer ‘carers’, none of which can really care, would be a betrayal of the user’s human dignity – a fourth-level need in Maslow’s hierarchy. In the early days of AI, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum made himself very unpopular with his MIT colleagues by saying as much. ‘To substitute a…