Category: Infrastructural Theory

  • How does the rabbit end up in the hat? (Or: what transhumanism doesn’t want you to know about infrastructure)

    Talk delivered at the Munich Volkstheater on 14th October 2017 for Bayerischer Rundfunk’s annual Zundfunk-Netkongress.

  • Roamin’ roads

    Via kottke, this tube-map-style atlas of Roman roads lands foursquare in a gloriously tangled Venn intersection of Things I Really Love: If that’s whetted your appetite, the Stanford ORBIS Geospatial Model of the Roman World will take you all the way down the rabbit-hole. Those with a more parochial bent may prefer the tube-map atlas…

  • A threshold phenomenon

    This whole fake news phenomenon is hugely important and historically significant. At the moment I’m completely captivated by the strength of an analogy between the Gutenberg era and the internet era, this rhythmic force coming out of the connection between them. Radical reality destruction went on with the emergence of [the] printing press. In Europe…

  • The interface and the illusion of control

    Most obviously, in using [smartphones] to navigate, we become reliant on access to the network to accomplish ordinary goals. In giving ourselves over to a way of knowing the world that relies completely on real-time access, we find ourselves at the mercy of something more contingent, more fallible and far more complicated than any paper…

  • No organism can be reduced to its own action

    … the obsession with ‘selfish genes’, that is, the neoliberal theory of action parading as biology, makes it impossible to follow Lovelock’s reductionist call. When you really believe that externalities — to locate this philosophy of biology where it belongs: namely economics — cannot be internalized by selfish individual agents, how could you possibly understand what…