Category: Infrastructural Theory
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the unbearable lightness of blockchain: utopian visions and invisible infrastructures
As already noted, this has been a strange and hectic year so far, with a whole lot of public talking in the last month and a bit. Not all of these were video’d for public consumption, but some were, and I’m gonna stuff them up here over the next few days, partly because I unwisely…
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dimensions of experience / accessions in the anarchive
The middle of the year is always a period of transition to some extent, but this year it feels like it may well be more of one than usual, for reasons which will probably become apparent as I start writing here more regularly in the months ahead—indeed, writing here more regularly is a structural part…
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making them seem insurmountable
A new Laleh Khalili joint at NOEMA: … what if infrastructure is designed, financed and adopted into the habits of everyday lives of its users in such a way that it is not a harbinger of apocalypse? I fear that thinking of infrastructures in a generalized and totalizing way, as always only girding the structures…
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a media architecture that creates feedback loops that reinforce certain behaviors
Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber: For me, the big question isn’t whether Jonathan Chait (or Glenn Greenwald, or name any other extremely online person who you think is a controversialist or party hack) is an innately terrible human being. It’s why we have a media architecture that creates feedback loops that reinforce certain behaviors (whether…
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a clear parable of power
Raising my head briefly above the palisade*, here, to clip a couple of paragraphs from an excellent (and, unusually, free-to-air) essay at the Paris Review, which is apparently a tweaked version of an introduction by Michael Tondre for a new edition of Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, the foundational petro-novel. You should read the whole thing, as…