Category: Social Theory
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solar matter stomache-ache
So it seems I got a rise out of Matt Webb with my response to his “eating the sun” thing a week or so back. This was not exactly my intention—I had little expectation he’d actually read the thing, tbh—but I’m kinda pleased, for reasons which I’m going to try to explain here, as much…
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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…