Category: Technology
-
A commodified, nostalgic aesthetic
” …the visual remnants of vaporwave have long outlasted its radical ideological underpinnings. Almost immediately, its pastel, geometric, softcore aesthetics were gobbled up by media platforms, in particular the image-driven platforms Tumblr and Instagram. The pastiche compositions of Arizona Iced Tea cans and old Windows desktops were very quickly made available on all these commercial…
-
Against the asymptote
Joi Ito: “For Singularity to have a positive outcome requires a belief that, given enough power, the system will somehow figure out how to regulate itself. The final outcome would be so complex that while we humans couldn’t understand it now, “it” would understand and “solve” itself. Some believe in something that looks a bit…
-
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…
-
The aesthetics of decentralisation
Despite the cacophony of political conjecture, the story of blockchain so far is a tale of financial speculation, in which the cash rewards reaped by bankers and venture capitalists are largely a result of the techno-utopian hype. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The prospect of decentralizing control does not absolve us of…
-
No such thing as magic: misinterpreting Clarke’s Third Law
Over the weekend John Naughton at Teh Graun provided some much-needed deflation regarding the religion of machine learning and “AI”. I am in full agreement with much of what he says — indeed, I have been singing from that songsheet for quite a few years now, as have a number of other Jonahs and Cassandras.…