The Triumph of the Farmers’ Market
The "sidewalk ballet" of the farmers' market
79 Theses on Technology: Jacobs Responds to Wellmon
The resources of the household are indeed limited, and the steward does indeed have to make decisions about how to distribute them, but such matters do not mark him as a “sovereign self” but rather the opposite: a person embedded in a social and familial context within which he has serious responsibilities.
79 Theses on Technology: The Hand That Holds the Smartphone
The image of hands grasping, texting, and swiping draws our attention to the people at other end of the technologies that shape our lives.
79 Theses on Technology: On Things
Posted on April 7, 2015
in Infernal Machine
Image:
Of course technologies want. The button wants to be pushed; the trigger wants to be pulled; the text wants to be read—each of these want as much as I want to go to bed, get a drink, or get up out of my chair and walk around, though they may want in a different way than I want. To reserve “wanting” for will-bearing creatures is to commit oneself to the philosophical voluntarianism that undergirds technological instrumentalism.
79 Theses on Technology: Piper to Jacobs—No Comment
What if we taught commentary instead of expression, not just for beginning writers, but right on through university and the PhD?
79 Theses on Technology: Jacobs Responds to O’Gorman
Once you start to think of technologies as having desires of their own you are well on the way to the Borg Complex: we all instinctively understand that it is precisely because tools don’t want anything that they cannot be reasoned with or argued with. And we can become easily intimidated by the sheer scale of technological production in our era. Eventually we can end up talking even about what algorithms do as though algorithms aren’t written by humans.
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