Do We Really Take Science Too Seriously?
A better understanding of the meaning and limits science will surely help correct the distorted and reductionist views that many today seem to believe scientific knowledge supports.
Virtual Assembly and the Legal Limits of Digital Dualism
The virtual dimensions of assembly may yield insights for how we understand more traditional assemblies and the legal protections that we assign to them.
Cultural Critics vs. Social Scientists—They Both Stink
We need to think more about the process of cultural modeling. How do we model a cultural subset through a data set (a generation, contemporary television), and how do we model a cultural practice or concept through a particular measurement? These aren’t easy questions, but they are the prerequisite for correcting against the journalistic just-so stories of cultural criticism.
Quit Lit: Do the Humanities Need the University?
We have a difficult time imagining the future of the humanities beyond the anxieties of professors and the failures of university administrators. And when we invoke the humanities, we are actually speaking about a beleaguered and exhausted profession. There are only professors and their disciplines here. And they both are trapped, as Nietzsche would say, in a "castrated" passive tense: "The humanities are compelled . . .." There are no agents in this drama, just put upon, passive professors.
Is Portland for Slackers? An Interview With Tom Krattenmaker
An interview with Portland-based writer, Tom Krattenmaker concerning the health and future of Portland, OR.
Big Data, Small Data, and the Ethics of Scale
If we think of Facebook and Google and the computations in which we are enmeshed merely as information-processing machines, we concede our world to one end of the scale, a world of abstracted big data and all powerful algorithms. We forget that the internet, like any technology, is both a material infrastructure and something we do.
Categories
- 79 Theses on Technology
- Announcements
- Beyond the Reveal/Black Box
- Commentary
- COVID Commentaries
- Critical Miniatures
- Debates
- Dispatches
- Essays
- Interviews
- Media are Elemental
- Podcasts
- Politics Is Downstream from Culture
- Reviews
- Reviews and Reactions
- Salvaging Digital Democracy
- Series
- Thematic Essays
- Uncategorized
- Weekly Roundup