Politics of computing

‘Headed for technofascism’: the rightwing roots of Silicon Valley

The industry’s liberal reputation is misleading. Its reactionary tendencies – celebrating wealth, power and traditional masculinity – have been clear since the dotcom mania of the 1990s

📏 When machines start calling the shots

Tennis in the era of automated decision-making

Information Civics

An exploration of computer-network architectures as civic structures.

Data Feminism

Today, data science is a form of power. It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to d...

The Secret History of Facial Recognition

Sixty years ago, a sharecropper’s son invented a technology to identify faces. Then the record of his role all but vanished. Who was Woody Bledsoe, and who was he working for?

The politics of ‘platforms’ - Tarleton Gillespie, 2010

Online content providers such as YouTube are carefully positioning themselves to users, clients, advertisers and policymakers, making strategic claims for what ...

Radical Interoperability is a Political Agenda

Model the world you want to live in.

Close to the Metal — Real Life

The value of reintroducing friction into our interactions with computers

Information Access of the Oppressed: A Problem-Posing Framework for Envisioning Emancipatory Information Access Platforms

Online information access (IA) platforms are targets of authoritarian capture. These concerns are particularly serious and urgent today in light of the rising levels of democratic erosion worldwide, the emerging capabilities of generative AI technologies such as AI persuasion, and the increasing concentration of economic and political power in the hands of Big Tech. This raises the question of what alternative IA infrastructure we must reimagine and build to mitigate the risks of authoritarian capture of our information ecosystems. We explore this question through the lens of Paulo Freire's theories of emancipatory pedagogy. Freire's theories provide a radically different lens for exploring IA's sociotechnical concerns relative to the current dominating frames of fairness, accountability, confidentiality, transparency, and safety. We make explicit, with the intention to challenge, the dichotomy of how we relate to technology as either technologists (who envision and build technology) and its users. We posit that this mirrors the teacher-student relationship in Freire's analysis. By extending Freire's analysis to IA, we challenge the notion that it is the burden of the (altruistic) technologists to come up with interventions to mitigate the risks that emerging technologies pose to marginalized communities. Instead, we advocate that the first task for the technologists is to pose these as problems to the marginalized communities, to encourage them to make and unmake the technology as part of their material struggle against oppression. Their second task is to redesign our online technology stacks to structurally expose spaces for community members to co-opt and co-construct the technology in aid of their emancipatory struggles. We operationalize Freire's theories to develop a problem-posing framework for envisioning emancipatory IA platforms of the future.

Backseat Software

What if your car worked like so many apps? You’re driving somewhere important…maybe running a little bit late. A few minutes into the drive, your car pulls over to the side of the road and asks:

Bezos said the quiet part out loud — hopes that you'll give up your PC for a cloud one

Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos once said how he thinks of local PC hardware as antiquated, ready to be replaced by cloud options from companies like AWS and Azure.

Software as Fast Fashion

Clothes have never been cheaper. These days a t-shirt is often cheaper than a decent cup of tea in a cafe. The wonders of capitalism. At least that is how it is often described. And when you point at the underpaid, gruesome labor that people in poorer regions of the planet have to do to […]

Ursula's list

Ursula Franklin is one of my all-time favorite thinkers about both the obvious and obscured parts of our technological world.

Ursula K. Le Guin — Ursula on Writing: A Rant about "Techonolgy"

Ursula K. Le Guin on the presence of technology in her work

“Just a Tool” and Other Fictions — Natalia Ilyin

Ever one to hope for the best, last semester I suggested that students use ChatGPT as a “research partner” in the big bibliographic project they do in the Fall term of Parallel Narratives , their Junior-level history-and-criticism class. In a 27-person class, only one student took me up on the idea

Don't Get Distracted

I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people. But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time.

This is your phone on feminism

Let’s face the truth. We are in an abusive relationship with our phones.

pastagang

Unrestrained, raw technological possibilities are scary. That it is why it is the duty of the corporation to package, sanitise, file down and finish with a coat of beige (or the current Pantone colour of the year, if we’re being extra fruity), lest “users” hold them in the wrong way.