Today we’re doing one of our occasional episodes where host Mack Hagood talks about a new essay he’s written for our newsletter “Feed Logic and the Failure to Thrive” Mack writes that students and professors are struggling, both academically and spiritually. He tries to diagnose the issue he felt in his classrooms this year and the role technology may play in it. For new listeners, Mack is a writer and researcher who studies sound, technology, and culture. He is the author of Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control, a book on noise-canceling headphones, white noise, tinnitus, and the ways people use sound to manage modern life. He is currently writing a new book for Penguin Press, and he also hosts this podcast Phantom Power, where he interviews artists, scholars, musicians, and sound designers about the invisible power of sound in everyday life. Besides all that, Mack is a university professor and that’s what his most recent essay is about. Click here to read the newsletter for free. Cited Media: Film:Mary…
Silence is a Commons by Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich is doing to computers what he did to education (De-Schooling Society, 1971), to energy (Energy and Equity, 1974), to medicine (Medical Nemesis, 1975), and to sex roles (Vernacular Gender, 1983). Each time it has been radical analysis that changes our perception of what is really going on. Each time, and with growing clarity, it is an economic/historical analysis having to do with the idea of scarcity as a means of exploitation. This article is from Illich's remarks at the "Asahi Symposium Science and Man - The computer-managed Society," Tokyo, Japan, March 21, 1982. The ideas here are part of a book Illich is working on, The History of Scarcity. - Stewart Brand The CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1983
Sound Obsessed — collection
Design Must Learn to Decompose
A meditation on the quiet death of digital things.
A Compilation of Students Booing AI Graduation Speeches
Reading, and Understanding Media
A guidebook, and poetry more than prose, Marshall McLuhan's 1964 work remains one of our best resources for exploring the nature and effects of new media. It's not an easy read, so I'm going to help.
how do you a call a person who is interacting with digital media ?
We use tools from computer science, media design, and digital art to study massive cultural data sets. Directed by Dr. Lev Manovich.
Person Overview ‹ Mitchel Resnick – MIT Media Lab
Mitchel Resnick, LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab, develops new technologies and activities to engage people (particularly child…
The Noise Floor of Latent Dissent // Harry Halpin
This is an interview with Harry Halpin. Harry Halpin is a technologist and philosopher who moved from building Indymedia during the anti-globalisation protests to earning a Ph.D. in Informatics und…
How Big Tech Co-opted DIY – and how to Fight Back | The Quietus
As technology has developed in the last twenty years, it has brought with it a sense of enablement. Over time, access to nearly everything has become simpler, and as such, the message from Silicon Valley and its offshoots was that you can do it all. I have worked in the music industry since the late […]
How Creatives and Devs Can All Finally Escape the Control of the Silicon Valley of Evil and Make a Trillion Dollars, Audio Style
the online home of alan w smith
Taylor Owen
Academic, writer and podcast host working on media, digital technology and public policy.
Episode 5: Metaphors for AI, with Shannon Vallor
This week, Adam talks with Shannon Vallor, a philosopher of AI, about the metaphors we use to talk about AI and ourselves. They also dunk on libertarians and San Francisco billboards, and consider what kind of hope we can have for the future of technology.Messages: • Support the show at patreon.com/DreamingAgainstTheMachine • Follow us on Bluesky and Instagram • Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts! • Check out other great podcasts from Multitude like Wow if TrueAbout the show:Dreaming Against the Machine is a podcast about envisioning a realistic and hopeful future. Each week, the show’s host, journalist and astrophysicist Dr. Adam Becker, will have an earnest (and entertaining!) conversation with a guest about possible futures, seen through the lenses of history, science, and culture. In a world where tech oligarchs and their power fantasies are driving visions of the future, Dreaming Against the Machine aims to take back the terms of the public conversation about what our world can and should be.
Big Tech's Dehumanization Strategy
Keynote Speaker - Cory Doctorow
Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider
Welcome. I’m a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where I direct the Media Economies Design Lab and teach and learn from our students. I’ve written a book each on online democracy, cooperative enterprise, the Occupy movement, and God, and I’ve edited ones about solidarity economies, crypto, and co-ops. Reporting articles for both magazines and academic journals keeps my notebooks filled. Working with others to build a democratic economy keeps me accountable.
AI Was Never About Helping You | Cory Doctorow