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Frontiers | Cyber-mobbing, technology-facilitated abuse and online violence

This article collection will explore the pressing issues of cyber-mobbing, technology-facilitated abuse and online violence, including online abuse, stalking...

Thoughts on Cyberpositionality: The Construction of Digital Communities in Digital Spaces, Damien Patrick Williams

I found Rebecca Monteleone, Martin Perez Comisso, and Elma Hajric’s “Cyberpositionality: Sociotechnical Location in the Digital Age” (2024) to be an extremely timely and important article which can…

Erlend Sogge Heggen (@erlend.sh)

1. solitude: single-player game loop 2. bottomlessness: infinite scroll 3. speed: instant delivery/gratification 4. teasing: generally satisfactory, never perfect; “maybe the next one is exactly what I want” ↘️ quoting NPR (@npr.org): Taken together, these four features can create a trancelike state that can keep us stuck on social media apps or video games for hours. Children are particularly vulnerable. n.pr/4mH6i6s

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

A witty, often terrifying that chronicles our transform…

Historical pragmatism and the internet

This article argues that the literature describing the internet revolution in the 1990s was characterized by the rhetoric of the technological sublime. This rhetoric suffered from three fatal flaws: (1) it was not sufficiently grounded in the historical development of technology; (2) it viewed the internet in isolation, failing to consider the wider technological context; and (3) it failed to examine the internet in view of the social, economic, religious and political circumstances of its users. Several examples from history are cited, demonstrating that changes in various systems for the production, dissemination and preservation of cultural information both border and deborder the world. The article suggests that if internet researchers take a pragmatic, historically grounded approach, they will discover that the introduction of internet technology can be seen to have similar consequences. While the technology overcomes many boundaries (of space and time, politics and economics), other social borders may be created at the same time. It is easier to see old boundaries coming down than to see new ones being erected. Rather than being swept by utopian or dystopian enthusiasms, the article insists that the really interesting discoveries are to be made in locating the subtle social shifts taking place, relatively unnoticed, as a consequence of technological change.

Cyberspace to Cyberplace

This post is a broad exploration, it doesn’t have a single central goal or thesis so I will be presenting quotes, resources, and various reflections on these to start circling around the topic from different angles.

Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software

In the tradition of Being Digital and The Tipping Point…

The digital exiles: Why people are abandoning their smartphones - Coda Story

A growing movement of “former screenagers” is calling for a screen-free, surveillance-free life, for a chance to build a future beyond tech capture

Cyberselfish the Book

Introduction Ravers and gilders. In which I describe something of the strange land of technolibertarianism (it's a culture, not a political party) that I will be guiding readers through.

» The Goldilocks Principle in Fantasy Strategy The Digital Antiquarian

Although I’ve played way too many games for way too many hours over the way too many years I’ve been writing these histories, it’s safe to say that I haven’t spent more time with any one game than Heroes of Might and Magic II. Partly this was down to circumstance. Heroes II showed up on the syllabus just as I was embarking on one of my periodic digressions, a long series about international communications networks and how they culminated in the World Wide Web. Without the need to write in detail about a new game every fortnight, I was freer than I usually am just to play whatever I felt like playing. And what I felt like playing at that time was Heroes II. I beat every single Heroes II scenario in my Heroes of Might and Magic Millennium Edition set, some alone, some in multiplayer mode with my wife Dorte, who became almost as obsessed as I was. I must confess that my usual rule of no more than two hours of gaming per day was strained at times, shattered completely at others. But we were still in the midst of the pandemic then and there wasn’t much else for me to do with my free time, so I figured it was okay to set self-discipline aside for a while. Maybe it was even good experiential research, in that it re-familiarized me with that strange hungover feeling you get when you’ve spent hours and hours peering into an imaginary world behind your monitor screen — like butter that’s been scraped over too much bread, to steal a phrase from Tolkien. (For what it’s worth, I’ve found that the best cure for this condition is the same as that for a conventional hangover: a long walk in nature.)

AI-powered online abuse: How AI is amplifying violence against women and what can stop it | UN Women – Headquarters

AI is turning online spaces into new frontiers of abuse. Feminist and tech experts, Laura Bates and Paola Gálvez-Callirgos, explain how it happens and how we fight back.

Lone game dev builds an explorable cyberpunk city almost entirely out of ASCII characters

Dot dot dot matrix.

Moving Forward from Hot Fable Summer

Suggestions on how to move forward on the craziest 90 days in cyber and AI history.

Anthropic blames dystopian sci-fi for training AI models to act “evil”

But training on "synthetic stories" that model good AI behavior can help.

Introducing The Pentaract: A Comprehensive Set of Video Game Lexicons for ATProto

Some of you already know that I’ve been working on-and-off on a lexicon for video games. I figured it would be a good idea to put the lexicon up for further discussion, and to make sure I’m headed down the right path with things. But why? Last year, the video games industry experienced a significant upheaval when radical groups leveraged moral panic to pressure payment processors, which in turn pressured games platforms to remove NSFW applications. This resulted in a lot of underrepresented dev...