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And we dream as electric sheep
‘Can machines think?’Alan Turing,‘Computational Machinery and Intelligence,’ Mind, 236, 1950, 433–466, at 433. The computer scientist Alan Turing posed the question and proposed a way to answer it. We...
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The power of law or the law of power?
A couple of years ago, I visited the Romanian parliament in Bucharest. It is the world’s heaviest building, in more ways than one. Built on top of the ruins of the old city, where 40,000 people used to...
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Big Brother to the rescue
Transparency International’s 2018 Corruption Perception Index (CPI) puts Ukraine in 120th place out of 180 countries. With a CPI score of 32, where 0 is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean, Ukraine...
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Notes on the networked psyche
Photo by Mario Azzi on Unsplash. ‘Don’t hope, cope’. Tomi Ungerer — ‘Just forgot that life is pain and then remembered again’. Tweet — ‘Truth is like poetry, and most people fucking hate poetry’. Lotte...
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Digital socialism
First, the bad news. When it comes to Big Tech, we have lost the plot. By we, I refer to those of us who, in one way or another, feel a relationship with social democracy or socialism. And by the plot,...
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Game over for the monopolists?
Here’s the problem with Big Tech, in a nutshell. A few years ago, Mark Zuckerberg said the following: ‘In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. We have this large...
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A computer is all you need
In her 2015 book Reclaiming Conversation, Sherry Turkle describes ‘one of the most gut-wrenching moments in my then fifteen years of research on sociable robotics’, one which ‘changed her mind’ after...
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The end of anonymity
In mid-January, The New York Times revealed that hundreds of law enforcement agencies and private companies across the world use a software called Clearview. It allows images of people to be identified...
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Big Tech: The law of power?
The technoliberationism that accompanied the early days of the web and that resurfaced with the Twitter revolutions a decade ago now belongs to myth. Deleting Facebook is the new rebellion....
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Friction and the aesthetics of the smooth
Computers began as human beings. In black and white photographs dating back to the middle of the twentieth century, human computers appear in the form of women, with well-sharpened pencils and paper,...
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