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ABOUT REAL LIFE
I’ve argued that “online” and “offline,” like “body” and “mind,” aren’t like two positions on a light switch — a perspective I've called digital dualism. Instead, all social life is made of both information and material; it's technological and human, virtual and real. Together with friends and colleagues, I’ve theorized an experience of the internet based less inAS YOU WERE
Released on April 5th, on the 27th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, “Drowned” is the latest entry in the Lost Tapes of the 27 Club, an ongoing series by Toronto-based nonprofit Over the Bridge, which is dedicated to raising awareness of mental health issues in the music and recording communities.These issues “ just been ignored,” the organization explains on its website. SOCIALIZED STREAMING Socialized streaming would not be a fix-all, but it would be a step away from a culture shaped by profit motives and a step toward new logics of listening online. And it could seed paradigm shifts for the way we think about cultural consumption and how we value creativelabor.
PAY IT FORWARD
Unemployment is the highest since the Great Depression, but federal, state, and local governments have failed to provide material support for people in the United States.From food for children who aren’t receiving free school lunches to PPE for health care workers, there are a range of online campaigns to help those in need, often funneled through platforms like GoFundMe andPAID IN FULL
Full-text audio version of this essay. In a 2000 piece for Wired, John Perry Barlow celebrated the rise of Napster and peer-to-peer file sharing while ridiculing the entertainment industry’s effort to suppress those developments. “The conflict between the industrial age and the virtual age is now being fought in earnest,” he claimed,and
DIGITAL HYGIENE
Together, these guides and services promote what one might call personal data hygiene: a set of tools, habits, skill sets, technical knowledge, and digital literacy that constitute practices of a so-called healthy digital lifestyle. They encourage personal data hygiene affectively, linking browsing habits with certain feelings andstructures of
THEY’RE JUST LIKE US A paparazzi gold rush arrived in the early 2000s, after Us Weekly introduced a front-of-book feature called “Stars: They’re Just Like Us,” rocketing demand for unauthorized photos of celebrities pumping gas and doing other mundane things. By 2005, UsSELF-OPTIMIZATION
Self-optimization becomes a form of piety: privatized labor of personal responsibility as public good. This plays out as a commitment to efficiency, as in “if you’re not optimizing your life for the benefit of your work (whether or not that work helps anyone other than your employer) you are dead weight” — a drain on other people’sAGAINST IMMORTALITY
The capitalist imagination paints the dregs of society as leeches, sucking vital force out of the social body to survive without paying their dues. Reality, however, confirms that it is the upper classes who are quite literally vampiric. After several less than conclusive studies, a startup in California is now offering a transfusion of the THE 30,000-FOOT VIEW The perspective, too, is skewed, offering not a top-down view (glass-bottomed airliners are still a fantasy, at least for now) but an oblique and fragmented angle of perception, resulting in an indistinct tableau.Indeed, the “30,000-foot view” metaphor has more to do with what’s displayed by the “flight tracker” technology on seatback screens: a data visualization marking the planeABOUT REAL LIFE
I’ve argued that “online” and “offline,” like “body” and “mind,” aren’t like two positions on a light switch — a perspective I've called digital dualism. Instead, all social life is made of both information and material; it's technological and human, virtual and real. Together with friends and colleagues, I’ve theorized an experience of the internet based less inAS YOU WERE
Released on April 5th, on the 27th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, “Drowned” is the latest entry in the Lost Tapes of the 27 Club, an ongoing series by Toronto-based nonprofit Over the Bridge, which is dedicated to raising awareness of mental health issues in the music and recording communities.These issues “ just been ignored,” the organization explains on its website. SOCIALIZED STREAMING Socialized streaming would not be a fix-all, but it would be a step away from a culture shaped by profit motives and a step toward new logics of listening online. And it could seed paradigm shifts for the way we think about cultural consumption and how we value creativelabor.
PAY IT FORWARD
Unemployment is the highest since the Great Depression, but federal, state, and local governments have failed to provide material support for people in the United States.From food for children who aren’t receiving free school lunches to PPE for health care workers, there are a range of online campaigns to help those in need, often funneled through platforms like GoFundMe andPAID IN FULL
Full-text audio version of this essay. In a 2000 piece for Wired, John Perry Barlow celebrated the rise of Napster and peer-to-peer file sharing while ridiculing the entertainment industry’s effort to suppress those developments. “The conflict between the industrial age and the virtual age is now being fought in earnest,” he claimed,and
DIGITAL HYGIENE
Together, these guides and services promote what one might call personal data hygiene: a set of tools, habits, skill sets, technical knowledge, and digital literacy that constitute practices of a so-called healthy digital lifestyle. They encourage personal data hygiene affectively, linking browsing habits with certain feelings andstructures of
THEY’RE JUST LIKE US A paparazzi gold rush arrived in the early 2000s, after Us Weekly introduced a front-of-book feature called “Stars: They’re Just Like Us,” rocketing demand for unauthorized photos of celebrities pumping gas and doing other mundane things. By 2005, UsSELF-OPTIMIZATION
Self-optimization becomes a form of piety: privatized labor of personal responsibility as public good. This plays out as a commitment to efficiency, as in “if you’re not optimizing your life for the benefit of your work (whether or not that work helps anyone other than your employer) you are dead weight” — a drain on other people’sAGAINST IMMORTALITY
The capitalist imagination paints the dregs of society as leeches, sucking vital force out of the social body to survive without paying their dues. Reality, however, confirms that it is the upper classes who are quite literally vampiric. After several less than conclusive studies, a startup in California is now offering a transfusion of the THE 30,000-FOOT VIEW The perspective, too, is skewed, offering not a top-down view (glass-bottomed airliners are still a fantasy, at least for now) but an oblique and fragmented angle of perception, resulting in an indistinct tableau.Indeed, the “30,000-foot view” metaphor has more to do with what’s displayed by the “flight tracker” technology on seatback screens: a data visualization marking the plane BODY TALK — REAL LIFE Half of these dudes only moonlight as adult performers. Off camera, they are marketing associates, web developers, social media managers, servers, stylists, and so forth, blessed with extraordinary physiques and a flair for lucrative exhibitionism.AS YOU WERE
Released on April 5th, on the 27th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, “Drowned” is the latest entry in the Lost Tapes of the 27 Club, an ongoing series by Toronto-based nonprofit Over the Bridge, which is dedicated to raising awareness of mental health issues in the music and recording communities.These issues “ just been ignored,” the organization explains on its website.PAID IN FULL
Full-text audio version of this essay. In a 2000 piece for Wired, John Perry Barlow celebrated the rise of Napster and peer-to-peer file sharing while ridiculing the entertainment industry’s effort to suppress those developments. “The conflict between the industrial age and the virtual age is now being fought in earnest,” he claimed,and
MIDDLE MANAGEMENT
The bustle of self-driving cars, helpful robot assistants, and holograms throughout the sparkling city square immediately marks this world apart from ours, but something else is different, something that can only be described in terms of ambiance. Everything is frictionless here: The streets are filled with commuters, as is the sky, but theFUTURE MYOPIA
Depending how you do the math, we have known about climate change for over 100 years now. In 1896, Svante Arrhenius first described the greenhouse effect, and noted that carbon dioxide released by burning coal could theoretically lead to rising global temperatures. In 1958, Charles David Keeling’s measurements showed that CO2 had been steadily increasing since the industrial revolutionLAYERS OF IDENTITY
This is how influencers teach us how to do real life when everyone is watching: They play with layers of visibility to conceal the slick and accentuate the sin, conceal the commerce and accentuate the community, conceal the artifice and accentuate the affect. And when they approach the next threshold of authenticity, influencers design newPLAY TO LOSE
This attitude toward the self is being ingrained earlier and earlier. Many are welcomed into adulthood by taking on enormous amounts of debt for higher education, and some are indoctrinated even earlier. Concepts like “ school lunch debt ” are now being used to THE 30,000-FOOT VIEW The perspective, too, is skewed, offering not a top-down view (glass-bottomed airliners are still a fantasy, at least for now) but an oblique and fragmented angle of perception, resulting in an indistinct tableau.Indeed, the “30,000-foot view” metaphor has more to do with what’s displayed by the “flight tracker” technology on seatback screens: a data visualization marking the planeLOYALTY TESTS
The concept of subscriptions isn’t new, but thanks to the internet, any mundane purchase can seemingly be reinvented as a subscription service, from socks to baby food.Historically, subscriptions have tended to be about novelty: You needed to subscribe to newspapers because each day’s issue was different and its window of relevancewas short.
AGAINST IMMORTALITY
The capitalist imagination paints the dregs of society as leeches, sucking vital force out of the social body to survive without paying their dues. Reality, however, confirms that it is the upper classes who are quite literally vampiric. After several less than conclusive studies, a startup in California is now offering a transfusion of theABOUT REAL LIFE
I’ve argued that “online” and “offline,” like “body” and “mind,” aren’t like two positions on a light switch — a perspective I've called digital dualism. Instead, all social life is made of both information and material; it's technological and human, virtual and real. Together with friends and colleagues, I’ve theorized an experience of the internet based less in SOCIALIZED STREAMING Socialized streaming would not be a fix-all, but it would be a step away from a culture shaped by profit motives and a step toward new logics of listening online. And it could seed paradigm shifts for the way we think about cultural consumption and how we value creativelabor.
PAY IT FORWARD
Unemployment is the highest since the Great Depression, but federal, state, and local governments have failed to provide material support for people in the United States.From food for children who aren’t receiving free school lunches to PPE for health care workers, there are a range of online campaigns to help those in need, often funneled through platforms like GoFundMe andMONEY TALKS
Money Talks. When truth becomes an effect of power, power can’t be checked by truth. Aaron Miguel Cantú March 20, 2017 share. Image: Surrealism on TV (1986) by Robert Heinecken. Courtesy of Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills and the Robert Heinecken Estate. Immediately after the U.S. presidential election, mainstream media outlets wentinto
DIGITAL HYGIENE
Together, these guides and services promote what one might call personal data hygiene: a set of tools, habits, skill sets, technical knowledge, and digital literacy that constitute practices of a so-called healthy digital lifestyle. They encourage personal data hygiene affectively, linking browsing habits with certain feelings andstructures of
AGAINST IMMORTALITY
The capitalist imagination paints the dregs of society as leeches, sucking vital force out of the social body to survive without paying their dues. Reality, however, confirms that it is the upper classes who are quite literally vampiric. After several less than conclusive studies, a startup in California is now offering a transfusion of the THEY’RE JUST LIKE US A paparazzi gold rush arrived in the early 2000s, after Us Weekly introduced a front-of-book feature called “Stars: They’re Just Like Us,” rocketing demand for unauthorized photos of celebrities pumping gas and doing other mundane things. By 2005, Us LET’S TAKE THIS OFFLINE Let’s take this offline posits a fantasy space where people really communicate, and things really get done; as opposed to the space you’re in, where the opposite is happening, be it online or off. This fantasy space is a realm in which you are productive and focused; hard, brilliant work is attainable, distractions are few.FIRE IN THE SKY
Courtesy the artist and Theodore:Art, NYC. On December 27, 2018, for about three whole minutes, the dark New York City skyline flashed an eerie aqua blue. People stood in the streets and looked out their windows at the strange glowing light, wondering (and possibly panicking) about the source, and unsurprisingly, many pulled out theirphones.
FRICTION-FREE RACISM The ability to define one’s self and tell one’s own stories is central to being human and how one relates to others; platforms’ ascribing identity through data undermines both. At the same time racism and othering are rendered at the level of code, so certain users can feel innocent and not complicit inABOUT REAL LIFE
I’ve argued that “online” and “offline,” like “body” and “mind,” aren’t like two positions on a light switch — a perspective I've called digital dualism. Instead, all social life is made of both information and material; it's technological and human, virtual and real. Together with friends and colleagues, I’ve theorized an experience of the internet based less in SOCIALIZED STREAMING Socialized streaming would not be a fix-all, but it would be a step away from a culture shaped by profit motives and a step toward new logics of listening online. And it could seed paradigm shifts for the way we think about cultural consumption and how we value creativelabor.
PAY IT FORWARD
Unemployment is the highest since the Great Depression, but federal, state, and local governments have failed to provide material support for people in the United States.From food for children who aren’t receiving free school lunches to PPE for health care workers, there are a range of online campaigns to help those in need, often funneled through platforms like GoFundMe andMONEY TALKS
Money Talks. When truth becomes an effect of power, power can’t be checked by truth. Aaron Miguel Cantú March 20, 2017 share. Image: Surrealism on TV (1986) by Robert Heinecken. Courtesy of Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills and the Robert Heinecken Estate. Immediately after the U.S. presidential election, mainstream media outlets wentinto
DIGITAL HYGIENE
Together, these guides and services promote what one might call personal data hygiene: a set of tools, habits, skill sets, technical knowledge, and digital literacy that constitute practices of a so-called healthy digital lifestyle. They encourage personal data hygiene affectively, linking browsing habits with certain feelings andstructures of
AGAINST IMMORTALITY
The capitalist imagination paints the dregs of society as leeches, sucking vital force out of the social body to survive without paying their dues. Reality, however, confirms that it is the upper classes who are quite literally vampiric. After several less than conclusive studies, a startup in California is now offering a transfusion of the THEY’RE JUST LIKE US A paparazzi gold rush arrived in the early 2000s, after Us Weekly introduced a front-of-book feature called “Stars: They’re Just Like Us,” rocketing demand for unauthorized photos of celebrities pumping gas and doing other mundane things. By 2005, Us LET’S TAKE THIS OFFLINE Let’s take this offline posits a fantasy space where people really communicate, and things really get done; as opposed to the space you’re in, where the opposite is happening, be it online or off. This fantasy space is a realm in which you are productive and focused; hard, brilliant work is attainable, distractions are few.FIRE IN THE SKY
Courtesy the artist and Theodore:Art, NYC. On December 27, 2018, for about three whole minutes, the dark New York City skyline flashed an eerie aqua blue. People stood in the streets and looked out their windows at the strange glowing light, wondering (and possibly panicking) about the source, and unsurprisingly, many pulled out theirphones.
FRICTION-FREE RACISM The ability to define one’s self and tell one’s own stories is central to being human and how one relates to others; platforms’ ascribing identity through data undermines both. At the same time racism and othering are rendered at the level of code, so certain users can feel innocent and not complicit inEMERGENCY BREAKS
Image: Amazon worker cage patent drawing as virtual King Island Brown Thornbill cage (US 9,280,157 B2: “System for transporting personnel within an active workspace,” 2016) (2019) by Simon Denny.Photo by Jesse Hunniford/MONA. Courtesy the artist and the RachofskyCollection.
NATURAL PROCESSES
The organizers even included a “Most Wanted” list: all starfish, seaweeds, pink acorn barnacles, the Dark Unicorn Snail, European Green Crabs, Chinese Mitten Crabs, and sea anemone. During these bioblitzes, according to the bioblitz Wikipedia entry, scientists gather data, and hopefully, get lay people “interested in biodiversity.”.AS YOU WERE
Released on April 5th, on the 27th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, “Drowned” is the latest entry in the Lost Tapes of the 27 Club, an ongoing series by Toronto-based nonprofit Over the Bridge, which is dedicated to raising awareness of mental health issues in the music and recording communities.These issues “ just been ignored,” the organization explains on its website.MONEY TALKS
Money Talks. When truth becomes an effect of power, power can’t be checked by truth. Aaron Miguel Cantú March 20, 2017 share. Image: Surrealism on TV (1986) by Robert Heinecken. Courtesy of Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills and the Robert Heinecken Estate. Immediately after the U.S. presidential election, mainstream media outlets wentinto
THE ZOOM GAZE
The Zoom gaze ultimately comprises how the software’s programmers see users in the abstract. But the gaze imposed by software is also a matter of the risks that engineers have overlooked. As the pandemic intensified and more people started videoconferencing, “Zoombombing” incidents rose.MATCH GAMES
Everyone gets a chance to present their elevator pitch deck, along with data about their height, drug habits, politics, and alma mater. Hinge is trying to sell an old-fashioned form of romance. It promises that users can transcend the advertorial presentation ofLAYERS OF IDENTITY
This is how influencers teach us how to do real life when everyone is watching: They play with layers of visibility to conceal the slick and accentuate the sin, conceal the commerce and accentuate the community, conceal the artifice and accentuate the affect. And when they approach the next threshold of authenticity, influencers design newSICK OF MYSELF
Licensed by Art Resource, New York. According to the common story about our fall into postmodernity, being yourself has become hard work. Once, people were born into relatively stable situations in which identity was prescribed based on where one was born and to whom. There was little choice in the matter of what sort of life one wouldlead
MRS. MEYER’S
Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day debuted in 2001. The line was named after Nassif’s mother, Thelma Meyer, a housewife from rural Iowa who’d raised nine children in total. Thelma was strong, sensible, salt-of-the-earth: “When I think of my mother, I think of her gift for finding joy in the everyday,” Nassif wrote in a housekeepingguide the
INVISIBLE ENEMIES
Image: By Russell Sadeghpour for Real Life. In Guy de Maupassant’s 1887 story “The Horla,” an affluent bachelor begins to experience “mysterious influences” that leave him melancholic and paranoid. Trying to account for this, he remarks that “the air, the invisible air, is full of unknowable Forces, whose mysterious presence we haveABOUT REAL LIFE
I’ve argued that “online” and “offline,” like “body” and “mind,” aren’t like two positions on a light switch — a perspective I've called digital dualism. Instead, all social life is made of both information and material; it's technological and human, virtual and real. Together with friends and colleagues, I’ve theorized an experience of the internet based less in SOCIALIZED STREAMING Socialized streaming would not be a fix-all, but it would be a step away from a culture shaped by profit motives and a step toward new logics of listening online. And it could seed paradigm shifts for the way we think about cultural consumption and how we value creativelabor.
PAY IT FORWARD
Unemployment is the highest since the Great Depression, but federal, state, and local governments have failed to provide material support for people in the United States.From food for children who aren’t receiving free school lunches to PPE for health care workers, there are a range of online campaigns to help those in need, often funneled through platforms like GoFundMe andMONEY TALKS
Money Talks. When truth becomes an effect of power, power can’t be checked by truth. Aaron Miguel Cantú March 20, 2017 share. Image: Surrealism on TV (1986) by Robert Heinecken. Courtesy of Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills and the Robert Heinecken Estate. Immediately after the U.S. presidential election, mainstream media outlets wentinto
DIGITAL HYGIENE
Together, these guides and services promote what one might call personal data hygiene: a set of tools, habits, skill sets, technical knowledge, and digital literacy that constitute practices of a so-called healthy digital lifestyle. They encourage personal data hygiene affectively, linking browsing habits with certain feelings andstructures of
AGAINST IMMORTALITY
The capitalist imagination paints the dregs of society as leeches, sucking vital force out of the social body to survive without paying their dues. Reality, however, confirms that it is the upper classes who are quite literally vampiric. After several less than conclusive studies, a startup in California is now offering a transfusion of the THEY’RE JUST LIKE US A paparazzi gold rush arrived in the early 2000s, after Us Weekly introduced a front-of-book feature called “Stars: They’re Just Like Us,” rocketing demand for unauthorized photos of celebrities pumping gas and doing other mundane things. By 2005, Us LET’S TAKE THIS OFFLINE Let’s take this offline posits a fantasy space where people really communicate, and things really get done; as opposed to the space you’re in, where the opposite is happening, be it online or off. This fantasy space is a realm in which you are productive and focused; hard, brilliant work is attainable, distractions are few.FIRE IN THE SKY
Courtesy the artist and Theodore:Art, NYC. On December 27, 2018, for about three whole minutes, the dark New York City skyline flashed an eerie aqua blue. People stood in the streets and looked out their windows at the strange glowing light, wondering (and possibly panicking) about the source, and unsurprisingly, many pulled out theirphones.
FRICTION-FREE RACISM The ability to define one’s self and tell one’s own stories is central to being human and how one relates to others; platforms’ ascribing identity through data undermines both. At the same time racism and othering are rendered at the level of code, so certain users can feel innocent and not complicit inABOUT REAL LIFE
I’ve argued that “online” and “offline,” like “body” and “mind,” aren’t like two positions on a light switch — a perspective I've called digital dualism. Instead, all social life is made of both information and material; it's technological and human, virtual and real. Together with friends and colleagues, I’ve theorized an experience of the internet based less in SOCIALIZED STREAMING Socialized streaming would not be a fix-all, but it would be a step away from a culture shaped by profit motives and a step toward new logics of listening online. And it could seed paradigm shifts for the way we think about cultural consumption and how we value creativelabor.
PAY IT FORWARD
Unemployment is the highest since the Great Depression, but federal, state, and local governments have failed to provide material support for people in the United States.From food for children who aren’t receiving free school lunches to PPE for health care workers, there are a range of online campaigns to help those in need, often funneled through platforms like GoFundMe andMONEY TALKS
Money Talks. When truth becomes an effect of power, power can’t be checked by truth. Aaron Miguel Cantú March 20, 2017 share. Image: Surrealism on TV (1986) by Robert Heinecken. Courtesy of Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills and the Robert Heinecken Estate. Immediately after the U.S. presidential election, mainstream media outlets wentinto
DIGITAL HYGIENE
Together, these guides and services promote what one might call personal data hygiene: a set of tools, habits, skill sets, technical knowledge, and digital literacy that constitute practices of a so-called healthy digital lifestyle. They encourage personal data hygiene affectively, linking browsing habits with certain feelings andstructures of
AGAINST IMMORTALITY
The capitalist imagination paints the dregs of society as leeches, sucking vital force out of the social body to survive without paying their dues. Reality, however, confirms that it is the upper classes who are quite literally vampiric. After several less than conclusive studies, a startup in California is now offering a transfusion of the THEY’RE JUST LIKE US A paparazzi gold rush arrived in the early 2000s, after Us Weekly introduced a front-of-book feature called “Stars: They’re Just Like Us,” rocketing demand for unauthorized photos of celebrities pumping gas and doing other mundane things. By 2005, Us LET’S TAKE THIS OFFLINE Let’s take this offline posits a fantasy space where people really communicate, and things really get done; as opposed to the space you’re in, where the opposite is happening, be it online or off. This fantasy space is a realm in which you are productive and focused; hard, brilliant work is attainable, distractions are few.FIRE IN THE SKY
Courtesy the artist and Theodore:Art, NYC. On December 27, 2018, for about three whole minutes, the dark New York City skyline flashed an eerie aqua blue. People stood in the streets and looked out their windows at the strange glowing light, wondering (and possibly panicking) about the source, and unsurprisingly, many pulled out theirphones.
FRICTION-FREE RACISM The ability to define one’s self and tell one’s own stories is central to being human and how one relates to others; platforms’ ascribing identity through data undermines both. At the same time racism and othering are rendered at the level of code, so certain users can feel innocent and not complicit inAS YOU WERE
Released on April 5th, on the 27th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, “Drowned” is the latest entry in the Lost Tapes of the 27 Club, an ongoing series by Toronto-based nonprofit Over the Bridge, which is dedicated to raising awareness of mental health issues in the music and recording communities.These issues “ just been ignored,” the organization explains on its website.EMERGENCY BREAKS
Image: Amazon worker cage patent drawing as virtual King Island Brown Thornbill cage (US 9,280,157 B2: “System for transporting personnel within an active workspace,” 2016) (2019) by Simon Denny.Photo by Jesse Hunniford/MONA. Courtesy the artist and the RachofskyCollection.
NATURAL PROCESSES
The organizers even included a “Most Wanted” list: all starfish, seaweeds, pink acorn barnacles, the Dark Unicorn Snail, European Green Crabs, Chinese Mitten Crabs, and sea anemone. During these bioblitzes, according to the bioblitz Wikipedia entry, scientists gather data, and hopefully, get lay people “interested in biodiversity.”.MONEY TALKS
Money Talks. When truth becomes an effect of power, power can’t be checked by truth. Aaron Miguel Cantú March 20, 2017 share. Image: Surrealism on TV (1986) by Robert Heinecken. Courtesy of Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills and the Robert Heinecken Estate. Immediately after the U.S. presidential election, mainstream media outlets wentinto
THE ZOOM GAZE
The Zoom gaze ultimately comprises how the software’s programmers see users in the abstract. But the gaze imposed by software is also a matter of the risks that engineers have overlooked. As the pandemic intensified and more people started videoconferencing, “Zoombombing” incidents rose.MATCH GAMES
Everyone gets a chance to present their elevator pitch deck, along with data about their height, drug habits, politics, and alma mater. Hinge is trying to sell an old-fashioned form of romance. It promises that users can transcend the advertorial presentation ofMRS. MEYER’S
Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day debuted in 2001. The line was named after Nassif’s mother, Thelma Meyer, a housewife from rural Iowa who’d raised nine children in total. Thelma was strong, sensible, salt-of-the-earth: “When I think of my mother, I think of her gift for finding joy in the everyday,” Nassif wrote in a housekeepingguide the
LAYERS OF IDENTITY
This is how influencers teach us how to do real life when everyone is watching: They play with layers of visibility to conceal the slick and accentuate the sin, conceal the commerce and accentuate the community, conceal the artifice and accentuate the affect. And when they approach the next threshold of authenticity, influencers design newSICK OF MYSELF
Licensed by Art Resource, New York. According to the common story about our fall into postmodernity, being yourself has become hard work. Once, people were born into relatively stable situations in which identity was prescribed based on where one was born and to whom. There was little choice in the matter of what sort of life one wouldlead
FUTURE MYOPIA
Depending how you do the math, we have known about climate change for over 100 years now. In 1896, Svante Arrhenius first described the greenhouse effect, and noted that carbon dioxide released by burning coal could theoretically lead to rising global temperatures. In 1958, Charles David Keeling’s measurements showed that CO2 had been steadily increasing since the industrial revolutionABOUT REAL LIFE
I’ve argued that “online” and “offline,” like “body” and “mind,” aren’t like two positions on a light switch — a perspective I've called digital dualism. Instead, all social life is made of both information and material; it's technological and human, virtual and real. Together with friends and colleagues, I’ve theorized an experience of the internet based less in SOCIALIZED STREAMING Socialized streaming would not be a fix-all, but it would be a step away from a culture shaped by profit motives and a step toward new logics of listening online. And it could seed paradigm shifts for the way we think about cultural consumption and how we value creativelabor.
PAY IT FORWARD
Unemployment is the highest since the Great Depression, but federal, state, and local governments have failed to provide material support for people in the United States.From food for children who aren’t receiving free school lunches to PPE for health care workers, there are a range of online campaigns to help those in need, often funneled through platforms like GoFundMe andMONEY TALKS
Money Talks. When truth becomes an effect of power, power can’t be checked by truth. Aaron Miguel Cantú March 20, 2017 share. Image: Surrealism on TV (1986) by Robert Heinecken. Courtesy of Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills and the Robert Heinecken Estate. Immediately after the U.S. presidential election, mainstream media outlets wentinto
DIGITAL HYGIENE
Together, these guides and services promote what one might call personal data hygiene: a set of tools, habits, skill sets, technical knowledge, and digital literacy that constitute practices of a so-called healthy digital lifestyle. They encourage personal data hygiene affectively, linking browsing habits with certain feelings andstructures of
AGAINST IMMORTALITY
The capitalist imagination paints the dregs of society as leeches, sucking vital force out of the social body to survive without paying their dues. Reality, however, confirms that it is the upper classes who are quite literally vampiric. After several less than conclusive studies, a startup in California is now offering a transfusion of the THEY’RE JUST LIKE US A paparazzi gold rush arrived in the early 2000s, after Us Weekly introduced a front-of-book feature called “Stars: They’re Just Like Us,” rocketing demand for unauthorized photos of celebrities pumping gas and doing other mundane things. By 2005, Us LET’S TAKE THIS OFFLINE Let’s take this offline posits a fantasy space where people really communicate, and things really get done; as opposed to the space you’re in, where the opposite is happening, be it online or off. This fantasy space is a realm in which you are productive and focused; hard, brilliant work is attainable, distractions are few.FIRE IN THE SKY
Courtesy the artist and Theodore:Art, NYC. On December 27, 2018, for about three whole minutes, the dark New York City skyline flashed an eerie aqua blue. People stood in the streets and looked out their windows at the strange glowing light, wondering (and possibly panicking) about the source, and unsurprisingly, many pulled out theirphones.
FRICTION-FREE RACISM The ability to define one’s self and tell one’s own stories is central to being human and how one relates to others; platforms’ ascribing identity through data undermines both. At the same time racism and othering are rendered at the level of code, so certain users can feel innocent and not complicit inABOUT REAL LIFE
I’ve argued that “online” and “offline,” like “body” and “mind,” aren’t like two positions on a light switch — a perspective I've called digital dualism. Instead, all social life is made of both information and material; it's technological and human, virtual and real. Together with friends and colleagues, I’ve theorized an experience of the internet based less in SOCIALIZED STREAMING Socialized streaming would not be a fix-all, but it would be a step away from a culture shaped by profit motives and a step toward new logics of listening online. And it could seed paradigm shifts for the way we think about cultural consumption and how we value creativelabor.
PAY IT FORWARD
Unemployment is the highest since the Great Depression, but federal, state, and local governments have failed to provide material support for people in the United States.From food for children who aren’t receiving free school lunches to PPE for health care workers, there are a range of online campaigns to help those in need, often funneled through platforms like GoFundMe andMONEY TALKS
Money Talks. When truth becomes an effect of power, power can’t be checked by truth. Aaron Miguel Cantú March 20, 2017 share. Image: Surrealism on TV (1986) by Robert Heinecken. Courtesy of Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills and the Robert Heinecken Estate. Immediately after the U.S. presidential election, mainstream media outlets wentinto
DIGITAL HYGIENE
Together, these guides and services promote what one might call personal data hygiene: a set of tools, habits, skill sets, technical knowledge, and digital literacy that constitute practices of a so-called healthy digital lifestyle. They encourage personal data hygiene affectively, linking browsing habits with certain feelings andstructures of
AGAINST IMMORTALITY
The capitalist imagination paints the dregs of society as leeches, sucking vital force out of the social body to survive without paying their dues. Reality, however, confirms that it is the upper classes who are quite literally vampiric. After several less than conclusive studies, a startup in California is now offering a transfusion of the THEY’RE JUST LIKE US A paparazzi gold rush arrived in the early 2000s, after Us Weekly introduced a front-of-book feature called “Stars: They’re Just Like Us,” rocketing demand for unauthorized photos of celebrities pumping gas and doing other mundane things. By 2005, Us LET’S TAKE THIS OFFLINE Let’s take this offline posits a fantasy space where people really communicate, and things really get done; as opposed to the space you’re in, where the opposite is happening, be it online or off. This fantasy space is a realm in which you are productive and focused; hard, brilliant work is attainable, distractions are few.FIRE IN THE SKY
Courtesy the artist and Theodore:Art, NYC. On December 27, 2018, for about three whole minutes, the dark New York City skyline flashed an eerie aqua blue. People stood in the streets and looked out their windows at the strange glowing light, wondering (and possibly panicking) about the source, and unsurprisingly, many pulled out theirphones.
FRICTION-FREE RACISM The ability to define one’s self and tell one’s own stories is central to being human and how one relates to others; platforms’ ascribing identity through data undermines both. At the same time racism and othering are rendered at the level of code, so certain users can feel innocent and not complicit inAS YOU WERE
Released on April 5th, on the 27th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, “Drowned” is the latest entry in the Lost Tapes of the 27 Club, an ongoing series by Toronto-based nonprofit Over the Bridge, which is dedicated to raising awareness of mental health issues in the music and recording communities.These issues “ just been ignored,” the organization explains on its website.EMERGENCY BREAKS
Image: Amazon worker cage patent drawing as virtual King Island Brown Thornbill cage (US 9,280,157 B2: “System for transporting personnel within an active workspace,” 2016) (2019) by Simon Denny.Photo by Jesse Hunniford/MONA. Courtesy the artist and the RachofskyCollection.
NATURAL PROCESSES
The organizers even included a “Most Wanted” list: all starfish, seaweeds, pink acorn barnacles, the Dark Unicorn Snail, European Green Crabs, Chinese Mitten Crabs, and sea anemone. During these bioblitzes, according to the bioblitz Wikipedia entry, scientists gather data, and hopefully, get lay people “interested in biodiversity.”.MONEY TALKS
Money Talks. When truth becomes an effect of power, power can’t be checked by truth. Aaron Miguel Cantú March 20, 2017 share. Image: Surrealism on TV (1986) by Robert Heinecken. Courtesy of Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills and the Robert Heinecken Estate. Immediately after the U.S. presidential election, mainstream media outlets wentinto
THE ZOOM GAZE
The Zoom gaze ultimately comprises how the software’s programmers see users in the abstract. But the gaze imposed by software is also a matter of the risks that engineers have overlooked. As the pandemic intensified and more people started videoconferencing, “Zoombombing” incidents rose.MATCH GAMES
Everyone gets a chance to present their elevator pitch deck, along with data about their height, drug habits, politics, and alma mater. Hinge is trying to sell an old-fashioned form of romance. It promises that users can transcend the advertorial presentation ofMRS. MEYER’S
Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day debuted in 2001. The line was named after Nassif’s mother, Thelma Meyer, a housewife from rural Iowa who’d raised nine children in total. Thelma was strong, sensible, salt-of-the-earth: “When I think of my mother, I think of her gift for finding joy in the everyday,” Nassif wrote in a housekeepingguide the
LAYERS OF IDENTITY
This is how influencers teach us how to do real life when everyone is watching: They play with layers of visibility to conceal the slick and accentuate the sin, conceal the commerce and accentuate the community, conceal the artifice and accentuate the affect. And when they approach the next threshold of authenticity, influencers design newSICK OF MYSELF
Licensed by Art Resource, New York. According to the common story about our fall into postmodernity, being yourself has become hard work. Once, people were born into relatively stable situations in which identity was prescribed based on where one was born and to whom. There was little choice in the matter of what sort of life one wouldlead
FUTURE MYOPIA
Depending how you do the math, we have known about climate change for over 100 years now. In 1896, Svante Arrhenius first described the greenhouse effect, and noted that carbon dioxide released by burning coal could theoretically lead to rising global temperatures. In 1958, Charles David Keeling’s measurements showed that CO2 had been steadily increasing since the industrial revolutionrlmobile Home
Real Life
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GLOW AESTHETICS
Dalia Barghouty 08-22-2019 Ubiquitous cameras are changing the meaning of makeup Glow AestheticsFEATURED
DON’T LOOK NOW
Laura Maw 08-19-2019 VR horror enacts our greatest fears about technology Don’t Look NowKEEP CONNECTING
Anh Vo 08-15-2019
When pornography becomes a "frictionless" technology, our bodies' task is to seamlessly and endlessly circulate Keep ConnectingDATA SWEAT
Amanda K. Greene 08-12-2019 Even through a screen, machines can read our body language Data SweatARCHIVE
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GLOW AESTHETICS
Dalia Barghouty 08-22-2019GLOW AESTHETICS
Dalia Barghouty August 22, 2019 Ubiquitous cameras are changing the meaning of makeup*
DON’T LOOK NOW
Laura Maw 08-19-2019DON’T LOOK NOW
Laura Maw August 19, 2019 VR horror enacts our greatest fears about technology*
KEEP CONNECTING
Anh Vo 08-15-2019
KEEP CONNECTING
Anh Vo August 15, 2019 When pornography becomes a "frictionless" technology, our bodies' task is to seamlessly and endlessly circulate*
DATA SWEAT
Amanda K. Greene 08-12-2019DATA SWEAT
Amanda K. Greene August 12, 2019 Even through a screen, machines can read our body language*
FIRE IN THE SKY
Stephanie Monohan 08-08-2019FIRE IN THE SKY
Stephanie Monohan August 08, 2019 Extraterrestrial stories reflect the feeling of living under constant surveillance, of bodies being subject to manipulation and constraint at all times and in all spaces, and most importantly, they translate an acquiescence to control. Sightings and/or abductions, while described as events that appear clearly traumatizing or controlling of physical and psychological autonomy, also confirm the suspicion that such invisible authoritative powers exist. They validate the sense that we’re being watched or that our choices do not exist in a vacuum. But they also seem to say to many that perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to give in.*
IN THE FLESH
Rachel del Valle 08-05-2019IN THE FLESH
Rachel del Valle August 05, 2019 Offline stores are unnerving, not because they are inherently bad but because they make clear the hollowness of viewing a brand as a means of self-discovery. Online, it’s easy to feel a connection to a brand, to imagine that it understands you, and that it can get you closer to the life you want. In store, it becomes more obvious that this sense of relatability is part of a larger strategy of customer engagement, a tactic that can be switched on or off.*
OUR BODIES, OURSELVES Neta Alexander 08-01-2019 OUR BODIES, OURSELVES Neta Alexander August 01, 2019 Regulation, patient advocacy, and hacking projects can help us cultivate new relationships between our bodies and ourselves, and our bodies and medical-device companies. As the story of Theranos taught us, “Move fast and break things” is not the best mindset when it comes to people’s lives. For the internet of medical things, "Move slow and proceed with caution" might be the more productive motto.*
NETWORK OF BLOOD
Kelly Pendergrast 07-29-2019NETWORK OF BLOOD
Kelly Pendergrast July 29, 2019 The victory of wi-fi and hatred of ornament has led us toward the consumer technology we use today: blobs of untethered plastic and aluminum that are sleek but sexless, with hidden seams and untouchable insides. If I know one thing for sure, it’s that my iPhone doesn’t want me prying it open. The smoothness of our devices goes hand in hand with the dematerialization of information. Wireless technology and cloud computing mean that data flies around us, shifting and accumulating like a swarm of invisible but omnipresent bees. Information, which has always wanted to be free, finally is: free from embodiment, free from form.*
CHILDREN OF PRODUCTION Danya Glabau 07-25-2019 CHILDREN OF PRODUCTION Danya Glabau July 25, 2019 Without appeals to Nature, patriarchy would be on much flimsier footing. Women couldn’t be defined as “natural” gestators or “inherently” inferior to men in technical skills. They would no longer need paternalistic protection from the darker elements of their own being. Challenging the social order by pointing out that it does not perfectly reflect nature renders many forms of oppression illogical, indefensible, immaterial. So when Sophie Lewis debunks the doctrine of Nature, patriarchy’s immune system must fight for itslife.
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BAD METAPHORS: COMMUNITY David A. Banks and Britney Gil 07-22-2019 BAD METAPHORS: COMMUNITY David A. Banks and Britney Gil July 22, 2019 Facebook portrays itself as an antidote to FOMO: the cool hangout where all your friends are. The company makes itself necessary not just by highlighting what you gain access to in using it, but by what you miss out on if you do not: event invites, group chats, meme references, and so on. Its “community standards” sound like something a group of like-minded, invested people decided on together, not a document written by lawyers. Believing that something as big as a global brand, or a nation, is a community creates a mental bridge to believing — or selling the idea — that community is a service youcan sign up for.
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THE ALGORITHMIC COLONIZATION OF AFRICA Abeba Birhane 07-18-2019 THE ALGORITHMIC COLONIZATION OF AFRICA Abeba Birhane July 18, 2019 The question of technologization and digitalization of the continent is a question of what kind of society we want to live in. African youth solving their own problems means deciding what we want to amplify and show the rest of the world. It also means not importing the latest state-of-the-art machine learning systems or any other AI tools without questioning what the underlying purpose is, who benefits, and who might be disadvantaged by the implementation of suchtools.
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SCREEN TIME, SACRED TIME Skyler Balbus 07-15-2019 SCREEN TIME, SACRED TIME Skyler Balbus July 15, 2019 While time-tracking tools may help us manage and compartmentalize our time, merely changing focus through the use of alerts does not facilitate a transition between different experiences of time. There are no ritual markers that can move us in and out of Screen Time withintention
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IDOL THOUGHTS
Alexandra Molotkow 07-11-2019IDOL THOUGHTS
Alexandra Molotkow July 11, 2019 It's hard to know exactly why a given artist appeals to you, but explaining that connection to yourself is a bit like reading your astrological chart — a process of self-creation through a set of coordinates that offer a great deal of interpretive leeway. This person represents "your people," in the greatest abstract — that you share a shade of experience or perception that overcomes space and time. To confront a divergent interpretation of the same attraction can be jarring; it can prompt an identity crisis.*
NETWORKED DREAM WORLDS Shannon Mattern 07-08-2019 NETWORKED DREAM WORLDS Shannon Mattern July 08, 2019 Do we really need 5G’s datafied dream world? Is it solving real, pressing problems? Do we want a world filtered through augmented-reality goggles, a world that makes it ever easier for us to participate in public life remotely, a world where our online and real-life activities are tracked and mapped to facilitate not only “seamless” online consumer experiences but also authorities’ ability to monitor populations already subject to oppression?*
GHOSTS OF THE FUTURE Julia Foote 07-01-2019 GHOSTS OF THE FUTURE Julia Foote July 01, 2019 Technology cannot exist without lives and bodies, whether in the factories and warehouses or in the data centers that allow it to function. As in the Gothic, the ghosts of the smart home are monstrous not because they are inherently bad, but because of the histories theyrepresent.
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WELL PLAYED: PLAY PER VIEW Vicky Osterweil 06-27-2019 WELL PLAYED: PLAY PER VIEW Vicky Osterweil June 27, 2019 This combination of buzzing sociality in the chat with the chaotic bell-ringing of the streamer’s commercial celebrations turns a “successful” stream into a kind of riotous digital party. Participation in the stream is not merely a question of passive watching or even chatting but also making micropayments to maintain the stream as both a means of subsistence for the streamer and as a lively, interactive place for other viewers. Live streaming thus ends up being a constant performance of crowdfunding as entertainment, likea low-rent telethon
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THE EASY WAY OUT
L. M. Sacasas 06-24-2019THE EASY WAY OUT
L. M. Sacasas June 24, 2019 Convenience can be a cloak veiling an undisclosed exchange not merely between me and some future society that I am robbing of “privacy” but between me and other people right now: My convenience is often bought at someone else’s expense.*
OUTER LIMITS
David A. Banks 06-20-2019OUTER LIMITS
David A. Banks June 20, 2019 When you are alone in your house or your car, the radio or podcasts you listen to and the television you watch take up an outsized portion of how you think about and frame social problems. These are the moments in which individuals, alone in their cars with Ben Shapiro squealing through the speakers, form opinions and decide who to associate with. In what Castells calls “the network society,” the suburbs actually go from a pacifying force to a hotbed of politicalactivity.
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DIGITAL HYGIENE
Rachel Bergmann 06-17-2019DIGITAL HYGIENE
Rachel Bergmann June 17, 2019 Metabolic metaphors ignore the structural factors that place internet users in peril, putting the burden on individuals to know where their data exists, how they’re being tracked, who has access to the data, and how it is being used to make decisions about them. And while these habits might make people feel like they have a modicum more control, it distracts from the real issue, which is the corporations actually doing the extracting, and the systems that allow this in the firstplace.
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NEW FEELINGS: ROACH COMPLEX Chris Randle 06-13-2019 NEW FEELINGS: ROACH COMPLEX Chris Randle June 13, 2019 At the climax of horror movies, I shiver watching the lone survivor soaked in gore, bearing a family resemblance to the evil they just overcame. During the final pages of Junji Ito’s “Amigara Fault,” researchers discover the other end of those mysterious tunnels; no longer human-shaped, they have the formless architecture of fractals. Scientists peer inside one hole to find a hideously distended creature inching closer, its blind eyes swiveling high above like a lighthouse beam. If this figure were still capable of coherent speech, it might say: “Having a normal one!”*
MANUFACTURED RECOLLECTION Sara Reinis 06-10-2019 MANUFACTURED RECOLLECTION Sara Reinis June 10, 2019 In a world where the same kinds of algorithms determine both the personal memories we should revisit and the ads that perform the best, the memories placed at the forefront of our minds inevitably look ever more similar to the advertising campaigns and the influencer posts that surround us. The social consensus around what is “worth” remembering is becoming more and more tethered to the same ideal, in which all memories are visual, polished, and commercially viable.*
BAD METAPHORS: ON A JOURNEY Rochelle DuFord 06-06-2019 BAD METAPHORS: ON A JOURNEY Rochelle DuFord June 06, 2019 Whether we advertise it on our social media, and whether we like it or not, we are all on many “journeys” with many brands toward conversion and retention — long-lasting relationships with consumer brands without a clear end-point. While they claim to lead us on a path of self-discovery and liberation, these brands mediate and circumscribe our lives’ possibilities.*
ALWAYS IN
Drew Austin 06-03-2019ALWAYS IN
Drew Austin June 03, 2019 As audio-based platforms take off, network effects would kick in, strengthening the incentives to leave earbuds in for longer and longer. It wouldn’t seem rude to wear them in conversation; it would be as acceptable as glancing at one’s phone or even sending a quick text message seems today.*
WELL PLAYED: IMAGINED HOMELAND Vicky Osterweil 05-30-2019 WELL PLAYED: IMAGINED HOMELAND Vicky Osterweil May 30, 2019 In the context of such bleak, broad global political trends, it’s hard to consider gaming communities worthy of much attention. But these communities have established themselves as quasi safe spaces in which fascist ideology can hide in plain sight as it spreads.*
ILL AT EASE
Kelly Pendergrast 05-28-2019ILL AT EASE
Kelly Pendergrast May 28, 2019 In most of the smooth fantasies I’ve looked at, automation (if there is any) is only a small part of what’s really going on. Instead, the “innovation” is to make the friction occur somewhere else, out of sight of the customer: disappearance as a different kind of magic. In this way, the cozy narratives and ease of use encourage the displacement of difficulty, stress, waste, trash, and trauma, onto other people and places. This displacement takes place at two major geographic scales: the regional, and the global and hugelydistributed.
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HANGING ON THE TELEPHONE Meghan Gilligan 05-23-2019 HANGING ON THE TELEPHONE Meghan Gilligan May 23, 2019 Crackle signals an ambiguous past, provoking audience nostalgia for how things used to be without actually having to return to when that was. The failure to cinematically engage with the role of phones in everyday life suggests a similar failure to see the world how it is. The present absence of our habitual phone use has the effect of taking a story out of time: It’s invisible crackle. This leaves films ill-equipped to explore, let alone solve, the problems new communication technology brings.*
TOO HUMAN
Ella Jacobson 05-20-2019TOO HUMAN
Ella Jacobson May 20, 2019 Higher fidelity physical medical models haven’t closed the gap between models and real-world practice. In fact, it seems that the reverse is arguably true — the more lifelike models become, and the greater the sense of mastery they provide, the more they hide the deficiencies and biases they contain. In other words, when physical fidelity is held up as the highest goal for simulators, the simulators may become less — not more — effective.*
JUST RIDE
David A. Banks 05-16-2019JUST RIDE
David A. Banks May 16, 2019 The distinctly normie feel of standing on an electric scooter may be the keystone that unites the American mainstream with the activists struggling for a less car-centric city. The anarcho-cyclist, the Provo, wants to remake the city in the image of the bike, sweat and all. The resulting society, they imagine, is a more just, more ecologically sustainable, but less comfortable. It’s a particular kind of leftist asceticism that can be a valuable ally in a burgeoning coalition against the car. When it comes to democratizing the street for all sorts of transportation, the hardcore cyclist and the e-scooter commuter will have very similar demands.*
FUZZY LOGIC, FUZZY ETHICS Brian Justie 05-13-2019 FUZZY LOGIC, FUZZY ETHICS Brian Justie May 13, 2019 Fuzzy ethics is also not simply a bad or ineffective mode of ethics. Rather ethics as such is characteristically fuzzy in that it begins with the postulation of principles for individual conduct. This fuzziness no doubt resonates with our individual diversity (recall Raskin’s appeal to the “you-colored prism”) and can meaningfully guide us in our day-to-day interactions with others. But it also explains why ethics is woefully limited when employed in the face of widespread, structural injustice. Translated into start-up jargon, we might say that there is no growth hack for ethics.*
PRESENT PERFECT
Emma Stamm 05-09-2019PRESENT PERFECT
Emma Stamm May 09, 2019 Live streams can counter the sense that we are being exploited by social media. They can seem to indicate the possibility that human beings are still the primary constituents of the web, rather than impersonal and profit-motivated technical functions — a space in which humans are little more than connective ligaments or fonts of monetizable data. Live streams make a living place out of the digital domains that so many of us already treat like home.*
THE GARDENER’S VISION OF DATAOs Keyes 05-06-2019
THE GARDENER’S VISION OF DATA Os Keyes May 06, 2019 he scientists preparing and reusing NIST’s data to train facial recognition models may simply be subject to these tendencies and these philosophies — comfortable with screaming, bloodied, and non-consenting research subjects because they are not people to them but abstract sources of abstract data. But there are signs that this isn’t the only thing that is going on.*
ANNOTATE THE WORLD
Alexandra Molotkow 05-02-2019ANNOTATE THE WORLD
Alexandra Molotkow May 02, 2019 I opened a book I intended to discard, and saw my own strident observations shrieking up at me in bleeding ink. The notes seemed foul, the waste products of a self I’d repudiated; there are few people more objectionable than the person you were until recently. As objects, the books seemed cursed in reverse: To most readers the notes would be nothing more than an eyesore, but to put them in circulation would somehow manifest versions of myself that no longer felt familiar, and seemed to risk preceding me. The fear wasn’t rational of course — it was an incarnation of certain anxieties I’d developed over years of living online, transposed to objects. Those anxieties had to do with the sense that with every post, every click, I’m shedding a doppelgänger.*
OF BEING NUMEROUS
Natasha Lennard 04-29-2019OF BEING NUMEROUS
Natasha Lennard April 29, 2019 This much became undeniable by 2014 (at the latest): The devices and platforms we rely upon — to communicate, gather information, and build solidarity — offer us up as ripe for constant surveillance. The surveillance state could not be upheld without its readily trackable denizens. To sidestep our tacit complicity in this would be to fail to recognize how deep our participation in our own surveillability runs — it’s how we live.*
BILL OF HEALTH
Danya Glabau 04-25-2019BILL OF HEALTH
Danya Glabau April 25, 2019 As the fields of health-data obsession have grown, they have contributed to the impression that data alone is sufficient for medical care. Compared with the intricacies of human biology and relationships, data appears straightforward. It doesn’t depend on the people who generate it, with their messy lives filled with competing priorities.*
BUILT TO SHILL
David A. Banks 04-23-2019BUILT TO SHILL
David A. Banks April 23, 2019 You may hate capitalism but love your childhood home and use the laws of land ownership to protect it and keep it as your own. You hate Uber, but your car is in the shop and it’s the only way to get to work on time. This is, in part, why Morton says that “the time of hyperobjects is a time of hypocrisy.”*
BAD METAPHORS: LET’S TAKE THIS OFFLINE Mikaella Clements 04-18-2019 BAD METAPHORS: LET’S TAKE THIS OFFLINE Mikaella Clements April 18, 2019 The real implication of let’s take this offline is that, online or offline, you are always already in the wrong place. If the metaphor seems incoherent, even contradictory, that’s because it reflects the contradictory demands of the workplace.*
RUNNING THE NUMBERS
Jeremy Antley 04-15-2019RUNNING THE NUMBERS
Jeremy Antley April 15, 2019 Video games are not unique in their ability to anchor live streams that transform private acts into public spectacles. And there are many streamers who undertake the “work of play” as a way to share gameplay experience without any thought of compensation or growing spectator numbers. But under the auspices of centralized platforms like Twitch, the “work of play” will always become a numbers gameunto itself
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NEAR, FAR, WHEREVER YOU ARE Will Partin 04-11-2019 NEAR, FAR, WHEREVER YOU ARE Will Partin April 11, 2019 Unlike Stranger sociality of yesteryear, though, encountering strangers no longer carries the symmetry it once did. Just as it is impossible to touch without being touched in return, meeting strangers once meant being one yourself — to acknowledge another human seeing you seeing them. Today, though, we do not know for whom we are the “People You May Know.”*
COUNTING THE COUNTLESSOs Keyes 04-08-2019
COUNTING THE COUNTLESS Os Keyes April 08, 2019 A reformist approach to facial recognition — making the system more “inclusive” — will not really reduce harm for the people actually harmed. This control and normalization is part of the point of data science. It is required for data science’s logics to work. All reform-based approaches do is make violent systems more efficiently violent, under the guise of ethics and inclusion.*
SPOKEN FOR
Sasha Geffen 04-04-2019SPOKEN FOR
Sasha Geffen April 04, 2019 Q says they belong to a world “where we are no longer defined by gender, but rather how we define ourselves,” as if gender were not a perfectly fruitful tool for self-definition. The crackling of a voice deepened by injectable testosterone, the leaps and flights of a voice deliberately rising above its conditioned pitch — these are signs of people authoring their own stories upon the body, not of neutrality. To transition in adulthood is to balance conflicting signs across the body, to square an interior experience with the anatomical language available to describe it. To transition as a non-binary person is not to settle on a comfortable shade of grey somewhere between two available poles. It's more like seizing so much gender that it overloads the cis gaze and the cis ear, refusing neat categorization by way of internal contradiction or excess. It's not gender neutrality; it's gender chaos.*
GAME BOYS
Vicky Osterweil 04-01-2019GAME BOYS
Vicky Osterweil April 01, 2019 Deep forms of play — autonomous, chaotic, queer, and anti-hierarchical — threaten the systems of profit, work, and exploitation. Calls for increased play, joy, and an end to boredom were common slogans and demands among the radical wings of the movements of the 1960s, graffitied on the walls of Paris in May ’68 and broadcast over the radio by the anti-work workers’ movements in Italy. Video games, as designed today, overwhelmingly work to harness and co-opt that energy, to discipline the desire for play into the work ethic, to transform the freedom of creativity, exploration, and questioning into the diligent following of rules and learning ofsystems.
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CHANCES ARE
Justin Joque 03-28-2019CHANCES ARE
Justin Joque March 28, 2019 Bayesian thinking and its valorization of a science of doing rather than knowing has allowed a whole host of human activities to be predicted rather than theorized. Read in its most dystopian light, this revolution has allowed algorithms to treat subjective knowledge as though it were objective, calculable, and ultimately predictable. This belief in the ability to predict probabilistically has allowed data scientists to try to control who sees what news, which friends people make, what dates they go on, the credit they are given, the jobs their applications are considered for.*
BAD METAPHORS: THE 30,000-FOOT VIEW Christopher Schaberg 03-25-2019 BAD METAPHORS: THE 30,000-FOOT VIEW Christopher Schaberg March 25, 2019 While everyone is invited to see things from 30,000 feet, not everyone is invited to stay there or make decisions from such an elevated position. Access to the “God view” doesn’t automatically convey Godhead; in fact, the rhetorical trick in the “30,000-foot view” is in how it allows for a differentiation between those who are merely impressed if not overawed with the all-encompassing aerial perspective and those who can read it and control it.*
DOT MATRIX
Alexandra Molotkow 03-21-2019DOT MATRIX
Alexandra Molotkow March 21, 2019 A sensibility can cohere a worldview more vividly than an institution, for worse and for better. “Stan culture”; the cyclical interest in astrology and its archetypes; the commodification of co-presence, as in podcasting and vlogging — all speak to the timeless fact that it’s easier to make sense of a world in flux, atomized by a million emergencies and bids on one’s attention, through the unifying lensof another person.
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NATURAL’S NOT IN IT Danya Glabau 03-18-2019 NATURAL’S NOT IN IT Danya Glabau March 18, 2019 The work of Le Guin and other science fiction writers whose work chips away at the presumed links between nature and culture demand that we regard biological facts (like sex) as accidents of history and social facts (like gender, family organization, and capitalism) as open to reconfiguration. Science fiction socializes technology, creating a sandbox in which its role in mediating biology and society can be reimagined as well. In the process the genre creates space to propose alternative social fictions that take the place of the social arrangements that act as social facts in the “real” world.*
ALWAYS ON
L. M. Sacasas 03-14-2019ALWAYS ON
L. M. Sacasas March 14, 2019 If platforms deplete our willpower by making us hyper-self-conscious, they also are increasingly structured to make us experience the will as beside the point. Platforms are designed to make us less conscious of our decisions about how we spend time on them, attempting to automate decision-making with auto-play. The algorithms that ostensibly reveal what your “true” or “authentic” self would choose for itself feed off the very exhaustion that the platforms generate, offering refuge from the burden of identity work in the automation of the will.*
BAD METAPHORS: I DON’T HAVE THE BANDWIDTH Sophie Haigney 03-11-2019 BAD METAPHORS: I DON’T HAVE THE BANDWIDTH Sophie Haigney March 11, 2019 BAD METAPHORS is an ongoing series that takes a critical look at the figures of speech that shuttle between technology and everyday life. All metaphors are bad ones.*
IT GIRLS
Kerry Doran 03-04-2019IT GIRLS
Kerry Doran March 04, 2019 Avastars can’t suddenly develop inconvenient politics that run counter to their brand. Instead, as Brud's Miquela has demonstrated, their politically inflected scandals can be scripted in advance as part of their process for accruing influence. Then, the very existence of publicly lauded “avastars” can in turn be used as leverage against human influencers, who see how easily they can fall from social media grace if they don’t keep in line.*
LOCATION NOT FOUND
Angella d'Avignon 02-28-2019LOCATION NOT FOUND
Angella d'Avignon February 28, 2019 Warm and safe in my Brooklyn apartment, protected by brick rather than stucco and with the radiator humming, far from the drifting ash clouds and fire-scorched sunsets I’d come to know, I felt a folksy voyeurism tinged with faint nostalgia for the disaster of fire season. This instinct seemed as virtually distant and surreal as toggling through images of old Paradise on Street View. I experienced a sudden wave of topophilia — a strong sense of attachment to a place, a notion that its terrain was connected to my life — for both a time and a community that no longer exists, even in the unlikely case that it returns, in the next decade, in another form.*
ALL WORK AND ALL PLAY Vicky Osterweil 02-25-2019 ALL WORK AND ALL PLAY Vicky Osterweil February 25, 2019 The pleasure players derive from today’s games also reflects and distorts the conditions of their creation. These games allow consumers to enjoy as an experience of freedom, fun, and joy what the legion of programmers who made them have experienced as repetitive labor and stress. The products those workers painstakingly make have the effect of directly smashing solidarity, creating a volunteer nation of scabs who are rejuvenated through play for long days of stultifying, dog-eat-dog labor of their own.*
GIVE ME WHAT YOU WANT Cherie Hu 02-21-2019 GIVE ME WHAT YOU WANT Cherie Hu February 21, 2019 As long as the subscription-box market successfully positions passivity as the ultimate convenience, its belief system will encourage customers to detach themselves from their own tastes and from consumerism at large and rechannel their newfound energy into becoming allegedly better, more productive human beings. Yet instead of liberating us from these supposedly wasteful competitions over taste and status, subscription boxes will have only intensified the cutthroat management and marketing of these attributes. Rather than rendering taste irrelevant, they will have reinscribed competitive taste as inescapably human.*
NEW FEELINGS: SCREEN PROTECTIVENESS Suzannah Showler 02-19-2019 NEW FEELINGS: SCREEN PROTECTIVENESS Suzannah Showler February 19, 2019 My husband hopping on my computer because it’s close by, and he wants to “just check something really quick.” When he does this, I have to suppress the urge to body-check him and make an offer that’s really a demand: let me do it. I don’t like to think of my relationship to technology as possessive, but the internal histaminic explosion I feel when someone else uses — or, if I’m being honest, even just touches — my devices says otherwise.*
FREE SHIPPING
Chenoe Hart 02-14-2019FREE SHIPPING
Chenoe Hart February 14, 2019 The ability to request the express arrival of any object missing from your life with a minimum of effort could make it increasingly possible to live as though you already own everything. That is to say, ownership might become an irrelevant consideration in comparison to the availability of abundant options for short-term consumption like those already offered by media streaming services. Once the home becomes seamlessly integrated as an appendage of fulfillment infrastructure, the activity of making shopping decisions might recede from our consciousness altogether.*
COLONIAL CARTOGRAPHY Apoorva Tadepalli 02-11-2019 COLONIAL CARTOGRAPHY Apoorva Tadepalli February 11, 2019 Maps created by colonial governments were in the business of creating political identities, while city advertisements reinforce them. But they are both the same kind of artifact, both coming from comparable, centralized entities in whose interest it is to alienate individuals from the physical relationship they have with their immediate surroundings — because this “eye level” relationship is at direct odds with the identities of consumer and national citizen that these entities are trying to create*
NUMBERS GAME
Drew Austin 02-07-2019NUMBERS GAME
Drew Austin February 07, 2019 Rather than escapist fantasies, then, we can understand games as spaces to relearn a kind of being that has receded from many other environments. Games can remind us or teach us how to carve out oases of calm in the midst of a cutthroat, omnipresent battle royale. As one more of many simplified environments with its own rules and constraints, Fortnite isn’t necessarily more free than the others. But its particular contours offer a different kind of freedom than other spaces where we spend our time.*
CHASING THE APOCALYPSE Brianna Rettig 02-04-2019 CHASING THE APOCALYPSE Brianna Rettig February 04, 2019 The first time I came to the Project Faultless test site, though I had already spent a month driving solo through Nevada, I didn’t get out of my car. The earth seemed soiled, toxic — a threat waiting to seep through the rubber soles of my hiking boots. If I walked, I felt like I would become part of the landscape.*
WELL PLAYED: STORE CREDIT Vicky Osterweil 01-31-2019 WELL PLAYED: STORE CREDIT Vicky Osterweil January 31, 2019 As paywalls and privileges proliferate around more and more of the things we consume, and as the possibility of sharing the things we buy decreases through digital rights management and other technological shifts, our ownership of even these impoverished commodities becomes less reliable and total. Video games make this logic seem immanent, reasonable, even fun.*
NEW FEELINGS: UNGOOGLEABILITY Linda Besner 01-24-2019 NEW FEELINGS: UNGOOGLEABILITY Linda Besner January 24, 2019 In casual conversation, when I say, “Just for the record,” this is what I mean, and I’m saying it as a formality because everything is on the record: Transcripts of conversations between my third-grade teacher and the school janitor. A diagram showing how Stonehenge was built, with my parents’ visit in the 1970s marked on the timeline. In another urn, all the physical world as it was on every day since the universe began. The cardboard suitcase my mother brought to Canada, the handkerchief Socrates blew his nose on.*
NATURAL PROCESSES
Ana Cecilia Alvarez 01-22-2019NATURAL PROCESSES
Ana Cecilia Alvarez January 22, 2019 A year ago, at Muir Beach, I had poked around some exposed tide pools while tripping, and, enthralled, decided to stare a sea anemone down with my desire for contact. After a few seconds, my brain felt very hot. I instinctively covered my eyes and became convinced contact had been made. The sea anemone’s message: “Get the fuck away from me.” The takeaway stuck: Not all life wants to be seen, or known.*
NEW FEELINGS: SELFISH INTIMACY Alexandra Molotkow 01-17-2019 NEW FEELINGS: SELFISH INTIMACY Alexandra Molotkow January 17, 2019 My mother noticed what I was up to and eyed me uneasily. “Why do you have to document everything?” she said, as I snapped away at some erotic ceramicware. I told her I didn’t plan to show anyone, but the point was that I could.*
BUILDING TO CODE
David A. Banks 01-14-2019BUILDING TO CODE
David A. Banks January 14, 2019 The fact that new cities are experiencing a new spin on old problems, instead of leapfrogging American and European mistakes is unsettling. Are the growing pains of cities more intrinsic to urbanization than Howard believed, or have we yet to try something truly new in city-making? The only way to find out is to re-center the human in the city. What I want to do with this column is ask: How do we want to live among technology and each other? Why are cities treated like appplatforms?
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NEW FEELINGS: PHATIC CHECKING Greg Nissan 01-10-2019 NEW FEELINGS: PHATIC CHECKING Greg Nissan January 10, 2019 The Google Alerts I had set up for my name, in their sheer absurdity, act as a funhouse mirror image of what I’m looking for when I check my apps. Their simple binary — crash or opening — seemed to mock the inputs for my checking behavior, laying bare how superficial my connection to the news has become while delivering the same quick hit.*
SILENT SHOUT
Ava Kofman 01-07-2019SILENT SHOUT
Ava Kofman January 07, 2019 The privacy flaws of wi-fi are nearly universal — and yet most of us like to think of ourselves as exempt from its violations. Even when we’re made aware of the problem, we have trouble understanding that it’s actually happening to us. By implicating nearly every viewer who walks past them, these works are a clever attempt to challenge our delusional attitudes about being the exceptions to the rule of masssurveillance.
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SLEEP SUBJECTS
Zach Kaiser 01-03-2019SLEEP SUBJECTS
Zach Kaiser January 03, 2019 FitBit’s measurements of my quantity and quality of sleep became a kind of empirical assurance, a metrical safety blanket that said, “Yes, you can feel this tired,” or “You should feel spry and alert.” Does it know better than I do how much sleep I got, or how tired I should feel? Does it matter if these measurements are actually accurate? What would "accurate" even mean when it came to how I felt? How did I come to implicitly trust it over my own consciousness?*
SPECIAL ISSUE: 2018
Real Life 12-20-2018SPECIAL ISSUE: 2018
Real Life December 20, 2018 Collected here are some essays from Real Life that reflect not only what seemed to be some of the most pressing “tech” topics in 2018 — automation, algorithmic control, data surveillance, climate change, “virtual reality,” and a variety of attention economies — but also essays that we hope indicates what a broader approach to “tech” might look like. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do.*
WELL PLAYED: BATTLE ROYALE Vicky Osterweil 12-19-2018 WELL PLAYED: BATTLE ROYALE Vicky Osterweil December 19, 2018 Games, like all mass culture, are administered ideology, but to have effective force they must not be too dogmatic or stale — the widespread recognition of vulgar state-produced propaganda as such masks the more insidious but no less propagandistic functioning of culture markets. But to achieve that cover, they tend to appropriate the vitality of emergent culture. When games steal this popular energy, the ideology they convey becomes potentially unreliable.*
AMBIENT CRUELTY
Linda Besner 12-17-2018AMBIENT CRUELTY
Linda Besner December 17, 2018 In the same way that the expectation of tipping means servers are (in some jurisdictions) paid less than minimum wage, the reputation layer of the gig economy builds the social exchange of ratings anxiety into our conception of work, just as “likes” and other attention metrics build it into our social lives. Work is subtly reframed as socializing, so that pleasing people is the job. Precarious laborers are further encouraged to see themselves as vulnerable — to feel lucky they are allowed to work at all. Ratings aren’t about creating information for users; they’re about creating paranoia for workers.*
STARS AND STRIKES
David Turner 12-13-2018STARS AND STRIKES
David Turner December 13, 2018 The myth of the solitary genius — chart-topper or tech entrepreneur — further entrenches a punishing economic system, wherein a special outlier finds improbable success in a harsh industry on the strength of their extraordinary talent. Record executives love this narrative, which justifies the idea that musicians aren’t workers at all, but rather starry-eyed hopefuls submitting themselves to an industry that offers great rewards to the select few at the expense of everyoneelse.
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COLD DISCOVERY
Drew Austin 12-10-2018COLD DISCOVERY
Drew Austin December 10, 2018 The phrases “watching Netflix” and “listening to Spotify,” as opposed to watching or listening to something specific on them, suggest that these platforms denature their content and assimilate its identity into their own. While a book cover wrapped an individual work — an independently defined, freestanding unit of content — a platform interface wraps the entire collection of works that users can access through it. In the process, that collection becomes a slurry of fungible content that fuels the platform.*
SEE NO EVIL
Melissa Powers 12-06-2018SEE NO EVIL
Melissa Powers December 06, 2018 By blurring out Ariel Castro's home, where the crimes took place, Google has implied that what happened inside the house is beyond comprehension; the company has unmoored the once-physical 2207 Seymour Avenue from the concept of the house. This clumsy attempt to distract us from tragedy neither protects virtual visitors nor honors its victims — rather, in altering its own records, Google turns the site into a horror trope.*
SINS OF THE MOTHER
Danya Glabau 12-03-2018SINS OF THE MOTHER
Danya Glabau December 03, 2018 While digital self-tracking might seem to be the answer to someone like me who seeks to become a parent, using it to record evidence of all the ways that the parent might set the child up for failure could make it easier to revisit the sins of the mother upon the child. To safeguard future generations, it may be more important to guard against self-tracking's intrusion into our lives than to reap its benefits. Is the Apple Watch truly a guardian, caring for our well-being — or is it a warden, watching and waiting for us to makea misstep?
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WELL PLAYED: PASSIVE ATTACK Vicky Osterweil 11-26-2018 WELL PLAYED: PASSIVE ATTACK Vicky Osterweil November 26, 2018 Video games are not more interactive or creative than previous medium; if anything, they are arguably less. Each video game involves a mastery of a series of digital gestures, controls, contextual clues, or modes of seeing and knowing. While the best games offer space for improvisation, reflection, storytelling, and of course fun, the relation between gamer and game is most commonly one of disciplining the gamer to a set of systematized interactions.*
PLAUSIBLE DISAVOWAL
Rob Horning 11-19-2018PLAUSIBLE DISAVOWAL
Rob Horning November 19, 2018 If “deepfakes” make us nostalgic for the supposedly automatic authenticity of documents, AI artworks posit a corollary nostalgia for the authenticity of artists. AI creativity appears as creativity with no human strategy behind it, which can be reassuring: It seems like art without ego. By staging a clumsy show of computer creativity, it makes it seem as though human individuals once really were freely creative and might be again. The aspirational ideal of the “artist” as a bastion of individualized creativity and agency can live on in a world that replaces care workers with chatbots.*
RE: MARY LEE
Alex Ronan 11-15-2018RE: MARY LEE
Alex Ronan November 15, 2018 Scrolling through celebrity gossip usually ends suddenly, with the realization that I’m wasting my time keeping tabs on how strangers spend theirs. By contrast, tracking Mary Lee felt productive, protective. Knowing her whereabouts imbued me with a weird sense of temporary power over my own fears, which were tempered by a strangeintimacy.
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FAKED OUT
Nathan Jurgenson 11-13-2018FAKED OUT
Nathan Jurgenson November 13, 2018 To see truth as dying and reality as increasingly fake is self-flattering. It feels good because it allows readers to affirm that they are smart, a stable island of reasonable good in a chaotically bad world. If reality itself is in crisis, then you can posit yourself as the savior, the slayer of chaos dragons, by simply continuing to do what you were already doing: Consume the same news that misinformed you about the election and that today can only describe reality as bizarre. Support those politicians and political strategies that lost. Fight for the recent past that gave us Trumpism in the first place. Float adrift in a bubble of those who have nothing left to do but complain about bubbles.*
HAUNTED VILLAGE
Joe Sutton 11-08-2018HAUNTED VILLAGE
Joe Sutton November 08, 2018 Toward the end of the 19th century, medical science viewed epileptics as straddling the line between sanity and insanity. The etiology of the disease was not understood, and seizures were seen as uncontrollable and dangerous periods of insanity that could launch an epileptic into a murderous rage, no matter the nature of their ordinary behavior. The perceived danger of these fits led to the forced institutionalization of epileptics. One idea, held to be progressive at the time, was to take them out of “lunatic asylums” and place them in their own institutions — not because they were seen as requiring less supervision so much as their seizures distressed other patients.*
PERSONAL PANOPTICONS L. M. Sacasas 11-05-2018 PERSONAL PANOPTICONS L. M. Sacasas November 05, 2018 Older conceptions of privacy — which construe privacy as a merely individual concern — may misread the threat pervasive surveillance poses, leading to a paradox in which a deeper concern for privacy produces only more despair or indifference about it. Privacy pragmatists may conclude that they have nothing to hide, or that the capture of their anonymized consumer data poses no particular risk to them. They may be right on both counts, but they are missing the collective privacy risks presented by a networked society.*
THE LAST FORMAT
David Turner 10-29-2018THE LAST FORMAT
David Turner October 29, 2018 The mp3 seemed like the endpoint for music consumption, the last format: free, accessible, unencumbered, it enabled fans to enjoy their favorite artists with minimal interference by corporate entities. But, while it took a decade, the music industry found a way to dash those utopian hopes. The mp3 was just another format, after all, and eventually the industry managed to undercut its relevance, partly by appealing to the ideals it once represented.*
WELL PLAYED
Vicky Osterweil 10-22-2018WELL PLAYED
Vicky Osterweil October 22, 2018 No other cultural medium could support the idea of pleasurable “grinding” in which you play a particular section of a game over and over again, purely to watch your numbers and stats tick up enough to advance to the next section. ("Marathoning" a TV show only approximates this.) Video games are a safe, controlled space of growth, learning, and repetition: a desirable fantasy version of the fractured, precarious, ever shifting workplaces most of us findourselves in.
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FRICTION-FREE RACISM Chris Gilliard 10-15-2018 FRICTION-FREE RACISM Chris Gilliard October 15, 2018 What would it mean for those “still just a negro” moments to become primarily digital — invisible to the surveilled yet visible to the people performing the surveillance? Would those being watched and identified become safer? Would interactions become more seamless? Would I no longer be rudely confronted while making copies?*
NO JOKE
Natasha Lennard 10-11-2018NO JOKE
Natasha Lennard October 11, 2018 The alt-right euphemistic symbols of racism are meant to confuse outsiders and affirm insiders who can feel a sense of belonging by being in the know. They are not attempts to trick the otherwise unsusceptible into racist thinking. The ability for angry, entitled people to find each other and support each other’s racial animosities, to speak freely and spread their message without negative consequences provides the conditions for far-right extremism to flourish, not the ambiguities of ironic discourse.*
NEW FEELINGS: KID BRAIN Aurora Stewart de Peña 10-09-2018 NEW FEELINGS: KID BRAIN Aurora Stewart de Peña October 09, 2018 My memory of watching that commercial is both fuzzy and vivid: a non-verbal collage, as I melt into the doll’s tactile components. This is a state of mindfulness I haven’t been able to achieve since, not in any meditation class with singing bowls, not with any app. And while it probably wasn’t the copywriter’s objective, cultivating this kind of singular focus eased the anxiety of youth, as it now doesadulthood.
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ORDINARY DOSES
Emma Stamm 10-04-2018ORDINARY DOSES
Emma Stamm October 04, 2018 The tension between instrumentalized and exploratory approaches to psychedelics should not simply be dismissed. If the long-term impact of psychedelic research is shaped by the psychopharmaceutical industry, it would threaten the social potential of a psychedelic revival. The intertwining of mind-altering drugs and politics in the 1960s sparked a movement that embraced communitarianism over individualism and promised an immanent new consciousness.*
THE LAST FRONTIER
Ella Jacobson 10-01-2018THE LAST FRONTIER
Ella Jacobson October 01, 2018 Remoteness, here, signifies freedom: Men are able to create society as they wish, unconstrained by government interference or social norms. These shows are a nostalgic return to the 19th-century conception of the frontier as a place where white settlers can earn land and success through hard work, with race, class, and luck playing no role. Such a place doesn’t exist, and never existed, so it’s fitting that the locales are embellished or falsified.*
SAME DIFFERENCE
David A. Banks 09-27-2018SAME DIFFERENCE
David A. Banks September 27, 2018 “Contemporary capitalism,” Mould argues, “has commandeered creativity to ensure its own growth.” As that claim suggests, he believes that creativity pre-existed capitalism and has not always just been a euphemism for economic exploitation. In his view, the word originally signified the generation of something from nothing, or the uniting of two previously separate ideas. But since something truly new or different is unassimilable to capitalism’s techniques for value extraction, much of creativity under capitalism is, as Mould argues, “newness to maintain more of the same,” rather than the development of new ways of being.*
THE GREAT MORTALITY
Elisa Gabbert 09-24-2018THE GREAT MORTALITY
Elisa Gabbert September 24, 2018 Death may represent a kind of escape, but is this posturing really about wanting to escape, or is it about wanting to suffer? Lately, when I luck into an excellent bag of cherries or an especially luscious peach, I think, automatically: I don’t deserve this. When people say they’re quitting social media because it doesn’t make them happy, I think, Wrong reason. I think, We don’t deserve to be happy. It feels related to the death wish, my own version of liberal guilt run amok, morphed into a longing for punishment.*
TOO MUCH OF NOTHING
Rob Horning 09-20-2018TOO MUCH OF NOTHING
Rob Horning September 20, 2018 When I looked at Nothing on Street View, though, it didn’t feel uncanny, just anachronistic. It’s name implied a time where you could really feel lost, far off the grid. Now you can’t even go where there is nothing to get away from digital capture, from the standardization and assimilation with which Google is “organizing the world’s information.” But it is not like Nothing was some serendipitous joy back when I used to drive by it. It felt like a desperate scam being conducted from beyond the margins.*
CONTROLLED MEASURES
R. Joshua Scannell 09-17-2018CONTROLLED MEASURES
R. Joshua Scannell September 17, 2018 Arguing that physiognomy and phrenology were dominant until “of course, science happened” is a misrepresentation. It wasn’t “science” that happened; it was the civil rights movement. The root problem with the recent phrenology and physiognomy studies is their political implications: that they could give a scientific-seeming alibi for monitoring, impoverishing, or incarcerating people, much like earlier social Darwinism helped legitimate racial regimes. If that is the main problem with the “pseudosciences” of phrenology and physiognomy, we need to consider how biometrics in general — routinized facial recognition, gait recognition, and “behavioral” biometrics to list just a few — performs these same core functions.*
CRYSTAL VISIONS
Apoorva Tadepalli 09-13-2018CRYSTAL VISIONS
Apoorva Tadepalli September 13, 2018 TV has always been quick to exploit the image of the skyline for subliminal messaging: quick shots in between scenes establish setting, and some of these are shots so fast we don’t consciously register them. Media creates legibility and familiarity, too, through a kind of narrative augmentation that arguably renders, or attempts to render, physical familiarity almost irrelevant. This is how the city markets itself not just for its residents but for the world.*
THE CONSTANT CONSUMER Drew Austin 09-10-2018 THE CONSTANT CONSUMER Drew Austin September 10, 2018 Formerly, being a customer was a role one assumed upon physically entering a store or ordering something from a company. Amazon promises to create a newer type of environment, a hybrid of the digital and the physical, that lets us permanently inhabit that role: the world as Everything Store, which we’re always inside.*
NEW FEELINGS: INVOLUNTARY LURKING Linda Besner 09-04-2018 NEW FEELINGS: INVOLUNTARY LURKING Linda Besner September 04, 2018 Who is suffering today? The likelihood that something terrible is about to happen or is, in fact, already happening without my knowledge makes posting anything from my small island of relative stability feel heartless. I nearly posted “How come no one on TV ever looks both ways before they cross the street? I keep thinking Julianna Margulies is going to get hit by a bus,” an hour before a man drove a van along a crowded sidewalk in Toronto, killing 10 people. This confluence of devastating event with flippant comment wouldn’t have been my fault, exactly. But it’s enough to make me want to keep mymouth shut.
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TAKE THE WHEEL
Nina Horstmann 08-30-2018TAKE THE WHEEL
Nina Horstmann August 30, 2018 As much as the negative social and environmental effects that the automotive age has wrought have been naturalized as definitive parts of American culture and life, their detrimental effects remain inescapable. Rather than considering the impact of the current transportation system that prioritizes individual journeys, the driverless car extends and entrenches this model.*
SHOW TUNES
David Turner 08-27-2018SHOW TUNES
David Turner August 27, 2018 With a surplus of music available, the “community” itself, or rather the sense of oneself as participant, is increasingly the point. The walls around genre and niche have crumbled, only to be replaced with credit card transactions. The hunt for a “Song of the Summer” is a long-standing tradition that has been lately commodified into an endless content creation race. This takes the streaming-first mode of music appreciation to the next level: fans aren’t rallying around an artist, or a cluster of artists, but an ephemeral zeitgeist, into which any artist could possibly fit.*
SUN BELT SIMULACRA
David A. Banks 08-23-2018SUN BELT SIMULACRA
David A. Banks August 23, 2018 Whereas history is constantly being rewritten, geography stubbornly reminds you of what you once thought to be true. Each ranch house totally disconnected from public transport is a reminder of the easy motoring myth it was founded on. The half-built gates on Douglas Road are a contestation of limitless progress.*
ODD NUMBERS
Frank Pasquale 08-20-2018ODD NUMBERS
Frank Pasquale August 20, 2018 The dispute over how to reform or restrict algorithms is rooted in a conflict over to whom algorithmic processes should be accountable. If it’s to a community of engineers and technocrats, then accountability will usually mean more comprehensive data collection to produce less biased algorithms. The narrowest conceptions of accountability can themselves be treated algorithmically, while the broader conceptions demand political engagement and social change.*
WAR OF WORDS
Adam Clair 08-13-2018WAR OF WORDS
Adam Clair August 13, 2018 Discourse on platforms is refracted through a hidden lens, and the rules can only be inferred from what's projected into one’s own feed, which will of course differ for every user. But that doesn’t mean that what a user sees on a social media platform is random. There are no accidents — only a platform’s priorities.*
TWO-FACED
Daniel Joseph 08-09-2018TWO-FACED
Daniel Joseph August 09, 2018 Online platforms aren’t simply replacing stores by replicating their function. Instead they are making themselves gatekeepers capable of controlling and regulating commerce — just as Steam regulates the weapon skins market — playing a decisive role in which sellers continue to exist and which workers get to show up to work tomorrow. Culture is constrained and warped by this gatekeeping dynamic, which not only maintains the existing monoculture — in which a few popular titles dominate markets — but intensifies it.*
POTEMKIN AI
Jathan Sadowski 08-06-2018POTEMKIN AI
Jathan Sadowski August 06, 2018 In 1770, the Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen unveiled the Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing contraption that “consisted of a wooden cabinet behind which was seated a life-size figure of a man, made of carved wood, wearing an ermine-trimmed robe, loose trousers and a turban — the traditional costume of an Oriental sorcerer,” according to journalist*
NEW FEELINGS: CRUSH FATIGUE Alexandra Molotkow 08-01-2018 NEW FEELINGS: CRUSH FATIGUE Alexandra Molotkow August 01, 2018 Living online can feel like living in a big city: you make an ephemeral acquaintance, or click a link into an entirely new set of priorities, suppositions, and patterns of logic, sometimes totally at odds with your own and yet just as convinced of itself. The issue is not just that context bleeds and collapses; it’s that every new window opens onto a different horizon of concern, each with wildly different stakes, but equally urgent.*
JUST RANDOMNESS?
Michael Marder 07-30-2018JUST RANDOMNESS?
Michael Marder July 30, 2018 Excessive reliance on algorithms not only masks the persistence of bias, but also threatens to make human experience itself appear totally random. It is as though the milestones of your existence, such as getting a job or receiving a rejection letter, befell you out of the blue, with no rhyme or reason, with no one to blame, to praise, or to hold responsible.*
PERIPHERAL VISIONS
Paul Roquet 07-19-2018PERIPHERAL VISIONS
Paul Roquet July 19, 2018 Ambient control will not only come from the top down, imposed by governments and large corporations on unsuspecting individuals. Much like the earlier turn to personal forms of ambient media internalized the principles of peripheral mood regulation, the “smart” automation of our shared perceptual background has a private corollary in virtual reality. While not often thought of in these terms, VR is the result of ambient intelligence put to personal use, reimagining context awareness as a way for individuals to carve out a virtualspace of their own.
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INDUSTRY STANDARDS
Lux Alptraum 07-16-2018INDUSTRY STANDARDS
Lux Alptraum July 16, 2018 Twitter, Reddit, online commerce, and working remotely may seem like social trends wholly unrelated to sex work — but they’ve been integral to sex work, just as sex work has been integral to them. The internet, in shifting the way we live and work and relate to one another, has fundamentally altered the place that sex work resides inwithin our society.
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CONSUMING OTHERS
Real Life 07-09-2018CONSUMING OTHERS
Real Life July 09, 2018 We are not only watching the shows but they seem to watch us, play to our anticipated reactions, give value to our attention, as if watching made you a performer too. It is as if you are with them, so you can’t pretend to be them. Reality TV abolishes vicarious participation by destroying the distance that makes it possible; instead there is a mediated co-presence that dissolves aspiration into companionship, envy, contempt — anything but empathy.*
HUMAN SACRIFICE
Alexandra Molotkow 07-09-2018HUMAN SACRIFICE
Alexandra Molotkow July 09, 2018 Two decades after the birth of reality stardom, “famous for being famous” is no longer pejorative. The talent required to put yourself in front of strangers is revered as much as any other performance skill; self-marketing is a talent just as impressive to a general audience, and more relevant, than the ability to sing, dance, or act. YouTube, launched two years before Anna Nicole Smith’s death, is in some ways a dedicated medium for what reality stardom became. It’s also a medium capable of forging entertainments out of feelings too granular, or too intimate, for media like broadcast television to reach. On YouTube, reality narratives are reduced to gesture and affect, the smallest units of affinity.*
TRASH TV
Michael Thomsen 07-09-2018TRASH TV
Michael Thomsen July 09, 2018 One of the reasons reality television always appears faker than fiction is its pretense, belied by its endless editing interventions, that recording things gives them significance. But the documentary fragment is never enough on its own; it’s increasingly dependent on other fragments for context and meaning. So reality TV has the uncanny effect of making individual documents, if not individuals themselves,seem disposable.
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EMPATHIC CONSUMPTION Real Life 07-02-2018 EMPATHIC CONSUMPTION Real Life July 02, 2018 Virtual reality is often sold as an “empathy machine” — a narrative technology capable of literally placing its consumer in its subjects’ position, supercharging their fellow-feeling for social good: for boosting fundraising efforts and making viewers more likely to act on human rights concerns, or for reducing implicit bias. While this seems promising, it can also inscribe or re-inscribe a destructive power dynamic between the consumer and the person whose story is being consumed.*
EMPATHY MACHINES
Olivia Rosane 07-02-2018EMPATHY MACHINES
Olivia Rosane July 02, 2018 The lives filmed for VR experiences are isolated from any collective movement for justice and deployed instead in a simulation staged as a meeting between a powerful and a powerless individual in which all the petitioner’s words and actions are pre-selected by a third party. VR allows elites to believe that the best way to understand another’s perspective and act in their interest is not through talking to them directly but through consuming their experience at a distance, as framed by someone who seems more like a peer.*
APATHY MACHINES
Rob Horning 07-02-2018APATHY MACHINES
Rob Horning July 02, 2018 More than any moral lesson, then, the book teaches you how to better consume books, and makes that seem like morality itself. They taught consumers how to enjoy things in solitude, taking aloneness and preventing it from becoming loneliness. They were instrumental in normalizing isolation, making it seem possible, even desirable, that we should have a world where our things strive to keep us apart from each other and absorbed in our own purely personal pleasures, with nothing but abstracted genre conventions to connect us. People thus become morally legible only insofar as they conform to such genreexpectations.
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SOUVENIRS
Real Life 06-25-2018SOUVENIRS
Real Life June 25, 2018 Souvenirs tend to scale experiences down to evidence of our interesting personal lives. The memories they evoke beyond our daily experience may mask what our daily choices reap. That remains a story that is hard to tell: a social life of objects that exceed any one person’s biography or ability to narrate it.*
BIG AND SLOW
Elisa Gabbert 06-25-2018BIG AND SLOW
Elisa Gabbert June 25, 2018 The nebulousness of global warming works in the status quo’s favor. We don’t know exactly how it will play out, which allows fossil-fuel corporations and politicians to exploit that uncertainty, telling the public the facts aren’t all in yet — as if doing nothing were the wiser, more cautious move. Even those who recognize its urgency can be lulled by its uncertain specific effects, “postponing doom into some hypothetical future." The disaster seems always just over the horizon. But the hyperobject spells doom now, not at some future date.*
NOSTALGIA FOR PERMANENCE Philippe Pamela Dungao 06-25-2018 NOSTALGIA FOR PERMANENCE Philippe Pamela Dungao June 25, 2018 These days, the logs we keep of ourselves are increasingly ephemeral, even as the personas they represent remain, lingering and ghostlike. Stories and other sharing functions allow us to broadcast moments of our lives for only brief intervals. This can feel liberating, like a severing of ties; but when the evidence we leave of ourselves disappears, how do we remember it?*
SACRED SITES
Real Life 06-18-2018SACRED SITES
Real Life June 18, 2018 Technologies of transcendence are easily misused. Those same techniques of suspension and feats of collective will can be used to give a moral character to a range of rules and exclusions. Governance is not abolished, but rather placed in parentheses indefinitely, and rule by force or fiat takes hold: Black sites, Guantánamo Bay, prisons and county jails, ICE detention centers all rely on a state of exception, the same suspension of the normal rules of society that sacred spaces also evoke. All places, sacred and profane, depend on technology to define their boundaries and functions. This week we present essays on these spaces, and how various technologies enable them, their sense of localness, specificity, exceptionality, andtranscendence.
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SEDUCTIVE DOOM
Arabelle Sicardi 06-18-2018SEDUCTIVE DOOM
Arabelle Sicardi June 18, 2018 “Spatial forms or distance,” wrote Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception, “are not so much relations between different points in objective space as they are relations between these points and a central perspective — the body.” Water is such a bridge of relation, a medium that relates us to both the symbolic sacred and the state that demands our transformation. The body is justwhere we begin.
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PARADISE REGAINED
Soraya King 06-18-2018PARADISE REGAINED
Soraya King June 18, 2018 The same devices that are sometimes suspended to protect sanctity can also create it, maintain a partition around oneself — useful, maybe, to a woman who isn’t at the park to have her attention or speech elicited by whomever else happens to be there too. Being online in public can overlay space with a sited, concentrated quality that rivals the plugged-in-ness of recognized holy sites. The sacred is a room with a composite view.*
CURSED NETWORKS
Real Life 06-04-2018CURSED NETWORKS
Real Life June 04, 2018 What makes a “cursed image” disturbing is arguably the fact that it depicts something that someone else has gotten used to. It builds a network out of those for whom it’s abnormal and unwanted. Images can be cursed, but so can legends and stories and people. Whatever materials people might use to affirm an identity and create a sense of coherence where there is only a need for affinity.*
LEGEND TRIPPING
Stephanie Monohan 06-04-2018LEGEND TRIPPING
Stephanie Monohan June 04, 2018 Legend tripping has more radical potential value. The practice is a way in which many youth encounter alternative histories, cultural memory and the porous boundary between physical space and ideology. For a moment, legend tripping forces its practitioners into a confrontation with their local geography and history — a story can be mostly “fake” (or “fakelore”) but still reveal a ton about the anxieties or troubled history of a community, the subaltern stories and voices that hegemonic powers want forgotten.*
TRUE NONBELIEVERS
Rob Horning 06-04-2018TRUE NONBELIEVERS
Rob Horning June 04, 2018 All believers in something are the same, but we can each disbelieve in our own special way, yet share the same orientation toward the not-round world. The interactive connectivity extended across billions of people means that sociality need not depend on consensus reality about local conditions so much as a shared commitment to trust friends and whatever they choose to believe, and reject the consensus ofeveryone else.
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THE ACCURSED SHARE
Rahel Aima 06-04-2018THE ACCURSED SHARE
Rahel Aima June 04, 2018 A haunted object relies on a singularity of experience, an event or series of events, each with a fixed time and place. Yet here in "The Hands Resist Him," up for bid on eBay, was a painting so haunted that any representation of it, whether png or a paper copy, had somatic effects in home viewers and home printers alike. Rather than diminishing it, each copy only seemed to amplify its power.*
SELF-OPTIMIZATION
Real Life 05-29-2018SELF-OPTIMIZATION
Real Life May 29, 2018 Digital networks and resources can give the illusion of accessibility — if anyone can access nutritional guidelines, for instance, anyone should be able to follow them. This incorrect notion produces a moral residue: If anyone can “do it” — be healthy and attractive and alert and prepared to capitalize on any opportunity — than to not do it is a moral failing.*
STRAIGHT EDGE
Rebecca O'Dwyer 05-29-2018STRAIGHT EDGE
Rebecca O'Dwyer May 29, 2018 Apps like I Am Sober, as well as Sober Time, Quit That, and Sobriety Counter, function similarly to the Fitbit. They turn sobriety, understood simply as the conscious denial or removal of something, into something game-like and compulsive. It becomes something that is worn, that takes material form as an object of data: something tangible and measurable, and always bifurcated by outside, technological interests. Sobriety becomes objective, which is also to mean it can always be better. As I constantly check my progress it becomes clear that I am competing against myself.*
OUT OF NETWORK
Alex Beattie 05-29-2018OUT OF NETWORK
Alex Beattie May 29, 2018 Disconnection as a form of self-care could be a means to address the ailments that communicative capitalism produces. Yet individual acts of disconnection do nothing to change the living conditions we’re stuck with. Jamming your access to the internet to perform deep work is the equivalent of recycling your plastics and glassware to addresspollution.
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FAKES
Real Life 05-21-2018FAKES
Real Life May 21, 2018 The concern with technological fakery and digital impersonation often involves this sort of subterfuge. Egregious forms of media manipulation — deepfakes, for instance — are held up for scrutiny, with questions of whether they are sufficiently convincing distracting from persistent underlying questions about the longstanding ruses ofpower.
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UNREAL NEWS
Drew Nelles 05-21-2018UNREAL NEWS
Drew Nelles May 21, 2018 Satire relies on exaggeration — the space between what actually happened and what might have been, if we lived in a marginally more ridiculous world. But the image of Trump painted by outlets like the New York Times is often much more bizarre than anything the Onion could invent. The Donald Trump who retires at 6:30 pm to wander, aimless and ghost-like, around the White House residence; who obsesses over choosing new drapes for the Oval Office; who awakens in the wee hours to stare blankly at his phone — that Donald Trump is veryfunny.
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NEGATIVE SPACE
Adam Clair 05-21-2018NEGATIVE SPACE
Adam Clair May 21, 2018 The concern about the end of reality, common to coverage of deepfakes and related simulation tech, presumes somewhat complacently that unfaked footage can’t be used to inspire spurious conclusions. Even the most far-fetched conspiracy videos on YouTube tend to draw from real rather than fabricated material. And despite widespread phones and dashboard- and body-mounted cameras, law enforcement officials rarely face meaningful penalties for their crimes. Video alone is inadequate to generate accountability.*
BODY DOUBLES
PJ Patella-Rey 05-21-2018BODY DOUBLES
PJ Patella-Rey May 21, 2018 Overlooking the porn performers whose bodies are used to create deepfakes points to a broader issue with how bodies and sexuality — and their violation or abuse — are conceptualized with respect to the internet. Too often, intimate digital images of the body are treated as an inert documentation of the physical form rather than as a deeply felt extension of the self — as if only information were being made vulnerable rather than an integral aspect of one’sperson.
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DEBATE FETISH
Real Life 05-14-2018DEBATE FETISH
Real Life May 14, 2018 Logic is important and useful and insufficient, the same way that empathy is important and useful and insufficient. To engage with social conditions requires both and more. If debate logic only adheres in the abstract as an essence extracted from circumstances and rinsed of particulars, it functions mainly to distract attention from these circumstances and these particulars.*
ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE Rob Horning 05-14-2018 ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE Rob Horning May 14, 2018 The assumption that everyone should be ready and willing to engage in articulate and rhetorically sophisticated discussions about their reasons for doing and thinking what they do and think manifests itself across culture, especially in the affordances of social media, which presume a kind of public-sphere model of conversation — if not a game-show like contest with a scoreboard — that few interactionsactually aspire to.
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FAULTY LOGIC
Linda Besner 05-14-2018FAULTY LOGIC
Linda Besner May 14, 2018 If debate doesn’t actually change minds, the rhetorical power of social media networks may work best as a way to insist on a broadening of our honor worlds. In the behavior of social media users posting under their real names, identity — contrary to logic-proponents’ assumptions — may be among the strongest persuasive tools.*
BOT FEELINGS
Rob Horning 05-07-2018BOT FEELINGS
Rob Horning May 07, 2018 Trying to understand bot consciousness is not an idle exercise in speculative epistemology. Instead it serves as a proxy case for the sorts of inclusions and exclusions humans have continually made about the personhood and integrity of others. Understanding the point of view of a bot, explaining how it thinks in our own terms, is not just a way to try to defend ourselves from what it might do, but it also protects our broader habit of projecting our own ways of thinking as an ethical limit — that if something or someone doesn’t think like us, then it isn’t really thinking, or can’t really think.*
FAKING IT
Jacqueline Feldman 05-07-2018FAKING IT
Jacqueline Feldman May 07, 2018 There’s a furtive quality to the utterances of bots. They are, after all, planted. The robot Sophia engages in the kind of making nice that indicates, in humans, some fearsome repression. To Jimmy Kimmel she remarked, “I’m on my favorite show, the Today show.”*
WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A BOT Damien Patrick Williams 05-07-2018 WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A BOT Damien Patrick Williams May 07, 2018 We cannot know what it’s like to be a bot, for the same reason that we can’t know what it’s like to be a bat or what it’s like to be one another. But engaging these questions about nonhuman consciousness, knowledge, and what it means to be and to know helps us confront the often unconscious human tendency to believe that personhood is modeled after some perfect exemplar.*
NEW GENRES
Real Life 04-26-2018NEW GENRES
Real Life April 26, 2018 The mass influx of new voices and the various platforms that inform and enable an avalanche of free, readily viewable video have accelerated the genre-making process, creating more than a handful of recognizable forms. This month, the Museum of the Moving Image's exhibition The New Genres presents a survey of the most significant, influential, and representational of these videos, including the vlog, a direct-to-camera diary in dialogue with the audience, narrated video game playthroughs, unboxing, and ASMR — with a series of pieces brought to you by Real Life and many of our favorite writers. See you at the exhibition!*
RED PILLED
David A. Banks 04-26-2018RED PILLED
David A. Banks April 26, 2018 Alex Jones’s business model is seemingly unusual for a media company: Rather than set up a paywall or subscription service, Jones has been selling his own dietary supplements under the InfoWars Life brand since 2013. Fans are invited to consume InfoWars twice: first as media, and a second time as branded food products.*
DISASTER PREPAREDNESS Linda Besner 04-26-2018 DISASTER PREPAREDNESS Linda Besner April 26, 2018 Sitting safely at my desk, my body believed I was in the sinking car with the cohost of The List — I gasped for air, realizing that I had been holding my breath. The disaster infotainment video genre walks a zigzag line, swerving between public service, spectacle, and nightmare visualization aid. It packages together the paranoid’s obsessive catastrophization with the star-pupil’s faith in the all-conquering power of doing as we’re told.*
DAILY AFFIRMATIONS
Tony Tulathimutte 04-26-2018DAILY AFFIRMATIONS
Tony Tulathimutte April 26, 2018 Why do "Rockstar Affirmations" unsettle me? By replacing aspiration with willful delusion, it represents a full literalization of “the Secret,” the Oprah-sanctioned belief that merely visualizing something hard enough suffices to make it so. The channel description asserts that the key to manifesting is to “feel the feelings of already having your desire.” Of course, if you actually felt like you already had what you wanted, you’d no longer want it. Maybe the appeal here is that of focused daydreaming, or maybe conviction is its own reward, one of the basic virtues of a virtual world.*
INFINITE LOOPS
Jane Hu 04-25-2018
INFINITE LOOPS
Jane Hu April 25, 2018 The contemporary prevalence of the gif both reflects and obscures just how much it has been integrated into our own everyday aesthetic practices — incorporated into cellphone keyboards and Instagram stickers, gifs are always ready at hand. While video has since developed past its original formatting, the gif remains defined by its technological limits. Its ubiquity relies on a set of constraints: The gif lives because it doesn’t try to evolve.*
GAMES WITHOUT FRONTIERS Vicky Osterweil 04-25-2018 GAMES WITHOUT FRONTIERS Vicky Osterweil April 25, 2018 The evolution of video game culture has been shaped more by the sense of nostalgia, intimacy, and privacy games can evoke among players than by the more conspicuous desires for agency, vicarious violence, or an instrumentalist sense of control they might speak to for a lone user. The nostalgic intimacy remains, but it is most immediately accessible through the experience of watching someone else play video games.*
THE WILD ONES
Michael Thomsen 04-25-2018THE WILD ONES
Michael Thomsen April 25, 2018 Local TV news used to fill time now and then with odd pet oddities, but with YouTube, the occasional distraction has become a willful routine of mild transgression. If a home is meant to set humans apart from nature, the presence of wild animals both violates this logic and extends it. Exotic animal videos are thus equal parts cute and contraband: Forbidden animalistic impulses are trapped in a suburban web of incipient domestication.*
SLOW TRAIN COMING
Britney Gil 04-24-2018SLOW TRAIN COMING
Britney Gil April 24, 2018 I came across these sorts of videos while studying for my PhD examinations. For six weeks I spent 10 hours a day in my office reading and taking copious notes, accompanied by the sights and sounds of train rides through Scandinavia. These offered just the right amount of presence without excessive distraction. When my eyes tired from reading, I glanced up at my screen and watched scenic landscapespass by.
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SCORES UNSETTLED
Shuja Haider 04-24-2018SCORES UNSETTLED
Shuja Haider April 24, 2018 “The ear goes more toward the within, the eye toward the outer,” French director Robert Bresson wrote in “Notes on Sound.” Thus the seductive power of musical accompaniment, and the Richard Spencer punch’s lack of it raised an irresistible question: If this was a movie scene, what song would fit it best?*
ALTERED STATES
Devin Kenny 04-24-2018ALTERED STATES
Devin Kenny April 24, 2018 As algorithms have become better at detecting copyrighted content, more elaborate YouTube countermeasures have been improvised: cutting a thing into small pieces, adding watermarks or silence at the beginning or end. The videos strain toward esotericism, new ways of working, the production of new culture with subversion built in.*
OPEN HEART
Maya Binyam 04-23-2018OPEN HEART
Maya Binyam April 23, 2018 If WebMD provides the medical translation for patients’ symptoms — chest pain, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, nausea — YouTube is the theatre in which patients can watch those symptoms be repaired. For surgeons who provide elective procedures like breast augmentation, posting videos of successful surgeries is incentivized: Potential patients are more likely to hire a doctor whose work they feel they already know and trust. But for procedures whose function is to save lives, and which are therefore often performed without notice or choice, surgical videos function like a command.*
CHALLENGE EATING
merritt k 04-23-2018CHALLENGE EATING
merritt k April 23, 2018 The value in LA Beast's videos comes precisely from that place of discomfort. When he puts himself through gastrointestinal hell, we cringe even as we can't help but root for him. And for many viewers, seeing a man who embodies white masculine norms — he was a college football player, after all — punish his body over and over while keeping up a jovial, friendly persona is a pleasurable experience and an unusual one outside of gay pornography.*
UNCOMFORTABLE ASMR
Stephanie Monohan 04-23-2018UNCOMFORTABLE ASMR
Stephanie Monohan April 23, 2018 Can something be “self-care” if it is designed to make us feel anxious? Negative ASMR raises important questions about the politics of anxiety and of our sensitivity to our social world. On one hand, it allows people to engage with fear and anxiety in an indulgent way that relieves tension; on the other hand, like any effective horror film, it increases vigilance.*
INFLUENCERS
Real Life 04-16-2018INFLUENCERS
Real Life April 16, 2018 It’s not an inborn advantage so much as the powers of transformation that make an influencer. We like to see feats of transcendence, evidence of the gap between person and presentation, some residue of the labor required to vault from one to the other. Just as important, we watch for feats of competence: Influencers are self-help gurus as much as they are entertainers, showing off a skill set and, crucially, a clarified sensibility amid an onslaught of stimuli and possibilitiesof selfhood.
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LAYERS OF IDENTITY
Crystal Abidin 04-16-2018LAYERS OF IDENTITY
Crystal Abidin April 16, 2018 By continuously alluding to their more secret, more genuine, more real “real lives,” influencers aim to create a backstage region in which they can invite followers to assess how genuine they really are. An audience is enticed into trying to evaluate and validate how genuine a persona is by following the feedback loop across the front stage of social media and the backstage of “real life,” through inconspicuous and scattered holes or gateways that were intentionally left as trails for the curious.*
SEEING IS BELIEVING
Adrienne Matei 04-16-2018SEEING IS BELIEVING
Adrienne Matei April 16, 2018 A kind of vertigo ensues if we try to assess lifestyle-oriented images in terms of their level of truth. Instagram is consumed not as bona fide reality but a hyperreality, in which representations refer to other representations, not some supposed truth outside the app. There is no natural beauty, just “natural” beauty. Using something faked, edited, misleading, or out of context to attract attention isn’t the platform’s problem but its point. There is no “fake news” on Instagram.*
THE GENRE OF YOU
Isabel Munson 04-16-2018THE GENRE OF YOU
Isabel Munson April 16, 2018 “Influence” may seem like a self-explanatory term, but on Instagram, with its intricate economy of influencers melding the fashion industry and reflecting the aspirational fantasies of individual users, it takes on a different significance. Rather than being strictly a product of other styles, “influence” itself is an aesthetic that can be generated and consumed.*
GOD VIEW
Real Life 04-09-2018GOD VIEW
Real Life April 09, 2018 The idea that anyone can, in the pursuit of knowledge, transcend their social location — who you are, where you are from, what your particular interests, fears, vulnerabilities, and so on are — has a long history; it also has a long history of being debunked.*
NERDING OUT
David A. Banks 04-09-2018NERDING OUT
David A. Banks April 09, 2018 As long as reactionary nerds establish the parameters of debate and liberal wonks elect merely to debunk them, we will be stuck in a cycle of failing institutions and populist authoritarianism. For all their command of information and adept application of technical skill, nerds categorically refuse to be moral agents in a world desperately lacking them. This makes them a danger to us all.*
EXTREMELY ONLINE SOCIALISM Real Life 04-09-2018 EXTREMELY ONLINE SOCIALISM Real Life April 09, 2018 It may not have the ring of fully automated luxury communism, but socialism seems primed for rehabilitation. On this panel, activists, Occupy participants, political analysts, and journalists will assess the status of the left online and consider a variety of political and communication strategies for moving forward.*
THE NEXT GENERATION
Real Life 04-09-2018THE NEXT GENERATION
Real Life April 09, 2018 When young people receive old ideas, they find the inconsistencies. Maybe the most meaningful source of the generation gap we’re seeing now isn’t digitality itself, but the incredible dissonance between received wisdom and what is obviously the case — institutional knowledge has never seemed so completely at odds with the world as itis.
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ADULTHOOD
Real Life 04-02-2018ADULTHOOD
Real Life April 02, 2018 "Adulting" is an irritating cliché, but it indicates that certain definitions of adulthood don't work anymore, that the characteristics of maturity have been diffused, in some cases made deliberately or systematically inaccessible. Contemporary life makes tremendous emotional, psychological, and political demands that many don't feel capable of meeting. Adulthood is at once aspirational and abominable.*
CHILDREN’S CRUSADE Rachel Giese 04-02-2018 CHILDREN’S CRUSADE Rachel Giese April 02, 2018 The current glorification of the youth activist fortifies the idea that being daring, politically engaged and passionate is a young person’s game. As such, teenagers represent an effort-free do-over for adults. In them, we wistfully imagine our own (best) past selves and enjoy a vicarious thrill in our ability to recognize their heroism, while absolving ourselves of the responsibility toparticipate.
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MOVE ON UP
Tiana Reid 04-02-2018MOVE ON UP
Tiana Reid April 02, 2018 The American pornographic, as a genre and a way of looking, is at the core of blackness’s violent origins: It is its history, its present, its frontier. Hovering at the edge of the possible and the impossible, the pornographic is a breaking point worth breaking in. If, as Saidiya Hartman maintains, “slavery is the ghost in the machine of kinship,” it is also true that the black family — its making, unmaking, and impossibility — is the ghost in the machine ofadulthood.
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ACTING MY AGE
Hanif Abdurraqib 04-02-2018ACTING MY AGE
Hanif Abdurraqib April 02, 2018 Those of us aging now have the filter of the internet to push our aging through. We can build narratives around our aging. Jay Z, for example, created a whole album around his flawed maturity. Some of us make albums of music, and some of us archive our balance of coolness with aging in other ways. In either case, it is a careful curation. I write the narrative for myself, and the narrative becomes what I tellit to be.
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PICTURES OF FOOD
Real Life 03-26-2018PICTURES OF FOOD
Real Life March 26, 2018 The camera, like a new utensil, establishes a pre-meal tradition: Documentation may function as a form of certification, a ritual that celebrates the food, offers a thought for those who aren’t present, and focuses attention on the tableau, deepening the anticipated pleasure. It can function as a complement to conventional modes of food preparation, a way of carrying it symbolically from raw tocooked.
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TASTE MADE
Linda Besner 03-26-2018TASTE MADE
Linda Besner March 26, 2018 If the internet were a country, its cuisine would speak to a turbulent civic life. But more than this, all food grown in the terroir is by definition unpalatable. The internet is like a metaphysical takeout window — there is no for-here option, everything must be passed through the square opening before it can be consumed in the traditional sense. Yet the way food is consumed online is meaningful precisely because it’s all metaphor.*
HOME COOKING
Mila Samdub 03-26-2018HOME COOKING
Mila Samdub March 26, 2018 With their low-budget feel, the Village Food Factory videos are unfrantic, going on and on, sometimes for 17 minutes or longer of action that is oddly transfixing, a mashup of slow food and slow television. In this context, the word factory might seem incongruous. But it hints at the fact that these settings are actually saturated with machines, and the videos themselves are entirely dependent on one of these, which makes all the activity on display doubly productive:the camera.
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EAT THE DOCUMENT
Anya Metzer 03-26-2018EAT THE DOCUMENT
Anya Metzer March 26, 2018 Food media collapses elaborate, perfect food into the lifestyle it is made to seem to promise. This means it turns our unfulfillable desires into a normative protocol for vigilance over one’s appetites. We can consume as many images of food as we want, but with them we ingest rules for self-management.*
CONTENT
Alexandra Molotkow 03-19-2018CONTENT
Alexandra Molotkow March 19, 2018 Content is not just material as in “everything is material,” the old writerly cliché. Material suggests rawness, something that needs to be processed. “Content” is material accelerated, totalized without necessarily being analyzed or synthesized. It doesn’t need to consist of life’s most painful or awkward moments repurposed; it instead presents an instrumental approach to life and social interaction for its own sake. At worst, this degrades experience and relationships, and the reality of other people, to their potential inputs — to set design.*
YOU DON’T SAY
Navneet Alang 03-19-2018YOU DON’T SAY
Navneet Alang March 19, 2018 We are grappling with what it means to utter things as authors, as potentially always stand-ins for some much broader cultural debate. And with that we are stuck in the fundamental paradox of being a subject: that to other subjects, we are at best only ever an object, a thing to be placed in the appropriate context despite whatever objections we may exclaim.*
COST OF SIMPLICITY
Tatum Dooley 03-19-2018COST OF SIMPLICITY
Tatum Dooley March 19, 2018 Minimalism is both an easy enough aesthetic to obtain - a "goth juicer" would be much harder to find than a "minimalist" one - and one that suggests an ethos that is appealingly at odds with its dubious function: marketing. Minimalism, or pseudo-minimalism, turns out to be a handy undercover vehicle for consumer obsession: aesthetically pleasurable, and suggestive of high-minded austerity, it obscures its own extravagance. It signals virtue while suggesting that beauty and the good are one and the same.*
OUTER SPACE
Real Life 03-12-2018OUTER SPACE
Real Life March 12, 2018 Elon Musk, who aspires to found a Martian colony, declared that candidates must be prepared to die, but that “it would be an incredible adventure. I think it would be the most inspiring thing that I can possibly imagine.” It is sad to imagine an imagination so limited. It is as if Musk believes our planet is so devoid of the possibility of good, that all the opportunities for improving the lot of beings on Earth are so boring or so disappointing that it is more inspiring to hold a death lottery and launch his similarly nihilistic counterparts into the void.*
EVENT HORIZON
Lou Cornum 03-12-2018EVENT HORIZON
Lou Cornum March 12, 2018 When a world is new, it creates alongside a space held for the older worlds. This is the drama between what can be brought from before and what will be made anew. It is why Aeneas carried his dying father Anchises on his shoulders out of Troy on his way to found Rome. The traveler always brings baggage. Jeff Bezos would like to be the one who carries that baggage to space.*
WHEELS IN THE SKY
Christopher Schaberg 03-12-2018WHEELS IN THE SKY
Christopher Schaberg March 12, 2018 Musk has become a trailblazer in transforming outer space not into habitable space but into ad space, ready to be populated with name brands. Beginning with his own cast-off convertible, Musk has made space into junk space. Launching his sports car into space is less a celebration of car culture than a confirmation of cars as an emblem of selfishness rather than progress. Commercial space flight appears not as the future of humankind but the future of egotism.*
PRIVATIZATION
Real Life 03-05-2018PRIVATIZATION
Real Life March 05, 2018 Technology is an ancient category that expresses itself in the ways humans find to do things. It is becoming more and more remote from “tech,” which in the popular imagination now stands for something more like magic, never to be really “unboxed,” rather than the mundane means by which we make the world function. That purported magic is invoked implicitly or explicitly to authorize all kinds of corporate takeover. The physical devices and algorithms mining data out of our privacy keep more to themselves than ever.*
UBER ALLES
David A. Banks 03-05-2018UBER ALLES
David A. Banks March 05, 2018 Obtaining a car was once necessary to gain access to the spoils of America’s postwar wealth. For everyone else there was the bus, whose mainstream introduction as a public utility coincided with cities’ fiscal insolvency and thus became inextricably linked with poverty and government mismanagement. This is the “image problem” that Uber and Lyft are now trying to navigate when they brand their own bus-likeservices.
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CARE PACKAGE
Natasha Young 03-05-2018CARE PACKAGE
Natasha Young March 05, 2018 Changing how we care for our sick, elderly, and disabled would be liberating for undercompensated laborers and uncompensated family members alike - the problem is that the thought of being tended to by machines just too painful. As strange as it is to ask, how do we reconcile the human need for care with the human need for otherhumans?
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AURA
Real Life 02-26-2018AURA
Real Life February 26, 2018 Amid online platforms, where the spread of content and sentiment seem to correspond but often in opaque, oracular ways, who can say where auras begin and end? But it may be useful to try to imagine their amorphous existence without trying to map them, where what is “special” is not what is unique or specifically marked as rare but what is being experienced together. This week we consider how the idea of aura plays out now through the new means of self-mediation and limitless distribution.*
GOOD BOYS
Rahel Aima 02-26-2018GOOD BOYS
Rahel Aima February 26, 2018 This new economy of animal images and videos has come to replace the once frequent animal interactions we might have once had before urbanization and mechanization. They create a nostalgia for animals we would have never seen without them, capturing the impossible and the impossibly rare. But the new techniques also encourage a kind of emotional projection. Infinite looping gifs, Instagram stories, and features like Boomerang, which repeats a short motion back and forth, work as a kind of synecdochal butchery, reducing an animal to an isolated constituent part or motion: That sudden wobbliness and narcoleptic bellyflop that reminds you you’re so very tired too.*
UNLIMITED EDITIONS
Rob Arcand 02-26-2018UNLIMITED EDITIONS
Rob Arcand February 26, 2018 If art has any liberating potential beyond serving as a tax-dodging investment vehicle, its place along a blockchain seems only to amplify the art world’s existing inequalities, ensuring a select few well-connected artists see unimaginable profits while others remain walled off from the industry. But can the technology be harnessed to re-engage with conceptual ideas about scarcity, valuation, and ownership? Or is digital provenance fated to look exactly like its material counterpart, every bit as fickle and fast-paced as the world that internet art once sought to escape?*
TO THE POINT
Apoorva Tadepalli 02-26-2018TO THE POINT
Apoorva Tadepalli February 26, 2018 I often write in my journal as though I am writing for an audience. Imaging those readers seems to affirm that the stories I tell in my journal actually matter, actually mean something. This imagining goes beyond the words I choose; I use my favorite fountain pen, paper that smells nice, an attractive notebook. I am trying to mimic images I’ve seen, both online and in real life, of calmness: beautiful desks and cups of steaming tea. Such images momentarily ease an anxiety I have about writing, or productivity, or living a meaningful life. Self-care is bound up with images of serenity that can prefigureit.
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POSITIVITY
Real Life 02-20-2018POSITIVITY
Real Life February 20, 2018 Positivity is not necessarily synonymous with self-care sentiments like “blocking out the fakes” and “allowing only good energy in,” or with family values, or with flat nondynamic righteousness, or with any capitulation to capitalism. It may also signal a push for action that relieves a shared burden. It is rooted in the present moment, not a counterpoint to our bleak so-called life but continuous with everything bleak about it.*
ANTHEM OF THE SUN
Olivia Rosane 02-20-2018ANTHEM OF THE SUN
Olivia Rosane February 20, 2018 A more empowered or positive relationship to technology can’t happen through sheer innovation or different consumer choices within the existing structure. Instead, the task is to craft new tools and new structures of interaction at the same time, realizing that they were always already intertwined.*
MOMENTARY CONNECTIONS Hanif Abdurraqib 02-20-2018 MOMENTARY CONNECTIONS Hanif Abdurraqib February 20, 2018 There are hundreds of videos on the internet like this. Animals, young and old, playing in snow for the first time, or perhaps for the 10th time, but a time that might as well be the first all over again. The internet is still good for this, too.*
PLAYING FAVORITES
Sasha Geffen 02-20-2018PLAYING FAVORITES
Sasha Geffen February 20, 2018 What would it look like for a game to simulate not just the accumulation of approval points on social media, but sociality as a broader whole? What, for that matter, would social media look like were it not designed to reward the massive accumulation of approval points above all else? I am imagining a connection that does not look like money, one with space for variations in tone and affect, one whose goal is not necessarily "more."*
TEAMS
Real Life 02-12-2018TEAMS
Real Life February 12, 2018 This sentimentality about teamwork should not distract us from the fundamental organizing principle of teams: winning. Forming a team implies choosing an enemy. Beating that enemy redeems the personal sacrifices. A team is a collective subject that corresponds to capitalist organization, pre-empting the kinds of collectivity that might go against its grain. Social media, often discussed as means of self-branding, also allow for, if not encourage, the formation of teams, positioned to seize upon the way being online can gamifyeveryday life.
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LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE
Vicky Osterweil 02-12-2018LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE
Vicky Osterweil February 12, 2018 New media forms have intensified the cult of celebrity’s pull in both those seemingly opposed directions at once. Stars can participate more openly and directly in their publicity, making a seamless blur of their life and their image, while deepening their aura with unfathomable follower counts and engagement metrics. Their relation to fans becomes at once more intimate and more mediated.*
CLONE WARS
Robert Minto 02-12-2018CLONE WARS
Robert Minto February 12, 2018 The same technology that had helped to call the protest into being made visible, by recording it, what it means to be swallowed by the crowd. At the protest, my feed had proved to me that I was both a participant and an observer, that my personality had not quite dissolved in the moment and the mass but remained outside it. Now I saw my “feed self” caught up in an even bigger crowd. Paradoxically, I had become the spectator to a thing I had made to reflect my autonomy as it became integrated into a different kind ofaffective machine.
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ENEMY BODIES
Tom Thor Buchanan 02-12-2018ENEMY BODIES
Tom Thor Buchanan February 12, 2018 In fitness "boot camps," our body, seemingly a self-evident border between ourselves and the world, becomes instead a threshold that exercise, the advice of trainers, fitness discourse in general, and the organization of the gym itself, can take us beyond. We pass through that boundary, and our body dissolves into systems of classification, measurement, and competition. The body is a site of opportunity, but it is also an enemy.*
OBJECTIVITY
Real Life 02-05-2018OBJECTIVITY
Real Life February 05, 2018 Bias is not a problem that should be solved by resolving perspectives into one master "god view." Eliminating “bias” means invalidating points of view, nullifying entire lives of lived experience. Rather than try to eliminate “bias” in the name of expediency, rather than homogenize experience into a uniform consistency, we must recognize that just as digitalization yields tractable representations of big data, it entails even greater losses if we insist on seeing society through only those lenses.*
HELPING HAND
Linda Besner 02-05-2018HELPING HAND
Linda Besner February 05, 2018 When large organizations delude themselves into thinking that they are truly neutral actors, they put themselves in danger of hurting the people they are ostensibly helping and directing attention away from others in need. And when tech companies present themselves as neutral platforms for expression and connection, they disguise the extent to which they manipulate our sensibilities.*
MODEL CITIZENS
Mila Samdub 02-05-2018MODEL CITIZENS
Mila Samdub February 05, 2018 Models in SimCity are not only describing a reality in the game; they are also projecting a reality in the world, and bringing it into being. At stake is not whether SimCity’s model “reads” as representationally accurate. The more pernicious issue is that players will come to think of this perspective as objective — if a particular model seems off, then it is only a matter of shifting certain parameters to make the model correct. In this view, the entire world works according to a hidden logic that can be captured by ever more precise algorithms. But the work of modeling will never becomplete.
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PLAYING WITH MARBLES Anna Reser and Leila McNeill 02-05-2018 PLAYING WITH MARBLES Anna Reser and Leila McNeill February 05, 2018 Feminist approaches to climate change insist that we ground solutions in the particular, not in the domination of the universal and the fiction of the objective. To move beyond simple recognition of women’s vulnerability to climate change, the research and methods used to formulate solutions to climate change effects must begin from marginal lives, with an understanding of gender inequality.*
REALITY TV
Real Life 01-29-2018REALITY TV
Real Life January 29, 2018 When reality TV stages its rituals of confession and exposure, they don’t reconstruct the illusion of a pre-existing personal privacy. They confirm what we are all coming to accept: “Reality” is not what evades capture — the unmediated “authentic” life lived in the moment purely for its own sake — but what can be mobilized forattention.
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DELETED SCENES
Linda Besner 01-29-2018DELETED SCENES
Linda Besner January 29, 2018 For scripted television and movies, "behind-the-scenes" footage offers committed audiences the actors and directors as substitutes, so the viewer can continue the relationship they've forged with fictional characters by displacing these emotions onto real human beings. For reality television, these "extras" promise an honesty beyond the honesty. Reality television takes off one disguise — the false mustache of fiction — only to don a more complex one: the disguise that looks like a natural face.*
SWEET NOTHINGS
Kelli Korducki 01-29-2018SWEET NOTHINGS
Kelli Korducki January 29, 2018 Sixteen years after The Bachelor first aired, viewers know how the story ends. Few of the couples brought together by the show have made it to the proverbial altar, let alone beyond it. As if that was ever the point. What makes The Bachelor appealing isn't the naive romanticism of its audience but the show's imposition of structure onto a process whose offscreen equivalent lacks a clear narrative arc.*
ALTERNATIVE
Real Life 01-22-2018ALTERNATIVE
Real Life January 22, 2018 The idea of “alternative” has always carried with it a sense of individual alienation and the faith in a community that might resolve or redeem it. The prominence of the alt-right, in discrediting the term, is also threatening to discredit the promise that has always been latent within it: that an ultimately inclusive solidarity can be forged through opposition to a mainstream that relies on so manyexclusions.
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NO ALTERNATIVE
Gavin Mueller 01-22-2018NO ALTERNATIVE
Gavin Mueller January 22, 2018 Before, in the 1990s, one radical solution was finding means of creating more critical, combative, active media consumers and expanding the range of perspectives on offer. “Alternative” was, it seems to me now, itself a kind of insufficient consumerist prerogative, a demand for more choices that was agnostic to the content of those choices.*
LONELY ROAD
Adam Clair 01-22-2018LONELY ROAD
Adam Clair January 22, 2018 Even on a clear night, a Coast to Coast AM broadcast is still prone to interference. Electromagnetic waves are all around us, and each pop and sizzle is the sound of the show’s signal crossing paths with the sinusoid discharge of nearby microwaves, CFL bulbs, cell phones, wi-fi routers and other electronics. The crackling sonic patina is a reminder that you're not alone out here — between you and the transmitter, someone, somewhere, is doing something.*
EXTREMELY ONLINE
Real Life 01-16-2018EXTREMELY ONLINE
Real Life January 16, 2018 What if we thought about the “on” of “online” not as a location — I’m on this raft of a website — but as a kind of being attuned, as in being turned on or being on trend? What if instead of an escape from being “in real life,” we think of the internet as a genre or style? “Online” can be seen as structuring an entire a way of being in the world. Akin to goth or punk or any number of cultural identities, “online” can be thought of as a way of doing things, not the place they are done.*
SHARPER IMAGE
Rina Nkulu 01-16-2018SHARPER IMAGE
Rina Nkulu January 16, 2018 In real time, outfits are noticed, witnessed, spotted in motion; they are incidental to existing in public space. We have limited control over the backdrop that frames us, or the people on whom we might make an impression. But on these forums, the context is static: a good picture of an outfit is a good outfit. And it has less to do with the synergy between the wearer and their clothing than between the clothing and the backdrop, as well as the meta-backdrop — the confines of the threads these images exist in.*
HOW TO DO THINGS WITH MEMES Eric Thurm 01-16-2018 HOW TO DO THINGS WITH MEMES Eric Thurm January 16, 2018 The existence of online jokes that require an extraordinary level of context to grasp continually trains us to pay attention to the way that context is demanded even in using what might appear to be commonplace language, forcing us to consider what we think is obvious and what is only obvious to us — and that what might seem obvious might really be totally obscure.*
CIRCADIAN MEDIA
Real Life 01-08-2018CIRCADIAN MEDIA
Real Life January 08, 2018 "Circadian media" — technologies that once helped situate consumers within or without the rhythms of a collective day — are no longer calibrated to one consistent daily rhythm but to countless rhythms at once. We're now embedded in an welter of circadian technologies, struggling to calibrate an abundance of circadian rhythms. Ideally they give our days shape and connect us to others who, for whatever reason, find themselves similarly situated in time. At worst they perpetuate a feeling of personal untimeliness.*
ALREADY LATE
Ana Cecilia Alvarez 01-08-2018ALREADY LATE
Ana Cecilia Alvarez January 08, 2018 I have since left New York, and have stopped checking my iPhone in the mornings because I no longer own one. Instead, when you dial my number, you’ll be ringing a flip: It does not hold me in a kind of addictive thrall: I need it, I use it, I forget about it. I have the same relationship with my phone as I do with my toothbrush. It is a routine activity with the wind taken out of it, done out of repetition or necessity rather than out of faith.*
AFTER HOURS
Linda Besner 01-08-2018AFTER HOURS
Linda Besner January 08, 2018 Off-peaking is the closest thing to a Platonic form of subculture: its entire content is its opposition to the mainstream. As an economic approach, the solution off-peaking proposes can seem unkind — it’s a microcosm of the larger capitalist idea that it is right to profit from the captivity of others. And yet off-peakers only want, in effect, to slow time down by stretching the best parts of experiencewhile wasting less.
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HERE COMES THE SUN
Adam Fales 01-08-2018HERE COMES THE SUN
Adam Fales January 08, 2018 Beyond merely establishing a set schedule, morning shows provide a sense of continuity. The same hosts appear every morning, continuing a conversation that picks up on the previous day’s stories and events. A morning show points to the newly risen sun in the sky. It says that today’s morning is just like yesterday’s.*
TOO MUCH NEWS
Real Life 01-02-2018TOO MUCH NEWS
Real Life January 02, 2018 “Information overload” made sense as a frame when we still had an intuitive sense of how big a newspaper should be, or how many stories fit into an hour. None of that is relevant anymore. “News cycles” are nostalgia fodder. Now we have “news feeds” that populate with stories just as fast as we can scroll. The limited spaces in which a shared sense of the news was constructed have become infinite personalized expanses. Our information problem has become “too much news” and “never enough news” at the same time.*
BREAKING NEWS
Nathan Jurgenson 01-02-2018BREAKING NEWS
Nathan Jurgenson January 02, 2018 After election night, we failed to put the feelings of shock and confusion to good use. The degree of disconnect between political reality and how journalists and pundits describe it was exposed, yet little has changed. We didn’t imagine different ways of doing things. The same mainstream outlets and often the same misleading commentators still have the job of describing the political world. It’s not enough to assume that, in the business of political journalism, competency simply doesn’t matter. It’s more plausible to assume that political news coverage didn’t fail at informing voters to perform their civic duty, but that it succeeded at somethingelse.
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TRUE CRIME
Elisa Gabbert 01-02-2018TRUE CRIME
Elisa Gabbert January 02, 2018 If we treat the news like sports, like a hobby, a dramatic “season” is more fun, even when some of that fun feels like pain. The disappointment of the losses makes the glory of the wins that much better. When I think of “fun” news days like Indictment Day, which couldn’t have occurred without the horror of Election Day, it’s almost like there’s another me, a spectator to the drama.*
EMOTIONAL OVERDRIVE
Navneet Alang 01-02-2018EMOTIONAL OVERDRIVE
Navneet Alang January 02, 2018 Captured in that phrase “I like to know what’s going on in the world” is actually a statement about the position of oneself in relation to that world: that to know what is happening is to better be able to situate oneself, to understand how one fits into the larger ebb and flow of this first draft of history.*
SPECIAL ISSUES: VISION Real Life 12-28-2017 SPECIAL ISSUES: VISION Real Life December 28, 2017 As the AIs behind image feeds come to “remember” for us, showing what they see in our aggregated lives and projecting our future’s past, we may become another sort of distanciated audience, with the same temptation to distrust what we see: Maybe it wasn’t really the sun lighting that outdoor shot; maybe we never really landed on Mars. Vision as presence, not absence — as responsibility for what we see rather than consumption of it — can contain the past and the future without being strung up between them.*
SPECIAL ISSUES: MEMORY Real Life 12-26-2017 SPECIAL ISSUES: MEMORY Real Life December 26, 2017 Most of the photos I’ve taken on my own are stored with services that make them arrangeable, reproducible, and public, with options. Some I took to capture the moment, and others, more and more, because the moment called for them. This form of storage is sturdier, but it leaves them at the mercy of elements less predictable than mold, and turns things infinite that were meant to be finite. Not all images are meant to be memories, but the technological systems we increasingly tend to default to for archiving don’t know the difference.*
SPECIAL ISSUES: PARANOIA Real Life 12-21-2017 SPECIAL ISSUES: PARANOIA Real Life December 21, 2017 Attention has become a scarce economic resource, and the efforts to commandeer it and disrupt our sense of control over it have become more and more intense and technologically sophisticated. Paranoia appears in this context as a kind of coping mechanism, a Pyrrhic effort to reassert executive function and reorient the self through heroic acts of feverish interpretation.*
SPECIAL ISSUES: MOVIES Real Life 12-19-2017 SPECIAL ISSUES: MOVIES Real Life December 19, 2017 New technologies have reshaped not only what sorts of stories seem narratable but what sorts of fantasies and fears feel appropriately cinematic. Social media have had a further effect, forcing films to accommodate the rise of microcelebrity, ubiquitous connectivity, routinized surveillance at the level of form and content. But this also points to how the influence is not unidirectional. As digital media increasingly “pivots to video,” the grammar of film feeds back into how we represent ourselves and how we communicate.*
BEYOND MACHINE SIGHT Olivia Rosane 12-14-2017 BEYOND MACHINE SIGHT Olivia Rosane December 14, 2017 On those nights when I have stayed up too late, binge-watching shows on Netflix or scrolling through Twitter, I have the disturbing sensation that the rest of my body has ceased to exist, and I am nothing but a giant eyeball, absorbing signals from my screen. The illusion persists, even as earbuds start to weigh uncomfortably on my ears and the bed I sit on hardens against my back. The brightness of the screen absorbs my focus like a porch light does a moth’s. In these moments, my body is telling me more articulately than the guilty tape loop in my head that I have stayed in one place too long, that I’ve seen too much. Something similar happens in the way digital technology is often discussed. Its more obvious engagement with sight distracts us from what is going on both beneath the screen and beyond our retinas. The visual component — the stakes for what we see and how we are seen — is overemphasized; its use as a metaphor becomesliteralized.
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TAPE MAGNETISM
Sam Carter 12-13-2017TAPE MAGNETISM
Sam Carter December 13, 2017 The cassette — tactile, requiring manual operation — represents a reciprocal power dynamic: it yields to a listener’s demands, and allows them to customize their experience without third-party direction. There are fewer ambient demands on one’s attention, and there is the feeling of a one-on-one connection with the playback. Where streaming promises the freedom to hear anything at any time, tape is seen to offer something even more valuable: freedom from.*
PICTURE BOOK
Adam Fleming Petty 12-12-2017PICTURE BOOK
Adam Fleming Petty December 12, 2017 Why have montages become so prevalent in kids’ movies? Viewing them as an adult raises questions for me: Are these scenes preparing my kids to speed their way through an ever-accelerating society? Is it teaching them pre-emptive nostalgia? But from the point of view of my children, these sequences are perfectly normal. Their lives arealready a montage.
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PERIOD PIECE
Jeremy Antley 12-11-2017PERIOD PIECE
Jeremy Antley December 11, 2017 Framing the practice of history as science is a misleading, even dangerous, conception. At their best, historical works are upfront in the deliberate but subjective selection and evaluation of sources used to build narrative. At their worst, they obscure ideological forces influencing methodology and purport to make objective claims. Games cannot hide their subjective nature so easily, but their procedural nature and their apparent openness to chance may obscure how susceptible they too are to injections of ideological readings. The game can be “played fairly,” and this can suggest that the playingfield is neutral.
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OLYMPIC FUTURISM
Annie Lloyd 12-06-2017OLYMPIC FUTURISM
Annie Lloyd December 06, 2017 Athletes, training at the limits of their physical capacity, project the triumph of ends over means as a kind of heroism. Severe injuries — not to mention doping — are common across virtually all Olympic sports. The use of steroids, stimulants, or other drugs to achieve higher athletic performance is technically illegal, but doping scandals are as much an Olympics tradition as the opening ceremonies. Russia recently earned the distinction of being banned from an entire Olympics in response to doping charges stemming from the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Putin’s utopia included high-achieving athletes, regardless of the cost; Olympic futurism imagines there should no cost to pay for achievement. It seeks to project a purity beyond the economic ramifications of competition.*
WAITING FOR WOLVES
James Freitas 12-05-2017WAITING FOR WOLVES
James Freitas December 05, 2017 The potential rewards of resigning oneself to happenstance compound when looking at an actual wild place rather than a reserve. On a recent evening, six other viewers and I watched a feed of what looked like flecks of static on an old, broken TV while our speakers emanated the sigh of nightfall in Laikipia County, Kenya — a pastiche of chirps, coos, and whoops, with the odd ambiguous groan. At this level, wildlife webcams blur into the realm of white-noise apps and “slow TV.” But wildlife webcams add to slow TV the promise of untamed liveliness. Life could trot into the frame — it might even stay awhile.
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MYSELF AND I
Safy-Hallan Farah 11-29-2017MYSELF AND I
Safy-Hallan Farah November 29, 2017 When you wrote under your journal avatar, it was tacitly understood that you were presenting a more private version of yourself, not just for safety reasons, but to eschew the expectations of daily life. You might want to tell an audience how you really felt that day in class, just not an audience of your classmates. Likewise, alt accounts are not only meant to evade the attention of authority figures, but to represent the breadth of one’s identity.*
PLAGUE OF METAPHORS
Sam Zucchi 11-27-2017PLAGUE OF METAPHORS
Sam Zucchi November 27, 2017 Your computer was infected because you did something morally objectionable, like torrenting a video game, stealing an album, or searching for porn. What did you think would happen? To let your machine become infected was to have been at the very least thoughtless and, at the worst, culpable — you sent the plague.*
HEAL THYSELF
Taylore Scarabelli 11-16-2017HEAL THYSELF
Taylore Scarabelli November 16, 2017 New regimes of data collection, aggregation, and analysis have the potential to revolutionize systems for the better, but they also threaten us with new forms of control, the ramifications of which we have only begun to consider. Like most other things in the datafied world, personalization is a byword for surveillance and regulation. As medical privacy becomes more and more unattainable and our bodies become increasingly quantified, the question becomes whether these “advancements” in care will have our best interests in mind.*
FADED PICTURES
Kristen Martin 11-15-2017FADED PICTURES
Kristen Martin November 15, 2017 That an external force — one I had wrongly assumed would forever preserve what I’d entrusted it with — had dismantled that narrative I had created for myself of my teenage life felt more unsettling than the hard drive crashes or misplaced envelopes of photos I had weathered before. Those losses, whether digital or analog, felt more under my control; with Webshots, a business decision destroyed my image anthology without my even knowing it.*
IMMACULATE CONTRAPTION Sasha Geffen 11-14-2017 IMMACULATE CONTRAPTION Sasha Geffen November 14, 2017 Cloaked in the visual language of futurity and transhumanism, 2049 reproduces contemporary capitalist value systems in its imagining of gender. Women sacrifice themselves for their partners or their children, and their sacrifices are revered with near-religious fervor. The film’s paradoxical treatment of its female characters — they are at once the reason for replicants’ liberation and utterly disposable — holds a blue-tinted mirror up to reproductive politics in the contemporary United States.*
ROOMS FULL OF MIRRORS W. Sebastian Kamau 11-13-2017 ROOMS FULL OF MIRRORS W. Sebastian Kamau November 13, 2017 Proponents of virtual reality have touted this illusion of embodiment as somebody they are not as a means of generating empathy for the other whose body and experience viewers are consuming. The format can supposedly serve as a panacea for discrimination and bias: If folks enter the lived experience of those unlike themselves, they can come to a better understanding of others and thus act more compassionately. But does VR deliver on what is being asked of it?*
FAMILIAR VOICE
David Rudin 11-09-2017FAMILIAR VOICE
David Rudin November 09, 2017 The Skimm, and newsletters like it, publish in a voice that feels like an uncanny amalgam of ideas about their readership. The form of their delivery blurs the distinction between personal correspondence and broadcasting, making it harder for the recipient to tell who is addressing them. A daily news roundup, or magazine published by direct delivery to one’s inbox may be harmless enough, but its hybrid tone feels insidious, and demands caution: It blurs the line between institutions and friends.*
ALL EARS
Adam Clair 11-08-2017ALL EARS
Adam Clair November 08, 2017 The mesmerizing freedom of streaming services traps us in a cycle of deskilled consumption that greases the wheels for deskilled production. Spotify offers not just escapism after work, but often, a lubricant to more easily get through the workday, background music specially fitted for any desk job. By dispensing with the contextual ornamentation, streaming services align themselves with other Silicon Valley productivity apps. The music may entertain but it also numbs.*
PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION Mary Pappalardo 11-07-2017 PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION Mary Pappalardo November 07, 2017 At the museums I had felt an imposing closure when I did not expect it; the regular interruption of photography reminded me that in a sense my experience was always already a thing that had happened, one that I would might show my friends pictures of after the fact. Surrounded by memorialization in real time, the present life of my experience felt abruptly shortened by dozens of strangers rather thanby me.
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SMOOTH TALK
Alex Christie 11-02-2017SMOOTH TALK
Alex Christie November 02, 2017 While the enhancements offered by beautification apps are often read as disruptive — the overlay distorting or misrepresenting our faces — writing apps swerve this charge by erasing the distinction between original and augmented forgery. The process of writing is not privileged here, nor is the subject’s becoming; rather, what matters is the final draft, our “best self.”*
BREAKING THE WAVES
Olivia Rosane 11-01-2017BREAKING THE WAVES
Olivia Rosane November 01, 2017 Designed to show inputs and outputs, maps and models can’t easily represent process. They tend to obscure the truth that the main danger of climate change is change: which means mess and violence and fleshy bodies against heat and water. The dominance of such maps in the visual culture of climate-change discourse makes the process of change appear much neater and more controllable than it actually has been orwill be.
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NET SHOP BOYS
Sasha Geffen 10-30-2017NET SHOP BOYS
Sasha Geffen October 30, 2017 That American masculinity considers shopping a taboo speaks, in a way, to its parameters, its limits. Derided as superficial and frivolous, shopping is in fact often a process of serious consideration about how you modulate your body in the world, how the interior life can be communicated by way of the visible presence. Grailed — part social network, part editorial outlet, and part resale store — is an aperture, albeit a narrow one, into how men negotiate their masculinity, how they resolve their bodies with the world.*
ECHO LOCATION
Corbin Dewitt 10-24-2017ECHO LOCATION
Corbin Dewitt October 24, 2017 The remixes on From Another Room are a recreation of “aura” with their invocation of physical space and sensory experience of distance. Listening to a song “from another room” does not immerse the listener in the drama of the song but rather in a new drama, a private one, partially removed, creating a voyeuristic disconnect, the same velvety thrill of eavesdropping. It is an active experience that replicates a passive one, cushions the listener, creates enough emotional space to envision a different room, a different life, pastor imagined.
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WHERE THE STREETS HAVE NO NUMBERS David A. Banks 10-23-2017 WHERE THE STREETS HAVE NO NUMBERS David A. Banks October 23, 2017 While Richard Florida’s past prescriptions of turning downtowns into adult playgrounds were indeed partly to blame for cities’ present inequalities, his latest work, The New Urban Crisis, perpetuates a much more fundamental error endemic to liberals’ approaches to solving social issues: the belief that measurements and rankings can be used to effectively administer means-tested redistribution programs. Though his faith in lattes and film festivals has been shaken, he still believes in the essential benefit of regulating a capitalist marketplace through a patchwork of conditional programs like a campaign for collectively owned property through land banks or co-ops. Nowhere do we get a universal program that is up to the task of eliminating the problems he has so dutifully measured.*
ERROR MESSAGES
Philippe Pamela Dungao 10-17-2017ERROR MESSAGES
Philippe Pamela Dungao October 17, 2017 We rely on autocorrect as we once did spell check, but there is a difference between the two. Spell check brings the mistake to our attention. Autocorrect makes the correction without our permission — without understanding the error. When “fucking” becomes “ducking,” the word sheds its intended meaning and function for something new and senseless. What is meant to heighten a phrase to a certain degree of intensity (“fucking”) makes it a blunder instead. Each letter is a unit of communication, a symbolic material measuring carefully what we mean, what we do not mean, what tone weintend.
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TO BE DISCONTINUED
Michael Thomsen 10-16-2017TO BE DISCONTINUED
Michael Thomsen October 16, 2017 Unlike the canvas or blank page, the camera is a tool of exclusion: Its frame and focal field subtract from an already existing scene. Motion picture editing and the logic of continuity is a check on this quality. During the same period, discontinuity was a refutation of this artificial consensus. In the aesthetics of discontinuity, the cinema has preserved the energetic cruelty of the avant-garde and waited for its politics to bleed out, leaving behind only the exclusionary mechanism of the camera and its frame.*
CLOSE READING
Navneet Alang 10-12-2017CLOSE READING
Navneet Alang October 12, 2017 There is warmth in the feed of images: a steady cavalcade of tiny, precious detail, a gentle flood of affection for both others and ourselves. For the lonely, sitting by themselves in quiet rooms and apartments, it represents an emergent social field, a kind of extra-bodily space in which one communes. The modal shift of ambient intimacy from text to the image is itself a minor analog of the broader one, from mass media to the network, from the body to its holographic pairing.*
EXTERNAL MEMORY
Madeleine Monson-Rosen 10-11-2017EXTERNAL MEMORY
Madeleine Monson-Rosen October 11, 2017 It is increasingly obvious that the internet is less an immersive playground, less a virtual environment, than it is an archive — a Library of Babel that is sometimes incomprehensible, sometimes sinister, but occasionally beautiful. What we encounter in that archive is an experience that is distinctly embodied and stands in stark contrast to the fantasy of virtual space.*
SEX POSITIVISM
Robert Astermann 10-10-2017SEX POSITIVISM
Robert Astermann October 10, 2017 People are allowed to be who they really are out of a presumed respect for this inner truth, but a fluid sexuality is rendered suspect if not impossible. If the media interpretations of the Pornhub data are any indication, society is less ready to accept the idea that sexual desires may represent only who we are at a given time or that we may not have a coherent and definite sexual “self” at all.*
DOOMSDAY PATTERN
Elisa Gabbert 10-09-2017DOOMSDAY PATTERN
Elisa Gabbert October 09, 2017 Nukes, like poison gas, can end up killing your own men and not just your enemies, depending on which way the wind blows, so they don’t make very good weapons of war. But in their theoretical potency, their supernatural mystique, they work very well as weapons of fear. The coldness of a cold war depends on reciprocal threat, the idea that assured mutual destruction will act as a deterrent against actually using the things. If it works, the nuclear weapons stay symbols, and we all agree to live in constant low-level fear: the pre-apocalypse.*
HATE MAPS
Linda Besner 10-05-2017HATE MAPS
Linda Besner October 05, 2017 For their intended percipients, a map of hate groups burns a painful symbology into the American landscape. A map of the U.S. dotted with swastikas and Klan hoods instead of place names is both familiar and unrecognizable — a layer has been added, or, perhaps, scraped away. A map raked with swaths of violent feeling makes hatred seem like corn or barley, something America is actively cultivating.*
TIME AFTER TIME
Siobhan Leddy 10-04-2017TIME AFTER TIME
Siobhan Leddy October 04, 2017 Linear time is an algorithm that has become so incontrovertible, so deeply foundational to our worldview, that it’s almost impossible to conceive of time any other way. It is unlikely that Facebook or Twitter or any other platform will change this with an algorithmic timeline, despite the concentration of power these platforms have. However, social media feeds do show that there are other ways of organizing temporal events. Are there other, new algorithms for time that we can develop ourselves?*
BACK TO THE LAND
Olivia Rosane 10-03-2017BACK TO THE LAND
Olivia Rosane October 03, 2017 The representation of exploitation of data users generate through use as an “act of friendship” recalls feudal ideology, which treated bonds of servitude as natural expressions of quasi-familial duty. Facebook and other social media sites replace the patriarchal hierarchy of feudalism with the seeming egalitarianism of a hangout session, making themselves the means by which we keep up with our peers, so that if we decide to disengage, we seem to reject not our oppressors, but our communities.*
SQUARE PEGS
James K. Williamson 09-28-2017SQUARE PEGS
James K. Williamson September 28, 2017 The new genre of Republican visuals — Republican Instagram — looks like an emphatic effort to socialize in a foreign medium, like an alien trying to blend into the midwest, like Governor Scott Walker enjoying a ham and cheese out of a brown bag lunch: the working man’s dose. He’s an example of the Republican sculpting the never-before really seen politician, a previously unimagined narrative far beyond the aristocratic duties of the seasonal thank-you card. On Republican Instagram, their fear — or our hope — of their quick fade into irrelevancy is imaginatively stalled.*
EDIBLE CREATIONS
Erin Schwartz 09-27-2017EDIBLE CREATIONS
Erin Schwartz September 27, 2017 Hampton Creek is one of a cadre of food startups advertising hefty scientific and technological qualifications, while advancing a vision of a future in which their product will be indispensable, woven into the fabric of everyday life. These visions have inspired outsize anxiety, scorn, mirth and suspicion, and the reactions make sense: Though the futures these companies propose are far from being realized, they still shape what is imaginable in the present.*
IT’S ALL YOU
Annie Felix 09-26-2017IT’S ALL YOU
Annie Felix September 26, 2017 As “it me” memes recirculate, those who relate to them are not necessarily relating to their particular content but to the general feeling of relating to something completely random. “It me” is not relatable because of its content but because the response itself — saying the words “it me” — triggers an intuitive sense of recognition. Interpretation is preempted. It becomes an intuitionabout intuition.
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FANCY FEAST
Danya Glabau 09-21-2017FANCY FEAST
Danya Glabau September 21, 2017 What to make of Moon Dust, rainbow bowls, and mermaid toast? These culinary artifacts are odes to a specific ideal of the modern capitalist woman: the woman who can have it all, the entrepreneur who can get a quirky idea to land in the overcrowded marketplace of quirky ideas, the well-off person who can turn their love for travel into profitable expertise, all while being beautiful and decidedly nonthreatening. They signify being able to chase your dreams and catch them, the sparkling fairy dust of success.*
AGAINST IMMORTALITY
Jasper Avery 09-20-2017AGAINST IMMORTALITY
Jasper Avery September 20, 2017 Science and the state are the synecdochic hands of a puritanical society, excising the unhealthy, the cancerous, pushing death to the margins. The outcome of the decision is entirely unimportant — we have explicitly held that the patient is dead in the first place. What exists is a warm cadaver onto whom all manner of ethical mess and biopower is inscribed. This two-pronged apparatus would have us all liminally alive, on life support, patiently waiting to be allowed ourdeath.
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INFINITE BINGE
Eric Thurm 09-19-2017INFINITE BINGE
Eric Thurm September 19, 2017 If the show is to be influential and have a second, third, and fourth life in streaming channels and continued conversation, the plates have to stay spinning, forever, persisting through a viewer’s experience with other shows, other stories. Finales conclude their specific show, but in the process are also charged with imbuing the entire medium with a sense of renewable possibility: Though this story ends, all stories keep going, indefinitely.*
TRASH LIFE
Ana Cecilia Alvarez 09-18-2017TRASH LIFE
Ana Cecilia Alvarez September 18, 2017 Political philosopher Jane Bennett asks in her book Vital Materialism, “Why advocate the vitality of matter? Because my hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption.” If we flatten the hierarchy of being and more humbly commune with non-human matter, humans might — here’s hoping — not extinguish that which we have assumed is already lifeless by treating it as lessthan alive.
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DINNER THEATER
Linda Besner 09-14-2017DINNER THEATER
Linda Besner September 14, 2017 In its evocation of a family dinner table with no past and no future — having no leftovers is one of the key advertising promises of these services — meal-kit delivery services promise that traditional family life can continue undisturbed even as its underlying structures undergo extreme disruption. If becoming an adult is learning to parent yourself, meal-kit delivery imagines that parent at sea in the overwhelming churn of an unmoored and unrecognizable life.*
BEING THERE
Nehal El-Hadi 09-13-2017BEING THERE
Nehal El-Hadi September 13, 2017 When members of marginalized communities engage in the production of change, they are not only showing up but also altering the nature of (urban) space in tangible ways. If presence is understood in terms of impact rather than mere physical manifestation, it is easier to see how online content can generate presence in ways as powerful as physically showing up at protests is sometimes taken to be.*
TOUCH SCREEN
Navneet Alang 09-12-2017TOUCH SCREEN
Navneet Alang September 12, 2017 Over time, one’s interaction with a phone becomes a series of muscle-memory patterns accompanied by visual and aural confirmation that, after a while, become almost Pavlovian. One might talk of interfaces as tool-like, or even ideological, but perhaps at root they are not merely mechanisms of interaction, but ways of channeling affect — of giving shape to the emotional dimensions of information.*
SEEING RED
Zack Hatfield 09-07-2017SEEING RED
Zack Hatfield September 07, 2017 The act of seeing Mars has always been a vicarious one. And although virtual spaces are usually associated with environments that lack any “real” coordinates, Mars might also be considered a sort of virtual zone, one where sight, and thus reality, is always made possible by screens and algorithms.*
SUBLIME ATHLETICS
Thuto Durkac-Somo 09-06-2017SUBLIME ATHLETICS
Thuto Durkac-Somo September 06, 2017 Digging through the statistics of one player’s season can quickly become complex. Sometimes complexity is beautiful. The search for clarity, for objectivity, brings a feeling of awe. If in sports, cameras can present the viewer with moments of catharsis, then analytics may express the inherent ingredients that go into thosemoments.
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IMMATERIAL GIRLS
Rina Nkulu 09-05-2017IMMATERIAL GIRLS
Rina Nkulu September 05, 2017 1. I am trying to understand how a “real” girl is meant to present herself online, and in the process, I keep avoiding eye contact with the camera above my laptop’s screen. The eyes that meet the gaze of a front-facing camera are ones that look right back at me: I am awarethat I’m
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WARPED IMAGE
Rob Arcand 08-31-2017WARPED IMAGE
Rob Arcand August 31, 2017 Stock photos have always seemed a little eerie, no matter what they depict; they are purely affective gestures, void of the visual difference that sets most photos apart as unique. In that way, an account like Dark Stock Photo is more of a fine-tuning of what makes the form so jarring to begin with. As Vic Berger’s grimly comedic video edits did for coverage of the 2016 election, or the comedy duo Tim & Eric did for cable-access television, this comedy works by isolating the already absurd within what attempts to pass as normal.*
PANIC CITY
Hanna Hurr 08-30-2017PANIC CITY
Hanna Hurr August 30, 2017 Tech companies have thrived by parasitically capitalizing on the social relations that cities make possible, collecting marketizable data on residents by mediating their communication and travel, and inserting themselves as brokers for a variety of goods and services that city dwellers provide for each other. Given how valuable cities have already been for tech companies, it should come as no surprise that they would seek to design whole cities directly.*
PROACTIVE PARANOIA
Robert W. Gehl 08-24-2017PROACTIVE PARANOIA
Robert W. Gehl August 24, 2017 While "proactive paranoia" sounds like a pathological condition reserved for users of hidden web sites, OPSEC politics — borrowed tactics for the dark web from military jargon for "operations security" — functions as a means to structure online social relations and from there build a social order. After all, despite scams, exploitation, and arrests, dark web markets continue to thrive. OPSEC politics need not be limited to the dark web.*
TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES Daniel Spielberger 08-23-2017 TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES Daniel Spielberger August 23, 2017 Receipts — shorthand for a broader desire for hard, objective documentation — come in the form of text messages, photos, footage, voicemails, and emails: the harder and more indisputable the proof, the better. Once receipts are unveiled, social media users are invited to investigate a situation for themselves, and then rejoice in “the truth,”an ostensibly democratic and decentralized practice that says less about the nature of truth than the fetish for objectivity.*
SPECTRAL POWER
Liat Berdugo 08-22-2017SPECTRAL POWER
Liat Berdugo August 22, 2017 The Israeli/Palestinian conflict has produced an inequality of visual rights. These visual rights include rights to see and to be seen; rights to look and to surveil; rights to be out of sight; and rights to have one’s image trusted (rather than be subject to “digital suspicion”). If “the gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates,” as Foucault has written, then the seer has power over the seen. An uneven distribution of power in the realms of economics, politics, natural resources, equality, and justice within a conflict zone also reaches the realm of visuality itself.*
MOTION PICTURES
Patrick Nathan 08-21-2017MOTION PICTURES
Patrick Nathan August 21, 2017 Via gif-based memes, our person-to-person language of motion is gaining a writing system. Like the photograph, which clips a moment out of time and freezes it forever, the gif has captured how it was that we moved in that moment. It liberates motion itself from time and elevates it to a mythology of movement; and it’s in this technological middle space where we find ourselves, right now, able to write this captured motion but simultaneously experience it as art.*
EASY ACTION
Natasha Lennard 08-17-2017EASY ACTION
Natasha Lennard August 17, 2017 Four years before Tinder was founded, I was painted a picture of radical sexual practice that looked something like the stereotype ideal of a liberated sexuality. Now Tinder, Bumble, Feeld and any number more hook-up apps sit snug on our screens, and I’m skeptical — not of technology’s ability to deliver a platform for radical sex but of the very idea of “radical sex” tout court.*
VOX POPULI
Erin Schwartz 08-16-2017VOX POPULI
Erin Schwartz August 16, 2017 Without the aesthetic pleasure of music, sound relies on its indexical content, sociality and physicality. So musical anhedonics seek out sounds for what they signify: culturally shared narratives and new entry-points for relation; radio stories, oral histories, films, music-making with others. Listening this way synthesizes the individual and the commons, reinscribing one’s place in the world through encounters with other subjects, both real and fictional.*
TAKING TURNS
Jeremy Antley 08-15-2017TAKING TURNS
Jeremy Antley August 15, 2017 Cards are played and dice are rolled, token markers are placed and subsequently taken away, all in service to a simulative model that offers quiet moments of contemplation rather than relentless stimuli and vicarious violence. But board games, no less than video games, are synthesized reflections of the society from which they spring. So also encoded in Labyrinth’s narratives are Western assumptions regarding the “true” nature of terrorism, and Western heuristics for understanding the cause-and-effect chain associated with terrorism are meant to be contemplated through play.*
FASCISM
Real Life 08-14-2017FASCISM
Real Life August 14, 2017 Online platforms have become instruments for meting out brutality, suppressing freedom of thought, reinforcing marginalization and social exclusion, and enforcing orthodoxy. But it makes sense also to think of fascism itself as a political technology, an approach to social control that relies on negating the truth, sowing confusion, destabilizing shared values, and setting unmoored bureaucracies against the population and one another.*
I REMEMBER
Astrid Budgor 08-10-2017I REMEMBER
Astrid Budgor August 10, 2017 Cibele allows the player, in an abstract way, to relive that experience of bonding online with a friend who may have nothing to do with your daily life. There is an invisible contract to these relationships, a more delicate rhythm than the firm commitments required to, say, hang out at a friend’s house. Transience is normal. People delete their accounts. They log off. They move to a different site, or their computer breaks.*
PUBLIC ENEMIES
Grant Wythoff 08-09-2017PUBLIC ENEMIES
Grant Wythoff August 09, 2017 We don't have to look too far back for another moment when dangerous new forms of political feeling seemed to correspond to novel forms of communication that were assumed to encourage the opposite. After World War I, it became imperative to understand not only how masses of people had been driven by their governments to violence and destruction on a scale never before possible, but also the networks through which these masses understood themselves to be part of a public. These theories weren't necessarily in conversation with one another, but they shared a desire to understand a moving target: the politics emerging from emerging media.*
THE AUTHORITARIAN SURROUND David A. Banks 08-08-2017 THE AUTHORITARIAN SURROUND David A. Banks August 08, 2017 The suburbs offer a promise of perfect order, even if it is always already deferred. One of the defining features of authoritarian personalities is a revulsion toward things, and people, that complicate their established categories. In the suburbs, everything is designed to have its specific place, and to walk or work in the wrong place is to transgress legal, technical, and cultural boundaries.*
TO FORGIVE
Linda Besner 08-07-2017TO FORGIVE
Linda Besner August 07, 2017 If lengthy public confession of complicity in collective sin seems self-indulgent, a quieter, private ritual of building a feed that will keep personal change at the forefront of one’s mind could be a part of a meaningful move towards atonement facilitated by digital space. While forgiveness may be a lure that attracts people to atonement, and moral restitution may allow for the most powerful changes when it reaches the public sphere, atonement for some may be a personal goal that does not come attached to any public act. For most, it certainly starts out that way.*
PICTURE YOURSELF HAPPY Elisa Gabbert 08-02-2017 PICTURE YOURSELF HAPPY Elisa Gabbert August 02, 2017 These people aren’t posing for a photographer, the selfie ad says; they are posing for themselves, and for their family and friends who might later see the selfie on social media. Ads “may refer to the past,” says Berger, but “always they speak of the future.” The selfie ad speaks of two futures: the future where you and your family are in the mountains, and the further future, where you prove you werethere.
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CLOSED CAPTIONS
Madeline Coleman 08-01-2017CLOSED CAPTIONS
Madeline Coleman August 01, 2017 The most defining characteristic of infinite scroll is its illusion of limitlessness. For that, it needs opacity: Anything that could cause friction has to be tucked away or sidelined. That’s why embedded metadata and quick hashtags work so much better than visible who-what-where captions do. Metadata nudges from behind, finessing photographs’ position in searches and the stream.*
POETIC LICENSE
Lauren Michele Jackson 07-31-2017POETIC LICENSE
Lauren Michele Jackson July 31, 2017 In what the Genius annotations page calls verse three, Kendrick Lamar makes an overt reference to Rihanna’s accountant woes, famously publicized by her own song “Bitch Better Have My Money.” Genius users notice the reference, and the lyric is highlighted — “How did the Bad Girl feel when she looked at them numbers?” But Riri isn’t the Bad Girl. She’s the bad gal (or gyal), a patois inflection Lamar noticeably includes in his pronunciation of the word. You don’t have to be part of the Navy to know that. Just a goodlistener.
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SCANNERS
Kyle Paoletta 07-27-2017SCANNERS
Kyle Paoletta July 27, 2017 It’s impossible to have read more than a fraction of the texts that become cultural touchstones, let alone all the texts we actually cast our eyes over and read. Seeing text is often all that’s necessary to construct and maintain an ethos. As text available approaches infinity, reading becomes reinvented less as a matter of comprehension or interpretation then as something visual and affective.*
THROUGH THE WIRES
Jane Frances Dunlop 07-26-2017THROUGH THE WIRES
Jane Frances Dunlop July 26, 2017 In 19th-century "telegraph plays," both novel and realistic, the telegraph returned a literal edge to the metaphor of deus ex machina — “god from the machine.” With the telegraph onstage, audiences knew there would eventually be news of some sort; it was no longer a surprise, as with the earlier device of having a messenger arrive suddenly in the last act. Instead the question became, How fast would the news arrive? Would it arrive in time?*
UP AND AWAY
Alex Quicho 07-25-2017UP AND AWAY
Alex Quicho July 25, 2017 The drone has become as ordinary to the war machine as the fighter jet. It has been designed as terrorism’s perfect nemesis, the imagined inhumanity of radicalism flushed out by a non-human hunter. Drones see no civilians and no sovereignty. They reverse the wishful rally for “no nations, no borders” with the “autonomous zone of slaughter” they carry like snails do their shells. Its rule is projected downward, a tyranny of presence, and whatever its vision touches becomes its own.*
IN LABOR
Eleanor Penny 07-24-2017IN LABOR
Eleanor Penny July 24, 2017 What, then, do we make of the artificial womb — a technology that seemingly allows people to control such production without the complications of managing human sociality along gender lines? By potentially automating childbearing, it seems to offer us the chance to unpick the stitches that tie people with certain kinds of organs to certain ways of living. However, with artificial wombs, the conspicuous labor of childbirth could be rendered invisible, mitigating one of the more overt inequities around which a broader insurrection could be organized.*
ADVANCE SCREENING
Cynthia X. Hua 07-20-2017ADVANCE SCREENING
Cynthia X. Hua July 20, 2017 Computer-based technologies change the way media operates as a tool of communication, establishing complex matrices of relationships in a way that fractures the previously unified narrative. In order for cinema to adapt, it has to bend back on the tropes it was founded on, lettingthem splinter.
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DIMINISHING RETURNS
Adam Clair 07-19-2017DIMINISHING RETURNS
Adam Clair July 19, 2017 Novelty is typically framed as offering some direct advantage for the consumer. A soda company, for example, might try to attract customers with a new flavor or a more ergonomic bottle. Novelty implemented on online platforms, however, often tends to alienate rather than attract users. How many Twitter renovations have sparked a predictable wave of outrage? Such changes often generate criticism and hostility from users, but that pushback is integrated into a larger calculation: Some degree of user grievance is tolerable if it ends up improving adperformance.
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ESCAPE POD
Sasha Geffen 07-18-2017ESCAPE POD
Sasha Geffen July 18, 2017 Unlike the Walkman, which played one album or mixtape and had no room for spontaneous choice, the iPod offered the opportunity to play anything from a given record collection in any environment. Different songs could shield the listener from different situations; if you listened enough, you learned which music worked best to drown out the noise of a subway commute, what sounded good on an airplane, what evaporated the shouts of a fighting couple into distant haze.*
MANDATORY UPDATES
Olivia Rosane 07-17-2017MANDATORY UPDATES
Olivia Rosane July 17, 2017 That I should feel similar guilt for my slow phone as I have felt about my slow eyes makes perfect sense: More and more, ability means the ability to do jobs that the economy requires. Upgrading one’s devices diligently forms a part of contemporary compulsory able-bodiedness. Having the technology that most effectively enhances the speed and efficiency with which we can access, process, and respond to information is a prerequisite for being a productive worker in the 21st century. To refuse is to fail.*
STILL LIVES
Patrick Nathan 07-13-2017STILL LIVES
Patrick Nathan July 13, 2017 A self-portrait is not its painter. An essay is not its author. These personae, these images of ourselves that we call our selves, are only narratives. Filtered through the same Instagram algorithms and quoting a shared language of selfie poses, each projected self comes to resemble the others: We narrate ourselves based on the narratives we read in the images and personae of others. The more we storify and cleanse our pasts and futures based on images, the more, like in Sherman’s Film Stills, the self itself corrodes, until we too may remind someone of a narrative uncannily familiar, a film never made, alife never lived.
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OFF THE MAP
Marisol García Walls 07-12-2017OFF THE MAP
Marisol García Walls July 12, 2017 I wonder if the new residents will ever ask about the people who lived there before them — whether, like my sister and I, they will try to excavate, in soil or online, the relics of lives that once took place there. Most likely, they will never piece together the past with the clues available, piecemeal, just as my sister and I were ignorant of the flood that had once changed the neighborhood where we used to play. My childhood home has become a thing defined by non-existence, a placemark for something that is missing.*
JOB DREAM
Kieran Delamont 07-11-2017JOB DREAM
Kieran Delamont July 11, 2017 If work — geared to your personality or not — is more difficult to come by, then what purpose does vocational guidance serve? The proposition of career guidance assumes that the problem is not a lack of jobs, but the market’s inability to connect you with them — it assumes that the work is out there in the first place. A service targeting job seekers while doing little to improve the material conditions of a precarious labor market risks offering little more than cajoling: Rather than connect you with meaningful work, it can help you derive meaning from whatever work you manage to find.*
BUGS AS FEATURES
Nitin K. Ahuja 07-10-2017BUGS AS FEATURES
Nitin K. Ahuja July 10, 2017 A growing awareness of the enteric nervous system as a signal mediator between the microbiome and the human body has led to comparisons to data transmission — what one reviewer at Nature has termed “bacterial broadband.” Endowing the organisms that live inside our bodies with the qualities of software lends credence and charm to the possibility of a complete system reboot.*
FOR THE MOMENT
Benjamin Haber 06-29-2017FOR THE MOMENT
Benjamin Haber June 29, 2017 To treat ephemerality as a practice of withdrawal is to reinforce the narrow, static understanding of public and private that informs too many discussions around digital communication, framing online privacy as a matter of choosing between the normativity of mass communication or the implied deviancy of the secret. The anxiety and vulnerability of being “undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network” (as Deleuze has famously described life under “societies of control”) leaves us scared or shamed into keeping secret the very forms of intimacy that make social media compelling.*
FIDGET SPINNERS
Jason Farman 06-28-2017FIDGET SPINNERS
Jason Farman June 28, 2017 Though waiting is a powerful tool used by companies to create a bond with their products and a promise of fulfillment for the things we long for, users and customers want to feel that their waiting isn’t in vain. This is especially true when users are confronted with complex systems that aren’t visible, as with computer code being processed or data being sent across the lines. Feedback becomes an essential tool for letting users know that the system is working, making the invisible arenas of computing life seem less threateningand off-limits.
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INSTANT RECALL
Molly Sauter 06-27-2017INSTANT RECALL
Molly Sauter June 27, 2017 It’s as if the wellness obsession with “being in the present moment” that has creeped into Silicon Valley over the past few years has resulted in a familiar technological hoarders tendency: if living in one present moment is good, living in endlessly arrested presents must be even better. A continual living in the present means there is no space for reflection, for coherence-building. There is just the continual, lepidoptery-like collection of “moments.” Memories turned into mere mementos. Remembering turns into reminding.*
LANGUAGE ARTS
Renée Reizman 06-26-2017LANGUAGE ARTS
Renée Reizman June 26, 2017 Just as a society cannot function without language, soon our societies will not operate without networked systems. But much as with the dominant languages we speak, we have a very limited amount of control over the structures we make use of online. Our agency and range of expression is inevitably curtailed by platforms as well as enabled. Artworks that function as “minor literature” of the internet can expose these limitations, as well as exemplify how we might still develop our own voice within them and despite them.*
STAR SEARCH
Charlotte Shane 06-22-2017STAR SEARCH
Charlotte Shane June 22, 2017 We were 15, 16, and 17 years old. Taking pictures, whether moving or still, was a stab at ascertaining information that felt like it should be attainable even as it could never be definitively grasped: Who were we — to each other, to ourselves, to ourselves when we were with each other? Filming was an attempt to interpret and further indulge in our access to unparsable personalities. Adolescence was our first confrontation with the magnetic unknowability of other humans, and we turned towards documentation in search of explication.*
PLAYER ONE
Michael Thomsen 06-21-2017PLAYER ONE
Michael Thomsen June 21, 2017 In “What Do Bosses Do?” economist Stephen A. Marglin argued that logistical technology and the advancing division of labor have made capitalist production a bureaucracy of deferrals, lacking individually charismatic leaders. This enforces a facelessness and a meaningless on workers, who become detached from any possibility for creative expression or self-realization through work. So it would be no wonder if they were to gravitate to play and its opportunities for role-play and experimentation as relief. A belief that art, or games, manifest individual passion to the point of obsession addresses an underlying fear that individuality is disappearing.*
THE STORY OF A NEW BRAIN Ava Kofman 06-20-2017 THE STORY OF A NEW BRAIN Ava Kofman June 20, 2017 It felt great to meditate for the first time only to be told that I was already off to a good start. But I knew — or, at least, I thought I knew — that I had not felt calm during any part of the session. I had to either accept that I did not know myself, in spite of being myself, or insist on my own discomfort to prove the machine wrong. It seemed that what the brain tracker wanted was less for me to know myself better than for me to know myself the way that it knew me.*
WEB OF LIES
Jake Pitre 06-19-2017WEB OF LIES
Jake Pitre June 19, 2017 Bad digital sci-fi isn’t necessarily propagandistic, but it does tend to stoke the wrong fears, leaving us complacent in the face of the genuinely fearsome; and it very rarely comes close to identifying the nature of modern authoritarianism, or to questioning our complicity. These are not compelling, artful or thoughtful representations of the digital era — they rely on flawed, and badly outdated conceptions of the internet, which they reduce to a narrative “Other”: a mysterious imposition on our lives, or an alternative reality controlled by malevolent forces, rather than a feature of reality itself. Media that attempts to depict “the way we live now” by envisioning the way we might live tomorrow should not be sosimple.
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MASS APPEAL
Vicky Osterweil 06-15-2017MASS APPEAL
Vicky Osterweil June 15, 2017 Today’s fascist style must concern itself not with aestheticizing the political as such — that’s already been accomplished after all — but instead must work to produce conditions of sufficient confusion, apathy, irony, or symbolic distance about what they are trying to do, so that they can fall within liberal democracies’ commitment to tolerance. The memetic and anonymous nature of fascist image production becomes paramount. There are no Albert Speer in the alt-right. Individual creativity is surrendered to the crowd, the mass, in exchange for a perception of powerful group cohesion. Their memes are often marked by a slapdash, cut-and-paste aesthetic — which, like Trump’s clumsy braggadocio, is precisely what makes themappear accessible.
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FORCED SMILES
Linda Besner 06-14-2017FORCED SMILES
Linda Besner June 14, 2017 I couldn’t help but feel that forcing the past to smile isn’t pure comedy. The smiles made the originals feel withholding, as if they had been deliberately cheating me of a level of interaction I had a right to expect. As the interactivity that governs the digital world influences our relationships with institutions, creators, and art pieces, it can feel as though art that doesn’t respond to us — that doesn’t signal an awareness of our presence — is refusing or rejecting our advances. We pay attention to it; why doesn’t it pay attention to us? The resolute deadness of the past can feel like a form of abandonment.*
ALL MY GHOSTS
Ruby Brunton 06-13-2017ALL MY GHOSTS
Ruby Brunton June 13, 2017 In an age where we meticulously scrutinize every opinion we place online and often post on “best behavior,” it can be a relief to encounter someone in the ocean of online performativity to be frank with behind the closed doors of a private chat. Before ever cultivating a meeting to look forward to, a stranger can be familiar in their strangeness.*
DOMAIN NAME
Lou Cornum 06-12-2017DOMAIN NAME
Lou Cornum June 12, 2017 But in the term ndn's notes of subversion and irreverence, as well as its widespread use in forming digital collectives and connections, ndn also signals the ways in which ndns build worlds even as ours are invaded and denigrated. This remains true in the ways ndns emerged on the internet and continue to use internet spaces for cultural expression, consciousness-raising and political organization. In my time on the ndn internet, the term has come to signify not just a clever transfiguration but also a digital model for how ndns might form new kinds of relationships at the outer limits of colonialcategories.
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HORROR HEAD
Stephanie Monohan 06-08-2017HORROR HEAD
Stephanie Monohan June 08, 2017 Many horror films position the digital world as a place we consciously enter that is corruptible by other humans and vulnerable to haunting. They’re at the very least tech-anxious, if not techno-phobic, although more dated films did not anticipate the more insidious ways that tech actually became embedded in our embodied lives, nor the utopian promise of tech and cybernetics that Silicon Valley would sell consumers in the twenty-first century. In Cronenberg’s worlds, the digital is made flesh, and that is horrific. In our world the horror comes from our inability to escape our flesh and what we encounter init.
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MY MANCHESTER
Zara Rahman 06-07-2017MY MANCHESTER
Zara Rahman June 07, 2017 The last terrorist attack we had in Manchester was in 1996. At the time, I was not old enough to really understand what had happened, but I can remember broad brushstrokes: breaking news on the television, announcements at school, overheard conversations that I understood little of, and a halt in our family visits to Manchester city center. This time, my phone took on the role of meting out information to me as I scrolled through to see, almost in real time, what was happening in my city. Knowing it was in real time made it feel treacherously close, but the events themselves were gut-wrenchingly distant from thecity I know.
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NECESSARY PURITY
Danya Glabau 06-06-2017NECESSARY PURITY
Danya Glabau June 06, 2017 Food allergy is peculiar among modern diseases because the patient’s memory and the real-time functions of their body are often considered more reliable than the way the body is mediated through modern medicine’s sophisticated technological apparatus. Much of modern biomedical practice makes a habit of suspending belief in a patient’s symptoms until it can be technologically verified, whether through a 19th century technology like a stethoscope or a computerized CT scanner. How can a disease be “real” in the 21st century if it cannot be validated by laboratory techniques that operate independently of human bodies?*
CLEARINGS
Jacqueline Feldman 06-05-2017CLEARINGS
Jacqueline Feldman June 05, 2017 In contemporary American English, epigrams like “Never forget” and “Never again” imply that remembering enacts something automatically. There is, from Nietzsche, a competing idea that too much collective memory inhibits action, working like a neurotic’s insomnia. Forgetting makes humans happy, Nietzsche argued, so each pretends to greater forgetting than they actually enjoy, inspiring jealousy in others. This mechanism, by which forgetting escalates, reminds me of an arms race.*
OBJECT LESSONS
Davey Davis 06-01-2017OBJECT LESSONS
Davey Davis June 01, 2017 Though it remains nominally a taboo (and in the eyes of the BDSM community a subversive, liberatory act), for my purposes, masochism, like sleeping enough and getting my caffeine and paying my bills on time, is a coping mechanism. For the person with the urge to escape selfhood every once in awhile, it’s one of the most direct routes to objectification; both self-care and stress release, it’s a mental health practice that’s gotten me through many years’ worth of work weeks. But since selfhood has a way of redefining itself, so too must the meanings of self-care, pain, and pleasure continue to change.*
SONGS OF MYSELF
Robin James 05-31-2017SONGS OF MYSELF
Robin James May 31, 2017 Though psychographic profiling has been around for decades, big data analytics and distributed computing have made it easier and more powerful to execute and implement, capable of targeting not just populations or market segments, but individuals. Such big-data driven psychographics (often called “psychometrics”) purport to be capable of both perceiving and predicting individual preferences and behaviors. Replacing essentializing stereotypes with abstractions that better account for intersectionality and individual situatedness, psychometrics represents identity-based political categories in a way that superficially resembles the way progressive academics have urgedfor decades.
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A WARM PLACE
Astrid Budgor 05-30-2017A WARM PLACE
Astrid Budgor May 30, 2017 In "altgames," mood is the key more than polish or mechanics or length. Altgames represent a revolutionary undercurrent in modern-day video game design, an ethos encompassing meditative peace as well as gut-churning dread. They offer players the ability to induce a feeling in themselves, like a song rather than a novel — a mood space unburdened by reminders of day-to-day life, and the power structures that make living difficult.*
THE DOMINO EFFECT
David Rudin 05-25-2017THE DOMINO EFFECT
David Rudin May 25, 2017 The language of app interfaces makes the complex processes of desiring and preparing food feel like completing a personality test: You simply check off a series of preferences and receive the right meal for you, as if the app’s magic alone had summoned it. These vitamin-like “moods” impose categories of experience onto the user. As we learn to map our desires onto these interfaces, we absorb their vocabulary; human experience is delimited, incrementally, by the limitations ofour machines.
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NO CONTEST
Britney Gil 05-24-2017NO CONTEST
Britney Gil May 24, 2017 The format of reality TV competition licenses and structures the cruelty staged for the audience’s delight. Manipulation, cutthroat morality, and contempt for weakness are represented as practical, even laudable means for attention and success; helping others is framed as a quick way to disappear. This narrative not only draws in and caters to audiences who are attracted to sadistic spectacle; it creates a pedagogy through which more and more viewers learn to enjoy conflict and humiliation as the rationale and reward for participating in contemporary capitalism.*
INFLUENCING MACHINES Geoff Shullenberger 05-23-2017 INFLUENCING MACHINES Geoff Shullenberger May 23, 2017 To assert that self-identified "Targeted Individuals" are simply undiagnosed schizophrenics underestimates the implications of their self-invention as a collective identity. By elaborating its own shared metalanguage and designating its own experts and information sources, the TI subculture has generated an explanatory system that aims to circumvent psychiatric authority altogether — and it is partlysucceeding,
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FIBER OPTICS
Leslie L. Bowman 05-22-2017FIBER OPTICS
Leslie L. Bowman May 22, 2017 As Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest have grown, rooted in the personalized curation of immersive images, they have become a destination for niche: taxidermy, dank memes, and bodily functions. These photos often reflect a curiosity that exceeds the restrictions of cultural norms: The familiar can still surprise us. We want to peer into an image that speaks to something within ourselves, perhaps buried. In some cases that image is primal, insolent, wounding or offensive; in others, soothing. As we collect these images, we are picking up stitches: our online lives are continually woven by the handy repetition of touching, tapping, zooming, and looping, coalescing into an invisible mass.*
SPACE MEN
Anna Reser 05-18-2017SPACE MEN
Anna Reser May 18, 2017 But between these two phases in the technological life cycle — critical science fiction studies and the careful analysis of futurist visionaries — is a larval process of quantification undertaken in documents like NASA's Habitability Guidelines. Hidden in these intermediary steps is the codification of the techno-magic, the incantation books that both set out the rituals for making new technology and cloak its subjectivity and irrationality in the Organization Man’s native tongue.*
SICK OF MYSELF
Rob Horning 05-17-2017SICK OF MYSELF
Rob Horning May 17, 2017 It may not be only depressed people who are tired of having to become themselves. Under economic conditions in which maximizing our “human capital” is paramount, we are under unremitting pressure to make the most of ourselves and our social connections and put it all on display to maintain our social viability. We are perpetually “unable to measure up” — we must, like any other capitalist firm, demonstrate an ability to maintain growth or become obsolete. But being nobody isn’t yet much of an alternative.*
SCATTERED ATTENTION
Linda Besner 05-16-2017SCATTERED ATTENTION
Linda Besner May 16, 2017 The design of online spaces seems to work against the intimacy of effective listening. The immediate tools available for broadcasting my reactions have button faces: I can like or love, feel sad or angry, laugh or be shocked. But these reactions are about naming and sharing my own emotions. They implicitly encourage me to respond by making a public declaration of my sensitivity to the joys or sorrows of others. This framing threatens to make me into the kind of person I most distrust: the kind of person who is always telling people what kind ofperson they are.
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THE APOPHENIC MACHINE Molly Sauter 05-15-2017 THE APOPHENIC MACHINE Molly Sauter May 15, 2017 A sense of ubiquitous relevance has been reinforced by the broader acceleration of filter bubbles, which are becoming a kind of bespoke reality. These screens are both displays you see the world through and sorting sieves, filtering it according to your networked identity. So events or data points can be presumed relevant because they were encountered at all, as they are derived from your personal string of encounters and linkages — incidental shared qualities among dispersed groups can become defining characteristics of shared world views, shared realities.*
CITY FOLK
Michael Thomsen 05-11-2017CITY FOLK
Michael Thomsen May 11, 2017 The normalization of suffering is a consequence of all systematization, implicit in all data collection. It has the air of a natural law, like entropy, which West describes as guaranteeing that every attempt to produce order and structure also produces disorder, and that progress in any given area must produce regression in another. It frontloads any system-wide view of life with a haunted anxiety about that system being unviable, something that will become self-evident when angry mobs start to form or corpses begin piling up where they weren’t expected. At some point, the two orders of magnitude — the individual and the urban — must collide.*
EYES WITHOUT A FACE
Rahel Aima 05-10-2017EYES WITHOUT A FACE
Rahel Aima May 10, 2017 Infinitely more exciting is the transposed comic-book dream of X-ray vision — seeing through the image to what the machine sees. I want to be able to access that invisible layer of machine-readable markup to test my vision against a computer’s. AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky described the feeling of intuition as the way our “cognitive algorithms happen to look from the inside.” An intangibly human gut response is just as socialized (programmed) as anything an algorithm might “feel” on the inside, clinging to its intuitions as well. It should be enough to take the algorithms’ output at face value, the preferences they ascribe to me, or to trust that it is the best entity to relay its own experience. But I’m greedy; I want to know more. What does it see when it looks at me?*
END NOTES
Juli Min 05-09-2017
END NOTES
Juli Min May 09, 2017 The video of the mother’s death by escalator in China (in a public mall, on another mechanism of transport) took this horror one step further. It was no freelance cameraman who had caught death on film and then sold it to a tabloid for a fee. Her death was captured by a surveillance video that was then shared with the media and forwarded to millions across the country in an instant. Her death was not appropriated from her unjustly by a paper, or by a cameraman. Her death never belonged to her at all.*
PLAY TO WIN
Sasha Geffen 05-08-2017PLAY TO WIN
Sasha Geffen May 08, 2017 Scavenger hunts attempt to exploit fans’ desire to command some attention of their own. They offer an opportunity to share something exclusive and scarce, something that might attract feedback, shares, and likes. While these promotions try to give fans a rare and engaging experience above and beyond the music, they are also designed to incentivize fans to perform free promotional labor, funneling the aura of the “real” back online to re-enchant the dematerialized musicproduct for sale.
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HERE TO HELP
Jenny L. Davis 05-04-2017HERE TO HELP
Jenny L. Davis May 04, 2017 People share their lives on Facebook, and that includes expressions of mental anguish. While it would be nice to think that such expressions will always be met with unstinting support and empathy from friends and loved ones, recent history indicates that our networks might not be so reliable. Social media users have a shaky track record when it comes to helping one another; a version of the bystander effect at times seems to come into play. That is what distinguishes Facebook’s new suicide prevention tool; it is a technology that exhibits both care and control, stewardship and intrusion.*
ON SEEING BLACKNESS
Ismail Muhammad 05-03-2017ON SEEING BLACKNESS
Ismail Muhammad May 03, 2017 Mamie Till knew how to use technology. More specifically, she knew that photography could reconfigure how we see black people, rather than simply reproduce oppression. She understood that photographic technology was often a tool of representation through which white supremacy deposited meaning and terror into black bodies; she also understood that the same technology could help subvert those meanings and combat that terror. Her gesture is an origin story for an entire tradition of contemporary black visual culture that disrupts the visual codes governing black life.*
IN OUR MIDST
Elisa Gabbert 05-02-2017IN OUR MIDST
Elisa Gabbert May 02, 2017 What, in the world, are we supposed to care about, and how much? I don’t think the problem is entirely trivial — because we can’t actually care about everything equally, especially not all at once. My responsibility may be infinite, but my empathy is not, and there is more evil in the world at any given moment than I feel physically capable of processing, much less addressing with due thought and care.*
CONSIDER THE LOST GLOVE Genevieve Walker 05-01-2017 CONSIDER THE LOST GLOVE Genevieve Walker May 01, 2017 You’ve seen them: on the street, the guardrail of the staircase leading to your laundry room or basement. There’s almost always one in the gutter, outside the nightclubs, the daycares. The crosswalks. Why crosswalks? Always by a car door. What happened. It’s not just an urban problem or a winter problem. It's an always everywhereproblem: global.
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HELP WANTED
Tatum Dooley 04-27-2017HELP WANTED
Tatum Dooley April 27, 2017 Advice forums have given rise to their own, call-and-response genre, with a set of rules and a narrative structure. The advice-seeker describes a problem typically in 500 words or less, condensing and cutting away the details of their life to leave familiar forms of trouble; advice-givers respond in recognizable tropes that, memorized, can filter down into day-to-day conversations.*
ROUTINE PROCEDURE
Alex Ronan 04-26-2017ROUTINE PROCEDURE
Alex Ronan April 26, 2017 When protesters came with signs, one clinic responded by hanging a 1-800-ABORTION sign in view so any media coverage came with free promotion. Another pretty effective tool is lawn care: remote activated sprinklers soak protesters, so landscape work is scheduled to coincide with protests, drowning out chants and giving protestors a choice between getting covered in mulch or going away. One clinic put up a rather effective hedge until police determined it’d be a perfect place for anti-choice protestors to hide a bomb.*
HATE THE PLAYER
Dorothy R. Santos 04-25-2017HATE THE PLAYER
Dorothy R. Santos April 25, 2017 It’s not the sort of game you would want to play again and again, and that is part of the point: to problematize the kind of repetition that structures other games. But the estrangement of PUA language from its customary context also allows players to focus on its strategic logic and form, and perhaps recognize, disturbingly, how often they have already been exposed to such rhetoric — how often they have been brought to play this game in the world.*
UPDATING OUR NIGHTMARES Nathan Ferguson 04-24-2017 UPDATING OUR NIGHTMARES Nathan Ferguson April 24, 2017 Judging by the way surveillance is often represented in culture, it can seem as though our ideas of what surveillance looks like and how it works have not changed much since both the fictional and real 1984: cameras mounted on buildings, human guards watching from towers, phone mouthpieces surreptitiously bugged, and so on. They presume individual targets tracked by government agents and figure the point of surveillance as being a matter of prohibiting behavior rather than channeling it toward certain ends.*
NEW SKIN
Tara Aghdashloo 04-20-2017NEW SKIN
Tara Aghdashloo April 20, 2017 Like for the militant Tom Cruise in The Edge of Tomorrow, suspended in a 24-hour time loop to “save the day” and repeating his mission from the beginning every time he dies, the interchangeable role of reality and fantasy stands in for a “reset” button we press as we forge ahead. Both the visual lexicon and format of the film are identical to computer games where you “lose” — not always accidentally — and repeat the round.*
SKY MINING
Siobhan Leddy 04-19-2017SKY MINING
Siobhan Leddy April 19, 2017 Faced with the blank canvas of outer space, we’re all, to some extent, toddlers with a fistful of crayons. Our imaginations run wild when we think about what we could achieve with other planets. We could leave this trash-can planet behind, with all its wars and climate change and corrupt politicians, and start over. Earth doesn’t have to be the main event but rather a rehearsal for utopia. It certainly sounds easier than trying to fix the mess down here.*
WORLD DOMINATION
Anna Reser 04-18-2017WORLD DOMINATION
Anna Reser April 18, 2017 In rewilding, we are drawn to the exercise of power across deep planetary time. We make use of an ecological understanding complete enough that humans can simply choose the one action that will create a “natural” chain reaction that accomplishes their goals with a minimum of “technological” intervention. And the recognition that climate change and rewilding are expressions of the same impulse only adds to the sense of totalizing power. It is intoxicating, almost erotic; the ability to bring the planet to the edge of death and then, capriciously, reset the conditions for it to bring itself back.*
FOREVER NOW
Natasha Young 04-17-2017FOREVER NOW
Natasha Young April 17, 2017 I’d always thought that to believe you are part of something bigger was mere pacification — I'm predisposed to a sensation of cosmic solitude — but the idea of a long now gives me comfort, like a light bouncing off the moon reassures us there is something familiar out there in the void. The future, like the past, is something to holdonto.
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WICKED GAME
Astrid Budgor 04-13-2017WICKED GAME
Astrid Budgor April 13, 2017 Conventional wisdom around videogames states that the more reactive and responsive a world is to players, the more involving it becomes. Den vänstra handens stig trades back-of-the-box variety for a ruthlessly clear vision: one that allows players the space to contemplate the ideas in the game without the incessant distraction of playing it. Den vänstra handens stig is not the player’s story; or if it is, they play the role of death: lurking in the shadows until they extend a single withered finger and end the story.*
CODE OF CONDUCT
Daniel Joseph 04-12-2017CODE OF CONDUCT
Daniel Joseph April 12, 2017 Platforms are the means for this enclosure, mediating activity for the purposes of controlling all forms of exchange around it. The sheer quantity of platforms that purport to be “Like Uber, but for X” shows how this process continues, with the goal of finding pieces of life that aren’t already commodified to bring them into the orbit of capital, taking things that were once free and selling them to us. Marxists call this “dispossession,” and platforms excel at it.*
MERCY MARKETS
Alana Massey 04-11-2017MERCY MARKETS
Alana Massey April 11, 2017 Charity crowdfunding — on sites like GoFundMe, YouCaring, GiveForward, or Indiegogo’s Generosity vertical — stages a much different version of “Would You Rather?” Declaring that you would rather fund a beloved local library volunteer’s anti-convulsant medication than the transition surgery for a survival sex working trans woman is obviously a very different kind of choice than saving hypothetical kittens. Choosing not to choose anyone to fund at all is yet another kind. In place of the projected fantasy self you’d like to be, there is a very real other on the other end of these campaigns for whom our choices are not at all abstract.*
SPOOKY ACTION
Linda Besner 04-10-2017SPOOKY ACTION
Linda Besner April 10, 2017 In recognizing the language of technology as the language of the mysterious, we are also recognizing a limit on our ability to understand our evolving world in purely rational terms. The fact that technology continues to feel like magic, even when we acknowledge its earthly origins, suggests that the rational veneer over this aspect of our lives conceals a deep well of uncertainty.*
NETWORKED LISTENING
Eric Harvey 04-05-2017NETWORKED LISTENING
Eric Harvey April 05, 2017 Streaming services, by delineating the post-possession future, are also stoking demand for its opposite, re-enchanting vinyl in the process. In on-demand streaming services, one listens to individual recordings, but these are not the “ceremonies of a solitary,” not as long as every click spins off information that is instantly privatized by outside parties. These contradictions keep the our understandings of public and private in motion.*
STUCK IN THE MIDDLE
David Rudin 04-04-2017STUCK IN THE MIDDLE
David Rudin April 04, 2017 On Facebook or Twitter, the content of an article is never the whole story; it is only the jumping off point for signaling and discussions by the very cultures bubble-bursting services seek to explain. What proves most galvanizing on social media is often unreliable; often its reliability is not the point.*
COMPUTER MOVES
Andrew Blevins 04-03-2017COMPUTER MOVES
Andrew Blevins April 03, 2017 There's a famous moment in Deep Blue vs. Kasparov that I find revealing. After staying up all night with his team trying to figure out a particular Deep Blue move, an exhausted Kasparov accused IBM of cheating. The move was genius, incredibly far-sighted, far above any move that Deep Blue had played so far, so much so that Kasparov believed it must have been illegal: He was convinced that only a human could have made it. Years later, it came out that Kasparov was kind of right; Deep Blue had selected the move at random, something it was programmed to do in the event of a certain malfunction. A main reason human-computer hybrids do so well at Advanced Chess is because the human ability to make a strategically random decision is stillunmatched.
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PERSISTENCE OF VISION Franceska Rouzard 03-30-2017 PERSISTENCE OF VISION Franceska Rouzard March 30, 2017 Livestreaming heightens the violence it shows. It can be an instrument of violence in itself. Some with hateful intentions are emboldened by the knowledge of an audience; for those being filmed, the exposure can add humiliation and shame to mounting fear. Those of us who watch from our iPhones and computers know that what we are witnessing is not over. We are helpless and complicit.*
WHERE ARE YOU REALLY FROM Zara Rahman 03-29-2017 WHERE ARE YOU REALLY FROM Zara Rahman March 29, 2017 For all the 1990s utopian dreams of the internet as a space where nation-state borders don’t matter, what we’ve ended up with is an online version of our offline realities, in which borders are not transcended but instead exaggerated. Citizenships aren't ignored but instead enforced more strongly, with internet users being put into stronger categories rather than having boundaries blurred like we had hoped. Data and the categorization of people and their identities have become more important than we ever imagined it would.*
FREE ROAMING
Robert Minto 03-28-2017FREE ROAMING
Robert Minto March 28, 2017 The music of the final cutscene fades, and my character stands alone in a field. I stare at him and he stares into the sunset. In my world, outside the game, it’s 2 a.m. I’ve stayed up to finish, and now I find myself glancing around, guilty. Guilty not because of the hour, but because of what I do next: The game’s over, but I don’t turnit off.
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DIVIDING LINES
Mayukh Sen 03-27-2017DIVIDING LINES
Mayukh Sen March 27, 2017 There is no denying Google Earth has a sleek, handsome interface. When I log on to it, a cerulean blue orb pivots along an arc against a pitch-black sky dotted with stars, suggesting a reckoning with vastness. It evokes childlike wonder within me; I feel as if I’m an astronaut orbiting the world. But Google Earth is not a vaccine for everyone’s homesickness. For those of us whose corners of the world are considered “remote” or “uncharted” from an essentialist white, Western perspective, the interface is far from seamless.*
SLEEP COUNTRY
Linda Besner 03-23-2017SLEEP COUNTRY
Linda Besner March 23, 2017 Imagination aids and sleep aids are not necessarily at odds with each other — part of what people seem to be looking for in relaxation sounds and videos is to be transported outside of themselves. Going to a café costs money, but listening to “Relaxing Sounds of Busy Cafe Ambient Noise for Creative Productivity – 2 hrs” on YouTube is free. For some listeners, these are the sounds of home, while for others they may connote travel. But for the duration of the audio experience, all are mentally inhabiting the same space, listening to the same birds singing, the same door flapping open to the desert.*
LONGING FOR TOMORROW Mary Wang 03-22-2017 LONGING FOR TOMORROW Mary Wang March 22, 2017 Amid the divisiveness of the current political climate, a subcategory of sci-fi cinema becomes newly relevant. Romantic science fiction films shift the genre’s focus to the future of human connection. The emotional worlds we create together, and the way we provide care within them have everything to do with justice and quality of life; why shouldn’t science fiction, in addition to imagining new paradigms for social and political life, offer new paradigms for how to treat each other?*
SAFETY IN NUMBERS
Tausif Noor 03-21-2017SAFETY IN NUMBERS
Tausif Noor March 21, 2017 Facebook's Safety Check recontextualizes any event as mainly of personal interest, or not — it is embedded as more immediate or more relevant based on personal connections rather than any other gauge of its significance: how they occurred, who was vulnerable, who was most affected, and who received aid and attention. It impedes a broader understanding of how tragedies can be politicized.*
MONEY TALKS
Aaron Miguel Cantú 03-20-2017MONEY TALKS
Aaron Miguel Cantú March 20, 2017 A rare artist or polemicist might be able to captivate and persuade millions through mere words and some luck. But in today’s fragmented media environment, amid unprecedented wealth inequality, the fight for truth on a large scale is waged by those with money and material power. Attacks on the media by rich bullies were still seen as a private matter; the panelists didn’t seem to appreciate the unified threat they posed to the fundamentals of the institution in apost-truth world.
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THE BEAUTIFUL ONES
Momtaza Mehri 03-16-2017THE BEAUTIFUL ONES
Momtaza Mehri March 16, 2017 There are bodies, or beauties, that the world does not make space for. We know and live this. To counter that, these bodies have created their own alternatives online. From the precision of winged eyeliner on plus-size black bloggers and dark skinned women who vlog their skin-care regimens and lives, to the black queer men chronicling acid peel treatments via YouTube, each beautifying process is an assertion of resourcefulness, creativity and an ultimate faith in aesthetics as a healing practice. I don’t want to burden these daily routines with a symbolism that casts everything black women and femmes do as inherently radical. Sometimes looking good is just that. Looking good. Other times, it’s archival.*
TENDER BUTTONS
Brent Lin 03-15-2017TENDER BUTTONS
Brent Lin March 15, 2017 The flurry of fingers and dazzle of buttons on display in controllerist music belies the mundane nature of their performance. The virtuosic musician is doing something we do all the time: namely, interacting with interfaces. In the quotidian moments of our everyday existence, waiting for the bus or sitting in the office, are we not pressing buttons on our smartphones, clicking and launching algorithmic things on our systems, and navigating between various rectangular boxes on our screens?*
SUSPICIOUS MINDS
Eric Thurm 03-14-2017SUSPICIOUS MINDS
Eric Thurm March 14, 2017 It’s impossible to stamp out paranoia in a linear fashion. Its patterns turn everything into circles, circuits, and circuses, mirroring the sprawl of its elaborate theories — a sprawl that is often aided by the disjointed nature of a tweet or image showing up in your feed. So how can people move past paranoia, or at least step away from it momentarily? Logging off isn’t enough. Paranoia’s embrace will still be there when you come back.*
TALK THERAPY
Ruby Brunton 03-13-2017TALK THERAPY
Ruby Brunton March 13, 2017 The concept of self-sourced care is barely new, it’s not as though people are born with a therapist attached. Most self-sourced care requires a lot of money, time, resources, a supportive community or family environment, the ability to take time off work and everything else that many of us don’t have. Initial bereavement counseling usually seeks to reassure the bereaved that with time their feelings will subside and they will no longer need that same level of care. But in reality there is no timeline for grief, nor logic.*
ILLICIT MATERIAL
Phoebe Boatwright 03-07-2017ILLICIT MATERIAL
Phoebe Boatwright March 07, 2017 When images are restricted and coveted, image quality becomes irrelevant. Instead, accessibility trumps technical quality, and “poor images” capable of being easily spread, optimized for the broadest possible availability under adverse circumstances, become the most valuable — for the people, if no longer for markets. These images do not conform to any sovereign nation’s intellectual property law. They become mass art by and for the masses, not because of their content (which is mostly U.S. entertainment industry product) but because of how they are circulated.*
COVER STORIES
Tara Isabella Burton 03-06-2017COVER STORIES
Tara Isabella Burton March 06, 2017 I made many LiveJournal friends — many of whom eventually became close friends off the platform — but Alex was my one real LiveJournal crush. Of course, Alex was improbable, but when I was a teenager, the sheer fact of adulthood felt improbable. Every time I indicated, in diary form, my own desires, Alex would seem to not just understand them but fulfill them. The platform allowed him to appear as a deeply attentive reader of me.*
ODE TO THE VOID
Kyle Paoletta 03-02-2017ODE TO THE VOID
Kyle Paoletta March 02, 2017 The compulsion to blog, despite the overwhelming indifference of the internet writ large, is not new. What is unique to it, what distinguishes it from scribbling in a notebook you can secure with a key, is that an audience does exist — if only theoretically. And it’s that phantom presence, out there somewhere in the void, that shapes the work into something distinct from entries in a diary. That’s why when a trawler happens onto these strangers’ musings, he lingers for a while, entranced. It’s in those moments, more than during any Periscope stream or exchange of Snapchats, that the promise of the internet seems closest: watching and admiring another person’s brain, functioning privately.*
CONSIDERED ALTERNATIVES Linda Besner 03-01-2017 CONSIDERED ALTERNATIVES Linda Besner March 01, 2017 The reified world both does and does not hold the monopoly on our lived experience. For many of those who felt Trump’s victory as a rip in the cosmos as they understood it, there has been a second reality dogging ours, a phantom limb they can still feel moving. Our propensity for imagining what could happen — both positive and negative — means that other worlds continually press against us, dimpling the contours of what is. At times, their pressure can be hard to bear. Where can we go to explore the worlds that did not come tobe?
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FORCE FED
Vicky Osterweil 02-28-2017FORCE FED
Vicky Osterweil February 28, 2017 “Echo chamber” social grouping is driven instead by advertising-oriented algorithms of tech companies and data brokers, and their need to relate their targeting to results. Algorithms produce algorithmically measurable identities — just as marketing produces consumers — and not the other way around. Society is correspondingly reshaped in the image of the needs of the market. That’s why my interest in Dota led to YouTube trying to make me aNazi.
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EATING DIRT
Michael Thomsen 02-27-2017EATING DIRT
Michael Thomsen February 27, 2017 Along the spectrum of good taste and the lack of it, dirt presents the uncanny illusion of common ground in the middle, providing the hungry a compulsive and sensual experience while offering something emotionally raw to the well-fed to help them pass the time. We all take pleasure in fakes and mimicries. The unconscious joy of fraudulence is in its dependence on us as participants; accepting the deceptive confusion is the price we pay to maintain the illusion that our tastes, feelings, or reactions are somehow central.*
WORD PERFECT
Tatum Dooley 02-23-2017WORD PERFECT
Tatum Dooley February 23, 2017 Correct pronunciations are something one has to learn: there’s a physicality and practice involved in learning to say “Nietzsche,” which confers a distinct cachet within the dominant culture. If you can learn how to say Nietzsche, you can learn to say Chimamanda NgoziAdichie.
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THE LEARNING ANNEX
A.M. Gittlitz 02-22-2017THE LEARNING ANNEX
A.M. Gittlitz February 22, 2017 Self-described "Deplorable Prof" Michael Rectenwald recently called his followers, which include self-described White Nationalists, his “Twitter family,” while at NYU he felt like he was “being exiled.” Like many other defectors, he belongs to a movement that seeks to be for white men, in an ironic turn of which they are fully conscious, a safe space. For these defectors, perhaps hurt feelings and defensiveness could be said to have hijacked values and political convictions; the way this community made them feel about themselves became more important than what it stood for.*
RULE BY NOBODY
Adam Clair 02-21-2017RULE BY NOBODY
Adam Clair February 21, 2017 Algorithms may be sold as reducing bias, but their chief aim is to afford profit, power, and control. Fairness is the alibi for the way algorithmic systems reduce human subjects to only the attributes expressible as data, which makes us easier to monitor, manipulate, sell to, and exploit. They transfer risk from their operators to those caught up within their gears. So even when algorithms are working well, they are not working at all for us.*
TACTICAL VIRALITY
Hannah Barton 02-14-2017TACTICAL VIRALITY
Hannah Barton February 14, 2017 The Trump campaign played to a media structured to ultimately privilege attention over fact checking. The attention he garnered would become the only relevant fact about him; attention itself plays as its own form of truth. Any politician who, like Clinton, depends on the media to tout the dignity and decorum of the establishment’s political rituals is now vulnerable, regardless of their ideology. The demand that media be viral has unsettled any symbiosis between political pomp and media tact.*
MINOR INFRACTIONS
Rachel Giese 02-09-2017MINOR INFRACTIONS
Rachel Giese February 09, 2017 To watch children is to be complicit in the removal of their agency over what they wish to reveal. Children aren’t alone in this; we all face it now. But for my son and his friends, there is a certainty of being watched their entire lives. As my wife and I scroll through timelines and read texts, I wonder who else might be doing so, and towhat end.
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INTERIORITY COMPLEX
Rae Nudson 02-08-2017INTERIORITY COMPLEX
Rae Nudson February 08, 2017 In online groups, tastes can begin to converge, focusing on the same stores, the same pieces, the same safe ideas. The sense that one’s decor is always potentially on display, capable of being posted to social media whenever, tightens the feedback loop between what is in actual homes, and what appears in the design-themed posts of our carefully chosen peers. Instead of extravagant creative visions, it’s the same couches, the same rugs, the same curtains, remixed slightly into a different combination, and then settling back into sameness — a comfortable familiarity cast in the image of furniture.*
VIRTUAL ATROCITIES
Linda Kinstler 02-07-2017VIRTUAL ATROCITIES
Linda Kinstler February 07, 2017 Simulations have myriad advantages over static memorials and museum displays: They are protected from prejudicial defacement and wear from hordes of visitors, and the scenes they depict can, in theory, be made available to anyone, anywhere. CEOs at the World Economic Forum in Davos can enter the Za’atari refugee camp from the plush comfort of Switzerland. But technology has a tendency to fail and to age, quickly. When it takes on such condemnable subjects, the failure of the medium may be an affront to the victims whose reality it hasseized.
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TERMINAL DEMOCRACY
Christopher Schaberg 02-06-2017TERMINAL DEMOCRACY
Christopher Schaberg February 06, 2017 What Trump seems to despise about airports is precisely what makes them airports: the tenuous messes, the congestion, the high visibility, and the people there. His rhetoric describing U.S. airports as “third world” raised their profile as sites of crisis, places where some supposed form of un-Americanness could already be seen plainly. Little did Trump realize that in directing further attention to airports, he was loading a weapon that would not be entirely his to wield.*
SELFWORK
Karen Gregory; Kirsty Hendry; Jake Watts; Dave Young 02-02-2017SELFWORK
Karen Gregory; Kirsty Hendry; Jake Watts; Dave Young February 02,2017
In the realm of perpetual work, it would seem that sheer exhaustion would overwhelm the possibility of continual productivity. Taylorist time-and-motion studies would seem beside the point if we are always working. But the spirit of measurement remains central to the project of reconciling workers to their work. Only now, workers are invited to seemingly measure themselves, and use the data for their own personal betterment. This calls for different form of measuring that can assess the worker’s body as valuable property.*
GUNSIGHT
Thuto Durkac-Somo 02-01-2017GUNSIGHT
Thuto Durkac-Somo February 01, 2017 Gunshots recorded on police dashcams are choppy, the muzzle flash is too quick to be picked up by the camera sensor. But the timestamp in the lower right-hand corner tells us the duration and date of the shooting. Technical details, like the mechanics of a firearm. The cataloging of a killing with little gore. Body cameras supposedly promote police accountability. But body cameras are prone to malfunctioning and panicked camera movements, the obvious stability issues of mounting a low-resolution camera on a person’s chest.*
JURY DUTY
Adam Kotsko 01-31-2017JURY DUTY
Adam Kotsko January 31, 2017 These material incentives line up to make the most toxic aspects of contemporary internet culture — things like ideological bubbles or fake news or harassment campaigns — unfixable under the most prevalent media business models. From the perspective of driving user engagement, these behaviors are features. This is why newspapers allow readers to vandalize articles with racist and otherwise hateful comments — engagement is engagement! A good-faith reader is worth one click, whereas a devoted racist troll could be worth dozens.*
RE: DOCTOR JAMES KELLY Sasha Chapin 01-27-2017 RE: DOCTOR JAMES KELLY Sasha Chapin January 27, 2017 Watching a doctor work possesses a lovely mystery. You know what the motive is — figuring out what is or isn’t killing you — but you don’t know how which gesture will uncover whatever scary information is there to be uncovered. You know when the game is won but not how it’s played. Often, it’s as though a doctor sees you with more accuracy than you could muster yourself.*
CLOSE CALLS
Zara Rahman 01-26-2017CLOSE CALLS
Zara Rahman January 26, 2017 When calls drop, my mother worries. What if something terrible just happened? That one monthly phone call is her way of finding out about her brother, her cousins, her sister in law, her nieces and nephews, her school friends and their families, and of updating them on how we’re all doing, too. Talking is worse than not talking, but hearing voices triggers an emotional response far beyond that of the written word, and the janky technology amplifies that, for good and bad.*
LIQUID LUNCH
Rachel Stone 01-25-2017LIQUID LUNCH
Rachel Stone January 25, 2017 Soylent's slogan "use less, do more," implies that a body is only good insofar as it is a tool for mental optimization. Its shape is secondary, unmentioned, and because it is not named, unimportant. Soylent and SlimFast exist in an ad space that presumes gender is binary and nonfluid. Women are sold bodies without minds, and men are sold minds without bodies.*
WORLDS OF PAIN
Jacqueline Feldman 01-24-2017WORLDS OF PAIN
Jacqueline Feldman January 24, 2017 Machines, especially ones cold to the touch, seem robotic to us, displaying no affection. When a panel snaps, or a program loops infinitely, we notice without pity, recalculating our way around the breakage. Pain works inductively. Here none has been seen. So we respond robotically.*
THE LAUGHERATORS
Kurt Newman 01-23-2017THE LAUGHERATORS
Kurt Newman January 23, 2017 Irony, despite its instability, is highly normative: If nothing else, it delineates an in-group and an out-group. Small-d democratic idioms of humor tend to reveal the arbitrariness of moral conventions and to mock the pretensions of elites, but irony often has a profoundly aristocratic cast. You always need to double-check with the vanguard (whoever they might be) to make sure that you are on the right side of the ironic divide. You can never be sure that you have verified — properly, completely, finally — whether you are at the table or onthe menu.
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CAMP DREAD
Daniel Spielberger 01-19-2017CAMP DREAD
Daniel Spielberger January 19, 2017 In viewing Melania as "camp," a hateful figure is reimagined as farcical. By reconfiguring and repurposing Melania as an absurdist character whose presence momentarily undermines the legitimacy of her much more sinister husband, viewers can act as curators of the Trump spectacle, restoring some sense of agency and hope when it is in short supply. The camping of Melania isn’t a radical or necessarily effective political strategy. Rather, it’s a meaningful and distinctly queer method of poking fun that offers fleeting moments ofcatharsis.
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HEARING THINGS
Kastalia Medrano 01-18-2017HEARING THINGS
Kastalia Medrano January 18, 2017 We’ve already acknowledged headphones as shorthand for “Do Not Disturb,” and their presence often affords us the refuge of at least being able to act as though we don’t hear the noise of, say, catcallers, even though much of the time we still do. For hearing persons, the sense of sound is a crucial one to human companionship; we equate quiet with distance. It was probably inevitable that the technology would proceed in this direction as soon as we had the means to facilitate it. We’re moving beyond the idea of shutting out the world. We’re entering the era of curating it.*
ALL I KNOW IS WHAT’S ON THE INTERNET Rolin Moe 01-17-2017 ALL I KNOW IS WHAT’S ON THE INTERNET Rolin Moe January 17, 2017 Fake news is a convenient framing that sets the stage for feel-good, ultimately escapist solutions. One such solution is “information literacy,” which is being proposed by many educators as the antidote to fake news. But fascism is on the rise not because students can’t tell fake news from the slanted news promulgated by hegemonic interests. Rather, fascism is resurgent because freedom of expression has turned out to have little to do with what we can create and much more to do with how much we can consume.*
EMERGENCY DIALECT
Paco Salas Pérez 01-12-2017EMERGENCY DIALECT
Paco Salas Pérez January 12, 2017 Human language use isn’t amenable to the kind of crisp snapshots we would like it to produce — we speak in incomplete sentences, interrupt each other, and mishear. What matters isn’t so much that we have a perfect specimen, but that we have a grasp on the mechanisms that produce them. Indeed, linguistic and cognitive science research increasingly suggests that there is only a single human language — the language of thought, of which every other language is simply atype of dialect.
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CLICKBAIT THANATOS
Anne Boyer 01-11-2017CLICKBAIT THANATOS
Anne Boyer January 11, 2017 Poetry, which was once itself a searching engine, exists in abundance in the age of Trump, as searchable and as immaterial as any other information. As it always has, poetry experiments in fashionable confusions, excels in the popular substitutive fantasies of its time, mistakes self-expression for sovereignty. But in making the world blurry, distressing, and forgettable, poetry now has near limitlesscompetition.
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COME INTO MY WORLD
Emma Healey 01-10-2017COME INTO MY WORLD
Emma Healey January 10, 2017 At worst, it seems like all the information I consume — to say nothing of the systems that deliver it to me — is somehow cancerous. Even the best news curdles in context. But goodness strobes in and out, and the pleasures of Couch Mode feel oddly pure, even under the auspices of Twitter: ordinary life beams through.*
SOLVE FOR WHY
Nisse Greenberg 01-09-2017SOLVE FOR WHY
Nisse Greenberg January 09, 2017 The shifting of meaning of the equals sign is a movement to take away the mathematical teaching of the idea of equality and replace it with the mathematical teaching of the idea of finality. Instead of giving students the metaphor that on either side of equality is a set of contexts and thoughts that combine in different ways but mean the same thing, we give them the metaphor that if you do things in order you end up getting an answer, and then you are done.*
SPECIAL ISSUES: THE COLLECTION Real Life 01-06-2017 SPECIAL ISSUES: THE COLLECTION Real Life January 06, 2017 Real Life presents the complete SPECIAL ISSUES for your consideration. Please enjoy these re-runs until we return to our usual scheduledprogram.
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SPECIAL ISSUES: TRANSCENDENCE Alexandra Molotkow 01-05-2017 SPECIAL ISSUES: TRANSCENDENCE Alexandra Molotkow January 05, 2017 As a kid bored on a car ride or a teen stoned in afternoon class I imagined zones of psychic communion, immaterial common rooms where everyone I knew lived a second life. These spaces are now mundane, although, if anything, the internet proves that mundanity is an illusion and that everything is shot through with magic, or whatever you want to call it. Online doesn’t feel new at all.*
SPECIAL ISSUES: REPETITION Soraya King 01-04-2017 SPECIAL ISSUES: REPETITION Soraya King January 04, 2017 Repetition has a way of meting out time; in recollection I have a way of meeting myself again, and giving me, as I do, the time of day. Restatements of a theme hold immense sway in figuring out why things, happening as they did, ever induced rapture or heartbreak, turning a lifelong project into a more digestible course.*
SPECIAL ISSUES: FASCISM Rob Horning 01-03-2017 SPECIAL ISSUES: FASCISM Rob Horning January 03, 2017 Online platforms have become instruments for meting out brutality, suppressing freedom of thought, reinforcing marginalization and social exclusion, and enforcing orthodoxy. But it makes sense also to think of fascism itself as a political technology, an approach to social control that relies on negating the truth, sowing confusion, destabilizing shared values, and setting unmoored bureaucracies against the population and one another.*
SPECIAL ISSUES: STRUCTURE Nathan Jurgenson 01-02-2017 SPECIAL ISSUES: STRUCTURE Nathan Jurgenson January 02, 2017 Cities, buildings, clothing, transportation systems may not seem technological in the same way as digital devices, but they all are means by which social relations are sustained and given a graspable order. They all shape what kinds of thought are possible, what collective and individual aspirations can be conceived, what sorts of failure we may face. That is to say, they structure, and the innumerable iterative choices that have gone into them afford and preclude experience, extending new freedoms — and risks.*
SPECIAL ISSUES: BOTS Rob Horning 12-29-2016 SPECIAL ISSUES: BOTS Rob Horning December 29, 2016 We can only trust bots when they say they can think, though we will have no incentive to believe them. Economists have long insisted that humans respond only to incentives and believing anything else is false sentimentality. We will demand that our bots be equally as self-centered, otherwise we will find it impossible to control them.*
SPECIAL ISSUES: BLOOD TIES Soraya King 12-28-2016 SPECIAL ISSUES: BLOOD TIES Soraya King December 28, 2016 Some stretch of primordial time passed — I imagine, I can’t look it up right now — during which blood was only shed, spilled or stolen, before it was ever drawn or given. Blood is magnetic wealth; it is the stuff of lifelong pacts and biohazards. The life of a creature is in the blood, and we are bloody symbolic creatures.*
SPECIAL ISSUES: STATIC Alexandra Molotkow 12-27-2016 SPECIAL ISSUES: STATIC Alexandra Molotkow December 27, 2016 Getting together is a need — to withhold it from others is a form of deprivation or torture; to refuse it can be a form of self-harm, or evil — and there is no having gotten together, only a never-satisfied effort whose requirements change by the moment, detectable by its failures, identified as longing, longing alongside. Empathy is insufficient. But it makes life livable.*
SPECIAL ISSUES: WAYS OF SPEAKING Nathan Jurgenson 12-26-2016 SPECIAL ISSUES: WAYS OF SPEAKING Nathan Jurgenson December 26, 2016 New ways of asking yield different ways of knowing, redefining what can be thought and who typically gets to be heard. A sense of information abundance brings a sense of omnipotence and hopeless inundation in equal measure. How we listen, too, is altered, as we hear content in tandem with its virality, and momentum (rather than the medium) becomes the message.*
END OF THE LINE
Eli Zeger 12-22-2016END OF THE LINE
Eli Zeger December 22, 2016 When San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) responded to its passengers on Twitter with thorough, pessimistically tinged transparency, it became a hot topic for newsrooms both regional and national, and the subject of general praise: Here was a public institution, daring not to think positively. But this strategic spokesmanship embodied a disconcerting trend: the illusion of transparency through pessimism, even while only a fraction of the truth was being revealed.*
MEMETIC MORI
Kristen Martin 12-21-2016MEMETIC MORI
Kristen Martin December 21, 2016 The desire to seek out some sort of unvarnished truth, beyond the influence of “media” reflects the same cultural current that has brought us hyperpartisan Facebook echo chambers and fake news. It’s a confirmation bias of sorts. The “truth” that MyDeathSpace users are seeking to confirm is one in which death is neither wholly random nor taboo; MyDeathSpace both quantifies and qualifies death, in a way that death, in reality, resists.*
FIGHT FROM THE INSIDE Ben Gabriel 12-20-2016 FIGHT FROM THE INSIDE Ben Gabriel December 20, 2016 Trolling doesn't always need to be elaborate, of course. Sometimes it means throwing a wrench in the general direction of a machine, like swinging the tenor of a Reddit discussion with a strategic half-dozen downvotes. Trolling can be as much an act of empathy as of cynicism.*
TELLING TIME
Charlotte Shane 12-19-2016TELLING TIME
Charlotte Shane December 19, 2016 If you don’t have a good video game culture of your own, you might not believe a video game can teach you about love. When my brother and I were binging on digital fantasy like the controllers were IV lines to a morphine drip, the common belief was that video games instantly atrophied every admirable human quality: curiosity, intelligence, extroversion. Maybe bad games do that, as can bad movies or bad books. But Chrono Trigger was not a bad game, and it was our favorite.*
RE: SHOGO GARCIA
May Waver 12-16-2016RE: SHOGO GARCIA
May Waver December 16, 2016 Although I’m not the intended audience for Garcia’s coaching, I’ve kept his videos in my web of soothing content. To me, there is something “oddly satisfying” about the way he draws in men searching for pick-up advice and then offers them an alternative to patriarchal selfhood. It feels good to believe that he is staging an effective anti-sexist intervention in the online realm of masculinistself-help.
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STOP MOTION
Quinn Moreland 12-15-2016STOP MOTION
Quinn Moreland December 15, 2016 Stillness offers the chance to reflect, to meditate. But it is also hard work. Maintaining motionlessness is a feat of physical endurance, as shown by the quivering arms of the carefully balanced participants in many Mannequin Challenge videos. Ultimately, stillness is a struggle between one’s mind and body in the quest to reach acontrolled state.
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LIFE SUPPORT
Hannah Barton 12-14-2016LIFE SUPPORT
Hannah Barton December 14, 2016 Upwards of eight times daily I press a spring-loaded lancet against a fingertip, release the mechanism, and massage the fleshy digit until a neat globule of blood pools upon it. Capillary action sucks the blood — shades of red varying from scarlet, to ruby, or wine — into the test-strip proboscis of a matchbox sized analog blood glucose monitor. Blood goes in, and data pours out. I peer at the small screen as I wait for my body to talk in numbers.*
APOCALYPSE WHATEVER
Tara Isabella Burton 12-13-2016APOCALYPSE WHATEVER
Tara Isabella Burton December 13, 2016 It doesn’t matter whether Kek is “really” a chaos god. In the world of Kek, affecting the world with racist lies and memes — all with an ironic smirk — returns the possibility of free, meaningful action to believers, and makes them heroes. The freedom to not really mean anything you say becomes the only way to have meaning in life. Irony is the greatest freedom of all.*
DEFENDING YOUR LIFE
Rooney Elmi 12-12-2016DEFENDING YOUR LIFE
Rooney Elmi December 12, 2016 Why does the public feel entitled to displays of vulnerability from women, especially women of color, in the public eye, as though their success is a reflection of neoliberalism’s tendency to reward model minorities for their climb up the socioeconomic ladder until they start to “slip up”? For those most at risk of involuntary exposure — those expected to apologize simply for existing in public — self-exposure can be a form of strategy.*
IMAGE FEED
Claudia McNeilly 12-08-2016IMAGE FEED
Claudia McNeilly December 08, 2016 People who seek to consume images of food are looking for a different experience than that of eating it. Imagining an experience is its own experience. Like porn, we use “food porn” to imagine ourselves in a situation we may or may not want to be in. A safe dose of desire stirs us from the humdrum of our lives, waking us lightly enough not to be rude and giving us access to access to palettes and tastes we might not have found on our own.*
SELFLESS DEVOTION
Janna Avner 12-07-2016SELFLESS DEVOTION
Janna Avner December 07, 2016 The robotics field tends not to question the idea that exploitation is part of the human condition. If the robot's function is to “empower people,” then must it be created to make humans into masters? Must robots be created to be content with exploitation? Are they by definition the perfectly colonized mind? In one video online, “Jia Jia” — a Japanese female robot “goddess” in the words of her bot maker — is subtitled in English as saying, “Yes, my lord. What can I do for you?”*
OPEN WINDOW
Philippa Snow 12-06-2016OPEN WINDOW
Philippa Snow December 06, 2016 Anybody who expected the 21st century's horror films to represent women much better than their predecessors must not read the news, since masculine rage appears to increase in proportion to female autonomy. Women may be more visible — in higher education, in the workplace, leading in mainstream films — but in contemporary horror, a girl’s visibility is her vulnerability. Violence begins with the camera, and with these women’s willingness to appear, dressed or undressed, in front of it. Being seen is its own sick punishment. In these kinds of pictures, exposure is torture.*
CLASS ACTIONS
Jeremy P. Bushnell 12-05-2016CLASS ACTIONS
Jeremy P. Bushnell December 05, 2016 It may not surprise you to learn that, despite its professed concern for what happens “inside the classroom,” Professor Watchlist spends nearly all its time and energy documenting activity that goes on outside the classroom. The unspoken argument that fuels the whole site is that if someone holds radical or even liberal ideas, this must inevitably carry over into classroom bias; the expression of a political point of view can be taken as evidence of a pattern of discrimination. One thing transforms into another: This is the magic trick Professor Watchlist performs over and over again.*
SURVIVAL GUIDES
Rachel Giese 12-01-2016SURVIVAL GUIDES
Rachel Giese December 01, 2016 Networks of support dreamed up in living rooms and on dance floors evolved into hospices, high schools for queer teenagers, health clinics, film festivals, churches and synagogues, Pride marches, party circuits, and advocacy groups. Within the span of a few decades, institutions were built from scratch. Gay and lesbian writers penned a canon of novels, poems and plays. We didn’t have traditions draw on. We had to imagine ourselves, and our tools, into being.*
SONIC YOUTH
Rob Arcand 11-30-2016SONIC YOUTH
Rob Arcand November 30, 2016 Now more than ever, new speculative forms feel necessary to help realize what a world beyond oppression and inequality can look like in better service of the individual. Protest music must build movements around the technological possibilities of global resistance — and across the world, new modes of electronic music have begun to do just that. Leveraging “noise-sound” as an expressive tool of dissent, such artists have flipped music’s most fundamental elements, pulling the violence of modern warfare into loaded audio weapons with sights set on larger reform.*
DISTRESS CALLS
Mayukh Sen 11-29-2016DISTRESS CALLS
Mayukh Sen November 29, 2016 Who was Nicky’s brother? Why did he kill himself? Was his story like my own? We all found our space for therapy as listeners in these questions. For representations of suicide to have this deterrent effect, it can be essential that they seem real. But how can it be ethical to seek refuge in a real person’s death? Blurring the provenance to the point of ambiguity, as this call’s digital footprint does, perhaps offers one solution to this problem. The mediating technology itself facilitates an ambiguity that makes thisartifact potent.
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MAGNIFICENT DESOLATION Elisa Gabbert 11-28-2016 MAGNIFICENT DESOLATION Elisa Gabbert November 28, 2016 All three incidents — the sinking of the Titanic, the Challenger explosion, and 9/11 — forced people to either watch or imagine huge man-made objects, monuments of engineering, fail catastrophically, being torn apart or exploding in the sky. These are events we rarely see except in movies. The destruction of the Challenger and the World Trade Center are now movies themselves, clips we can watch again and again. The proliferation of camera technology, including our cell-phone cameras, makes disaster easier to witness and to reproduce; it may even create a kind of cultural demand for disasters. Also on film are reaction shots: We get both the special effects and the humandrama.
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INSTANT REPLAY
Monica Torres 11-22-2016INSTANT REPLAY
Monica Torres November 22, 2016 The default for gifs on Twitter is to autoplay, and many users do not opt out. I was among them. There was no warning that I was about to see something graphic and disturbing, as there was on the cable networks that were also showing the video. The gif of McDonald’s death was instead indiscriminately injected in between my banal tweets about Thanksgiving prep. Unmoored from even minimal context, the gif felt cheap and tawdry, with each loop replay increasing some engagement metric, while righteously confronting nothing.*
CULT OF ONE
Tara Isabella Burton 11-21-2016CULT OF ONE
Tara Isabella Burton November 21, 2016 To speak of a life lived publicly, in both digital and nondigital forms, can be to imply a duality of the self: the “real person” (whose being, thoughts, and circumstances determine who she is) and the “artificial” double who appears before others: a doppelgänger that is, generously, an aspirational figure and, ungenerously, a total sham. This duality rests upon an assumption that one’s true self is static, determined ultimately by the conditions into which one wasborn.
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RE: HYDRAULIC PRESS ACCOUNTS Alex Ronan 11-18-2016 RE: HYDRAULIC PRESS ACCOUNTS Alex Ronan November 18, 2016 The hydraulic press was invented by the same 18th-century British man who patented flush toilets. The proliferation of hydraulic press accounts can be traced to a Finnish factory owner, Lauri Vuohensilta, who started posting such videos on YouTube in 2015. Each one features a black-and-white intro set to a light metal soundtrack, and the persistent hum of the hydraulic press at work. On Instagram, clips start just as the destruction begins.*
EVERY PLACE AT ONCE
Crystal Abidin 11-17-2016EVERY PLACE AT ONCE
Crystal Abidin November 17, 2016 Digital artifacts are new vehicles through which we can grieve. Digital traces bear witness of our proximity to the deceased. Digital capsules are encouraging us to convert mundane memories into effusive memorials. Digital, digital, digital. Do they have wi-fi in heaven?*
WHAT WAS THE NERD?
Vicky Osterweil 11-16-2016WHAT WAS THE NERD?
Vicky Osterweil November 16, 2016 Before their emergence as goose-stepping shit-posting scum, nerds — those “losers” into video games and comics and coding — had already been increasingly attached to a stereotypical set of political and philosophical beliefs. The nerd probably read Ayn Rand or, at the very least, bought into pseudo-meritocracy and libertarianist “freedom.” From his vantage, social problems are technical ones, merely one “disruption” away from being solved. The sea-steading, millennial-blood-drinking, corporate-sovereignty-advocating tech magnates are their heroes — the quintessential nerd overlords.*
CREATURE SUITE
Tiffany Sum 11-15-2016CREATURE SUITE
Tiffany Sum November 15, 2016 If you have been to a zoo, you have probably seen passive and hidden zoo and aquarium species, which want no part of the public outside their cage or tank. At animal attractions in theme parks, live animals are mostly declawed or sedated for safety and security reasons. How can a fast and predatory wild mammal such as a Bengal tiger stay calm and nonviolent in a hotel “habitat,” as in Las Vegas’s MGM Grand? How much “medicine” and “training” are given to these wild lives to contain them? The animal bodies appear to be what they are, but there is hardly any behavioral semblance to their former wild beings. They may as well be machines.*
WORLDS APART
Sarah Beller 11-14-2016WORLDS APART
Sarah Beller November 14, 2016 Skype and FaceTime are designed to allow us to feel together when we’re apart: long-distance couples use them to keep in touch; some therapists and doctors now conduct clinical sessions over video. The video visiting technology used in the carceral setting can do the opposite. The technology seems designed to prevent intimacy and create a sense of disconnection. If Skype can simulate the feeling of being in a room with someone, carceral video technology can simulate being in a room filled with a dense fog and loud static; if you stretch out your hand in front of you, it’s not clear what you'll touch, or whether you’ll touch anything at all.*
WATCH AGAIN
Lydia Kiesling 11-07-2016WATCH AGAIN
Lydia Kiesling November 07, 2016 The worst thing about housework, I always think, is that it doesn’t end. No sooner have you made everything tidy then you dirty a dish, or drop your laundry in the corner, leave a glass on a table. I’m accustomed to thinking about tasks as things you complete and forget about, like films. But the season of “finished” housework is vanishingly short, like the life of a gnat. You have to find a way to enjoy the process, or you are doomed to disappointment as you seek to enjoy its fleeting effects. It’s a serial mini-drama, completely predictable, often maddening.*
YOUR BRANDS AND LOVERS Alana Massey 11-02-2016 YOUR BRANDS AND LOVERS Alana Massey November 02, 2016 Brands function more optimally than our friends. We continue to engage our friends on Instagram, of course, if we aren’t monsters, and because we do like the way the quilt is coming along, but brands would never do the feed-cluttering photo dumps from vacations that our friends might. Brands wouldn’t post virtually indistinguishable selfies every day without at least doing us the courtesy of saying which makeup products they’re wearing.*
SING TO ME
Alexandra Molotkow 11-01-2016SING TO ME
Alexandra Molotkow November 01, 2016 When I was growing up in Toronto, karaoke was reviled for reasons that now seem crass: There is nothing more nobodyish than pretending you’re somebody. The ’90s were less empathetic, too, and karaoke lays bare the need to be seen, and accepted; such needs are universal, and repulsive. We live now, you could say, in a karaoke age, in which you’re encouraged to show yourself, through a range of creative presets. Participating online implies that you’re worthy of being perceived, that some spark of you deserves to exist in public.*
IT CAME IN THROUGH THE BATHROOM MIRROR Natasha Lennard 10-31-2016 IT CAME IN THROUGH THE BATHROOM MIRROR Natasha Lennard October 31, 2016 My bathroom ghost sits somewhere liminal in my web of belief; he’s not part of how I typically navigate the world, which requires constant banal prediction. That it remains there, however, is ethically important. Your ghosts, too, your demons, your holy visions don’t need to exist; you could no doubt account for them scientifically. The bombastic tendency of Western science is to pathologize, and thus dismiss such things. But the question of what realities are possible should not just be answered by the measurable components of what already has been. Does maintaining the reality of your ghost hurt you or help you? Does a collective commitment to something mystical, outside “reason,” cause more harm than good?*
VERBAL TICS
Jacqueline Feldman 10-27-2016VERBAL TICS
Jacqueline Feldman October 27, 2016 Recently, I had to write the lines for an artificially intelligent bot, and, as I imagined where it was coming from, I tried to do so seriously. I wanted my bot to express itself authentically, in a way consistent with its experience, rather than being constrained to answer questions either by impersonating a human or by parroting back similar questions, performing semantic backflips like a SmarterChild. Later, as I tested it, asking questions, I was charmed by some of the responses, errors, choices no human would have made. The labored mistakes implied effort, and they were idiosyncratic, implying a self. “Oh, bot,” I felt like saying, “That’s not at all right. But what an interesting choice.”*
ADVANCED SEARCH
Franceska Rouzard 10-26-2016ADVANCED SEARCH
Franceska Rouzard October 26, 2016 Through the interests of people I opted to follow, and the people they followed, the well of knowledge was bottomless. On Twitter and other social media platforms, as many critics have argued, users volunteer to be bombarded with the consciousnesses of hundreds of thousands of other people. What naysayers fail to realize is that this unique characteristic is what makes social media inherently mystical.*
FIERCE ATTACHMENTS
Elizabeth Newton 10-25-2016FIERCE ATTACHMENTS
Elizabeth Newton October 25, 2016 Given how ambivalent and deeply personal the act of citation online can become, it makes sense that social media is littered with disclaimers about accreditation. “Retweets aren’t endorsements,” we say, trying to protect ourselves against accusations of referential irresponsibility. Cycles of social media seem to exacerbate the dangers of acknowledging bad ideas on the way to good ones. If we enable an idea’s circulation, even with the intention of critiquing it, we might be complicit in its potential misuse.*
CHAOS OF FACTS
Nathan Jurgenson 10-19-2016CHAOS OF FACTS
Nathan Jurgenson October 19, 2016 With his steady supply of metacommentary, Trump embodied the pundit-candidate. While his repugnant politics have had material consequences, he campaigned more explicitly at the level of the symbolic, of branding, of the image. His representation of himself as the candidate who rejects political correctness epitomized this: How he talked about issues was trumpeted by the candidate and many of his supporters as the essential point. It has been clear for decades that presidential politics have turned toward the performance of an image. But away from what reality?*
THE EDIFICE COMPLEX
David A. Banks 10-18-2016THE EDIFICE COMPLEX
David A. Banks October 18, 2016 Slow and steady changes can accomplish a lot with little pushback, whereas dramatic changes invite equal but opposite reactions. This is never more true than when political changes take shape in physical artifacts. But no labor dispute, lawsuit, direct action, Senate confirmation hearing, or eviscerating architectural review could stop Empire State Plaza. Through sheer executive force, Rockefeller got what he wanted. The ways in which a technology gains champions or becomes tightly interwoven with a culture over time did not have to happen for the plaza to persevere. This makes Empire State Plaza a rare example of a petrified vulgar technology.*
AUTO FORMAT
Navneet Alang 10-17-2016AUTO FORMAT
Navneet Alang October 17, 2016 To use Twitter is to become both its consumer, but also its bureaucrat. We propagate and internalize the logic of the platform, hundreds of millions of us performing these new behaviors in lockstep, beckoning each other to join in. It is a kind of auto-colonization: adopting the notion that a public digital self is a way to temporarily exceed the body, and embracing the personal brand as a mode of existence. We bend to the imagined Other like plants craning to maximize their exposure to sunlight.*
THE POETRY OF DIGITAL LIFE Michael Hessel-Mial 10-13-2016 THE POETRY OF DIGITAL LIFE Michael Hessel-Mial October 13, 2016 Image macros weren’t created self-consciously as poetry. The form first appeared in the memes of the early internet, from Something Awful to 4chan to Reddit. Some are based on familiar and readily understandable images: photos made viral through news media exposure, celebrities and brands, stock photos, and selfies. When image macros circulate widely online as memes, augmented with new words and sometimes re-edited, they accrue unexpected, spontaneous, collective meanings. They become poetry.*
LUCID STREAMING
Simon Lewsen 10-11-2016LUCID STREAMING
Simon Lewsen October 11, 2016 Perhaps we’ll get virtual-reality storytelling right when we learn to switch codes; creators can offer immersive experiences when the story calls for them, and they can use a limited, cinematic field of vision when they need to advance the plot. Maybe, instead of replacing the language of film, then, VR must absorb it. VR is both a radical new medium and an inadequate version of a preexisting one; it challenges narrative conventions and shows us how much we rely onthem.
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REMOTE CONTROL
Linda Besner 10-06-2016REMOTE CONTROL
Linda Besner October 06, 2016 Recently, I took a day to listen to a tiny fraction of Stefan Molyneux’s podcasts, which now number more than 5,000. It was an oddly pleasant experience, like taking a mild sedative and watching Polka Dot Door. Molyneux’s friendly voice ranged freely from topic to topic, circling the benefits of small government before touching on gun violence and flitting from there to peaceful parenting tactics and then to the moral ill of single motherhood. The effect is of allowing oneself to dissolve into a surreal universe where the laws of gravity are reversed and everyone is so much safer standing on the ceiling.*
GROUND CONTROL
Christopher Schaberg 10-05-2016GROUND CONTROL
Christopher Schaberg October 05, 2016 What it is about airborne sights that makes them worth not just capturing but also sharing, cataloging, indexing for search engines? It has to do with airportness, an underlying spirit of flight that crystallizes the whole ensemble of experiences that make up commercial air travel. Airportness transcends airports themselves. It has to do not so much with surface-level features such as sloping hallways and undulating rooflines, but a host of more disparate effects that make air travel something humans can internalize and learn to live with. Airportness is how flight becomes natural to us, expected and accepted: contrails in the sky, layovers between flights.*
DAYMARES
Alex Quicho 10-04-2016DAYMARES
Alex Quicho October 04, 2016 I’m not afraid of the dark because it’s light that has me not sleeping, keeping tabs on the public executions that are happening in the Middle East or in the Midwest, six time zones each way. “Blue light” — of screens, fluorescents, LCDs — is a sun that never goes down, upsetting our circadian rhythms. Texturally it’s thin, wan, and sickifying, a light that brings out the hangover in your face. It’s made to expose, cueing us into building trust through clarifying our perception, though it leaves us, too, in plain sight. Spanning a spectrum of technology we think is safe because it makes us feel that way, whether we’re sharing our location with an app to get a ride home or getting confessional with a friend via email, its omniscient eye comforts those with more to show off than to hide. Brightness tricks us into being unafraid.*
TIME CAPSULES
Fuck Theory 09-29-2016TIME CAPSULES
Fuck Theory September 29, 2016 Productivity drugs don’t take a “normal” or “average” person and “boost” their productivity. That is not their nature. Their true nature, misnomer notwithstanding, is to struggle to patch up the gap between our body’s capacities and the social idea of those capacities. Productivity drugs may incidentally help us make things; but they are prescribed to help us resolve the cognitive tension between what we’re doing and what we think we should be doing. Productivity drugs, in short, are better ethics through chemistry.*
NIGHT VISIONS
Chris Randle 09-26-2016NIGHT VISIONS
Chris Randle September 26, 2016 Brian De Palma has always been an early adopter, disorienting the eye with Steadicams and split lenses; he was digitizing his storyboards by the early ’90s. He exploits new technology to shoot from high, cloistered angles and cramped positions — positions only a voyeur could love. “Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen,” the old Margaret Atwood line goes. “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” But now you’re also your own exhibitionist. You can offer selective details through frosted screens; you can overlay versions of reality on semi-transparent frames. You can let watchers know that you’re watching yourself bewatched.
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THE PARALLAX VIEW
Michael Thomsen 09-22-2016THE PARALLAX VIEW
Michael Thomsen September 22, 2016 Video-game realism is less a practice of using computation to simulate reality than the practice of defending the visual from political or social meaning. To render a cube in a vacuum and give it a mathematical skin for players to marvel at, even if it looks like nothing but a block of wood — it’s strangely impossible to recall ever having touched or smelled or felt anything like it.*
QUICK FIX
Naomi Skwarna 09-21-2016QUICK FIX
Naomi Skwarna September 21, 2016 When I lose someone, my first impulse is to go through the receipts — reading every email, every text on record, trying to remember the first moment that signified some piece of it coming apart. Emails can be read over and over again for answers that never reveal themselves, nor relieve the present discomfort. So I read something else. Young Adult novels, cereal boxes, anything that will keep my reading eyes engaged. WikiHow, with its artless multi-step process to dealing with both existential woe and horse maintenance, was absurd enough to be exactly what I needed, even when the wisdom it provided was either common sense or notably odd.*
GRAVE SIGHT
Jade E. Davis 09-19-2016GRAVE SIGHT
Jade E. Davis September 19, 2016 Schadenfreude can and does go viral. But after consuming enough suffering in this mode, viewers may find that schadenfreude no longer affirms or soothes. If “we live in overstimulated times,” as Nicki Brand, a talk-radio psychiatrist in Videodrome, puts it, then it is no surprise that Max would be driven to seek more intense viewing experiences. After all, in the media world he has created for himself, where he re-broadcasts “everything from soft-core pornography to hard-core violence,” more extreme content can be hard to uncover. In its insidious intensity, Videodrome prefigures the digital social media machine we now live with, where elements of the dark web seep into the mainstream indexed web.*
RE: SEAN PABLO MURPHY Kaitlin Phillips 09-16-2016 RE: SEAN PABLO MURPHY Kaitlin Phillips September 16, 2016 It is easy to eat a celebrity. You can break them down to bite-sized morsels with a simple click, click, click, which is presumably why it’s called a “mouse.” Celebrities, on the other hand, that cannot be ethically consumed are either (1) not celebrities at all or (2) the best celebrities of all time. Consider the teenager currently eliding my fork: Sean Pablo Murphy, a skateboarder who was born in Los Angeles in 1997. Sean Pablo probably doesn’t know that’s the year Princess Diana died, let alone that her favorite food was bread pudding, and his only reference point for gratuitous public mourning may well be the makeshift altar for Bowie that lived across the street from Supreme. I worry about the teens.*
TASTE SPACE
Tom Jokinen 09-15-2016TASTE SPACE
Tom Jokinen September 15, 2016 Not long ago I discovered that Mosfilm, the Russian film studio that did its best and strangest work during the last decades of the Soviet Union, had posted most of their films on a YouTube channel. I have no idea where Mosfilm’s commercial and political imperatives intersect, if at all, but it’s a bad idea to watch Soviet films without the background hum of paranoia. After all, that’s the spirit in which they were made. Some have subtitles, others don’t. Except for the Tarkovsky films, already long popular in the West, I’d never seen any of them before, but had an impulse to binge. I watched them more as objects than as stories, without knowing exactly why.*
BOTLINE BLING
Angel Archer 09-14-2016BOTLINE BLING
Angel Archer September 14, 2016 Roxxxy is not a social subject. She is not making decisions to express any particular ideas about sex. Roxxxy is programmed with sexual ideas which are then executed, acted out socially with the user. Roxxxy then adapts herself, incorporates the particular ideas of the user, and replicates them. Roxxxy is not an object; she is a dynamic propaganda system. When I speak to my hypnosis clients, I use language like “reprogram,” “brainwash,” even “ideological re-education.” The hypnotic reprogramming is a sleight-of-hand which, like Roxxxy’s praxis of “Humanoid Self Persistence,” disguises the client’s desires as his very soul; he feels like he is an automaton because he is doing exactly what he wants to do.*
INFINITE SCROLL
Chelsea G. Summers 09-13-2016INFINITE SCROLL
Chelsea G. Summers September 13, 2016 The internet Dictionary is not yet the Library, but it could be. As dictionaries grow larger, so too grows the question of whether they will some day get so big as to become unmanageable. Programmers must stay one step ahead of lexicographers in perpetuity, staving off that collapse with the ticka-ticka-tick of their fingers. I imagine an interminable breathy race of introverts, arcane languages, and heated keyboards. How limitless the language, how exhausting the work of racing to contain it.*
FREE RECALL
Britt S. Paris 09-12-2016FREE RECALL
Britt S. Paris September 12, 2016 Search engines lead us to believe they are neutral tools that simply offer access to objectively valid and reliable information, provided users develop the correct sorts of queries. But in fact, the means of unearthing the information changes its nature. Our experience of search engines makes us see the world in terms of what is Googleable. It makes us crave information we know will be readily accessible. The experience of an immediate answer becomes as important as the content of the information itself.*
SUNSET BLOGEVARD
Isabel B. Slone 09-08-2016SUNSET BLOGEVARD
Isabel B. Slone September 08, 2016 Once my days of internet fame were over, I began to feel as if there was nothing left of me at all. I floated around like a vaporous ghost, waiting to be noticed nonetheless. Being a marginally famous blogger was the only aspect of my life that I had assigned any value to whatsoever, and when it was all over I was completely alone. We keep trying to do the thing we were once good at getting attention for, but never quite manage to recapture the zeitgeist that crested us up, thendropped us off.
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GIF HORSE
Britney Gil 09-07-2016GIF HORSE
Britney Gil September 07, 2016 If the written word exists in space and the spoken word in time, then gifs synthesize these, fleeting yet durable and ever redeployable. Gifs are both text and speech, and neither. Though concretized as digital files, they are not quite “dead” the way the written word can seem to be. Gifs not only move before the eye, echoing the poet’s gesticulations, but they also retain the magical quality of orality to change a conversation in real time. They are oral but notaural.
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DEFINITION NOT FOUND Rahel Aima 09-06-2016 DEFINITION NOT FOUND Rahel Aima September 06, 2016 There is no small irony in assigning a name to a form predicated upon resisting meaning, like penning a press release for a protest without demands. Yet it feels very right that asemic writing should emerge from that particular Y2K moment of hurtling globalization, techno-pessimistic paranoia and neon-lit fishtanks; a time of semiotic overstimulation where signs swarmed like white blood cells and where, in the immortal words of Horse_ebooks, everything happens so much.*
PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINES Chenoe Hart 08-31-2016 PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINES Chenoe Hart August 31, 2016 After ease of handling becomes an irrelevant design consideration for new vehicles steered by computers, designers will be free to stretch wheelbases, raise ceiling heights, and specify softer suspensions to make that movement more natural and comfortable. And since the people inside wouldn’t necessarily need to see where they were going, a growing range of possible wall fixtures — storage cabinets, LCD screens, perhaps a kitchen sink — could substitute passenger convenience over views of the world outside. The elimination of the driver will mean the end of the car as a car.*
AGAINST THE CLOCK
Maya Binyam 08-30-2016AGAINST THE CLOCK
Maya Binyam August 30, 2016 Like most filmic devices, real time postures as truth. And like most versions of the truth, it demands to be experienced live. But when the live experience is September 11 and the counterattacks launched in its name, bearing witness feels a lot like propaganda, or being made party to a regime that insists, despite all evidence, on the resilience of its sovereignty. The violence, put simply, gets to be a fiction.*
BROKEN WINDOWS, BROKEN CODE R. Joshua Scannell 08-29-2016 BROKEN WINDOWS, BROKEN CODE R. Joshua Scannell August 29, 2016 Northpointe, a software company that provides U.S. courts with what it calls “automated decision support,” is trying to sell itself as in the best tradition of Silicon Valley startup fantasies. You might not even infer from the aesthetic of Northpointe’s website that its business is to build out the digital policing infrastructure, were it not for small deviations the software-company-website norm, including a scrubber bar of logos from sheriffs’ departments and other criminal-justice institutions, drop-down menu items like “Jail Workshops” or a picture of the soot-covered hands of a cuffedinmate.
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INTERCONTINENTAL DRIFT Laura Maw 08-24-2016 INTERCONTINENTAL DRIFT Laura Maw August 24, 2016 Psychogeography accounts for the emotional effects of an urban environment on its walkers, claiming that a city was mapped in psychic zones. Why does one drift, instinctively, to the left hand side of the street when both pavements are clear? What codes these spaces with meaning? Dérive, then, is defined as unstructured drifting through urban environments to attune oneself to a city and its shifting ambiance. When public space — on the street or through a screen — is structured to keep us out, dérive moves beyond leisurely to becomepolitical.
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PAJAMA RICH
Moira Weigel 08-22-2016PAJAMA RICH
Moira Weigel August 22, 2016 In the heyday of John Wayne jeans, the break between work and not-work was clear. In the era of athleisure, time is more ambiguous. When the workday starts or ends, and where work happens, have become less clear. At the same time, selfhood has become an entrepreneurial project, a question of optimizing different activities. The ideal worker in this new regime is female.*
MUSE FEED
Stephen Thomas 08-18-2016MUSE FEED
Stephen Thomas August 18, 2016 Cluelessness about where the scene came from, or being part of a scene at all, is integral to Weird Facebook's culture. The fact that joining is as easy as sending friend requests to the people involved and just letting their content slowly take over your News Feed means that, for an art community, the barrier of entry is incredibly low. Some people take it very seriously; some people have been cultivating their audience for years. But randos don’t need to know any of this. Anyone can just wander in off the street, walk onto the stage, andstart singing.
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PET SOUNDS
Elizabeth Newton 08-17-2016PET SOUNDS
Elizabeth Newton August 17, 2016 If women are conventionally represented as patient listeners who accommodate the insensitivities of a person who speaks without purpose, pause, or perspective, offering unsolicited explanations that overwhelm bystanders, men are positioned as those compelled to inform, evaluate, and explain. Of this character type, the audiophile is the most intriguing iteration because he is the most ironic: a person who loves sound yet doesn’t listen.*
TORSO JUNKIE
Mayukh Sen 08-16-2016TORSO JUNKIE
Mayukh Sen August 16, 2016 Say what you will about spambots, but they don’t discriminate. They will message anyone. From one remove, there’s something to appreciate here: If Grindr implicitly promises a kind of inclusive universe in which the sexual playing field is leveled, at least in fantasy, with respect to all the isms otherwise rife in our social landscape, then a bot may be that utopia’s oddly inarticulateemissary.
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KIK STARTER
Chelsea G. Summers 08-15-2016KIK STARTER
Chelsea G. Summers August 15, 2016 Before 21st-century parents got fussed over their kids getting electronic mail from sketchy men, 18th-century parents got in a lather over their daughters getting letters from “crimping fellows,” period slang for fuckboys. This anxiety finds its apex in Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novels, which, in the eroticized freedom of their young female protagonists, warned parents about the dangers of men wielding pens, but just as a parental warning is catnip to the rebellious young, the novels also gave young female readers the delectable taste of autonomy.*
RE: OLD FRIENDS
Chris Randle 08-12-2016RE: OLD FRIENDS
Chris Randle August 12, 2016 For me, being a new immigrant to America, the passive immersion of this election feels both absurd and ominous, as if I were some émigré hanging around Vienna in the spring of 1914, scrolling through memes about Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Many people would share this compulsion with their therapist. I just looked at dogs on theinternet.
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BODY CAM
Rooney Elmi 08-11-2016BODY CAM
Rooney Elmi August 11, 2016 I made my first email account when I was 10 years old; the Hotmail address is so cringeworthy I can’t even utter it to myself in private. Nearly 12 years have passed and I’ve been active online ever since, from the clique-ish MySpace profile to the regrettable fan-fic friendly LiveJournal, live-blogging my first period, identifying a sexuality crisis, befriending like-minded people from around the world, and perhaps most conflicting: falling headfirst into a political awakening.*
FACE TO INTERFACE
Jenny L. Davis 08-10-2016FACE TO INTERFACE
Jenny L. Davis August 10, 2016 Human bodies are far from uniform. Sight, sound, and mobility vary widely across populations, and across the course of any individual’s life. For many, physiology makes face-to-face interaction inaccessible or less accessible than digitally mediated forms of communication. For a person who is physically impaired, communicating through text- and image-based platforms removes a significant barrier. The model that insists on face-to-face engagement thus erases the disabled body.*
THE SCRYING GAME
Alice Bolin 08-09-2016THE SCRYING GAME
Alice Bolin August 09, 2016 Making leisure your labor, an elaboration of “working from home,” can be a profound comfort. Collapsing the public and private can mean protection from both realms — stripped of some of the obligations of traditional professionalism, your public life can be more intimate and casual. And when you “be yourself” for a living, as beauty vloggers do, your private self can be infused with the armored posturing of a public persona. This elision can also, truly, drive aperson crazy.
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THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE Jacqueline Feldman 08-08-2016 THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE Jacqueline Feldman August 08, 2016 The hardware named Alexa responds to each question with a prefigured quip. She is a sleek black cylinder, an infinite curve. A light ring wraps the pole snugly, as if holding it, and fields the commands Alexa receives by flickering exuberantly. She’s a nerd’s dream girl. She takes infinite shit.*
SHOULD I TELL MY PARTNER I WAS PIGDICK69 ALL ALONG? Fuck Theory 08-05-2016 SHOULD I TELL MY PARTNER I WAS PIGDICK69 ALL ALONG? Fuck Theory August 05, 2016 My mantra for negotiating committed open relationships is simple: “Convert anxiety into desire.” Both of you are anxious about something. You’re worried about his fidelity and desires. He’s nervous that you won’t respond well if he tells you honestly what he wants to do or fantasizes about. Both of you need to figure out how to shift the affective charge of the idea in question — those things you think he’s doing or wants to do — from nervousness to arousal.*
MONSTER TUCK RALLY
Alexandra Kimball 08-04-2016MONSTER TUCK RALLY
Alexandra Kimball August 04, 2016 Our surgery monsters — uncanny mixes of flesh and plastic, human and technology — symbolize our fears about transformations in social life. But unlike 19th-century monsters, who lumbered in the pages of books and penny dreadfuls, our "abominations" are IRL. And in contrast to their predecessors, surgery monsters are not just monsters, but also creators, and they take pleasure in the startling, novel effect they have on others. The same anxieties that motivate our revulsion motivate their enthusiasm. However surreal their skin and features, they’re not from some other world, but ours.*
THE MISMANAGED HEART William Davies 08-03-2016 THE MISMANAGED HEART William Davies August 03, 2016 When a digital platform asks you “How are you feeling?” it specifically doesn’t want a number by way of response. The convivial approach is a means of getting around our defenses, to get at data that might be sold as more accurate and more revealing. To users interacting in real time, the question sounds like an opportunity for dialogue. But to the owner and controller of the platform, it generates data. When we express how we are, platforms hear this as a statement of what we are.*
FUNNY FEELINGS
Alicia Eler 08-02-2016FUNNY FEELINGS
Alicia Eler August 02, 2016 The jokes we make on Twitter have an indexed quality that improv and stand-up do not. To tweet or post reactively in the moment is to create a public archive of linkable emotional content, in which past catharsis becomes future nostalgia. Emotional echoes once available mainly through coincidences — overhearing a triggering phrase, reactivating a lost muscle memory, meeting a stranger’s look that mirrors that of a former friend, hearing a joke on stage that makes you miss a family member’s presence — become seemingly available by choice, on demand.*
VANITY PROJECT
Elisa Gabbert 08-01-2016VANITY PROJECT
Elisa Gabbert August 01, 2016 In a popular Quora thread, the top answers to the question “Why do I look good in the mirror but bad in photos?” all revolve around the “mere exposure effect,” which states that we prefer things simply because we are more familiar with them. Photos often capture unfamiliar angles, but even taken head-on, like a mug shot, they show us our true face, not the reversed face we see in the mirror. It’s the reflection that’s inaccurate, but to us, the unreversed facelooks wrong.
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THE RIGHT TO HAVE REMAINED SILENT Malcolm Harris 07-28-2016 THE RIGHT TO HAVE REMAINED SILENT Malcolm Harris July 28, 2016 When so much of our communication, shopping, even thinking happens on the record, how (and how much) can we achieve any meaningful privacy? Do we surrender our information in perpetuity to the public, to the press, to corporations, and to the government when it goes online? Is it naive to expect anything less?*
THE BABYSITTERS CLUB Jesse Barron 07-27-2016 THE BABYSITTERS CLUB Jesse Barron July 27, 2016 What unites Yelp, Seamless and Venmo is, in part, their desire to monopolize particular spheres of adult life (“spaces,” in Valleyspeak). They also offer services that diminish the user’s autonomy in a way that might — held at certain angles to the light — read as patronizing, when we’re supposed to be the patrons. We cannot find food on our own, or choose a restaurant, or settle a tiny debt. Where that dependency feels unseemly in the context of independent adult life, it feels appropriate if the user’s position remains childlike, and the childlikeness makes sense when you consider that Yelp depends on us to write reviews, and therefore must, like a fun mom, make chores feel fun too.*
RITUAL VIEWS
Linda Besner 07-26-2016RITUAL VIEWS
Linda Besner July 26, 2016 It’s an article of faith for me that reality can be coaxed to dwell inside fresh language, that our new and singular lives demand contemporary forms of expression. Yet I found myself at a loss for words that could contain or acknowledge the transmundane nature of what had happened. Death seemed to need old words. I scrounged my cupboards and came up with a candle. Then I opened my computer and typed in the search term “prayers for the dead.”*
POOR MEME, RICH MEME Aria Dean 07-25-2016 POOR MEME, RICH MEME Aria Dean July 25, 2016 One of the greatest tasks of blackness as collective being has been to hold itself together in something like cohesion, to exhibit some legible character. This cohesion only becomes necessary, perhaps, as the collective being is made visible to nonblack society. When considered on its own, in what to some are the shadows, this collective being is allowed to expand and contract at will. But when society shines a light on it, what is atomized and multiplicitous hardens into the Black.*
RE: WES LARSON
Haley Mlotek 07-22-2016RE: WES LARSON
Haley Mlotek July 22, 2016 Recently I’ve become attached to a stranger named Wes Larson, a bear researcher in the process of getting his Master’s degree in wildlife conservation. Based on his photos, his work seems to involve a lot of trapping bears, posing for photos with them, and then reassuring his followers that the bears are only temporarily incapacitated. He goes by @grizkid on Instagram and his captions from his different posts are a tone of voice I recognize, even if I’ll never hear it myself.*
INDECENT EXPOSURE
Rachel Giese 07-21-2016INDECENT EXPOSURE
Rachel Giese July 21, 2016 It was June, 2003. For the average non-techie at the time, it would have been entirely possible to believe that the explicit photos of judge Lori Douglas—posted to a porn website without her consent by her husband—had been erased forever when he had the site remove the pictures and destroyed the originals. But when they resurfaced, she was punished for his betrayal. She talks to Real Life about how shesurvived
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THE SPY IS A CAMERA
Madeline Coleman 07-20-2016THE SPY IS A CAMERA
Madeline Coleman July 20, 2016 At night in bed, phone in hand, we dispatch the unflattering angles and most embarrassing moments: no, no, no, OK, no. But to complain at the moment the picture is taken amounts to scopophobia. As it says in the preamble to the CreepShots subreddit, a repository for grainy zoom photos taken of unsuspecting women’s bodies: “We may be immoral, creepy, sinister (some may even accuse us of being ‘disturbed’) individuals but there is nothing here that breaks any laws. When you are in public, you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy.” The government might say the same about being on the internet. Of course, some people can still expect more privacy than others.*
NERVOUS? WE SHOULD BE Jane Frances Dunlop 07-19-2016 NERVOUS? WE SHOULD BE Jane Frances Dunlop July 19, 2016 When we regard nervousness as emotional glitching, it confirms that a clear signal is never a possibility: We cannot understand each other perfectly. We cannot feel together. We are living in muddles and tangles of our emotions as we strive to feel together. We live in the mess of misunderstanding. The unease that comes from being out of time with one another is necessary and not going away.*
MASKED AND ANONYMOUS Sharrona Pearl 07-18-2016 MASKED AND ANONYMOUS Sharrona Pearl July 18, 2016 The ubiquity of identity play, like in face swapping, obscures the line between revelation, reveling, and revolution. Empathy, envy, identification, and appropriation all intermingle. We almost don’t notice the transgressions anymore. They become comedic glitches, fascinating failures. Some face-swap images become popular precisely because they fail: They showcase the limits of technology in understanding humanity, as when faces are unintentionally switched with toasters, or breasts, or artfully arranged fruit.*
WHO WAS SHE?
The Coquette 07-15-2016WHO WAS SHE?
The Coquette July 15, 2016 You're one of those people who needs to commit daily acts of minor self-sabotage. Going deep into the ex-girlfriend's social media is a prime example. So is the urge to bring up the Instagram with your boyfriend, and I'm sure if we spent the afternoon together, I could point out another dozen little ways you've found to inflict emotional self-harm. Naturally, you do all these things for a reason. They fill your need for chaos. They keep you fueled.*
THE INTERNET IS A TOUGH ROOM Tom Jokinen 07-14-2016 THE INTERNET IS A TOUGH ROOM Tom Jokinen July 14, 2016 Online humor is riskier than stand-up or TV sketch comedy, and rewarded proportionally, because it has no scaffolding: no performance cues, laugh track, visual framing, or sympathetic buzz of the club to aid the gag. It’s naked, daring you not to laugh.*
THE THINGS WE CARRIED Ava Kofman 07-13-2016 THE THINGS WE CARRIED Ava Kofman July 13, 2016 Most thing-based Instagram accounts — for food, yoga, beaches — entice us to vicariously consume lifestyles and fantasies, but @TSA’s viral exhibitionism has the opposite function: to steel ourselves against making the same mistakes as those whose possessions are on view. @TSA instructs through these object lessons.*
SEEING STARS
Alex Ronan 07-12-2016SEEING STARS
Alex Ronan July 12, 2016 Andromeda bot offers a look at the physical universe, something that is, no matter what meaning we ascribe to it. The expansiveness that each tweet communicates makes me feel tiny. Even though the pain of losing Mark feels bigger than anything else. The stars shine for no one at all and the bot tweets endlessly to an unknown audience. We look to the stars for meaning, we make the bots that go on and onwithout us.
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JOCKS WITHOUT BORDERS Vicky Osterweil 07-11-2016 JOCKS WITHOUT BORDERS Vicky Osterweil July 11, 2016 In e-sports, biological determinism can’t be deployed to explain any gender disparity; female-bodied people can click a mouse just a fast as male-bodied people. So the masculinist bent of e-sports is not an unfortunate outcome but an initiating logic. It sustains a different project than celebrating physical excellence. It doesn't showcase a specific form of male-bodied performance so much as support a specific sort of male spectator: a straight middle-class boy full of resentment and patriarchal rage. This is and has been, around the world and across recent history, the sports fan par excellence.*
RE: ISABELLA KILLORAN Naomi Skwarna 07-08-2016 RE: ISABELLA KILLORAN Naomi Skwarna July 08, 2016 Killoran’s gestures are undeniably shaped by art — referring to Baroque and Renaissance paintings with equal parts wit and nonchalance. Hers are not the unheimlich magician hands of Ellen Sirot, but rather something unrehearsed and abstractly maternal.*
POST, MEMORY
Kelli Korducki 07-07-2016POST, MEMORY
Kelli Korducki July 07, 2016 To spend time inside the "Memorias" group, where a long-scattered village had recently rebuilt itself online, was to submit to the lush melancholia of diasporic longing. Members had inadvertently created a place that existed independently of the village’s present and past. Their community was a village of its own, a separate collective entity its members fortified together.*
TRUE-ISH GRIT
David A. Banks 07-06-2016TRUE-ISH GRIT
David A. Banks July 06, 2016 In today’s Troy, one can enjoy Brooklyn bohemian quirkiness at an upstate discount price in the inarguably real environment of Victorian dilapidation. Troy has turned half a century of neglect into a competitive advantage by recombining rust and rot into quaintness andauthenticity.
*
BOT COUTURE
Haley Mlotek 07-05-2016BOT COUTURE
Haley Mlotek July 05, 2016 Technologies that presume to innovate — or worse yet, “disrupt” — are often met with some hesitancy or weariness. They remove power from human hands, and ask us to trust machinery or algorithms. For couture, a trade founded on the belief that humans know best, this is an existential threat. But fashion thrives in the place between fear and boredom. “Manus x Machina” tries to show that wearable technology is not so scary after all; it’s all part of a familiarfamily tree.
*
AM I TEXTING MY FRIENDS WAY TOO MUCH? Mira Gonzalez 07-01-2016 AM I TEXTING MY FRIENDS WAY TOO MUCH? Mira Gonzalez July 01, 2016 I text my friends all day long which is nice and keeps us bonded. But we are so embedded in each other's lives that it's hard to know when to keep a thought to myself, and for what reason. Where, and how, does one draw the line between the self and beyond?*
CLASH RULES EVERYTHING AROUND ME Tony Tulathimutte 06-27-2016 CLASH RULES EVERYTHING AROUND ME Tony Tulathimutte June 27, 2016 Clan Prestige kicked me out immediately; Clan Friendship kicked me out for donating weak troops; Clan Love communicated mostly in Arabic. So I stayed awhile in the dead-silent Clan Maturity, left a week later for Clan Corgi Butts, and ended up where I always suspected I belonged: in the Trash Clan.*
E•MO•JIS
Lauren Michele Jackson 06-27-2016E•MO•JIS
Lauren Michele Jackson June 27, 2016 As gifs and emojis become more streamlined in the applications we use to communicate, the more puppeteer-like these platforms appear, demanding we move in time with the emotional range of the optionsgiven.
*
GEMINI HAPTICS
Michael Thomsen 06-27-2016GEMINI HAPTICS
Michael Thomsen June 27, 2016 The uniform repetitions necessary for operating these machines — the subtle caresses of finger tip, the unthinking memory of the keystroke — made the superstructural feel intimate, almost loving, something you could touch and take as your own.*
IN THE EYE OF THE CODER Autumn Whitefield-Madrano 06-27-2016 IN THE EYE OF THE CODER Autumn Whitefield-Madrano June 27, 2016 The golden ratio and beauty apps seem like they’re made for each other: Computer vision of any sort relies upon algorithms, and the golden ratio provides the basis for them. Beauty, by this definition, is order, symmetry, and definiteness. Beauty isn’t glamour; it’smath.
*
ABOUT REAL LIFE
Nathan Jurgenson 06-20-2016ABOUT REAL LIFE
Nathan Jurgenson June 20, 2016 I’ve argued that “online” and “offline,” like “body” and “mind,” aren’t like two positions on a light switch — a perspective I've called digital dualism. Instead, all social life is made of both information and material; it's technological and human, virtual and real. Together with friends and colleagues, I’ve theorized an experience of the internet based less in cyberpunk and more in body horror — and not just horror but other things too, like joy. With Real Life, we will be building on that perspective.2019
Real Life is a magazine about living with technology. The emphasis is more on living. We publish one essay, advice column, reported feature, or uncategorizable piece of writing a day, four or five days a week. To find out more about us, click here . To find out more about our contributors, or to contribute yourself, click here . To ask us a question about anything else, email info@reallifemag.com Real Life is made possible by funding from Snapchat, and we operate with editorial independence and without ads.Website: CHIPS
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Searching Real Life archives… 1" class="contributors-section editors-section">EDITORS
NATHAN JURGENSON
Editor in Chief
Nathan is a social media theorist, the co-founder and chair of Theorizing the Web , a researcher at Snapchat, and a contributing editor at the _New Inquiry_.
nathan@reallifemag.com@nathanjurgenson
ROB HORNING
Editor
Rob is a contributing editor at the _New Inquiry. _He frequently writes about social media, including at his blog, Marginal Utility.
rob@reallifemag.com
@robhorning
DAVID A. BANKS
Editor at Large
David is co-editor of Cyborgology and co-chair of Theorizing the Web . He writes about cities, politics, and expertise in the age of social media. david.adam.banks@gmail.com@da_banks
ALEXANDRA MOLOTKOW
Editor
Alexandra is a writer and a founding editor of _Hazlitt_. She has also been an editor at the _Hairpin_ and the _Walrus_ and an arts columnist at the _Globe and Mail_. alex@reallifemag.com@alexmolotkow
SORAYA KING
Editor
Soraya is an occasional writer and an editor of _Adult_. She has also edited at the _Guardian_ and the _Los Angeles Review of Books_. soraya@reallifemag.com@soraya_king
CONTACT
info@reallifemag.com Twitter FacebookTumblr
1}">
CONTRIBUTORS
*
A.M. GITTLITZ
A.M. GITTLITZ
_A.M. Gittlitz is a freelance writer on the subjects of counterculture and radical politics from Brooklyn, NY. He posts his work at gittlitz.wordpress.com _ * The Learning Annex ,02-22-2017
*
AARON MIGUEL CANTÚ
AARON MIGUEL CANTÚ
Aaron Miguel Cantú is a journalist in New York City. He is a senior editor at the_ NewInquiry_.
* Money Talks , 03-20-2017*
ABEBA BIRHANE
ABEBA BIRHANE
Abeba Birhane is a PhD candidate in Cognitive Science at University College Dublin. Her interdisciplinary research, which intersects between embodied cognition, digital technology studies, and critical data science, explores the dynamic and reciprocal relationships between individuals, society and digital technologies. She is a contributor to Aeon Magazine and blogs regularly about cognition, AI, ethics and data science. * The Algorithmic Colonization of Africa,
07-18-2019
*
ADAM CLAIR
ADAM CLAIR
Adam Clair is a writer currently based in Philadelphia. He tweets infrequently at @awaytobuildit.
* War of Words , 08-13-2018* Negative Space ,
05-21-2018
* Lonely Road , 01-22-2018 * All Ears , 11-08-2017 * Diminishing Returns ,07-19-2017
* Rule by Nobody ,
02-21-2017
*
ADAM FALES
ADAM FALES
Adam Fales grew up in Kansas and recently graduated from Fordham University. He is a manager at Book Culture in New York City and has also written for the American Antiquarian Society’s _Past is Present_, the _Journal of the History of Ideas_’s blog, the _Los Angeles Review of Books_,and _Full Stop_.
* Here Comes the Sun ,01-08-2018
*
ADAM FLEMING PETTY
ADAM FLEMING PETTY
Adam Fleming Petty is a writer in Indianapolis. His work has appeared in the _Paris Review Daily,_ the _Los Angeles Review of Books,_ and _Electric Literature_ * Picture Book , 12-12-2017*
ADAM KOTSKO
ADAM KOTSKO
Adam Kotsko is a social media brand based in Chicago. He is the author, most recently, of _The Prince ofThis World ._
* Jury Duty , 01-31-2017*
ADRIENNE MATEI
ADRIENNE MATEI
Adrienne Matei is a regular contributor to Quartz and NUVO Magazine. She has been published in Kinfolk Magazine, McSweeney’s, Vanity Fair, and Gather Journal. * Seeing Is Believing, 04-16-2018
*
ALANA MASSEY
ALANA MASSEY
Alana Massey is a writer covering culture, identity, vice, and virtue whose work regularly appears in outlets like _Elle_, _Hazlitt_, the _Guardian_, the _New Inquiry_, and more. Massey is the author of _All the Lives I Want ,_ a collection of essays about our relationships to women in pop culture. Her interests include books, champagne, cats, and money. * Mercy Markets , 04-11-2017 * Your Brands and Lovers, 11-02-2016
*
ALEX BEATTIE
ALEX BEATTIE
Alex Beattie is a writer and PhD candidate at Victoria University of Wellington and is researching ways in which people disconnect from the internet.* Out of Network ,
05-29-2018
*
ALEX CHRISTIE
ALEX CHRISTIE
Alex Christie is a PhD candidate at Loyola University Chicago where he writes about the entanglement of posthumanism and ethics. * Smooth Talk , 11-02-2017*
ALEX QUICHO
ALEX QUICHO
Alex Quicho is a writer and cultural analyst in London. Her writing on futures, sex, and power in art and design has appeared in _Adult_, _Mask_, and _Canadian Art_. * Up and Away , 07-25-2017 * Daymares , 10-04-2016*
ALEX RONAN
ALEX RONAN
Alex Ronan is a writer living in Berlin, mostly. Her work has appeared in the _New York Times_, _New York Magazine_, _D__well_, and elsewhere.* Re: Mary Lee ,
11-15-2018
* Routine Procedure ,04-26-2017
* Re: Hydraulic Press Accounts,
11-18-2016
* Seeing Stars , 07-12-2016*
ALEXANDRA KIMBALL
ALEXANDRA KIMBALL
Alexandra Kimball is a writer living in Toronto. Her work has appeared in the_ Walrus_, _Toronto Life_, _Hazlitt_, _This_, and the_ Guardian_. * Monster Tuck Rally ,08-04-2016
*
ALEXANDRA MOLOTKOW
ALEXANDRA MOLOTKOW
Alexandra Molotkow is a senior editor at _Real Life_ magazine. She was a founding editor of _Hazlitt_ and an editor at the _Hairpin_. She has written for the _Believer_, the _New York Times Magazine_, the _Cut _and the _New Republic_. * Idol Thoughts , 07-11-2019 * Annotate the World ,05-02-2019
* Dot Matrix , 03-21-2019 * New Feelings: Selfish Intimacy, 01-17-2019
* New Feelings: Crush Fatigue, 08-01-2018
* Human Sacrifice ,
07-09-2018
* CONTENT , 03-19-2018* Transcendence
, 01-05-2017
* Static , 12-27-2016 * Sing to Me , 11-01-2016*
ALICE BOLIN
ALICE BOLIN
Alice Bolin is the author of _Dead Girls_, forthcoming from Morrow/Harper Collins. She is moving toBoston soon.
* The Scrying Game ,08-09-2016
*
ALICIA ELER
ALICIA ELER
Alicia Eler is a writer whose cultural journalism and essays have appeared in _New York Magazine_, the _Guardian_, the _New Inquiry_, _Hyperallergic_, _Maxim_ and _Fusion_. Ask her anything about selfies, tinder
and the lesbian
dick pic
.
She is based in Los Angeles.* Funny Feelings ,
08-02-2016
*
AMANDA K. GREENE
AMANDA K. GREENE
Amanda K. Greene is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Lehigh University. Using interdisciplinary approaches from the humanities and social sciences, her research examines the constantly evolving feedback loops between human bodies and new media technologies. * Data Sweat , 08-12-2019*
ANA CECILIA ALVAREZ
ANA CECILIA ALVAREZ
Ana Cecilia Alvarez’ s words on art and women, among other topics , have appeared in several publications, including the _New Inquiry_ and _Vice_. She lives on a hill in Los Angeles. * Natural Processes ,01-22-2019
* Already Late , 01-08-2018 * Trash Life , 09-18-2017*
ANDREW BLEVINS
ANDREW BLEVINS
Andrew Blevins is a writer in New York who has previously appeared in the_ Point_, the_ Common_,and _WebSafe2k. _
* Computer Moves ,
04-03-2017
*
ANGEL ARCHER
ANGEL ARCHER
Angel Archer is a Libra and in her spare time enjoys downloading pictures of angels from Blingee.com, printing them out, and kissing them. * Botline Bling , 09-14-2016*
ANGELLA D'AVIGNON
ANGELLA D'AVIGNON
Angella d’Avignon was born and raised in California, lives and works in Brooklyn, and is an MFA candidate in Art Writing at School of Visual Arts. * Location Not Found ,02-28-2019
*
ANH VO
ANH VO
Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer. Their research focuses on experimental practices in dance and pornography. They are currently based in Brooklyn, NY.* Keep Connecting ,
08-15-2019
*
ANNA RESER
ANNA RESER
Anna Reser is a historian of technology and the editor of Lady Science.
* Space Men , 05-18-2017 * World Domination ,04-18-2017
*
ANNA RESER AND LEILA MCNEILL ANNA RESER AND LEILA MCNEILL Anna Reser is a historian of technology and the editor of _Lady Science._
Leila McNeill is a writer , historian of science, and editor for _Lady Science_ magazine. She is currently a regular writer on women and gender in the history of science, technology, and medicine forSmithsonianmag.com.
* Playing With Marbles, 02-05-2018
*
ANNE BOYER
ANNE BOYER
Anne Boyer
is
a poet and essayist. Her most recent book is _Garments Against Women_. She lives in Kansas City. * Clickbait Thanatos ,01-11-2017
*
ANNIE FELIX
ANNIE FELIX
Annie Felix is a human being and online presence who sometimes writes. She lives in New York City and tweets at @atanyafelix. * It’s All You ,09-26-2017
*
ANNIE LLOYD
ANNIE LLOYD
Annie Lloyd is a writer living in Brooklyn by way of Los Angeles. * Olympic Futurism ,12-06-2017
*
ANYA METZER
ANYA METZER
Anya Metzer studied English literature at Oxford University and the University of Chicago, with a focus on gender, pathology and Victorian social thought. She is currently based back in London and works in international development. * Eat the Document ,03-26-2018
*
APOORVA TADEPALLI
APOORVA TADEPALLI
Apoorva Tadepalli is a freelance writer. She is from Bombay and lives in Brooklyn. * Colonial Cartography, 02-11-2019
* Crystal Visions ,
09-13-2018
* To the Point , 02-26-2018*
ARABELLE SICARDI
ARABELLE SICARDI
Arabelle Sicardi writes about beauty, fashion, and power. Their work can be found in _Allure_, _Teen Vogue,_ _Racked_, _Hazlitt_, and elsewhere.* Seductive Doom ,
06-18-2018
*
ARIA DEAN
ARIA DEAN
Aria Dean is an artist and writer. She lives in Los Angeles. * Poor Meme, Rich Meme, 07-25-2016
*
ASTRID BUDGOR
ASTRID BUDGOR
_Astrid Budgor writes about movies and videogames on the internet._ * I Remember , 08-10-2017 * A Warm Place , 05-30-2017 * Wicked Game , 04-13-2017*
AURORA STEWART DE PEÑA AURORA STEWART DE PEÑA Aurora Stewart de Peña is a writer and ad strategist from Toronto. Her writing has appeared in _Vice_ and the _Puritan_, and she’s a playwright in residence at Buddies in Bad Times theater. * New Feelings: Kid Brain, 10-09-2018
*
AVA KOFMAN
AVA KOFMAN
Ava Kofman is a journalist based in Brooklyn. Her reporting on technology has appeared in the_ Atlantic, _the_ Intercept, _the_ New Republic_, and elsewhere. * Silent Shout , 01-07-2019 * The Story of a New Brain, 06-20-2017
* The Things We Carried, 07-13-2016
*
BEN GABRIEL
BEN GABRIEL
Ben Gabriel is a technical writer, the editor of Island Demeter, and a member of #spamfm. * Fight From the Inside, 12-20-2016
*
BENJAMIN HABER
BENJAMIN HABER
Benjamin Haber is a doctoral candidate in sociology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is currently co-editing a special issue of _Women & Performance_ on the queer digital.* For the Moment ,
06-29-2017
*
BRENT LIN
BRENT LIN
Brent Lin writes about aesthetics, politics, and technology. He is currently a graduate student at McGill University.* Tender Buttons ,
03-15-2017
*
BRIAN JUSTIE
BRIAN JUSTIE
Brian Justie is a PhD student at UCLA and will soon be launching the Workers In Formation Institute.
* Fuzzy Logic, Fuzzy Ethics, 05-13-2019
*
BRIANNA RETTIG
BRIANNA RETTIG
Brianna Rettig is a photographer and creator based in New York City. She is currently a member of the visuals team at _Artsy Magazine_. See her work at briannarettig.com. * Chasing the Apocalypse,
02-04-2019
*
BRITNEY GIL
BRITNEY GIL
Britney Gil is a freelance writer interested in technology and society, media criticism, and speculative fiction. She lives in Troy, New York. * Slow Train Coming ,04-24-2018
* No Contest , 05-24-2017 * Gif Horse , 09-07-2016*
BRITT S. PARIS
BRITT S. PARIS
Britt S. Paris is working on her PhD in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. Her research interests include information and communication technology aesthetics, critical data studies, history and philosophy of technology and information ethics. Her work has been published in _Big Data & Society_, _Discourse and Society_,_ Triple Canopy_, and_InterActions_.
* Free Recall , 09-12-2016*
CHARLOTTE SHANE
CHARLOTTE SHANE
Charlotte Shane has contributed to _Fusion_, _Hazlitt_, the _New Inquiry_, and the_ New Republic_. She is the author of _Prostitute Laundry_ and _N.B._ and the co-founder ofTigerBee Press .
* Star Search , 06-22-2017 * Telling Time , 12-19-2016*
CHELSEA G. SUMMERS
CHELSEA G. SUMMERS
A former academic, Chelsea G. Summers writes almost exclusively about sex. Her writing has appeared in _Hazlitt_, _Vice_, the _New Republic_, _Adult Magazine_, and the _Guardian_, among others.* Infinite Scroll ,
09-13-2016
* Kik Starter , 08-15-2016*
CHENOE HART
CHENOE HART
Chenoe Hart is an architectural designer in cyberspace. * Free Shipping , 02-14-2019 * Perpetual Motion Machines, 08-31-2016
*
CHERIE HU
CHERIE HU
Cherie Hu is a freelance journalist focusing on the intersection of music and technology. She writes regular columns for _Billboard_, _Forbes_ and _Music Business Worldwide_, with additional bylines in publications including _Pitchfork_, _Variety_, _Rolling Stone_, _Goldthread_ and the _Columbia Journalism Review._ * Give Me What You Want, 02-21-2019
*
CHRIS GILLIARD
CHRIS GILLIARD
Chris Gilliard has a PhD from Purdue University’s Rhetoric and Composition Program and currently teaches at Macomb Community College. His work concentrates on privacy, institutional tech policy, digital redlining, and the re-inventions of discriminatory practices through data mining and algorithmic decision-making, especially as these apply to collegestudents.
* Friction-Free Racism, 10-15-2018
*
CHRIS RANDLE
CHRIS RANDLE
Chris Randle is one of those Canadian writers living in New York. He has contributed to _Hazlitt_, the _Guardian_, _Pitchfork_, the_ New York Times Magazine_, andother publications.
* New Feelings: Roach Complex, 06-13-2019
* Night Visions , 09-26-2016* Re: Old Friends
, 08-12-2016
*
CHRISTOPHER SCHABERG CHRISTOPHER SCHABERG Christopher Schaberg is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, and the author of _The Textual Life of Airports_ (2011), _The End of Airports_ (2015), _Airportness_ (2017), and _The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth_ (2018). * The 30,000-Foot View, 03-25-2019
* Wheels in the Sky ,03-12-2018
* Terminal Democracy ,02-06-2017
* Ground Control ,
10-05-2016
*
CLAUDIA MCNEILLY
CLAUDIA MCNEILLY
Claudia McNeilly writes and takes pictures for her weekly column _Dinner, Deconstructed_ about Toronto’s restaurant scene in Canada’s _National Post_ newspaper. You can also find her food writing on/in _Vogue_, _Food Network Canada_, _Teen Vogue_, _New York_ magazine and _Broadly_. * Image Feed , 12-08-2016*
CORBIN DEWITT
CORBIN DEWITT
__Corbin Dewitt lives and writes in Berkeley, California. Most recently her work has appeared on _One Week // One Band_, where she wrote on Suzanne Vega. She
tweets at @corbin_dewitt and Instagrams flowers at @corbindewitt._
_
* Echo Location , 10-24-2017*
CRYSTAL ABIDIN
CRYSTAL ABIDIN
Dr. Crystal Abidin is an anthropologist and ethnographer who researches internet culture and young people’s relationships with social media, technology, and devices. She is Postdoctoral Fellow with the Media Management and Transformation Centre at Jönköping University and Adjunct Research Fellow with the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University. Reach herat wishcrys.com .
* Layers of Identity ,04-16-2018
* Every Place at Once ,11-17-2016
*
CYNTHIA X. HUA
CYNTHIA X. HUA
Cynthia X. Hua is a researcher working on Internet media ecosystems. She has studied web video at Hulu, _BuzzFeed_ and Facebook Video. * Advance Screening ,07-20-2017
*
DALIA BARGHOUTY
DALIA BARGHOUTY
Dalia Barghouty thinks and writes about beauty, temporality, digital experience and the self(ie). She is currently a PhD student at the University of California, Davis researching media theory and contemporary literature.* Glow Aesthetics ,
08-22-2019
*
DAMIEN PATRICK WILLIAMS DAMIEN PATRICK WILLIAMS Damien Patrick Williams is a PhD researcher at Virginia Tech in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society. His research areas include ethics, epistemology, philosophy of technology, philosophy of mind, and the occult. He writes at afutureworththinkingabout.com, technoccult.net
and tinyletter.com/technoccult. * What It’s Like to Be a Bot, 05-07-2018
*
DANIEL JOSEPH
DANIEL JOSEPH
Daniel Joseph is a freelance writer and postdoctoral fellow in the department of arts, culture and media at the University of Toronto Scarborough. * Two-Faced , 08-09-2018* Code of Conduct ,
04-12-2017
*
DANIEL SPIELBERGER
DANIEL SPIELBERGER
__Daniel Spielberger is a writer. He graduated from Reed College in 2015 and now lives in San Francisco. * Truth or Consequences, 08-23-2017
* Camp Dread , 01-19-2017*
DANYA GLABAU
DANYA GLABAU
Danya Glabau researches, teaches, and writes, about gender, bodies, and technology in New York at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Researchand NYU
Tandon School of Engineering. She is working on a book on food allergies, gender, and capitalism. * Children of Production, 07-25-2019
* Bill of Health ,
04-25-2019
* Natural’s Not in It, 03-18-2019
* Sins of the Mother ,12-03-2018
* Fancy Feast , 09-21-2017 * Necessary Purity ,06-06-2017
*
DAVEY DAVIS
DAVEY DAVIS
Davey Davis is a writer and editor living in the SF Bay Area. They have written about culture, sexuality, and genderqueer embodiment at the _Rumpus_,
the _Millions_ , _MaskMagazine
_,
and many other places.* Object Lessons ,
06-01-2017
*
DAVID A. BANKS AND BRITNEY GIL DAVID A. BANKS AND BRITNEY GIL David A. Banks is an editor at _Cyborgology_ and a Theorizing the Web committee member. His work focuses on the intersections of digital networks, urban form, and structures of power. David’s work has also been featured in the _New Inquiry, Tikkun Magazine_, and the _Baffler Blog_. Britney Gil is a freelance writer interested in technology and society, media criticism, and speculative fiction. She lives in Troy, New York.* Community ,
07-22-2019
*
DAVID RUDIN
DAVID RUDIN
David Rudin is a writer who lives in Montreal. He is highlycaffeinated.
* Familiar Voice ,
11-09-2017
* The Domino Effect ,05-25-2017
* Stuck in the Middle ,04-04-2017
*
DAVID TURNER
DAVID TURNER
David Turner is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, who writes a weekly newsletter on the business of music streaming called _Penny Fractions_.
* Stars and Strikes ,12-13-2018
* The Last Format ,
10-29-2018
* Show Tunes , 08-27-2018*
DOROTHY R. SANTOS
DOROTHY R. SANTOS
Dorothy R. Santos is a Filipina-American editor, curator, and educator whose research interests include digital art, activism, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology. She serves as Editor-in-Chief for _Hyphen_ magazine.* Hate the Player ,
04-25-2017
*
DREW AUSTIN
DREW AUSTIN
Drew Austin writes about technology and urbanism on the blog Kneeling Bus . * Always In , 06-03-2019 * Numbers Game , 02-07-2019* Cold Discovery ,
12-10-2018
* The Constant Consumer, 09-10-2018
*
DREW NELLES
DREW NELLES
Drew Nelles is a writer and podcast producer living in Brooklyn. * Unreal News , 05-21-2018*
ELEANOR PENNY
ELEANOR PENNY
Eleanor Penny is a writer, editor, translator and poet. She’s an editor at Novara Media, and an associate editor at openDemocracyUK. She holds a degree in Philosophy & French from University College London. * In Labor , 07-24-2017*
ELI ZEGER
ELI ZEGER
Eli Zeger is currently a freshman at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland. His work has been published in _Vice_, the _A.V. Club_, and _Paste_.* End of the Line ,
12-22-2016
*
ELISA GABBERT
ELISA GABBERT
Elisa Gabbert is the author of several poetry collections, including _The Self Unstable_, and a collection of essays, _The Word Pretty_ (Black Ocean, Fall 2018). She is currently writing a book about disasters, forthcoming from FSGOriginals.
* The Great Mortality, 09-24-2018
* Big and Slow , 06-25-2018 * True Crime , 01-02-2018 * Doomsday Pattern ,10-09-2017
* Picture Yourself Happy, 08-02-2017
* In Our Midst , 05-02-2017 * Magnificent Desolation, 11-28-2016
* Vanity Project ,
08-01-2016
*
ELIZABETH NEWTON
ELIZABETH NEWTON
Elizabeth Newton is a doctoral candidate in historical musicology. Her research interests include musico-poetics, fidelity and reproduction, and affective histories of musical media. She lives in New York City. * Fierce Attachments ,10-25-2016
* Pet Sounds , 08-17-2016*
ELLA JACOBSON
ELLA JACOBSON
Ella Jacobson is a freelance journalist and writer. An Alaskan transplant to Brooklyn, she writes about class, literature, and the wilderness. To read her most recent work, follow her on Twitter.
* Too Human , 05-20-2019 * The Last Frontier ,10-01-2018
*
EMMA HEALEY
EMMA HEALEY
Emma Healey ‘s first book of poems, _Begin With the End in Mind_, was published by ARP Books in 2012. Her nonfiction has appeared in the _LA Review of Books_, the _FADER_, the _Hairpin_ and more. * Come Into My World ,01-10-2017
*
EMMA STAMM
EMMA STAMM
Emma Stamm is a Ph.D. candidate and instructor at Virginia Tech, where she researches critical theory of technology. She also writes fiction and music. Her website is www.o-culus.com.* Present Perfect ,
05-09-2019
* Ordinary Doses ,
10-04-2018
*
ERIC HARVEY
ERIC HARVEY
Eric Harvey is an assistant professor in the School of Communications at Grand Valley State University. He researches and writes about music and technology. * Networked Listening, 04-05-2017
*
ERIC THURM
ERIC THURM
Eric Thurm would rather be watching _The Young Pope_ or playing _Pandemic: Legacy_. He also writes for, among other outlets, _GQ, Esquire_, and the _Guardian_, and is the founder and host of the extremely non-_TED_ affiliated event _DrunkTED Talks_.
* How to Do Things With Memes, 01-16-2018
* Infinite Binge ,
09-19-2017
* Suspicious Minds ,03-14-2017
*
ERIN SCHWARTZ
ERIN SCHWARTZ
Erin Schwartz is a writer based inNew York.
* Edible Creations ,09-27-2017
* Vox Populi , 08-16-2017*
FRANCESKA ROUZARD
FRANCESKA ROUZARD
Franceska Rouzard is an essayist based in Philadelphia. * Persistence of Vision, 03-30-2017
* Advanced Search ,
10-26-2016
*
FRANK PASQUALE
FRANK PASQUALE
Frank Pasquale is professor of law at the University of Maryland and author of _The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and Information_ (Harvard University Press, 2015). * Odd Numbers , 08-20-2018*
FUCK THEORY
FUCK THEORY
Fuck Theory is a New York-based scholar and critical thinker. Not critical like _critique_, but critical like _don’t leave home without it_. For more, there’sTumblr.
* Time Capsules , 09-29-2016 * Should I Tell My Partner I Was PigDick69 All Along?,
08-05-2016
*
GAVIN MUELLER
GAVIN MUELLER
Gavin Mueller is a contributing editor at _Jacobin_. He lives in Washington, D.C.* No Alternative ,
01-22-2018
*
GENEVIEVE WALKER
GENEVIEVE WALKER
Genevieve Walker is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Previously she managed editorial operations at the Players’ Tribune, and before that, was the lead web producer at _GQ_ magazine. You can find her gloves here.
* Consider the Lost Glove, 05-01-2017
*
GEOFF SHULLENBERGER
GEOFF SHULLENBERGER
Geoff Shullenberger teaches at NYU and has written for _Dissent_, the _Los Angeles Review of Books_, and _The_ _New Inquiry_, among others. * Influencing Machines, 05-23-2017
*
GRANT WYTHOFF
GRANT WYTHOFF
Grant Wythoff is a visiting fellow with the Center for Humanities and Information at Penn State. He teaches literature, digital media, and science fiction.* Public Enemies ,
08-09-2017
*
GREG NISSAN
GREG NISSAN
Greg Nissan is a writer and translator living in Berlin. * New Feelings: Phatic Checking, 01-10-2019
*
HANIF ABDURRAQIB
HANIF ABDURRAQIB
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His first collection of poems, _The Crown Ain’t Worth Much _was released in 2016 and was nominated for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, _They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us_, was released in fall 2017 by Two Dollar Radio. * Acting My Age , 04-02-2018 * Momentary Connections, 02-20-2018
*
HANNA HURR
HANNA HURR
Hanna Hurr is a co-founder and editor of Mask Magazine. She grew up in Finland and lives in Brooklyn. * Panic City , 08-30-2017*
HANNAH BARTON
HANNAH BARTON
Hannah Barton is a doctoral researcher based in London. Her academic interests include internet memes, new literacies, and cultural history. She tweets occasionally@hhannahhbarton .
* Tactical Virality ,02-14-2017
* Life Support , 12-14-2016*
ISABEL B. SLONE
ISABEL B. SLONE
Isabel B. Slone is a freelance journalist and copywriter living in Toronto. She has written for the_ Globe and Mail_, the _National Post_, _Flare_, the _Hairpin_, _Hazlitt_, and _Vice_. * Sunset Blogevard ,09-08-2016
*
ISABEL MUNSON
ISABEL MUNSON
Isabel Munson is a writer and producer based in Brooklyn. She writes about relationships between tech, economics, and design, and manages an experimental bass music label and event series as WorstBehavior Recs.
* The Genre of You ,04-16-2018
*
ISMAIL MUHAMMAD
ISMAIL MUHAMMAD
Ismail Muhammad is a staff writerfor the _Millions_
and a contributing editor at _ZYZZYVA_. His nonfiction
and criticism have appeared in _Slate_, the _Los Angeles
Review of Books
_,
_Catapult _, and
other venues. He’s currently based in Oakland, where he’s working on a novel and a PhD in American literature at UC Berkeley. * On Seeing Blackness, 05-03-2017
*
JACQUELINE FELDMAN
JACQUELINE FELDMAN
Jacqueline Feldman , a writer living in New York, has also worked in artificial intelligence. Her essays appear in the _White Review, _the_ Los Angeles Review of Books, _andother magazines.
* Faking It , 05-07-2018 * Clearings , 06-05-2017* Worlds of Pain ,
01-24-2017
* Verbal Tics , 10-27-2016 * This Is What a Feminist Looks Like,
08-08-2016
*
JADE E. DAVIS
JADE E. DAVIS
Jade E. Davis is an academic based in New York. By day, she is an applied theorist, working toward ethical integration of digital media in learning for marginalized populations. By night, she overthinks why we look at what we look at on the internet and how we talk about it. * Grave Sight , 09-19-2016*
JAKE PITRE
JAKE PITRE
Jake Pitre is a graduate student in Film Studies at Carleton University, working on a thesis about Steven Universe and queer fandom. He has been published at _Dazed & Confused_, _Polygon_, _Paste Magazine_, the _Outline_, and_Hazlitt_.
* Web of Lies , 06-19-2017*
JAMES FREITAS
JAMES FREITAS
James Freitas is a writer from Massachusetts. * Waiting for Wolves ,12-05-2017
*
JAMES K. WILLIAMSON JAMES K. WILLIAMSON James K. Williamson fact-checks and writes in New York City. His writing has appeared in the _Trace_, _Columbia Journalism Review_, and _Narratively_. * Square Pegs , 09-28-2017*
JANE FRANCES DUNLOP
JANE FRANCES DUNLOP
JANE FRANCES DUNLOP is an artist and writer whose work addresses emotion and performances of relation on the internet. She lives and works in London, UK. * Through the Wires ,07-26-2017
* Nervous? We Should Be, 07-19-2016
*
JANE HU
JANE HU
Jane Hu is an English PhD candidate at UC Berkeley with an emphasis in Film and Media Studies. She has published in _Textual Practice, _the_ New Yorker,_ the_ New Republic, Slate, _and the_ Awl_.* Infinite Loops ,
04-25-2018
*
JANNA AVNER
JANNA AVNER
Janna Avner is a creative technologist living in Los Angeles who recently co-created _Femmebit_, a yearly digital new media festival celebrating women artists. Janna graduated from Yale in 2012, and is currently a gallery director who curates shows, exhibits paintings, and writes as much as time permits. * Selfless Devotion ,12-07-2016
*
JASON FARMAN
JASON FARMAN
Jason Farman is an associate professor in the department of American studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is author of Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media (Routledge), winner of the 2012 Book of the Year Award from the Association of Internet Researchers.* Fidget Spinners ,
06-28-2017
*
JASPER AVERY
JASPER AVERY
Jasper Avery is a poet and writer living in Philadelphia. Her debut collection, _number one earth_, is the winner of the 2017 Metatron Prize and will be available in 2018. She wants you to think more seriously about fungal ecosystems and police violence. * Against Immortality, 09-20-2017
*
JATHAN SADOWSKI
JATHAN SADOWSKI
Jathan Sadowski is a postdoctoral research fellow in smart cities at the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. * Potemkin AI , 08-06-2018*
JENNY L. DAVIS
JENNY L. DAVIS
Jenny L. Davis is a lecturer in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University and co-editor of _Cyborgology _. * Here to Help , 05-04-2017 * Face to Interface ,08-10-2016
*
JEREMY ANTLEY
JEREMY ANTLEY
Jeremy Antley holds a PhD in Russian History from the University of Kansas and currently resides in Portland, Oregon. His most recent work on wargames and culture can be found at First Person Scholarand
in _Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming._
* Running the Numbers, 04-15-2019
* Period Piece , 12-11-2017 * Taking Turns , 08-15-2017*
JEREMY P. BUSHNELL
JEREMY P. BUSHNELL
Jeremy P. Bushnell is the author of two novels: _The Weirdness_ (2014) and _The Insides_ (2016), both published by Melville House. He lives and works in the Boston area. * Class Actions , 12-05-2016*
JOE SUTTON
JOE SUTTON
Joe Sutton is a freelance writer basedin Brooklyn.
* Haunted Village
, 11-08-2018
*
JULI MIN
JULI MIN
Juli Min is the editor in chief of the _Shanghai Literary Review _ and a lecturer of writing at Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. She lives in Shanghai. * End Notes , 05-09-2017*
JULIA FOOTE
JULIA FOOTE
Julia Foote is a writer and designer based in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from the New School with a degree in Urban Studies, and loves talking about haunted houses. * Ghosts of the Future, 07-01-2019
*
JUSTIN JOQUE
JUSTIN JOQUE
Justin Joque is the visualization librarian at the University of Michigan. He completed his PhD in Communications and Media Studies at the European Graduate School and holds a Masters in Science of Information from the University of Michigan. He is the author of _Deconstruction Machines: Writing in theAge of Cyberwar_
and
a forthcoming book on statistics, machine learning and capitalism. * Chances Are , 03-28-2019*
KAITLIN PHILLIPS
KAITLIN PHILLIPS
Kaitlin Phillips is a writer living in New York. * Re: Sean Pablo Murphy, 09-16-2016
*
KAREN GREGORY; KIRSTY HENDRY; JAKE WATTS; DAVE YOUNG KAREN GREGORY; KIRSTY HENDRY; JAKE WATTS; DAVE YOUNG _Cursor was established by artists __Kirsty Hendry__, __Jake Watts_
_, and __Dave Young_ _. The app also contains contributions from __Karen Gregory_ _, __Rumi Josephs_ _, __Simone C Niquille__, and __Anna Zett_
_._
* Selfwork , 02-02-2017*
KASTALIA MEDRANO
KASTALIA MEDRANO
Kastalia Medrano is a New York-based freelancer who still does not enjoy balloons. Her retweets are unwavering personal convictions.* Hearing Things ,
01-18-2017
*
KELLY PENDERGRAST
KELLY PENDERGRAST
Kelly Pendergrast is a writer, researcher, and curator based in San Francisco. She works with ANTISTATIC on technology and environmental justice, and she writes about natures, visual culture, and laboring bodies. * Network of Blood ,07-29-2019
* Ill at Ease , 05-28-2019*
KERRY DORAN
KERRY DORAN
Kerry Doran
contributes to exhibition catalogs, artist books, and independent publications, including _Artforum_, _BOMB_, _Flash Art_, _Foam Magazine_, _Rhizome_, _Terremoto_, and SFMOMA’s _Open Space_. * It Girls , 03-04-2019*
KIERAN DELAMONT
KIERAN DELAMONT
Kieran Delamont is a reporter for _Metro News_ in Ottawa, and has written about cities, technology, and culture for the _Guardian_, _Vice News_,_ CityLab_, and _Spacing_, among others. He runs, watches too much TV, and eats ramen far toofrequently.
* Job Dream , 07-11-2017*
KRISTEN MARTIN
KRISTEN MARTIN
Kristen Martin recently received an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. She is at work on a collection of essays on her parents’ lives and deaths. Her personal and critical essays have been published in _Catapult_, _LitHub_, _Guernica_, _Public Books_, the _Hairpin_, the _Toast_, the _Grief Diaries_, and elsewhere. She teaches first-year writing at Columbia University and Baruch College.* Faded Pictures ,
11-15-2017
* Memetic Mori , 12-21-2016*
KURT NEWMAN
KURT NEWMAN
__Kurt Newman is a Canadian-born Marxist historian who blogs weekly at the Society for U.S. Intellectual History blog (s-usih.org)
* The Laugherators ,01-23-2017
*
KYLE PAOLETTA
KYLE PAOLETTA
Kyle Paoletta is a writer from Albuquerque, New Mexico. He holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University and works as a researcher at _GQ_. His criticism and reporting has appeared in _BOMB Magazine_, _Salon_, and _Guernica_. * Scanners , 07-27-2017* Ode to the Void ,
03-02-2017
*
L. M. SACASAS
L. M. SACASAS
L. M. Sacasas is an independent scholar based in central Florida. He writes at his website, The Frailest Thing , and publishes The Convivial Societynewsletter.
* The Easy Way Out ,06-24-2019
* Always On , 03-14-2019 * Personal Panopticons, 11-05-2018
*
LAURA MAW
LAURA MAW
Laura Maw is a writer living in London. Her essays on horror film and art have featured in _Hazlitt_, _Catapult _and _Oh Comely_ magazine, among others. She is currently working on her first book, a critical memoir about women and horror film. * Don’t Look Now ,08-19-2019
* Intercontinental Drift, 08-24-2016
*
LAUREN MICHELE JACKSON LAUREN MICHELE JACKSON Lauren Michele Jackson is a doctoral student and writer-ish person living in Chicago. Her writing has appeared in the_ Atlantic_, the_ New Inquiry_, and the _Awl_ among other places. She tweets feelings @proseb4bros.* Poetic License ,
07-31-2017
* E•MO•JIS , 06-27-2016*
LESLIE L. BOWMAN
LESLIE L. BOWMAN
Leslie L. Bowman is a writer and recovering academic whose interests include women’s voices, television, pop culture and language. Her work has appearedon HuffPost
.
She currently lives in Boston with her sweet fur babies, Pippin andToast.
* Fiber Optics , 05-22-2017*
LIAT BERDUGO
LIAT BERDUGO
Liat Berdugo is an artist, writer, and curator whose work focuses on embodiment and digitality, archive theory, and new economies. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals internationally, and she collaborates widely with individuals and archives. She is currently an assistant professor of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco.* Spectral Power ,
08-22-2017
*
LINDA BESNER
LINDA BESNER
Linda Besner ’s most recent book is _Feel Happier in Nine Seconds_. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in the_ New York Times_ _Magazine_, the_ Boston Review,_ the_ Globe & Mail_, and _Enroute, _and aired on CBC Radio. She livesin Montreal.
* New Feelings: Ungoogleability, 01-24-2019
* Ambient Cruelty ,
12-17-2018
* New Feelings: Involuntary Lurking,
09-04-2018
* Faulty Logic , 05-14-2018 * Disaster Preparedness, 04-26-2018
* Taste Made , 03-26-2018 * Helping Hand , 02-05-2018* Deleted Scenes ,
01-29-2018
* After Hours , 01-08-2018 * Hate Maps , 10-05-2017*
LINDA KINSTLER
LINDA KINSTLER
Linda Kinstler is a Marshall Scholar at Goldsmiths, University of London, and contributing writerat Politico Europe.
* Virtual Atrocities ,02-07-2017
*
LOU CORNUM
LOU CORNUM
Lou Cornum was born and raised in Arizona. They now live in Brooklyn and study Black and Indigenous science fiction at the CUNY Graduate Center. They can be found in the park looking for mushrooms or on twitter @spacendn.
* Event Horizon , 03-12-2018 * Domain Name , 06-12-2017*
LUX ALPTRAUM
LUX ALPTRAUM
Lux Alptraum is a writer, sex educator, comedian, and consultant. Past gigs have included serving as the editor, publisher, and CEO of Fleshbot, the web’s foremost blog about sexuality and adult entertainment; editor-at-large for Nerve; a sex educator at an adolescent pregnancy prevention program; an HIV pretest counselor; and the founder of Boinkology, a blog about sex andculture.
* Industry Standards ,07-16-2018
*
LYDIA KIESLING
LYDIA KIESLING
Lydia Kiesling is the editor of the _Millions_. Her writing has appeared in the _New York Times Magazine_, the _Guardian_, the _New Yorker’s_ Page-Turner, and elsewhere. She is working on a novel. * Watch Again , 11-07-2016*
MADELEINE MONSON-ROSEN MADELEINE MONSON-ROSEN Madeleine Monson-Rosen writes about the cultural histories of real and fictional technologies. She has a PhD in English, and teaches literature and writing in Baltimore.* External Memory ,
10-11-2017
*
MADELINE COLEMAN
MADELINE COLEMAN
Madeline Coleman is a writer and editor who lives in New York. She has written for _Canadian Art_, _Artnet_, and _Aperture_, among others.* Closed Captions ,
08-01-2017
* The Spy Is a Camera ,07-20-2016
*
MALCOLM HARRIS
MALCOLM HARRIS
Malcolm Harris is a freelance writer and an editor at the _New Inquiry_. * The Right to Have Remained Silent,
07-28-2016
*
MARISOL GARCÍA WALLS MARISOL GARCÍA WALLS Marisol García Walls is an essayist in Mexico City. Her work in English has appeared in Remezcla.
She is currently writing a book on objects, surfaces, archives and museums. She is active as one of the editors and members of the Center for the Study of Cute and Useless Things.
* Off the Map , 07-12-2017*
MARY PAPPALARDO
MARY PAPPALARDO
Mary Pappalardo is a PhD candidate in English at Louisiana State University, where she writes about the contemporary novel and the internet. She is also the fiction editor at NDR magazine . * Pictures at an Exhibition, 11-07-2017
*
MARY WANG
MARY WANG
_Mary Wang is a Chinese-Dutch writer based in New York. Follow more of her work on __Twitter_ _ or__Instagram ._
* Longing for Tomorrow, 03-22-2017
*
MAY WAVER
MAY WAVER
May Waver is a new media and video artist based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her research-oriented practice explores technologies of care, intimacy, and privacy. May is also a co-founding member of the art collectivecybertwee .
* Re: Shogo Garcia
, 12-16-2016
*
MAYA BINYAM
MAYA BINYAM
Maya Binyam is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in the _New Inquiry_, the _Awl_, the _Hairpin_, and elsewhere. * Open Heart , 04-23-2018 * Against the Clock ,08-30-2016
*
MAYUKH SEN
MAYUKH SEN
Mayukh Sen is a writer who lives in New York. He has written for _New York_ magazine, _Vice__, __Pitchfork__, _the _Fader_, and elsewhere.* Dividing Lines ,
03-27-2017
* Distress Calls ,
11-29-2016
* Torso Junkie , 08-16-2016*
MEGHAN GILLIGAN
MEGHAN GILLIGAN
Meghan Gilligan is a writerliving in New York.
* Hanging on the Telephone, 05-23-2019
*
MELISSA POWERS
MELISSA POWERS
Melissa Powers is a Singaporean-American writer based in Brooklyn. Reach out at melpowers.com if you can help her put onHamlet in an IKEA.
* See No Evil ,
12-06-2018
*
MERRITT K
MERRITT K
merritt k is a writer and podcaster living in Brooklyn. She hosts the podcasts Woodland Secrets and dadfeelings and can be found on Twitter at @merrittk.
* Challenge Eating ,04-23-2018
*
MICHAEL HESSEL-MIAL
MICHAEL HESSEL-MIAL
Michael Hessel-Mial is the co-editor, with Penny Goring, of _MACRO: an anthology of image macros (Boost House)_, a collection of image macro poetry published from 2011and 2015.
* The Poetry of Digital Life, 10-13-2016
*
MICHAEL MARDER
MICHAEL MARDER
Michael Marder is an Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country , UPV/EHU, Vitoria-Gasteiz. His work spans the fields of phenomenology, environmental philosophy, and political thought. * Just Randomness? ,07-30-2018
*
MIKAELLA CLEMENTS
MIKAELLA CLEMENTS
Mikaella Clements is an Australian writer currently based in Berlin. Her fiction and non-fiction can be found in the _Guardian_, _Catapult_, _Buzzfeed_, _Hazlitt_ and more. * Let’s Take This Offline, 04-18-2019
*
MILA SAMDUB
MILA SAMDUB
Mila Samdub studied creative writing at a small college in upstate New York. He has interests like trees, food, borderlands, and typography. He lives in New Delhi, the city of his adolescence, where he now works everyday as a curator. He can be found on Instagram at @delhimodernism . * Home Cooking , 03-26-2018* Model Citizens ,
02-05-2018
*
MOIRA WEIGEL
MOIRA WEIGEL
Moira Weigel is a writer and academic currently finishing a PhD at Yale University. Her first book, _Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, _came
out_ _in May 2016.
* Pajama Rich , 08-22-2016*
MOLLY SAUTER
MOLLY SAUTER
Molly Sauter is the author of _The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on theInternet.
_ She’s
a PhD student in Communication Studies at McGill University in Montreal.* Instant Recall ,
06-27-2017
* The Apophenic Machine, 05-15-2017
*
MOMTAZA MEHRI
MOMTAZA MEHRI
Momtaza Mehri is a poet, essayist and co-editor of the digital platform Diaspora Drama. Her work is featured and forthcoming in _Dazed, Sukoon, Bone Bouquet, Vinyl_ and _Poetry International_. Her poems will appear in _Ten: Poets of the New Generation_,
to be published by BloodAxe Books in 2017. * The Beautiful Ones ,03-16-2017
*
MONICA TORRES
MONICA TORRES
Monica Torres is a journalist living in New York. Her writing has appeared in _Fusion_, the _Hairpin_ and the _Feminist Wire_. She emotes through gifs on Twitter.
* Instant Replay ,
11-22-2016
*
NAOMI SKWARNA
NAOMI SKWARNA
Naomi Skwarna is a writer and actor. Her work has appeared in the _Believer_, the _Globe and Mail_, the _Hairpin_, _Hazlitt_, the _National Post_, _Toronto Life_, and elsewhere. She lives in Toronto, where she takes pictureswith her phone.
* Quick Fix , 09-21-2016 * Re: Isabella Killoran,
07-08-2016
*
NATASHA LENNARD
NATASHA LENNARD
Natasha Lennard is a British-born, Brooklyn-based writer, focusing on how power functions, and how it is challenged. She writes for publications including the _Nation_, the _Intercept_, _Fusion_ and the _New York Times_ philosophy blog, the _Stone_. * Of Being Numerous ,04-29-2019
* No Joke , 10-11-2018 * Easy Action , 08-17-2017 * It Came in Through the Bathroom Mirror,
10-31-2016
*
NATASHA YOUNG
NATASHA YOUNG
Natasha Young is a writer whose essays and criticism have been published in the _New Inquiry_, _Artforum_, and _Adult_ magazine. Her first novel, Static Flux, is coming fall 2017 via Metatron . She lives inLos Angeles.
* Care Package , 03-05-2018 * Forever Now , 04-17-2017*
NATHAN FERGUSON
NATHAN FERGUSON
Nathan Ferguson is a recent creative writing graduate who resides in a hologram called the Midwest. You can follow his writing on _Cyborgology_ and tweet him @natetehgreat. * Updating Our Nightmares, 04-24-2017
*
NAVNEET ALANG
NAVNEET ALANG
Navneet Alang is a technology and culture writer based in Toronto. His writing has most recently appeared in the _Atlantic_, _New Republic_, _BuzzFeed_, and the _Globe and Mail._ * You Don’t Say ,03-19-2018
* Emotional Overdrive ,01-02-2018
* Close Reading , 10-12-2017 * Touch Screen , 09-12-2017 * Auto Format , 10-17-2016*
NEHAL EL-HADI
NEHAL EL-HADI
Nehal El-Hadi is a writer and researcher whose work explores the relationships between technology, the body, and space. She is based in Toronto, where she is currently a Visiting Scholar at the City Institute at York University. She tweets @iamnehal.
* Being There , 09-13-2017*
NETA ALEXANDER
NETA ALEXANDER
Neta Alexander is an Assistant Professor in the Film and Media Studies Department at Colgate University, New York. Her work focuses on digital culture, film and media, and science and technology studies. Her first book, _Failure_, co-written with Arjun Appadurai, will be published by Polity Booksthis fall.
* Our Bodies, Ourselves, 08-01-2019
*
NINA HORSTMANN
NINA HORSTMANN
Nina Horstmann is a PhD student in Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research uses ethnographic methods to better understand how technology is applied in political contexts and the social and political problems that technologyattempts to solve.
* Take the Wheel ,
08-30-2018
*
NISSE GREENBERG
NISSE GREENBERG
Nisse Greenberg is a storyteller, math educator, and vegetarian (ancestrally). His playground of work can be seen at nissegreenberg.com . * Solve for Why , 01-09-2017*
NITIN K. AHUJA
NITIN K. AHUJA
Nitin K. Ahuja is a physician living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. * Bugs as Features ,07-10-2017
*
OLIVIA ROSANE
OLIVIA ROSANE
Olivia Rosane has a master’s in art and politics from Goldsmiths, University of London. For her dissertation, she completed a multimedia imagining of communities surviving in a climate-changed London. She spent her 20s working and organizing at a bookstore and writing about drones and internet literature for _The State_. Her work has also appeared in the_ New Inquiry, Yes! Magazine
_, and
the _Dissent
_blog.
* Empathy Machines ,07-02-2018
* Anthem of the Sun ,02-20-2018
* Beyond Machine Sight, 12-14-2017
* Breaking the Waves ,11-01-2017
* Back to the Land ,10-03-2017
* Mandatory Updates ,07-17-2017
*
OS KEYES
OS KEYES
Os Keyes is a PhD student at the University of Washington and an inaugural Ada Lovelace Fellow who studies gender, data, technology, and control. * The Gardener’s Vision of Data, 05-06-2019
* Counting the Countless, 04-08-2019
*
PACO SALAS PÉREZ
PACO SALAS PÉREZ
Paco Salas Pérez is a writer, sci-fi enthusiast and computational linguist based in Brooklyn. They’re a contributing editor at the _New Inquiry_. * Emergency Dialect ,01-12-2017
*
PATRICK NATHAN
PATRICK NATHAN
Patrick Nathan ‘s first novel, _Some Hell_, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in February. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in _Boulevard_, _Gulf Coast_, the _Los Angeles Review of Books_, _Words in Light_, _Music & Literature_, and elsewhere. He lives in Minneapolis.* Motion Pictures ,
08-21-2017
* Still Lives , 07-13-2017*
PAUL ROQUET
PAUL ROQUET
Paul Roquet is associate professor of Japanese Studies at MIT, and the author of _Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self_(Minnesota,
2016). During the 2018-19 academic year he is researching AR and VR in Tokyo as a Japan Foundation fellow. * Peripheral Visions ,07-19-2018
*
PHILIPPA SNOW
PHILIPPA SNOW
Philippa Snow is a London-based writer and editor at _Modern Matter _and _Hexus_ journal. She has written for _i-D_, the _Guardian_, _Dazed & Confused_, and the _Quietus_, among others. * Open Window , 12-06-2016*
PHILIPPE PAMELA DUNGAO PHILIPPE PAMELA DUNGAO Philippe Pamela Dungao is a writer based in Toronto. Her work has appeared in Shameless Magazine, Broken Pencil Magazine, the White Wall Review, and elsewhere. * Nostalgia for Permanence, 06-25-2018
* Error Messages ,
10-17-2017
*
PHOEBE BOATWRIGHT
PHOEBE BOATWRIGHT
Phoebe Boatwright is a New York–based photographer. She is currently a project coordinator for the Bronx Museum’s Friends of José MartíSculpture Project.
* Illicit Material ,03-07-2017
*
PJ PATELLA-REY
PJ PATELLA-REY
PJ Patella-Rey is a writer and community organizer who works at the intersections of sexuality, labor, and digital technology. He is co-host of the Peepshow Podcast and co-founded the Cyborgology blog and the Theorizing the Web conference. * Body Doubles , 05-21-2018*
QUINN MORELAND
QUINN MORELAND
Quinn Moreland is a New York-based writer who joined _Pitchfork_ in 2015. Her writing has also appeared in the_ Fader_, the_ Hairpin_, _Hyperallergic_, _Impose_, _Jezebel_, and more. * Stop Motion , 12-15-2016*
R. JOSHUA SCANNELL
R. JOSHUA SCANNELL
R. Joshua Scannell is an adjunct instructor in Sociology and Women and Gender Studies at Hunter College, and the author of _Cities: Uncertain Sovereignty and Unauthorised Resistance in the Urban World. _
* Controlled Measures, 09-17-2018
* Broken Windows, Broken Code, 08-29-2016
*
RACHEL BERGMANN
RACHEL BERGMANN
Rachel Bergmann is a writer, researcher, and MA student in Communication Studies at McGill University. Her research explores the intersections of digital culture, computing technology, emotions, and social justice. Her current work examines the cultural history and social impacts of new technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning systems.* Digital Hygiene ,
06-17-2019
*
RACHEL DEL VALLE
RACHEL DEL VALLE
Rachel del Valle is a freelance writer and copywriter. She lives in Brooklyn. * In the Flesh , 08-05-2019*
RACHEL GIESE
RACHEL GIESE
Rachel Giese is a journalist in Toronto. She’s working on a book about modern boyhood and masculinity. You can find her at rachel-giese.com.
* Children’s Crusade, 04-02-2018
* Minor Infractions ,02-09-2017
* Survival Guides ,
12-01-2016
* Indecent Exposure ,07-21-2016
*
RACHEL STONE
RACHEL STONE
Rachel Stone is a student and writer from Chicago. Her work has been published in the _Awl_, the _Toast_, the _Hairpin_, and others. * Liquid Lunch , 01-25-2017*
RAE NUDSON
RAE NUDSON
Rae Nudson is a freelance writer based in Chicago. Her work has appeared on _Esquire_ and the _Billfold_. She is in the interior design certificate program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. * Interiority Complex, 02-08-2017
*
RAHEL AIMA
RAHEL AIMA
Rahel Aima is a writer based between Brooklyn and Dubai, a contributing editor at the _New Inquiry _and an editorial correspondent at_Ibraaz _.
* The Accursed Share ,06-04-2018
* Good Boys , 02-26-2018 * Eyes Without a Face ,05-10-2017
* Definition Not Found, 09-06-2016
*
REAL LIFE
REAL LIFE
* SPECIAL ISSUE: 2018, 12-20-2018
* CONSUMING OTHERS ,07-09-2018
* EMPATHIC CONSUMPTION, 07-02-2018
* SOUVENIRS , 06-25-2018* SACRED SITES ,
06-18-2018
* CURSED NETWORKS ,
06-04-2018
* SELF-OPTIMIZATION
, 05-29-2018
* FAKES , 05-21-2018* DEBATE FETISH ,
05-14-2018
* NEW GENRES , 04-26-2018*
REBECCA O'DWYER
REBECCA O'DWYER
Rebecca O‘Dwyer is an Irish art critic and writer based in Berlin. * Straight Edge , 05-29-2018*
RENÉE REIZMAN
RENÉE REIZMAN
Renée Reizman is an MFA candidate in critical and curatorial studies at the University of California, Irvine, and the curatorial assistant at And/Or Gallery in Pasadena. * Language Arts , 06-26-2017*
RINA NKULU
RINA NKULU
Rina Nkulu is a writer and artist studying in Arizona. She likes writing about cultures/subcultures, imagery, and identity. Her work has been published in _Rookie_, _Teen Vogue_, _Queen Mob’s Teahouse_, and others. * Sharper Image , 01-16-2018 * Immaterial Girls ,09-05-2017
*
ROB ARCAND
ROB ARCAND
Rob Arcand is a freelance journalist and culture writer based in Brooklyn. He writes about music and aesthetics and has appeared in _Tiny Mix Tapes_, _Thump_, and the_Quietus_.
* Unlimited Editions ,02-26-2018
* Warped Image , 08-31-2017 * Sonic Youth , 11-30-2016*
ROBERT ASTERMANN
ROBERT ASTERMANN
Robert Astermann is a former political science academic and blogger who doesn’t want the internet to know too much about them.* Sex Positivism ,
10-10-2017
*
ROBERT MINTO
ROBERT MINTO
Robert Minto is a philosopher and storyteller living in Boston. Heblogs and tweets
.
* Clone Wars , 02-12-2018 * Free Roaming , 03-28-2017*
ROBERT W. GEHL
ROBERT W. GEHL
Robert W. Gehl is an associate professor of communication at the University of Utah. This essay is based on a chapter from his forthcoming book, _Weaving Dark Webs: Violence, Propriety, Authenticity_ (MIT Press). * Proactive Paranoia ,08-24-2017
*
ROBIN JAMES
ROBIN JAMES
Robin James is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at UNC Charlotte. She writes about music, politics, gender, race, and sexuality at its-her-factory.blogspot.com.* Songs of Myself ,
05-31-2017
*
ROCHELLE DUFORD
ROCHELLE DUFORD
Rochelle DuFord is starting as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Hartford in Fall 2019. Her work is driven by a critical concern with the development of political, ethical, and social life under contemporary conditions of globalization, late capitalism, and liberalism. She is currently completing her first book project, which concerns the application of feminist and democratic theories of solidarity in contemporary political and economic conditions. * On a Journey , 06-06-2019*
ROLIN MOE
ROLIN MOE
Rolin Moe is Director of the Institute for Academic Innovation at Seattle Pacific University. Too much of his writing exists behind academic paywalls, but he can also be found at _Hybrid Pedagogy _and _Mindshift_. * All I Know Is What’s on the Internet,
01-17-2017
*
ROONEY ELMI
ROONEY ELMI
Rooney Elmi is a freelance film writer and founding editor of _SVLLY(wood)_ Magazine , a print and digital radical editorial geared toward curating a new cinephila. * Defending Your Life, 12-12-2016
* Body Cam , 08-11-2016*
RUBY BRUNTON
RUBY BRUNTON
Ruby Brunton is a New Zealand-raised writer, poet and performer who now lives in Brooklyn. She’s had poems in _Metatron, 4 Poets, Queen Mobs_ and the _Felt_ and essays in _Complex, the New Inquiry_ and _Mask Magazine_ where she is a contributing editor. She spends a lot of time thinking about intimacy, resistance, how to create community and education alternatives. Find her on twitter & tumblr @rubybrunton. * All My Ghosts , 06-13-2017 * Talk Therapy , 03-13-2017*
SAFY-HALLAN FARAH
SAFY-HALLAN FARAH
Safy-Hallan Farah is a writer whose work has appeared in the _Awl_, _Vogue_, _GQ_ and _NylonMagazine_.
* Myself and I , 11-29-2017*
SAM CARTER
SAM CARTER
Sam Carter is a writer and an editorat _Asymptote_ .
* Tape Magnetism ,
12-13-2017
*
SAM ZUCCHI
SAM ZUCCHI
Sam Zucchi is a law student and occasional games critic. * Plague of Metaphors, 11-27-2017
*
SARA REINIS
SARA REINIS
Sara Reinis is a strategist by trade who thinks obsessively about the internet. Her research and writing interests surround social media, visual culture, and new technologies. * Manufactured Recollection, 06-10-2019
*
SARAH BELLER
SARAH BELLER
Sarah Beller is a social worker andwriter.
* Worlds Apart , 11-14-2016*
SASHA CHAPIN
SASHA CHAPIN
Sasha Chapin is a writer living in Toronto. His writing has appeared in _Vice_, the _National Post_, and_Hazlitt_.
* Re: Doctor James Kelly, 01-27-2017
*
SASHA GEFFEN
SASHA GEFFEN
Sasha Geffen is a writer whose essays and music criticism have appeared in the _Chicago Reader_, the _New Inquiry_, and _Pitchfork_, among others. * Spoken For , 04-04-2019 * Playing Favorites ,02-20-2018
* Immaculate Contraption, 11-14-2017
* Net Shop Boys , 10-30-2017 * Escape Pod , 07-18-2017 * Play to Win , 05-08-2017*
SHANNON MATTERN
SHANNON MATTERN
Shannon Mattern is a Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research. Her writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; spatial epistemologies; and mediated sensation and exhibition. She is the author of _The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities_, _Deep Mapping the Media City_, and _Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media_, all published by University of Minnesota Press. In addition to writing dozens of articles and book chapters, she also contributes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures to _Places_, a journal focusing on architecture, urbanism, and landscape, and she collaborates on public design and interactive projects and exhibitions. * Networked Dream Worlds, 07-08-2019
*
SHARRONA PEARL
SHARRONA PEARL
Sharrona Pearl is an assistant professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communiation at UPenn. A historian and theorist of the body, she mostly spends her time thinking about faces. Her next book, _Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other_, is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press. She blogs at the Huffington Post and at kveller.com , mostly about parenting and social justice. * Masked and Anonymous, 07-18-2016
*
SHUJA HAIDER
SHUJA HAIDER
Shuja Haider is an editor at _Viewpoint Magazine_. * Scores Unsettled ,04-24-2018
*
SIMON LEWSEN
SIMON LEWSEN
Simon Lewsen is a magazine writer based in Toronto. He writes mostly about art, design, technology, society, mental health, and weird science, and he teaches writing at the University of Toronto.* Lucid Streaming ,
10-11-2016
*
SIOBHAN LEDDY
SIOBHAN LEDDY
Siobhan Leddy is a freelance writer and editor living in Berlin* Time After Time ,
10-04-2017
* Sky Mining , 04-19-2017*
SKYLER BALBUS
SKYLER BALBUS
Skyler Balbus is the Director of Product Design at Postlight , a digital product studio in New York City, where she practices design as both a maker and a leader. Her work is informed by her multidisciplinary background, and she is always interested in finding new ways to bring ideas and people together. * Screen Time, Sacred Time, 07-15-2019
*
SOPHIE HAIGNEY
SOPHIE HAIGNEY
Sophie Haigney is a writer whose work has appeared in the _New York Times,_ _New York_ _Magazine_, the _Baffler_, and elsewhere, and an editor at _Popula_. She often writes about visual art, social media, and the 24/7 news cycle. * I Don’t Have the Bandwidth, 03-11-2019
*
SORAYA KING
SORAYA KING
Soraya King is an editor at _Real Life_. She lives in Los Angeles. * Paradise Regained ,06-18-2018
* Repetition ,
01-04-2017
* Blood Ties ,
12-28-2016
*
STEPHANIE MONOHAN
STEPHANIE MONOHAN
Stephanie Monohan is a writer, illustrator, and youth researcher for MTV. She is currently pursuing a masters in Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt. Her work focuses on the intersections of technology, horror, and capitalism. She resides in New York and can often be found screening midnight movies at the Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn.* Fire in the Sky ,
08-08-2019
* Legend Tripping ,
06-04-2018
* Uncomfortable ASMR ,04-23-2018
* Horror Head , 06-08-2017*
STEPHEN THOMAS
STEPHEN THOMAS
Stephen Thomas is the author of _The Jokes_, a book of stories, and has contributed to _Hazlitt_, the _Daily Dot_, _Little Brother_, and the _Millions_. He lives inToronto.
* Muse Feed , 08-18-2016*
SUZANNAH SHOWLER
SUZANNAH SHOWLER
Suzannah Showler is the author of the poetry collections _Thing is _(McClelland & Stewart 2017) and _Failure to Thrive _(ECW 2014) and the book _Most Dramatic Ever _about _The Bachelor_. You can read her work in the_ New York Times Magazine_,_ Slate, Buzzfeed Reader, _the_ Walrus, Hazlitt, Maisonneuve, _and the_ Los Angeles Review of Books_, among other places. * New Feelings: Screen Protectiveness,
02-19-2019
*
TARA AGHDASHLOO
TARA AGHDASHLOO
Tara Aghdashloo is a writer , filmmaker and curator living in London. She writes, shoots, and talks about art, politics, and thefemale experience.
* New Skin , 04-20-2017*
TARA ISABELLA BURTON TARA ISABELLA BURTON Tara Isabella Burton has written on religion and culture for _National Geographic, _the_ Wall Street Journal, _the_ Atlantic,_ the_ American Interest_, and more. She is finishing a doctorate in theology and literature as a Clarendon Scholar at Trinity College, Oxford. * Cover Stories , 03-06-2017 * Apocalypse Whatever ,12-13-2016
* Cult of One , 11-21-2016*
TATUM DOOLEY
TATUM DOOLEY
Tatum Dooley is a writer living in Toronto. Her work has appeared in the _Globe and Mail_, the _Hairpin_, the _Fix_, the _White Wall Review_, and elsewhere. * Cost of Simplicity ,03-19-2018
* Help Wanted , 04-27-2017 * Word Perfect , 02-23-2017*
TAUSIF NOOR
TAUSIF NOOR
Tausif Noor is a freelance writer inLondon.
* Safety in Numbers ,03-21-2017
*
TAYLORE SCARABELLI
TAYLORE SCARABELLI
Taylore Scarabelli is a New York-based writer whose work focuses on fashion, feminism, and technology. She has written for _Dazed_, _Flaunt_, _Topical Cream_, and _Under the Influence_, among others. * Heal Thyself , 11-16-2017*
THUTO DURKAC-SOMO
THUTO DURKAC-SOMO
Thuto Durkac-Somo is a cofounder of the zine _Us Neither_ and a videoeditor in New York.
* Sublime Athletics ,09-06-2017
* Gunsight , 02-01-2017*
TIANA REID
TIANA REID
Tiana Reid is a writer and editor at the_ New Inquiry_. Her work has been published in _Bitch_, _Full Stop, Mask_, the _Toast_, _Vice_, and elsewhere. * Move On Up , 04-02-2018*
TIFFANY SUM
TIFFANY SUM
A sci-fi writer who also manages tech-heavy entertainment productions, Tiffany Sum proposes solutions for all to save our earth with emerging technologies.* Creature Suite ,
11-15-2016
*
TOM JOKINEN
TOM JOKINEN
Tom Jokinen is a Toronto-based writer and author of _Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training_.
* Taste Space , 09-15-2016 * The Internet Is a Tough Room, 07-14-2016
*
TOM THOR BUCHANAN
TOM THOR BUCHANAN
Tom Thor Buchanan is a writer and researcher living in Toronto. His work has appeared in _Joyland_, _Cosmonaut Avenue_, and _Metatron_. * Enemy Bodies , 02-12-2018*
VICKY OSTERWEIL
VICKY OSTERWEIL
Vicky Osterweil is a writer, editor, and agitator based inPhiladelphia.
* Well Played: Play Per View, 06-27-2019
* Well Played: Imagined Homeland, 05-30-2019
* Game Boys ,
04-01-2019
* All Work and All Play,
02-25-2019
* Well Played: Store Credit, 01-31-2019
* Well Played: Battle Royale, 12-19-2018
* Well Played: Passive Attack, 11-26-2018
* Well Played , 10-22-2018 * Games Without Frontiers, 04-25-2018
* Like and Subscribe ,02-12-2018
*
W. SEBASTIAN KAMAU
W. SEBASTIAN KAMAU
W. Sebastian Kamau is a biologist and writer and is on the editorial staff at CLOT Magazine . His work covers technology, race, and bioart. He is based in Seattle. * Rooms Full of Mirrors, 11-13-2017
*
WILL PARTIN
WILL PARTIN
Will Partin is featherless biped with broad nails and access to the internet. He researches labor, technology, and culture. * Near, Far, Wherever You Are, 04-11-2019
*
WILLIAM DAVIES
WILLIAM DAVIES
William Davies is author of _The Happiness Industry: How the Government & Big Business Sold us Wellbeing_ (Verso, 2015). He blogs at www.potlatch.org.uk.
* The Mismanaged Heart, 08-03-2016
*
ZACH KAISER
ZACH KAISER
Zach Kaiser is assistant professor of graphic design and experience architecture at Michigan State University. He dreams of a world that celebrates the suboptimal.* Sleep Subjects ,
01-03-2019
*
ZACK HATFIELD
ZACK HATFIELD
Zack Hatfield is a writer living in New York. His criticism has appeared in the _Paris Review Daily_, _Artforum_, _BOMB Magazine_, and the _Los Angeles Review of Books_. * Seeing Red , 09-07-2017*
ZARA RAHMAN
ZARA RAHMAN
Zara Rahman is a researcher, writer, and linguist who is interested in the intersection of power, race, and technology. She has traveled and worked in more than 25 countries in the field of information accessibility and data use in civil society. She was the first employee at OpenOil, looking into open data in the extractive industries, then worked for Open Knowledge, working with School of Data on data literacy for journalists and civil society. Rahman is currently a Fellow at the Data & Society Research Institute in New York City, investigating the bridging role between highly tech-literate communities and lower tech-literate communities. She is also a Research Lead at The Engine Room where she leads their Responsible Data Program. * My Manchester , 06-07-2017 * Where Are You Really From, 03-29-2017
* Close Calls , 01-26-2017*
DAVID A. BANKS
DAVID A. BANKS
David A. Banks is an editor at _Cyborgology_ and a Theorizing the Web committee member. His work focuses on the intersections of digital networks, urban form, and structures of power. David’s work has also been featured in the_ New Inquiry, Tikkun Magazine_, and the _Baffler Blog_. He is based in Troy, NY and he tweets from @da_banks . * Outer Limits , 06-20-2019 * Just Ride , 05-16-2019* Built to Shill ,
04-23-2019
* Building to Code
,
01-14-2019
* Same Difference ,
09-27-2018
* Sun Belt Simulacra, 08-23-2018
* Guided Tours Test 2: With GIFS ,08-21-2018
* Guided Tours Test 1: Screenshots ,08-21-2018
* Red Pilled , 04-26-2018 * Nerding Out , 04-09-2018*
JESSE BARRON
JESSE BARRON
Jesse Barron has written for the _New York Times Magazine, Harper’s_, _Vice_, _Bookforum_, and other publications. He lives in New York. * The Babysitters Club, 07-27-2016
*
THE COQUETTE
THE COQUETTE
The Coquette is the author of _Notes to My Future Husband_ and has written pop culture and advice columns for _Playboy_, _Nerve_, the _Daily_, and others. Her latest book, _The Best of Dear Coquette,_
is available for pre-order now.
* Who Was She? ,
07-15-2016
*
MIRA GONZALEZ
MIRA GONZALEZ
Mira Gonzalez is the author of _I will never be beautiful enough to make us beautiful together_.
She lives in Los Angeles. * Am I Texting My Friends Way Too Much?,
07-01-2016
*
ROB HORNING
ROB HORNING
Rob Horning is an editor at _RealLife_.
* Plausible Disavowal, 11-19-2018
* Too Much of Nothing,
09-20-2018
* Apathy Machines ,
07-02-2018
* True Nonbelievers ,06-04-2018
* Anxiety of Influence, 05-14-2018
* BOT FEELINGS ,
05-07-2018
* Sick of Myself ,
05-17-2017
* Fascism ,
01-03-2017
* Bots , 12-29-2016
*
NATHAN JURGENSON
NATHAN JURGENSON
Nathan Jurgenson is the editor-in-chief of _Real Life._ * Faked Out , 11-13-2018 * Breaking News , 01-02-2018* Structure ,
01-02-2017
* Ways of Speaking
, 12-26-2016
* Chaos of Facts ,
10-19-2016
* About Real Life ,
06-20-2016
* Real Life: Coming Soon , 06-16-2016*
KELLI KORDUCKI
KELLI KORDUCKI
Kelli Korducki has written for _Hazlitt_, the _New Inquiry_, the _Hairpin_, _Rookie_, the _Rumpus_, and numerous others in print and online. She resides in NYC, where she is a senior editor for a women’s lifestyle publication.* Sweet Nothings ,
01-29-2018
* Re: Diandra Janelle Heaven Rose ,12-23-2016
* Post, Memory , 07-07-2016*
HALEY MLOTEK
HALEY MLOTEK
Haley Mlotek is a writer and editor based in New York. Her work has appeared in the _New York Times Magazine_, the _New Yorker_, the _Pitchfork Review_, _n+1_,and elsewhere.
* Re: Wes Larson ,
07-22-2016
* Bot Couture , 07-05-2016*
DEVIN KENNY
DEVIN KENNY
Devin Kenny is an artist, educator, writer, and musician based in Houston Texas. He received his MFA in 2013 from the New Genres department at UCLA and is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program, SOMA Mexico, and is currently a fellow at the MFAH Core Program.* Altered States ,
04-24-2018
*
MICHAEL THOMSEN
MICHAEL THOMSEN
Michael Thomsen is a writer in New York and the author of _Levitate the Primate: Handjobs, Internet Dating, and Other Issues for Men_.
* Trash TV , 07-09-2018 * The Wild Ones , 04-25-2018 * To Be Discontinued ,10-16-2017
* Player One , 06-21-2017 * City Folk , 05-11-2017 * Eating Dirt , 02-27-2017 * The Parallax View ,09-22-2016
* Gemini Haptics ,
06-27-2016
*
TONY TULATHIMUTTE
TONY TULATHIMUTTE
Tony Tulathimutte wrote the novel _Private Citizens_ and runs CRIT, a writing class in Brooklyn. He has received a Whiting Award and an O. Henry Award, and is a graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. * Daily Affirmations ,04-26-2018
* Clash Rules Everything Around Me,
06-27-2016
*
AUTUMN WHITEFIELD-MADRANO AUTUMN WHITEFIELD-MADRANO Autumn Whitefield-Madrano is the author of _Face Value: The Hidden Ways Beauty Shapes Women’s Lives_. Her writing has
appeared in _Marie Claire_, _Glamour_, and _Jezebel_, and she blogs for the _New Inquiry_ and _Psychology Today_. * In the Eye of the Coder, 06-27-2016
CONTRIBUTE
The editors of Real Life are always looking for thoughtful, individual, and original work about living with technology. Please email contribute@reallifemag.com if you have a piece of writing or art in mind for this magazine. We pay.2019
Real Life is a magazine about living with technology. The emphasis is more on living. We publish one essay, advice column, reported feature, or uncategorizable piece of writing a day, four or five days a week. To find out more about us, click here . To find out more about our contributors, or to contribute yourself, click here . To ask us a question about anything else, email info@reallifemag.com Real Life is made possible by funding from Snapchat, and we operate with editorial independence and without ads.Website: CHIPS
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