Human escape from natural constrains sounds like a worthy project. Destruction of nature seems, well, destructive, but of course so does nature. I’m of two minds on the subject. I try to sleep at night by imagining that self awareness is unique to humans, but remain aware that notions of human exceptionalism, like notions of…

If you’re an OTA viewer you’re feeding on cultural leftovers, quite literally. If you’re not, your baseline cost of living is poverty line times 1.5 or something. Sure Netflix is somethingteen dollars a month (or is it more by now? I don’t follow such things), but for all practical purposes assumes you have wired Internet…

Aral Balkan: In the PC 1.0 era, individuals had ownership and control of their machines. If, for example, you installed an app and it used your 9600 baud modem to phone home and report on your behaviour, we called it a Trojan – and we understood it to be malware. Today, we call a far…

The problem with main$tream social media isn’t the fact that it’s closed source, but the fact that it’s for-profit. I’m happy to see that people are interested in creating alternatives that incorporate some combination of decentralization, software freedom, or user governance, but I’m dismayed that seemingly none of them are going for the jugular and…

I’m of two minds on the subject. I agree with everything in Larry’s declaration of digital independence and as far as I know, I agree with the petition language (although I haven’t yet followed the link to change.org). But as they say in Leftbook these days, self care means don’t read the comments. I don’t…

I used to sometimes joke (somewhat tastelessly I’m sure) that there are three categories of autistic people systematically underrepresented in media, at least news media. Those being autistic adults autistic girls autistic boys whose name is something other than Daniel The last one probably never had any basis in fact, but I’ve sometimes wondered if…

Part of the problem is that at some point the hype machine made a regular meme campaign of using the words innovation and entrepreneurship interchangeably. I can only assume that the goal of this aggressive framing is to create a social consensus that unmonetized innovation doesn’t count. Maybe it’s Team Capitalism’s response to those of…

Please see this discussion between Isabella DiMichelis and Evgeny Morozov, moderated by Maria Mazzucato. I’m concerned less with the right to monetize than the option of not monetizing. I miss the days when many Internet participants chose not to monetize. That pretty much got lost in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, DIY hacker ethos…

h/t /u/rbif All three do all three of those things and more. There is no major variation in business practices between competitors. The role of competition in capitalism is not to see who can be innovative and come up with something new, in products or in practices. It is a competition to see who milks…

First and foremost, schools should be independent. Whether they should also be agile is something to consider on a case-by-case basis. Agility is always welcome when it serves independence. Since “agile” is something of a corporate buzzword, if I heard the question “Can schools be agile?” with no other context, my first instinct would be…