Improving Reality 2013

Esoteric Content

presented by Georgina Voss

So the kind of tech­nolo­gies that get made are not nec­es­sar­i­ly very excit­ing. It’s some­thing that [Alexis] Madrigal of The Atlantic said, these tech­nolo­gies that are com­ing out of these star­tups, they’re nice, they’re cheap, they’re fun. And they’re about as world-changing as anoth­er vari­a­tion of beer pong. This is not big, rad­i­cal change.

An Introduction to Infrastructure Fiction

presented by Paul Graham Raven

The Someone Else’s Problem Field around infra­struc­ture is, iron­i­cal­ly enough, a mea­sure of infra­struc­ture’s ubiq­ui­ty and suc­cess. You don’t think about infra­struc­ture because you don’t need to. It just works. And when it does­n’t, there’s a phone num­ber you can not both­er call­ing, because they’ll only put you on hold any­way, and by the time you get through it’ll prob­a­bly have fixed itself, so why bother?