Open Transcripts

Archive

Afro Tech: Afrofuturism, Telling Tales of Speculative Futures

The exhi­bi­tion Afro-Tech and the Future of Re-Invention puts Afrofuturism in dia­logue with alter­na­tive tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tions and imaginations.

Humans as Software Extensions

What is this con­di­tion? I would sum­ma­rize it as peo­ple extend­ing com­pu­ta­tion­al sys­tems by offer­ing their bod­ies, their sens­es, and their cog­ni­tion. And specif­i­cal­ly, bod­ies and minds that can be eas­i­ly plugged in and lat­er eas­i­ly be dis­card­ed. So bod­ies and minds algo­rith­mi­cal­ly man­aged and under the per­ma­nent pres­sure of con­stant avail­abil­i­ty, effi­cien­cy, and per­pet­u­al self-optimization. 

From Managerial Feudalism to the Revolt of the Caring Classes

I think we need to real­ly think hard about what has been hap­pen­ing to social class rela­tions. And the con­clu­sion that I came to is that essen­tial­ly the left is apply­ing an out­dat­ed par­a­digm. You know, they’re still think­ing in terms of boss­es and work­ers and a kind of old-fashioned indus­tri­al sense. Where what’s real­ly going on is that for most peo­ple the key class oppo­si­tion is care­givers ver­sus man­agers. And essen­tial­ly, left­ist par­ties are try­ing to rep­re­sent both sides at the same time, but they’re real­ly dom­i­nat­ed by the latter.

The Precariat: A Disruptive Class for Disruptive Times

In a book that I wrote in 2011, on page one I said that unless the inse­cu­ri­ties, and the fears, and the aspi­ra­tions of the pre­cari­at were addressed as a mat­ter of urgency, we would see the emer­gence of a polit­i­cal mon­ster. You will not be sur­prised that in November 2016 I received a lot of emails from around the world from peo­ple who said, ​“The mon­ster has arrived.”

We Need to Tell a Better Story Than Cyberpunk

We have a lot of pro­pos­als on how tech­nol­o­gy should work in this soci­ety, how we want to avoid all the dan­gers we can see that oth­ers can­not see. But we do a very very bad job at com­mu­ni­cat­ing it.

The Coming War on General Computation

General pur­pose com­put­ers are in fact astound­ing. So astound­ing that our soci­ety is still strug­gling to come to grips with them. To fig­ure out what they’re for. To fig­ure out how to accom­mo­date them and how to cope with them.

When Algorithms Fail in Our Personal Lives

I won­der with all these vary­ing lev­els of needs that we have as users, and as we live more and more of our lives dig­i­tal­ly and on social media, what would it look like to design a semi-private space in a pub­lic network?

Common Tags

education design surveillance Internet Hall of Fame 2014 Carl Malamud privacy artificial intelligence art religion Berkman Klein Center open source Twitter community Geek of the Week Histories of Violence Internet history Internet infrastructure technology algorithms ethics Internet Hall of Fame New America Internet Hall of Fame 2013 politics