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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. 

Douglas Rushkoff WebVisions Portland 2016 Keynote

Google just has to grow. It has to keep grow­ing. But Google grows at its own per­il. Google grew so much that what hap­pened? It out­grew Google. Google had to become what? Alphabet. Now what is Alphabet? Alphabet is not Google. Alphabet is a hold­ing com­pa­ny. So Google’s new busi­ness as Alphabet is to do what? It’s to buy and sell tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies. So, once a com­pa­ny becomes just too big to flip any­more, it becomes a flip­per of oth­er companies.

Response to Tarleton Gillespie’s The Relevance of Algorithms”

It seems to me that to con­front algo­rithms on their own terms, we may have to mod­i­fy our pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with the pol­i­tics of knowl­edge and take up an inter­est in the pol­i­tics of logis­ti­cal engineering.