Archive

A Pessimist’s Guide to the Future of Technology

In this moment that we’re in today with tech­nol­o­gy, where we’re I think shift­ing final­ly into a mode where it’s pos­si­ble to be crit­i­cal with­out get­ting sneered at, if we kind of look back at the…I don’t know, the opti­mistic aspi­ra­tional­ism that we’ve been using to encounter tech­nol­o­gy in the broad­est sense, and we look back on those moments of the recent past or even the dis­tant past, we can see how we knew how things were going to turn out, actu­al­ly. We just weren’t pay­ing them heed.

The Essence of Sandwichness,” Including the Official New York Definition of a Sandwich

I love read­ing gov­ern­ment mem­os because the world is an unclas­si­fi­able place, but the peo­ple that write these mem­os have to try to clas­si­fy it any­way, and the results get weird. You get these clas­si­fi­ca­tion odd­i­ties, these reg­u­la­to­ry platypuses.