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.