“Perhaps it won’t be long before Google, not Gallup, is the most trusted name in polling”
“I took pictures of the panopticon while watching other tourists take pictures of the panopticon”
“the skeumorphic has begun to feel – in Lyotard’s terms – pornographic”
“Think of our password problem as being like polio”
“the system they’d developed could raise $3 million from a single email”
“Silicon Valley imagines itself as the un-Chick-fil-A”
“The lapses of disconnect between me and my avatar are occasional, but odd”
“social media nurtures the impulse to speak”
“since the election of Barack Obama, the worldview of online hate groups has become more violent”
“the vaunted FiveThirtyEight model is only as good as the data it runs through its algorithm”
“What happens when, as a result of social media, vigilantism takes on a new form?”
“In event of power or Internet loss, just shout 140-character comments out window”
“When disaster strikes, make sure to bring your sandbags of skepticism to Twitter”
“Death is denied when a Facebook activist can never prove it”
“the [cyberspace] metaphor constrains, enables, and structures very distinct ways of imagining”
“a dualistic offline/online worldview can depoliticise and mask very real and uneven power relationships“ more...
“The digital and the physical are becoming one”
“Design is one of the linchpins of capitalism, because it makes alienated labor possible”
“My hologram rendered somehow less complete. A broken stream in the data mind”
“Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world”
“Facebook is broken, on purpose, in order to extract more money from users”
“Writing for a general audience, he said, was “a responsibility of scholars”
“Scrobbling might be “social,” but it’s not very personal”
“Wikipedians may be their own worst enemy”
“I would challenge the idea that trolls, and trolls alone, are why we can’t have nice things online”
“Memory on the Internet is both infinite and fleeting”
“In this climate, it gets hard to draw strict distinctions between living systems and mechanical ones”
“if you haven’t visited the Deep Web, you ain’t seen nothing yet”
“nothing in society makes sense except in the light of power. And that goes for speech, too”
“Red Bull will most likely never fund a trip to Mars or a high speed rail line”
“A 3-year-old shouldn’t know which of her actions are worthy of being documented”
“Surface is going to make some kind of history for Microsoft, one way or another”
“I always react negatively against the idea that technology is a foreign body inside the human” (1997)
“to design with an eye to how clothes look online, perhaps sacrificing how they feel on the body”
The Jager Bomb:
Ingredients:
The shot of Jager is dropped into a glass of Red Bull and chugged until all evidence disappears down the throats of the youthful.
As I (and a record 8 million other live Youtube viewers) witnessed Felix Baumgartner jump from a floating platform 128,000 feet in the air, I could not help but think about those little red bulls on his helmet. Red Bull, the ubiquitous energy drink and funder of all things Extreme™, had branded nothing less than a moment in human history. A monumental achievement brought to you by a peddler of a sugary drink that has fueled some of the worst decisions in the world [NSFW]. There was a day when the United States government was in the business of dazzling humanity with its feats of technological superiority and raw tenacity. For three years we were landing on the moon almost every six months. We made it look easy. Baumgartner’s jump is truly incredible, but it also makes me a little angry. I am tempted to bemoan the fall of civic life and the rise of corporate-sponsored spectacle, but ultimately I cannot find a moral handhold. Do I want an arms race or consumer capitalism to fund the greatest technological achievements of my lifetime? more...
“There is an essential lack of any heroic narrative in most films about the second Gulf War”
“In twenty years universal television will be an everyday affair” (1927)
“Romney campaign’s presence on Tumblr is more subdued”
“The pay-to-promote feature disrupts the interest-based algorithm”
“The symbiotic relationship between us and our apps will be seamless”
“ESC became a kind of “interrupt” button on the PC — a way to poke the computer and say, “Cut it out””
“the concept of ‘internet addiction’ relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the internet is”
“Will there ever be a laptop that needs to be broken in, and improves as you use it?”
“With these gardens as crypto-water-computers, they were taking measurements of the universe”
“A troll exploits social dynamics like computer hackers exploit security loopholes”
“the fighting of war is now augmented – war by physical and digital means are now inseparable”
“there is no compelling evidence that any online dating matching algorithm actually works”
Below is a partial transcript of the introductory remarks I gave at the Technoscience as Activism Conference held in Troy, New York and hosted by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from June 26-28, 2012. The conference was funded by the NSF’s GK-12 Fellowship Program.
I almost never read my presentations but we’re short on time and there’s a lot of stuff that I want to share with you and I don’t want to miss anything. Publicly reading an apology for reading in public is an apt metaphor for what this conference is about, or more precisely what it is a response to. When I approached Dr. Ron Eglash about putting on this conference I told him I only wanted to do it if I could make the conference reflect the kind of politics espoused in the presentations. I don’t want to invite a bunch of brilliant people to Troy, who want to talk about democratizing science and technology, and keep them in a single room all day. Troy should benefit from some of your unique experiences, and the people of Troy have done some amazing things that I think the visitors will enjoy and appreciate. more...
“we’ll have a crack team of GIF artists cranking out instant animations of the best debate moments”
“And independent voters? The top term was “LOL,” short for laugh out loud”
“bad photos have found their apotheosis on social media, where everybody is a photographer”
“I am only as secure as the last time I was retweeted”
“everyone else seemed so natural in their tweeting. for me it was agony”
“the hate-blog phenomenon is basically anti-fandom”
“low-tech objects that are the paraphernalia of hipster culture”
“is Klout trying to smack a glossy veneer of Science™ onto social ranking?”
Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson more...“40% of Twitter users who log in on a regular basis never tweet”
“cyberpunk romanticisation of the ‘virtual’ plays a cultural role in propping up [digital dualism]”
“Drones will make traditional fences as obsolete as gunpowder & cannons made city walls”
“For the poor, there will be cyberspace”
“Percentage of folks living on a Native American reservation who have internet access: 10”
““Gangnam Style” signals the emergence of irony in South Korea”
“The Enterprise crew was driving a misfiring IBM PC in the service of a quasi-neoliberal agenda”
“Data’s positronic brain doesn’t have Wi-Fi”
“Desired Skills: Klout Score of 35 or higher”
