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Note: This article touches on slut shaming, body shaming, homophobia, and ableism.

I love swearing. It’s a weekly miracle that my essays don’t include “totally fucked” or “fucked up and bullshit” in every paragraph. If I were reborn as a linguist, I would study swearing and cursing. I watch documentaries about cursing, I play a lot of Cards Against Humanity, and this interview with Melissa Mohr, the author of Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing is my favorite episode of Slate’s just-nerdy-enough podcast Lexicon Valley. If you’ve been in the audience when I give a presentation, you probably (despite my efforts to the contrary) heard me swear five or six times. I would hate to live in a world without swearing because it would be fucking dull. Unfortunately, my (and most English-speaking people) love of swearing comes into direct contradiction with inclusionary social politics. I need a new arsenal of swear words that punch up and tear down destructive stereotypes. Every time I swear, I want to be totally confident that I’m offending the right people. more...

Today we’re featuring an interview with Olivia Rosane and Adam Rothstein, contributing editors for The State and the minds behind Murmuration, June’s month-long festival of drone culture. Given this blog’s close ties to that project, it seems appropriate to dig a little deeper into the thinking and aims behind it. Olivia and Adam were kind enough to sit down and answer some questions to that end.

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“Now that my father fit into a desktop-size box — my computer screen — the proportions seemed manageable”

“The chilling disciplinary effect taking place in the digital age affects everyone”

“street art is “so transitory” and ephemeral that without social media, “a lot of it would fall by the wayside””

“The term “cyberutopian” tends to be used only in the context of critique”

“passionate game fans are willfully blind to the communication gap between the games industry and everyone else”

“#Standingman is good activism for the same reasons it makes for a good meme”

“drone fiction denies the presence of human operators; it renders drones autonomous”

“Uber meets AirBnB for Helicopter Transport”

“In the nineties, tapping the Web, if not impossible, was certainly a pain”

“we are open-source-extremists, the feminist virus infecting your thoughts“ more...

One problem with taking social problems and re-framing them as individual responsibility is that it ends up blaming victims instead of pressuring root causes. This mentality creates a temptation to, for example, respond to the NSA scandal involving the government tapping into Internet traffic with something like, “well stop posting your whole life on Facebook, then”. Or less glib is the point raised many times this month that the habit of constant self-documentation on social media has made possible a state of ubiquitous government surveillance. The brutality of spying is made both possible and normal by the reality of digital exhibitionism. How can the level of government spying be so shocking in a world where people live-tweet their dinner? Perhaps we should stop digitally funneling so much of our lives through Gmail now that the level of surveillance is becoming clearer. Sasha Weiss writes in The New Yorker that, more...

Murmuration (a month-long festival of drone culture) is in full swing, and while I still plan to write a retrospective post once it’s all done, there are naturally already themes emerging as common to a number of the pieces. And like all powerful themes, they transcend the pieces themselves, speaking to wider technological and social issues, revealing existing things while pointing the conversational way forward. I think one of these themes in particular is worth some particular attention, not only for what it says about drones but for what it says about war in general.

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In Taksim Square, at around 8PM local time, a man started standing near Gezi park facing the Atatürk Cultural Center. According to CNN –and more importantly Andy Carvin (@acarvin) and Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) — the man is believed to be Erdem Gündüz, a well known Turkish performance artist who has inspired a performative internet meme that has already made it around the globe. (There’s a nice Storify here. Thanks to @samar_ismail for putting it on my radar.) Gündüz and his supporters were removed by police after an 8 hour stand-off (in multiple senses of the term) but now that small act has gone viral and spread well beyond Taksim Square. The idea is simple: a photo, usually taken from behind demonstrates that person’s solidarity with those hurt or killed by Turkish police actions in the past month, and the increasingly repressive policies of that country’s government in the last few years. On twitter, the hashtag #duranadam (“duran adam” is “the standing man” in Turkish) quickly spilled over the borders of Turkey and has been translated to #standingman as more people in North America and Western Europe start to stand in solidarity with those in Taksim. #standingman is an overtly political meme because, unlike other performative memes like #planking, #owing, or even #eastwooding, it is meant to demonstrate a belonging to a cause. more...

Over the weekend, I noticed that Facebook hashtags are now linked. “What!? When did this happen??” I quickly asked my network.

This simple shift opens avenues for  deeper discussions about the social media ecology of which I wrote a few weeks back. In particular, it shows the relational nature of the ecological system, and the back and forth multiply influential relationship between humans and technologies, all of which shape each other in a multiplicity of ways.

By social media ecology I refer to all of the media on and through which users are Social (in the capital “S,” linked and connected sense of the word introduced by Whitney Erin Boesel and Nathan Jurgenson). As social media increasingly integrates into the flow and logic of everyday life, users draw on a variety of digital tools to meet a diverse set of needs. The social media ecology refers to the set of tools users draw on, and the ways in which these tools, and their users,  are connected and/or compartmentalized. more...

“In social media, alienation appears as its opposite”

“A LinkedIn Body is made of the ways in which you’ve made money”

“it’s no surprise to see an app tracking your ability to disconnect”

“It’s no accident that both Manning and Snowden are former soldiers who served in Iraq”

“Should the government know less than Google?”

“7. Realize, w/ horror, that your boyfriend, unbeknownst to you, has had unprecedented access to all of your emails”

““Oh, don’t be such a digital dualist, Raymond,” Isobel quipped”

“In his egregious professional misstep, he inadvertently handed Fat Activists a microphone and a spotlight”

“Every wave of positivism eventually comes undone, when its central contradiction emerges”

“the digital beatdown he’d help deliver over Steubenville came back to haunt him”

“replacing cops and soldiers with PRISM and predator drones: Massively Open Online Police State (MOOPS)“ more...

I start with a nota bene by saying that I do not self-identify as a “surveillance scholar” but given our current sociotechnical and political climates, the topic is unavoidable. One might even be tempted to say that if you aren’t thinking about state and corporate surveillance, you’re missing a key part of your analysis regardless of your object of study. Last week, Whitney Erin Boesel put out a request for surveillance study scholars to reassess the usefulness of the panopticon as a master metaphor for state surveillance. Nathan Jurgenson commented on the post, noting that Siva Vaidhyanathan (@sivavaid) has used the term “nonopticon” to describe “a state of being watched without knowing it, or at least the extent of it.” I would like to offer up a different term –taken straight from recent NSA revelations—that applies specifically to surveillance that relies on massive power differentials and enacted through the purposeful design of the physical and digital architecture of our augmented society. Nested within the nonopticon, I contend, are billions of “boundless informants.” more...

I’ve been writing a lot about game consoles lately, mostly because a lot has been going on with gaming. To date I’ve mostly been focusing on the Xbox One and the degree to which it contributes to the troubling industry trend – intensely apparent in the game industry but by no means confined to it – of eroding the power of owners and turning them increasingly into users/renters. With the release of the Xbox one, I – and many others – wondered if this marked the final push in the setting of massive industry standards. If, with the Xbox One’s hopelessly restrictive and confusing game lending/resale process and its daily “phone home” requirement, this was simply going to become the norm. Which would mean a serious blow to the power of technology consumers and an important and worrying redefinition of our relationship with the technology that augments our daily lived experience.

Then E3 happened.

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