Hacking has been on our minds for months now, namely due to the American (and now French) presidential election. But hacking has been of interest to scholars for decades, and in many iterations. Hacking has been analyzed as a craft, an aesthetic, a historical practice, a subculture, a form of activism, a mode of resistance…
Author Archives: Emily Goldsher-Diamond
Web Roundup: If it Ledes, it Bleeds
This contemporary moment begs the question: what is a fact? And how do facts circulate? These questions are historical cornerstones in the study of the production of knowledge, and scaffold work in disciplines from philosophy to anthropology; however, in a post-truth climate asking after the genesis and dissemination of facts takes on a new and curious significance. The production and …
Web Roundup: Ethical Technology, Moral Medicine
Researchers at MIT have launched Moral Machine, a web project to help gauge human perspectives on “moral decisions made by machine intelligence.” The project comes in the wake of a new Science study regarding the complicated tangle of ethics and driverless cars, where the classic ‘trolley problem’ has been scaled up for new technology. Scientific American, weighing in, …
Web Roundup: How Do You Feel Today?
New Facebook reactions, the expansion of “like” options to include “love,” “sad” and “angry” emoticons (among others), is just one way affect has collided with technology this month. Zuckerberg and co. collaborated with the Greater Good Science Center team to produce “scientifically faithful” icons. No longer must you experience your feelings bounded within the body; instead, Facebook …
Web Roundup: Weather the Weather
Inspired by yet another prediction of snowfall tonight in Brooklyn, this month’s web roundup will briefly outline some recent looks at climate change. Over at Jacobin, Andreas Malm critiques the Anthropocene narrative’s place in discourse around climate change. Malm writes, “Species-thinking on climate change only induces paralysis. If everyone is to blame, then no one is.” At Aeon, Jedediah Purdy …
Web Roundup: Accessing Assistive Technology
This month, a brief look at some new initiatives meant to erode many different barriers to access when it comes to assistive technology for people with disabilities. There exists a tendency for popular media to approach innovation in assistive technology with the kind of techno-optimism pervasive in writing about consumer technology, where the stakes are arguably lower and motivations are …