Tag: technology

fishtime

Arena Online

UB

31 Dec 2021

Everyone smells like fish... What's wrong with just being human...? Maybe this is just a bad dream. All I need to do is hold my breath and swim for the surface...

Meta-Facebook: The Quest for the Infinite Office

Zuckerberg describes the metaverse as ‘an embodied internet’. In this, he could not be more wrong: the metaverse is precisely about deepening the forces of disembodiment.

Cybernetic Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics

China’s Social Credit System is a compelling manifestation of cybernetic capitalism—of how financial mechanisms interlock with other systems of social control, by combining mass surveillance, gamified corporate loyalty programs, and debt peonage.

Biotech is about more than ownership. It’s about what human beings are

…the notion that (potential) human beings—that life—can be ‘mined’ or even created in order to provide other human beings with the material they need to be healthy and happy represents a momentous shift in how we view human being itself…

Antennas Aflame: Cybernetics, Conspiracies and 5G

Much of mainstream liberal commentary on the 5G conspiracy consists of snide dismissals that blame credulous individuals for inaccurate beliefs. Yet, given how widespread the 5G conspiracies have become, it is not enough to dismiss them...

The divided citizen: Robo-debt was just the beginning

What does a citizen look like in the eyes of the state when she is constructed from multiple databases and how does she respond to the resultant kaleidoscopic rendition of her?

Australia’s ‘Link Tax’: A Path to Total Corporate Media Dominance?

The mainstream media’s conflation of links with content to support the code is very problematic. It entirely avoids the fatal philosophical problem at the heart of the code: the proposition that mere links to content should now be considered, both legally and commercially, content itself to be managed by bureaucratic decree.

‘The First Cry of a Newborn World’: The Trinity Test at 75

The bright young things of Silicon Valley, with their dreams of direct democracy on Mars and digital immortality, are often difficult to take seriously. But their hubris is only the gaudy version of a broader cultural and political belief in the power of science and technology to edit, alter and override the very stuff from which our world is made—in other words, to ‘play God’.

Technocratic Urban Governance and the Need to Localise Computing Infrastructure (Part II)

Whoever controls the computer-based infrastructure of the city can determine the type of future the city has... ‘Smart city’ vendors and their platforms will immediately lock-in governments and citizens and limit their development, shaping the way we relate to the city while programming citizens’ behaviour.

Technocratic Urban Governance and the Need to Localise Computing Infrastructure (Part I)

The ‘smart city’ agenda follows a logic of neoliberal platformisation of the city and its urban infrastructures, where wealth is transferred to private corporations that structurally cannot prioritise public benefit or citizens’ well-being above their own profit-maximising drive, or work to strengthen democratic governments and their institutions.

Technologies in Hong Kong’s anti-government movement

…proficiency in using technology, along with the ability to improvise, will remain a key tactic in protestors’ fights against the police and their superior resources.

Participative Platforms and Alternative Tech Regimes

After COVID, it is possible that participatory democracy will become more mediatised, and public and cooperative initiatives will rise as alternatives to recover technological infrastructure as a public good.