contemporary artifacts

Category: criticism

  • Bradley Manning and the Two Americas

    If you see America as a place within borders, a bureaucratic and imperial government that acts on behalf of its 350 million people, if you see America as its edifices, its mandarins, the careful and massive institutions that have built our cities and vast physical culture, the harsh treatment of Manning for defying that institution…

  • After-market in bugs

    After-market in bugs, originally uploaded by micahcraig. Softmodding an Xbox requires a doohicky to write to Xbox memory cards and a game that has an exploitable bug in the Load/Save routine. There’s a thriving after-market in these games, as evidenced by the frequency with which they are purchased together with the doohicky. I may be…

  • The Zero Sum Game of Penalty Kicks

    This discussion of the game theory of pentaly kicks has become more and more apropos every day through the end of the tournement.

  • Compare and Contrast: Eco versus Stephenson on Operating Systems

    In 1994, Umberto Eco wrote an essay in which he compared the Macintosh to the Catholic Church and DOS to the Protestants. “Indeed,” he says “the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits.” DOS, he says, is Calvinistic, as it “allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal…

  • Responses to Jaron Lanier’s crit of online collectivism

    I would like to see a steel cage death match amongst these net thinkers. David Pescovitz: Two weeks ago, Edge.org published Jaron Lanier’s essay “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism,” critiquing the importance people are now placing on Wikipedia and other examples of the “hive mind,” as people called it in the…