The book 1.0

Susan Leigh Star, a sociologist and theorist of infrastructure and networks, wrote in her 1999 influential paper, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure”:

“Study a city and neglect its sewers and power supplies (as many have), and you miss essential aspects of distributional justice and planning power. Study an information system and neglect its... See more

What kind of memetic monsters evolve in a primordial stew made of fractalized identities, multipolar geopolitics and viral media? Conspiracy theories, of course.

When someone’s political leanings begin to change, most of the time it is because they have fallen into new circles, not because they have learned something new from personal experience about how the government or the economy works.

In my new book, I came up with the word “Filterworld” to describe our interwoven environment of algorithms. These equations have become inescapable, influencing the vast majority of what we consume online — and thus what kinds of culture we consume, period. I use “filter” because algorithmic recommendations are ultimately filters that sort content.... See more

Writing, more visibly and unquestionably today than ever, is inherently networked. It begins and remains connected to its subject, and to everything else, becoming part of it. It acts. It does work. It lives. When we write, we reconfigure the world.

The internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.

A few years ago, a user by the name of IlluminatiPirate published Dead Internet Theory: Most of the Internet is Fake on the online forum Agora Road’s Macintosh Cafe.1 The theory proposes that the majority of the content with which we engage online is algorithmically generated by bots, all in an effort to control what we believe. I feel obligated to... See more

but continued a love affair with language and meaning as texture and material.