Sublime

In place of the human gatekeepers and curators of culture, the editors and DJs, we now have a set of algorithmic gatekeepers.

‘landed property’ is not actual soil, rocks or grass. It is a legal understanding, maintained by a subtle mix of morality and the threat of violence. In fact, land ownership illustrates perfectly the logic of what Rudolf von Ihering called the state’s monopoly of violence within a territory – just within a much smaller territory than a nation

The main split in twenty-first-century politics might be not between democracies and totalitarian regimes but rather between human beings and nonhuman agents. Instead of dividing democracies from totalitarian regimes, a new Silicon Curtain may separate all humans from our unfathomable algorithmic overlords. People in all countries and walks of

Technology tends to represent a thrust toward the future, an accelerated promise of microrefined systems and networks, deeper probes into the way we live and think. Technology claims the future on our behalf.

A persuasive framework for the digital that has ontological implications is being developed by Benjamin Bratton in San Diego. Bratton’s (2014) concern with the geopolitics of planetary-scale computation leads him to posit the existence of an “accidental megastructure,” the Stack.

Politicians boggled at two political problems that would attend the implementation of the plans: their fantastic cost and the necessity of removing from their path and relocating thousands, even tens of thousands, of voters. For years—decades—in every city in the country, the expressways remained on the drawing boards. In every city, that is,