Stories by Stephenson – which tend, predictably, towards singular heroes who win at technocracy – form the inspiration behind Amazon’s Blue Origin and Facebook’s Metaverse.
n the vacuum of this interim period we're offered up a brief window of reflection. Before another cycle of froth and evangelism sets in (cough cough AI), perhaps it's a good time to ask ourselves about what we just went through?
Today’s great-power competition is unfolding in the digital era, with the focus shifting to innovation in digital technology rather than ideological competition. The U.S. government has increasingly recognised that ideological intervention yields little practical value and does not substantively enhance its technological competitiveness. This under... See more
Digital networks have become the dominant cultural logic, profoundly transforming not only culture but also the economy, public sphere, and even people’s subjectivity. In contrast to digital culture, network culture makes information less the outcome of discrete processing units and more of the result of the networked relations between them, of con... See more
These refugees have labored to build an informational and communicative infrastructure that isn’t so overwhelming, one that can be bootstrapped in private or semi-private spaces where a level of trust and good will is taken for granted, and conflict can be productive and encouraging instead of destructive and terrifying. As she puts it, “If the mem... See more