I think these are symptoms of chronic, pervasive problems with the way we develop and interact with software. Messing up my formatting upon copy-and-paste is a data-corruption bug, but we don’t think of it this way. Imagine if every time you copied something, half the letters would just come out randomly scrambled.
The irony here is that to be technological is to be profoundly human. Humanity controls its fate by using tools and materials to survive and to self-realize. The human species developed by gradually accumulating complex, adaptive technologies passed on through cultural transmission, giving us essential tools. Not only does human life and survival... See more
With so much of our socializing, organizing, and life administration routed through screens and networks, we face the contradictory risks of things disappearing or things staying findable forever. Nothing on our computers stays the same for very long. Software updates, websites disappear, and newspapers edit their copy and hope to get away with it.... See more
All that to say, a lot has changed in the technology world in the past six to twelve years. One only needs to look at Moore’s law to see how this is pretty much built in to the technology world, as once-impossible ideas are rapidly made possible by exponentially more processing power. And yet, we are to believe that as technology soared forward... See more
Another essay I've been procrastinating on: clocks and calendars are tools imposed by rulers (consider what "to rule" really means) to measure, manage and control the world. it's a way of colonizing time, which is in many ways even more insidious than colonizing space https://t.co/gbMX3PuPku
The web is open-ended, and continues to produce plot twists. WebAssembly is one of these. It is a universal bytecode runtime, designed to run fast low-level code in a sandbox. Why does this matter?