We’ve all obsessed over someone who isn’t there: fictional characters, an absent lover, the dead. The verb “obsess” means to haunt, harass, or torment, as an evil spirit. But we are usually the ...
Tag: Technoculture
The World Silicon Valley Made
A repairman at the Shenzhen electronic bazaar treks from stall to stall, gathering inexpensive camera modules, casings, glass displays, batteries, and motherboards, and then, with only a screwdriver ...
Future Shocks
“The future’s not what it used to be,” sings Mickey Newbury in his 1971 hit of the same name. His song frames this witticism in romantically personal terms, but the insight has broad applicability ...
Virtual Roundtable on “Future Sex”
On Emily Witt’s smart and sometimes menacing study of 21st-century intimacy.
Being Data
In 1966, Der Spiegel interviewed Martin Heidegger: SPIEGEL: And what takes the place of philosophy now? HEIDEGGER: Cybernetics.1 Even before the mass production of personal computers, Heidegger saw ...
On Accelerationism
At a time when the future seems to belong to Chicago-school economists and the Internet to Google and the NSA, a new movement calls to re-imagine left politics from top to bottom.
Imagining the Near Future: An Interview with Dexter Palmer
At a reading this past winter, Dexter Palmer introduced his latest novel, Version Control, by sharing private messages swapped between Rebecca Wright, the story’s protagonist, and her would-be ...
Afrofuturism: Everything and Nothing
Whence the “Afro” in “Afrofuturism”? In the 1994 interview with Samuel R. Delaney that inaugurated the term, Mark Dery defines Afrofuturism as “speculative fiction that treats African American themes ...
What’s So Social About Social Media?
Social media is possibly the worst thing that’s ever happened to media scholars. I’m not referring to the phenomenon of Facebook, Twitter, and other brand-name-as-verb online platforms—experienced ...
The Folly of Technological Solutionism: An Interview with Evgeny Morozov
Evgeny Morozov, a former denizen of the technology world, gained notoriety as a skeptic of that world with his 2010 book The Net Delusion, in which he argued that technology enthusiasts or “cyber ...