Daniel Rourke /stream

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Tags: nature posthuman science apocalypse

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If you have the leisure time to read Newsweek, then you probably live with a generally manageable nexus of concerns. You know you are going to die, but are not terribly…

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A few weeks into the making of Her, Spike Jonze’s new flick about romance in the age of artificial intelligence, the director had something of a breakthrough.

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There's no command-Z for this great man's suffering. On Christmas Eve, Queen Elizabeth II pardoned the computer scientist Alan Mathison Turing. Nearly all of the modern world is constructed on Turing’s…

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In the late 1700s, machinists started making music boxes: intricate little mechanisms that could play harmonies and melodies by themselves. Some incorporated bells, drums, organs, even violins, all coordinated by a…

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If there is one issue in contemporary life that supposedly defines the progressive nature of liberal societies, it is gay rights. Over the past half-century, most of the world’s Western democracies…

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In “Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture?” Ihab Hassan uses the metaphor of the mythological Prometheus to frame his discussion on posthumanism and positions him as a trickster with a…

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Places that have never existed except in the human imagination may find an incongruous afterlife in the everyday world. Umberto Eco tells of how an attempt to commemorate the brownstone New…

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Metaphor wants to be… ‘[...] metaphors work to change people’s minds. Orators have known this since Demosthenes. [...] But there’s precious little evidence that they tell you what people think. [...]…

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Today, cyber means war. But back in the 1990s, it meant sex — at least, the kind of sex you can have in a chat room. Why did the word change,…

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Anyone who can read German can read the first book ever printed. If you can read Sumerian cuneiform, you can read clay tablets that were probably the first things ever written.…

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Lou Reed got Kanye West's Yeezus absolutely right. "No one's near doing what he's doing,” Reed wrote in a review just a few weeks before he died. “It's not even the…

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Ancient viruses inherited from Neanderthals have been found in modern human DNA. Scientists are investigating possible links between the “endogenous retroviruses”, which are hard-wired into DNA, and modern diseases such as…

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Images of a post-apocalyptic world are rife in contemporary literature. Written in 2006, The Road by American author Cormac McCarthy depicts a nearly decimated planet Earth. The probable end of mankind…

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You'd think that given how pervasive the internet is, we'd be stuck with the fundamental architecture it uses: servers that many devices connect to for their information fix. But a team…

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Tags: nature posthuman science apocalypse

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Influential post-industrial sound alchemists Coil once implored us to Worship the Glitch, and it’s true that errors and flaws have long been perceived as having an essentially spiritual nature: they serve…

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A few weeks into the making of Her, Spike Jonze’s new flick about romance in the age of artificial intelligence, the director had something of a breakthrough.

Bookmark

There's no command-Z for this great man's suffering. On Christmas Eve, Queen Elizabeth II pardoned the computer scientist Alan Mathison Turing. Nearly all of the modern world is constructed on Turing’s…

Bookmark

In the late 1700s, machinists started making music boxes: intricate little mechanisms that could play harmonies and melodies by themselves. Some incorporated bells, drums, organs, even violins, all coordinated by a…

Bookmark

If there is one issue in contemporary life that supposedly defines the progressive nature of liberal societies, it is gay rights. Over the past half-century, most of the world’s Western democracies…

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“Propaganda is called upon to solve problems created by technology, to play on maladjustments and to integrate the individual into a technological world” (Ellul xvii). How might future research into digital…

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Places that have never existed except in the human imagination may find an incongruous afterlife in the everyday world. Umberto Eco tells of how an attempt to commemorate the brownstone New…

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Today, cyber means war. But back in the 1990s, it meant sex — at least, the kind of sex you can have in a chat room. Why did the word change,…

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Peter Suchin reappraises the prismatic works of Roland Barthes – an author who defied his own pronouncement of the designation’s demise. From the Marxist of Mythologies to the ‘scientist’ of S/Z,…

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Lou Reed got Kanye West's Yeezus absolutely right. "No one's near doing what he's doing,” Reed wrote in a review just a few weeks before he died. “It's not even the…

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Ancient viruses inherited from Neanderthals have been found in modern human DNA. Scientists are investigating possible links between the “endogenous retroviruses”, which are hard-wired into DNA, and modern diseases such as…

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Chess has problems. Not for most of us, perhaps - not for the bluffers and the fudgers and the seat-of-the-pants players who prod a path through matchups in which each side's…

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You'd think that given how pervasive the internet is, we'd be stuck with the fundamental architecture it uses: servers that many devices connect to for their information fix. But a team…

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“I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell…