Daniel Rourke /stream

Bookmark

If Facebook can tag you, so can the government. Big Brother has never mere fiction, but thanks to improved technologies, the Orwellian lens has never been sharper. Janus, a recently launched…

Bookmark

If Facebook can tag you, so can the government. Big Brother has never mere fiction, but thanks to improved technologies, the Orwellian lens has never been sharper. Janus, a recently launched…

Bookmark

Human genome pioneer J. Craig Venter announced plans Tuesday to sequence the gene maps of 40,000 volunteers in a bid to crack the secrets of healthy human aging.

Bookmark

Inhumanism is the extended practical elaboration of humanism; it is born out of a diligent commitment to the project of enlightened humanism. As a universal wave that erases the self-portrait of…

Bookmark

Animals like to hoard. Christopher E. Overtree, director of the Psychological Services Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a specialist in treating hoarding, says that “the mechanisms triggering this…

Bookmark

From the darkness of a box in the Nevada desert, he watched as three men trudged down a dirt road in Afghanistan. The box was kept cold—precisely sixty-eight degrees—and the only…

Bookmark

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…

Bookmark

Nature is the featureless remainder at either end of the process of production. Either it’s exploitable stuff, or value-added stuff. Whatever: it’s basically featureless, abstract, gray. It has nothing to do…

Bookmark

Update: I’ve been working on expanding this timeline into a book. I’m currently in the research phase, but you can read my notes here. They are generally more up-to-date and correct…

Bookmark

If there’s one topic that writers can be counted on to tackle at least once in their working lives, it’s writing itself. A good thing too, especially for all those aspiring…

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

The road to a PhD is a common source of frustration. It is time to acknowledge and contest this experience as the outcome of a disciplinarian process. As a faceless PhD…

Bookmark

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…

Bookmark

“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…

Bookmark

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,…

Bookmark

There’s a lively debate going on about ‘accelerationism’. As Reza Negarastani has suggested, it might be a way in which big picture speculative thought about historical circumstances has returned after the…

Bookmark

The Latvian psychologist Konstanins Raudive spent the summer of 1965 trying to contact the dead. Every day, with careful precision, he would take a new reel of recording tape from its…

Bookmark

“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…

Bookmark

The digital turn, and with it increased use of location-aware technologies, has yieldedinnovative image applications and posed new questions about the status and value of theimage. These applications rely on algorithmically…

Bookmark

Starting a new project is exciting and intensely busy (which is also my excuse for taking a month to blog about it). And the Digital Panopticon is the biggest one we’ve…

Bookmark

The first draft of the Neanderthal genome, published in 2010, came with some titillating news. It showed that some 50,000 years ago, these ancient hominids interbred with the ancestors of many…

Bookmark

As our planet urbanizes more rapidly than ever before, an insidious set of boomerang effects, linking security doctrine in cities in the global North with those in the South, are permeating…

Bookmark

If Facebook can tag you, so can the government. Big Brother has never mere fiction, but thanks to improved technologies, the Orwellian lens has never been sharper. Janus, a recently launched…

Bookmark

If Facebook can tag you, so can the government. Big Brother has never mere fiction, but thanks to improved technologies, the Orwellian lens has never been sharper. Janus, a recently launched…

Bookmark

Craig Venter is scientist/entrepreneur and founded the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), a not-for-profit genomic research organization that announced in May 2010 they had successfully constructed the first self-replicating, synthetic bacterial…

Bookmark

Inhumanism is the extended practical elaboration of humanism; it is born out of a diligent commitment to the project of enlightened humanism. As a universal wave that erases the self-portrait of…

Bookmark

From the darkness of a box in the Nevada desert, he watched as three men trudged down a dirt road in Afghanistan. The box was kept cold—precisely sixty-eight degrees—and the only…

Bookmark

Sometimes, when you dig into the Earth, past its surface and into the crustal layers, omens appear. In 1676, Oxford professor Robert Plot was putting the final touches on his masterwork,…

Bookmark

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…

Bookmark

Nature is the featureless remainder at either end of the process of production. Either it’s exploitable stuff, or value-added stuff. Whatever: it’s basically featureless, abstract, gray. It has nothing to do…

Bookmark

Update: I’ve been working on expanding this timeline into a book. I’m currently in the research phase, but you can read my notes here. They are generally more up-to-date and correct…

Bookmark

If there’s one topic that writers can be counted on to tackle at least once in their working lives, it’s writing itself. A good thing too, especially for all those aspiring…

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…

Bookmark

The road to a PhD is a common source of frustration. It is time to acknowledge and contest this experience as the outcome of a disciplinarian process. As a faceless PhD…

Bookmark

“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…

Bookmark

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,…

Bookmark

There’s a lively debate going on about ‘accelerationism’. As Reza Negarastani has suggested, it might be a way in which big picture speculative thought about historical circumstances has returned after the…

Bookmark

The Latvian psychologist Konstanins Raudive spent the summer of 1965 trying to contact the dead. Every day, with careful precision, he would take a new reel of recording tape from its…

Bookmark

“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…

Bookmark

The digital turn, and with it increased use of location-aware technologies, has yieldedinnovative image applications and posed new questions about the status and value of theimage. These applications rely on algorithmically…

Bookmark

The first draft of the Neanderthal genome, published in 2010, came with some titillating news. It showed that some 50,000 years ago, these ancient hominids interbred with the ancestors of many…

Bookmark

As our planet urbanizes more rapidly than ever before, an insidious set of boomerang effects, linking security doctrine in cities in the global North with those in the South, is permeating…