Daniel Rourke /stream

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As the country’s population ages and shrinks, there’s increasing demand for services that clean out and dispose of the property of the dead.

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All Mark Rittman wanted was a cup of tea. Little did he know he would have to spend 11 hours waiting for his new hi-tech kettle to boil the water. Rittman,…

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So, let’s talk about the color-changing condom.

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Be careful about what you say in your living room if your new TV is on. News broke earlier this week that Samsung’s Web-connected SmartTV can listen to, record, and send…

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We all know it’s not cool to litter. If our hands are burdened with the weighty responsibility of an unwanted and snot-spent tissue, or an empty aluminum can that once held…

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Using DNA would finally divorce the thing that stores information from the things that read it. Time and again, our storage formats become obsolete because we stop making the machines that…

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The cosmos is composed of many different species of stardust and despite our advanced, secular knowledge we imagine these primordial substances give rise to a universe, fashioned in our own image.…

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Time rather than money is the currency in the recent science fiction film In Time. At the age of 25, the citizens in the future world the film depicts are given…

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In a New Yorker essay a few weeks back, Laura Miller considered the various ways in which science fiction writers have imagined aliens, from the 18th century through today. Perhaps inevitably,…

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This two-story brick building is nothing special, even a bit decrepit, but as you walk up its crooked metal staircase toward the second floor, you will find the first hint that…

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Michel Serres: We are in the middle of an extraordinary human and environmental transformation, without really being aware of it, one that can only perhaps be compared with the Renaissance, the…

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What I’ve learned, the hard way, is that the one thing you must never ask a collector is “why?” It’ll get you nowhere. They’ll just stare at you in baffled amazement…

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by Hito Steyerl What happens to identification at this point? Who can we identify with? Of course, identification is always with an image. But ask anybody whether they’d actually like to…

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In a fundamental sense, technology is deeply non-human. While we might apply a humanist logic to the function and workings of technological systems, and view technological objects as extensions of the…

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As the country’s population ages and shrinks, there’s increasing demand for services that clean out and dispose of the property of the dead.

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All Mark Rittman wanted was a cup of tea. Little did he know he would have to spend 11 hours waiting for his new hi-tech kettle to boil the water. Rittman,…

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“Les chose sont contre nous” ("Things are against us") is the wry slogan of Paul Jennings’ parodic philosophy resistentialism*. But Professor Jane Bennett of Johns Hopkins University doesn’t think so.

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Be careful about what you say in your living room if your new TV is on. News broke earlier this week that Samsung’s Web-connected SmartTV can listen to, record, and send…

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Narratives in the age of the smart object The cultural conversation about the Internet of things has tended toward a highly functionalist, utilitarian set of ideas: Connected objects can make smart…

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We all know it’s not cool to litter. If our hands are burdened with the weighty responsibility of an unwanted and snot-spent tissue, or an empty aluminum can that once held…

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Using DNA would finally divorce the thing that stores information from the things that read it. Time and again, our storage formats become obsolete because we stop making the machines that…

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Time rather than money is the currency in the recent science fiction film In Time. At the age of 25, the citizens in the future world the film depicts are given…

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This two-story brick building is nothing special, even a bit decrepit, but as you walk up its crooked metal staircase toward the second floor, you will find the first hint that…

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Hoarding disorder is categorized as “the excessive acquisition of and inability to discard objects, resulting in debilitating clutter,” wrote the researchers behind the new study, led by Yale University School of…

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Michel Serres: We are in the middle of an extraordinary human and environmental transformation, without really being aware of it, one that can only perhaps be compared with the Renaissance, the…

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I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front. I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead. I am being Childs.…

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In a fundamental sense, technology is deeply non-human. While we might apply a humanist logic to the function and workings of technological systems, and view technological objects as extensions of the…

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Kelly argues that all technologies, from the stone ax to the computer chip, should be seen as a collectivity—the technium, which is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating…