We hear a lot about how universities need to behave more like businesses. Controversies at the universities of Virginia, Wisconsin, and now Iowa, where I teach, have pitted conservative, business-friendly outsiders against university faculty and administration. The university is not sustainable, the critics say: it needs to get with the times. There is something deeply […]
In the film Elysium, the ultra-rich have left an apocalyptic Earth ravaged by global warming and overpopulation. Their utopian colony orbits high above Earth which festers below. Science fiction, but Silicon Valley techno-utopians also dream of rising above the planet’s problems. The Seasteading Institute, for example, seeks to create floating cities far enough from land […]
Last week, the interwebs were abuzz with reactions to the most recent attempt to conceptually delineate the generation-formerly-known-as-Y: the “yuccie.” A rather unpalatable term to be sure, the “yuccie” is an acronym for Young, Urban, Creatives; its Reagan-era ancestor, the yuppie, is but a specter of these self-enterprising, digitally networked, creative aspirants. Mashable contributor (and […]
When I was finishing my first book, John Durham Peters gave me some excellent advice. Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin, he said that texts are never finished. They are simply abandoned. It was exactly what I needed to hear at the moment, but it’s also something I’ve reflected on many times since then, especially as my work […]
Part 1 The Accountability Matrix (This is a follow-up piece to one we published recently on the Huff Post here) Let us begin with a modest proposal: Maybe the matrix isn’t so bad. Not long ago on Culture Digitally one of us wrote that we were immersed in a capture and conversion matrix. That series […]