At the invitation of Culture Digitally and with the permission of my publisher, MIT Press, I am thrilled to provide the introduction of my just-out book, Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism. (With bonus pictures not in the book!) Though the book is centered on FM radio activism, issues of digitality loom large. […]
“the blurriness in how we use “internet” has a history and a function: it has allowed the word to become a metonymy – a part that stands for the whole – for a complex, shifting, intertwined mix of institutions, technologies, and practices. In this it is similar to “the Church,” “the press,” “Hollywood,” or “television.” […]
“The web is full of beatific images of laptops sitting on heavenly clouds. The rhetoric of the data cloud likes to exploit the peaceful, inconsequential parts of the tradition while suppressing the rest. ‘The cloud’ is a huge PR achievement for the IT industry, but it is profoundly deceptive.” The following is a draft of an […]
“If analog refers both to things that come into contact with digital technology-probably to be transduced by it-and things outside the domain of digital technology that do not come into contact with it, the term expands to cover the whole of reality. This is a problem inasumuch as it conflates specific technological condition or operation […]
With permission from The MIT Press, I have the pleasure of circulating another essay from our 2014 volume, Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Sociality, this one from Chris Kelty, titled “The Fog of Freedom.” Here’s his abstract: This essay explores the relationship between the concept of freedom and the historical path that the design of computer technology has taken […]