Fax History
references, articles, publications on the history of fax machines
Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard
every onion story eventually comes true
Smelling ethics smells: when it looks ethical but something smells off... - Speaker Deck
"Ethics rule of thumb: If you start to sound like The Zuck, stop."
Ask Disabled People What They Want. It’s Not Always Technology.
"Technoableism is a particular type of ableism, one that is highly visible in media and entertainment and omnipresent in the ways most people casually talk about technologies aimed at disability.... Technoableism is a belief in the power of technology that considers the elimination of disability a good thing, something we should strive for. It’s a classic form of ableism: bias against disabled people, bias in favor of nondisabled ways of life. Technoableism is the use of technologies to reassert those biases, often under the guise of empowerment."
cohost! - post from @Nalathni
"OceanGate's underengineered, undercooked, doomed submarine isn't merely a metaphor for the hubris of the wealthy, it is a scale model of the way the wealthy dictate our reality. All consequences can be ignored, all blowback can be forestalled, let the end-user eat the cost."
i refuse to talk to you w those stupid ass ski goggles on your face
"how the hell am I gonna believe you when you say ‘yea I’m listening’ but you’re actually watching a 100 foot screen of Animal Planet bears wrestling each other"
Why Does It Feel Like Amazon Is Making Itself Worse?
a good explanation
Perfectly Good MacBooks From 2020 Are Being Sold for Scrap Because of Activation Lock
"... we have property rights, so the original owner is not the current owner and does not technically have a right to condemn to death what is no longer their property."
Pluralistic: 21 Aug 2022 The Shitty Technology Adoption Curve Reaches Apogee – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
'Kraemer discovered that the only way to avoid wage-theft was to do "mindless busywork" that produced the clicks that her bossware demanded, even if it got in the way of her work. This is yet more proof that "you treasure what you measure," or, more formally, "any measurement becomes a target" (AKA Goodhart's Law).'
Pluralistic: 20 Oct 2022 It was all downhill after the Cuecat – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
'Once we gave companies the power to literally criminalize the reconfiguration of their products, everything changed. [...] [I]n a world of Felony Contempt of Business Model, that discussion changes to "Given that we can literally imprison anyone who helps our users get more out of this product, how can we punish users who are disloyal enough to simply quit our service or switch away from our product?"'
How independent writers are turning to AI
field report of the tools in the hands of working writers
What Was the TED Talk? - The Drift
'I recently heard a business journalist say that when he’s short on story ideas, he’ll just look for people who have given TED talks and “figure out what they’re lying about.”'
What if PageRank Was a Mistake? — Sympolymathesy, by Chris Krycho
"All curation grows until it requires search. All search grows until it requires curation." see also Halt and Catch Fire syllabus week 13 https://bits.ashleyblewer.com/halt-and-catch-fire-syllabus/classes/13.html
Twilight of the Robots? Androids in Contemporary Cinema | Filmmaker Magazine
from Joanne McNeil: "... artificial intelligence with personality could become an early twenty-teens kitschy retro artifact. [...] The Tesla Bot announcement seemed to pre-figure this. The person in robot costume danced to music that sounded reminiscent of Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy soundtrack, which was released more than ten years ago. This isn’t the future. It’s an aesthetic that’s played out."
Creative Computing and Network Culture ~ Joachim Despland-Lichtert
"Imagine you go back in time to the 1970s to change the history of the internet to your own liking. Based on the events described in the reading, how would you do it? How much funding would you need to achieve the changes you seek? Where do you get that funding from at the time, and how difficult is it to obtain? What does your answer to these questions say about the “great man theory” of history?"
A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps | Ars Technica
this is hilarious. for best results, read while listening to the benny hill theme song
New Tendencies - Monoskop
"The organizers of NT initially sought to consciously accompany and form the historical transition in which the computer was perceived as medium of artistic creation. They set computer generated works in relation to Constructive and Kinetic art (1968/69) and to Conceptual art (1973). The arts of the electronic media were not considered as an isolated phenomenon but rather incorporated into the history and discourse of fine-and performing arts."
Cryptocurrency is an abject disaster
"Cryptocurrency is one of the worst inventions of the 21st century. I am ashamed to share an industry with this exploitative grift. It has failed to be a useful currency, invented a new class of internet abuse, further enriched the rich, wasted staggering amounts of electricity, hastened climate change, ruined hundreds of otherwise promising projects, provided a climate for hundreds of scams to flourish, created shortages and price hikes for consumer hardware, and injected perverse incentives into technology everywhere. Fuck cryptocurrency."
Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus - Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus
'This site features a curriculum developed around the television series, Halt and Catch Fire (2014-2017), a fictional narrative about people working in tech during the 1980s-1990s. The intent is for this website to be used by self-forming small groups that want to create a “watching club” (like a book club) and discuss aspects of technology history that are featured in this series.' really thoughtful and thorough!
Dexter has something to say to everyone 🎤 🐕 #dog #pet #dogsoftiktok #doggo #fyp
important
Pirate Care - Pirate Care
"Pirate Care is a research process - primarily based in the transnational European space - that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of “care” and “piracy”, which in new and interesting ways are trying to intervene in one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the ‘crisis of care’ in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions."
On Design Thinking | Issue 35 | n+1
"Americans love design most when we’re afraid. Just as the Depression enabled industrial design to present itself as the solution to US manufacturing woes, the 2000 to 2002 dot-com crash and 2008 recession, with their long tails, have enabled the rise of a new embrace of design and a new broadening of design’s imagined jurisdiction. This time the specific fear is that the knowledge economy is coming for everyone. Bewildered and anxious leaders, public and private, have responded by throwing in their lots with the seemingly magical knowledge-work that is design."
From Panic to Profit - Data & Society: Points
"As panic around AI-generated fake news and videos have shown, new technologies described as overwhelmingly advanced, conceptually inscrutable, and deeply conspiratorial make for headlines that draw attention. As AI-supported disinformation technologies advance, it is possible we will see panic around these technologies wielded to justify technological closure in the name of “the public interest.” While caution and care is warranted, we should not accept fast and seemingly easy technological closures for these problems without pushing for social, cultural, legal, and historical explanations."
How Big Tech Manipulates Academia to Avoid Regulation
"To be fair, some of the research is useful and nuanced, especially in the humanities and social sciences. But the majority of well-funded work on 'ethical AI' is aligned with the tech lobby’s agenda: to voluntarily or moderately adjust, rather than legally restrict, the deployment of controversial technologies. [...] It is strange that Ito, with no formal training, became positioned as an 'expert' on AI ethics, a field that barely existed before 2017. But it is even stranger that two years later, respected scholars in established disciplines have to demonstrate their relevance to a field conjured by a corporate lobby."
How the iPhone Helped Save the Planet | WIRED
filed under "suspicious because it argues for the status quo but also sort of a relief for the same reason, whoops haha"