Issue #146 The Hacking of Culture and the Creation of Socio-Technical Debt

The Hacking of Culture and the Creation of Socio-Technical Debt

Kim Córdova and Bruce Schneier

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John Fullmer, Yzy Gap Psyop Red Round Jacket, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

Issue #146
June 2024










Notes
1

McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press, 2004), thesis 126.

2

Jon Katz, “Birth of a Digital Nation,” Wired, April 1, 1997.

3

Marcin Szczepanski, “Is Data the New Oil? Competition Issues in the Digital Economy,” European Parliamentary Research Service, January 2020.

4

Bruce Schneier, A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend Them Back (W. W. Norton & Sons, 2023).

5

Lucie Levine, “Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op?” JStor Daily, April 1, 2020.

6

Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (W. W. Norton & Sons, 2015).

7

Adam Mosseri, “Shedding More Light on How Instagram Works,” Instagram Blog, June 8, 2021; Ben Smith, “How TikTok Reads Your Mind,” New York Times, December 5, 2021.

8

Giacomo Figà Talamanca and Selene Arfini, “Through the Newsfeed Glass: Rethinking Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers,” Philosophy & Technology 35, no. 1 (2022).

9

Zack Stanton, “How the ‘Culture War’ Could Break Democracy,” Politico, May 5, 2021.

10

Jason Johnson, “Inside the Failed, Utopian New Games Movement,” Kill Screen, October 25, 2013.

11

Fred Turner, “Taking the Whole Earth Digital,” chap. 4 in From Counter Culture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006).

12

Kaare Ericksen, “The State of the Video Games Industry: A Special Report,” Variety, February 1, 2024.

13

Rosa Schwartzburg, “The US Military Is Embedded in the Gaming World. It’s Target: Teen Recruits,” The Guardian, February 14, 2024; Scott Kuhn, “Soldiers Maintain Readiness Playing Video Games,” US Army, April 29, 2020; Katie Lange, “Military Esports: How Gaming Is Changing Recruitment & Moral,” US Department of Defense, December 13, 2022.

14

Shaun Waterman, “Growing Commercial SATCOM Raises Trust Issues for Pentagon,” Air & Space Forces Magazine, April 3, 2024.

15

Geoffrey A Fowler, “Your Instagrams Are Training AI. There’s Little You Can Do About It,” Washington Post, September 27, 2023.

16

Zengyang Li, Paris Avgeriou, and Peng Liang, “A Systematic Mapping Study on Technical Debt and Its Management,” Journal of Systems and Software, December 2014.

17

David Streitfeld, “How the Media Industry Keeps Losing the Future,” New York Times, February 28, 2024.

18

“The End of the Social Network,” The Economist, February 1, 2024; Ollie Davies, “What Happens If Teens Get Their News From TikTok?” The Guardian, February 22, 2023.

19

Eric Jaffe, “Quantifying the Death of the Classic American Main Street,” Medium, March 16, 2018.

20

Julia Halprin, “The Hangover from the Museum Party: Institutions in the US Are Facing a Funding Crisis,” Art Newspaper, January 19, 2024.

21

Quoted in Pete Buttigieg, “The Key to Happiness Might Be as Simple as a Library or Park,” New York Times, September 14, 2018.

22

Jeffery C. Mays and Dana Rubinstein, “Mayor Adams Walks Back Budget Cuts Many Saw as Unnecessary,” New York Times, April 24, 2024.

23

Karl Russell and Joe Rennison, “These Seven Tech Stocks Are Driving the Market,” New York Times, January 22, 2024.

24

Ian Bremmer, “How Big Tech Will Reshape the Global Order,” Foreign Affairs, October 19, 2021.

25

Nathan Sanders and Bruce Schneier, “How the ‘Frontier’ Became the Slogan for Uncontrolled AI,” Jacobin, February 27, 2024.

26

Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500–2025 (Fondazione Prada, 2023), 9. Exhibition catalog.

27

Rahul Rao, “AI Generated Data Can Poison Future AI Models,” Scientific American, July 28, 2023.