See Wikipedia entry on Amazon Mechanical Turk →
Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Mute, vol. 1, no. 3 (Autumn 1995) →
The header read: “We’re facing twenty-five years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?”
Social theorist Jaron Lanier points to the case of Instagram, sold for a billion dollars but employing only thirteen people, as an example of how the internet is shrinking the economy—clearly, Instagram’s “users” are the ones producing its value, yet their work is not formally rewarded.
From an unpublished text.
When physical states attempt to map themselves in this territory, the failure of this attempt at representation becomes apparent. In March 2014, the Danish Ministry of the Environment released a 1:1 topographical map of the entire country of Denmark in Minecraft, only to have it attacked by American hackers within two weeks. The hackers smuggled game “dynamite” into the map, planted American flags, and razed entire cities.
It is no accident that this is the name for it, and a sandbox is where children play.
Lacan argues that since babies cannot conceptualize ambivalence, they split the image of the mother into the “good” nurturing mother and the “bad” absent mother.
“In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.” Jorge Luis Borges, March 1946 edition of Los Anales de Buenos Aires, vol. 1, no. 3.
Quoted in The Economist, December 4, 2003.
Barbrook and Cameron, “The Californian Ideology.”
In Baotou, Mongolia, the byproduct of rare earth mineral mining has created a vast toxic lake that spans several kilometers. Baotou’s main exports are neodymium—used to produce lightweight magnets for in-ear headphones, cellphone microphones, and computer hard drives—and cerium oxide, mostly used to polish touchscreens on smartphones and tablets. One Kindle consumes the resources of four dozen books and has the carbon footprint of a hundred.
General Motors and John Deere have argued that copyright law cannot conflate ownership of a vehicle with ownership of the underlying computer software. In response, lawmakers in Minnesota and New York have introduced “Fair Repair” legislation that asserts an owner’s right to repair electronic equipment they’ve purchased.
The UAE has deemed that there is no righteous reason for humans to travel to Mars; were Muslims to perish attempting the trip, their death would be considered akin to suicide. Reportedly, around five hundred Saudis and other Arabs applied online for the Mars One mission (the first prospective martian colony, the brainchild of a Dutch Company).
See Tony Wood, “Reserve Armies of the Imagination,” New Left Review 82 (July–August 2013) →
To paraphrase Kerstin Stakemeier, “Lunch Bytes: On Art and Digital Media” conference, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.
As suggested recently by Philipp Ekardt at the “Lunch Bytes: On Art and Digital Media” conference, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.
Emily Apter, “On Oneworldedness: Or Paranoia as a World System,” American Literary History, vol. 18, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 365–389.
“Lunch Bytes” conference.