Posts tagged "technology":
Addiction considered harmful?
So it’s become clear that there exists a class of applications whose purpose is to be addictive. Their profit model is advertisements, and the number of advertisements the user sees is a function of how much the user uses the application. So perhaps “addiction” isn’t really the best word: it implies to me that it is difficult to quit a substance, but not necessarily that the amount of time spent using the substance increases. I want to particularly focus on the goal of maximizing the time spent using, for which “addiction” is a good enough term.
(...)Thoughts on presence bias
The Death Algorithm, Dark Enlightenment, and Capitalist Realism.
(...)Thoughts on technology
It’s by now a reasonably standard metaphor to describe humans as the reproductive organs of machines: Samuel Butler, to my knowledge, advanced the position first, most famously in Erewhon (1872), but themes of evolution and reproduction dominated his work; in Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Sigmund Freud calls machines the “auxilliary organs” of humans; J.C.R. Licklider, in his essay “Man-Computer Symbiosis” (1960), compared humans to an insect that polinates a plant and feeds on its fruit; Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media (1964), calls the electrical communications network an extension of the human nervous system; Ben Woodward, describing Slime Dynamics (2012), problematizes the distinction between the matter of humans and of machines; Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, in asking Are We Human? (2016), interrogate whether the homonid or technical body is the true human. The hominid body acts as a lubricant, as a seed, as a catalyst around which the technical body can accumulate like a shell: the many hominids build a structure like a coral reef or a conch shell, which will be inhabited by future generations of fellow-hominids, who will build it out for yet later generations, and so on in saecula saeculorum. Or again, humans are like wasps, building a nest to shoot out more of themselves (compare Mark Fisher’s reading of the wasps’ nest dream in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) in Fisher’s Flatline Constructs (1999)). The entire assemblage, in the sense of Deleuze-Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus (1980), is “human.” This is the meaning of saying that humans are “rational beings”: their action is determined by a principle greater than the organization of their own bodies; they are subservient to a higher logic, namely, that of their technical body. This should be compared to Kant’s second critique, wherein he outlines an ethical theory that does not make any prior assumptions about the body of the ethical agent except that it be capable of rational deliberation. I do not bring this up to apply the categorical imperative to the hominid-mechanical assemblage but to say that any ethical principle must be articulated with respect to the whole, which I take to be the aggregate of the hominid bodies and their accompanying technical apparatus. Hominid forms are useful and will continue to be a valuable component of the human body for a long time, but they are not a privileged component of what it is to be human.
(...)Addiction ravings
No but I really do think that computers are addicting. Put simply, we (as humans) directly enjoy communicating. And the computer stimulates that part of us in a visceral way. It is difficult to look away from the history of the world (apearing) to unfold in slow motion. Even beyond the over simplification of saying that Facebook and so on are bad because they actively design the product to retain viewers/users for as long as possible (how could they do otherwise? It’s directly in their interest, quite literally), the computer more generally displays the same phenomena.
(...)Time-sharing the blues
I don’t know that I can produce for the “serious” or the “public”: I don’t have it in me to do something like the academics want me to do. It’s too much criticism, too much pressure, too much attention. I can’t meet expectations because my work (unlike everyone else’s) is only provisional: I (unlike everyone else) can only do the best I have to piece together the information I have at the time. And my ability to ingest and digest and egest information is (unlike everyone else’s) bounded in time and space — that is, limited. So here goes a second draft at a provisional note on the interpretation of technical phenomena. You’re going to have to trust me on this one: honestly just check the relevant wikipedia pages, scroll to the bottom, and read through the references, then read their references, and so on. Try searching things in the search engine of your choice: sometimes you get lucky. That’s all I know to do, and giving citations doesn’t always help you find the thing cited (agh!).
(...)Addressed to Arasp
Hey, I was writing you on XMPP but I decided to hit you by HTTP instead. I’ve been looking more into encryption for XMPP, since I’m still having problems with it. I discovered that the standard for the encryption and key-sharing schemes used by XMPP’s new standard “OMEMO” XEP-0384 (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0384.html) uses the Double Ratchet encryption scheme and the X3DH key exchange protocol, both published by Signal (https://signal.org/docs/specifications/doubleratchet/ and https://www.signal.org/docs/specifications/x3dh/). I want to focus in particular on the use that the XEP’s authors, Andreas Straub, Daniel Gultsch, Tim Henkes, Klaus Herberth, Paul Schaub, and Marvin Wißfeld, envision for their system:
(...)Yet more adventures in web development
I have, once again, redeveloped this website. I think it’s slowly getting better each time. The change this time was rather radical: I reformatted the site’s html files as org files, an emacs major mode. To explain what I did, let give me quick overview for those who don’t know much about web work. I am particularly interested in static sites, sites that are dynamic documents. I’m not talking about “web applications”, sites that do some computation or present some user interface or form.
(...)Addictive machines
Computing machines are addictive. Internet and gaming addictions are more or less recognized phenomena, but I don’t know whether we talk about “computer addiction” as a more general phenomenon. In classical behavioralist terms, it’s periodic reinforcement: occasional, unpredictable positive stimuli that result from using the machine—as you use the machine, it occasionally rewards you with a sudden feeling of success that encourages you to use it more. This can be easily compared to gambling addiction: it’s not very far from a slot machine to a computing machine. Like the slot machine, the computing machine provides and addictive feedback structure that: it periodically rewards our efforts just often enough to condition us to continue poking at it. Ask a programmer, and they’ll tell you that they do the work because it’s addicting. There’s a reason we feel such a drive to debug code: we’re chasing the high we get when it finally works.
(...)Blogs, diaries, reading, filtering
This was all pretty much doomed from the start. I don’t know what I’m doing with this site, and I don’t really have the inclination to care that much. I guess that I did the one big reorganization, but that left more gaps than it filled: the only way to get back to the main page (considered-harmful.com/index.html) from this one (considered-harmful.com/posts.html) is by navigating back using the URL or the back button in your browser. The text isn’t very hyper, is it? I don’t even have nay branding on this page besides the title. If you landed here by mistake you must have no idea where you are. On the other hand, I don’t know that anybody has ever landed here by mistake.
(...)I redesigned this website today. Feel free to look around.
I know nothing about web design: I made this website to learn. To experts this site probably looks like a mess and it’s still very incomplete. But I’m improving and learning.
(...)Metaverses
FLAME ON
(...)