(Hi, Diggers.)
This just in from the shameless-commercialization department. At the urging of some comrades-in-gripery, I’ve caved and converted everything in my hitherto-defunct CafePress store to the 32-bit hexadecimal processing key for the AACS.
Products are here.
All of the markups have been set to $0.00; that is, I’m not getting any money for this. Please estimate how much extra you would have been willing to pay for whatever product you purchase, and consider donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Software Freedom Law Center, or other marginally relevant nonprofit of your choice.
Episode 5 of …ugh. It’s here. Spectator staff apparently can’t handle words with more than four syllables (the title was shortened to “Transparency and its discontents”), is blissfully unaware of seminal literature on the political-economic development of the 20th century—even when it’s written by the most outspoken Nobel laureate on campus—missed entire swathes of fundamental economic theory covered in Econ 101, doesn’t bother or know how to look things up on wikipedia (”the externality” was changed to “externality,” rendering an entire paragraph meaningless), and, adding insult to injury, has forgotten how to spell my last name for the third time this semester.
Honestly, I give up. The next episode was going to be exclusively about educational sucktitude, but I’m sure I can draw a few parallels to journalistic sucktitude. And that’s going to be the last one. Promise.
I stand by my assertion that the copy editing department at Spectator serves the sole function of introducing errors where before there were none. And quite frankly, in a web-enabled world, any medium where errors are irrevocable is patently idiotic. At some point in the next few months I’ll be putting all the original columns up here so I don’t look like such a dumbass.
Addendum: I’m not particularly interested in bitching without offering some sort of suggestion about how to improve things; said suggestions are forthcoming, and will probably be publicized via the facebook groups “My education is getting in the way of my learning” and “If Wikipedia Says It, It Must Be True,” which, predictably, have a combined distribution that exceeds Spectator’s by approximately a factor of five. Enablers of democracy, take note: effective solutions are at least as much about form as they are about content. The optimally effective medium for enabling democracy used to be newsprint. That’s over now. If it’s an information problem, the solution is probably a web application. And it’s an information problem. I may have some coherent suggestions about how to proceed.
The fourth episode of my Spec column, “Un|sustainable futures,” is up. It’s called “Externalize this,” and begins:
This episode, I’m unleashing my inner economist. This episode is about capitalism. Specifically, it begins the discussion of how to make capitalism suck less.
It’s online here. Next time: “The externality strikes back.” (…maybe.)
The third episode of my biweekly column in the Columbia Spectator is…okay, alright, went online more than two weeks ago. I’ve been behind. I invoke the ‘midterms’ defense—products of which to be posted soon.
Anyway, this episode is called ‘infrastructural adjustments,’ and it begins the discussion of how to muck about with our infrastructure so that ‘it stops killing us.’ So yes, I was feeling dramatic.
The second episode of my biweekly column in the Columbia Daily Spectator, complete with obligatory misspelled surname, is online here. (I wonder if it’s misspelled in the print version too—) This one’s about “the scope of interventions relevant to the task of realizing civilizational sustainability.”
But my other readers don’t know that, ’cause that sentence was cropped. In totally unrelated news, I’m glad that Jay Rosen over at NYU Journalism is thinking about how to leverage our clever new technologies to create useful new informational infrastructures.
The state of the world as I see it, and the purpose that falls out of it.
More »
The first instantiation of my biweekly (that’s once every two weeks) column in the Columbia Daily Spectator, “Un|sustainable futures,” is on the internets here. It’s about (I warn my unsuspecting audience) “coherent intervention in the accelerating cascade of technological and social change.” One of my favorite actual journalists, Lydia DePillis over at Bwog, gets to the point with a little selective exegesis.
I’m still trying to get Spec’s web team to put the links back in, and the em dashes formatted properly, but hey: print media learns slow, and dies hard. I imagine the dead tree version looks fine, but I haven’t bothered to look for it yet.
Update: Links are in, em dashes are fixed. w00t.
</self-indulgence>
A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon Liz Danzico’s interview with The Paradox of Choice author Barry Schwartz. The interview is well done, and together Danzico and Schwartz offer up a great deal of fantastic food for thought. I don’t agree with all of Schwartz’s points, and as a “millennial”—Danzico’s name for “the generation that has grown up with” the incredible proliferation of choice imposed upon us both online and in the toothpaste aisle (and, of course, often the toothpaste aisle is online)—I’d like to take a stab at some of these (rather thorny) issues.
In this first installment, I discuss a theoretical “patch” for addressing the “paradox of choice.” More »
After a couple weeks of portfolio uploading insanity and the resumption of classes, we return now to your regularly scheduled ramblings.
I want now to consider a specific flavor of ubicomp which might productively be called “spimedom,” after the term invented by Sterling (see also Sterling 2005, 2006). Spidedom raises some interesting technical problems, coherent discussion of which requires examination of the social-political-cultural-economic implications of different (or at least likely) approaches to their “solutions.” More »
We have heard very good arguments about why, assuming at least a modicum of economic stability and civilizational continuity, we will have ubiquitous computing. We have had some discussion of how ubicomp must be designed to behave if it is not to incur a dramatic growth in the complication and frustration already afforded by the accelerating proliferation of informatic interfaces that, increasingly—and without offering us much choice in the matter—mediate our social and cultural interactions (Greenfield 2004, 2006; please inform me of more).
In the series of posts to follow I will attempt to make a few tentative speculations about how we can use ubicomp to build a more sustainable civilization—that is, what role ubicomp can itself play in fulfilling the assumptions of economic stability and civilizational continuity that necessarily undergird any discussions of its “inevitability”—and how a civilization that manages to pull all of this off might look like, feel like, and act like. Discussion about the immediately social implications of ubicomp is underway (although perhaps not with the appropriate gravity and broad participation), but there appears to date to have been somewhat less discussion surrounding the long-term (on the order of 102 years) implications for a society thus transformed, especially if such a society is not merely a society in isolation, but rather one increasingly tightly bound to other “societies”—some similarly changed, some left out of the transformation or struggling to catch up. More »
This paper is a work in progress. It aims to summarize, for the nonspecialist, the ecological and economic predicament of humanity here at the dawn of the third millennium, and to provide a list of relevant technical and nontechnical references (including works of fiction). This iteration is not jargon-free, but after all of the ‘content’ is brought together, we hope to refine the language to make it as accessible as possible. The ‘final’ version will probably be a website rather than a paper.
This project was commissioned by Debra Rowe of University Leaders for Higher Education, the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, and other organizations. More »
After seeing the first issue of Outlet, Columbia’s new sex mag, and agreeing with much of the commentary about its lack of layout—but also of the opinion that the publication might have a shot at promoting more lucid dialogue about sexuality—I offered to design the magazine. Over the course of three nights, we hashed out the second issue. More »
This paper was written for Pedro Sanchez as part of the Fall 2006 Millennium Villages Seminar at Columbia. More »
This paper was written for Patricia Culligan and Phil Simmons as the final ‘technical memorandum’ for the Fall 2006 Urban Ecology Studio at Columbia. It outlines some thinking about how a discrete-time water balance model might be used to predict combined sewer overflow events. I’ll be coding up the rest of the model next semester. More »
This paper was written for Vijay Modi, Pedro Sanchez, and Cheryl Palm as part of the Fall 2006 Millennium Villages Seminar at Columbia. More »
