The feudal information age

I should start this with the disclaimer that I’m no expert on what life was like during Europe’s feudal age.

In Present Shock, an assessment of today’s information-saturated culture subtitled “When everything happens at once,” Douglas Rushkoff occasionally…

Magic, dissected

I didn’t start off well with Jason Benlevi’s Too Much Magic, a 2011 book subtitled “Pulling the plug on the cult of tech: Secrets they won’t tell you about your digital life.”

I should have known better with a sensationalist title like that. I’m only a few chapters in, and…

Ian Bogost, “The Turtlenecked Hairshirt”

“Not for the easily offended,” cautioned the tweet linking to “The Turtlenecked Hairshirt,” Ian Bogost’s essay for Debates in the Digital Humanities. I considered the source of the tweet: DC area, government-employed. You can make a career out of risk…

Analog isn’t broken

I can only imagine how strange it must feel to be a living famous author (first of all) whose donated archival collection is now the subject of multiple scholarly reflections. Most of us have the freedom to be our own life’s historians and experts.

Humans on computers

Note: I’m publishing this, no further edits, about seven years after originally drafting it. I don’t even remember much about reading this book, but I’m glad I did, and I saw no reason not to keep my notes.

Too Much Magic

Note: Here’s another draft from the seven-year-old archives. Did I finish this book? No telling. Mostly I find this funny because I’m oh-so-carefully picking on Facebook, which over the next seven years would be thoroughly excoriated for mis-applied algorithms and plenty else.