Year: 2024 (Page 2 of 2)

Clinton, the author, outside the Media Lab on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Cheating at Peekaboo against a Bad-Faith Adversary

March 19, 2024 / Clinton / 3 Comments

What follows is a short book detailing the mechanisms by which computers have thwarted our sense of reality and children’s sense of embodiment, with receipts. The narrative centers Terry A. Davis, creator of TempleOS, as self-reporting on the effects of cyberspace on children; cyberspace as designed and implemented in order to sell computers to adults.

Peekaboo! ICQ!

Peekaboo is a game we play with infants in order for them to learn what child psychologist Jean Piaget termed object permanence.

A world composed of permanent objects constitutes not only a spatial universe but also a world obeying the principle of causality in the form of relationships between things, and regulated in time, without continuous annihilations or resurrections. Hence it is a universe both stable and external, relatively distinct from the internal world and one in which the subject places himself

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A pile of books by Sherry Turkle. Her 1995 book Life on the Screen lays on top of the rest.

The Benefit of Hindsight in Turkle’s Life on the Screen

March 19, 2024 / Clinton / 0 Comments

I had to make a visit to the doctor’s clinic yesterday, interrupting my writing for this website. In order to not lose much time, I grabbed a book I hadn’t yet opened, but knew would be of benefit to what I was working on: Sherry Turkle’s 1995 book Life on the Screen. I had picked it up in Boston last years while attending the Free Software Foundations annual convention, LibrePlanet 2023. Now, from having read the opening chapters, I get the unfortunate impression that to the author—at least in 1995—, I may as well have been attending a Microsoft Appreciation convention.

Of course, working with the benefit of 29 years hind-sight, I have Dr. Turkle at an extreme disadvantage. I’ve found all of her books to be absolutely invaluable as sociological histories. Further, I will personally attest that her …

A dial-up modem from 1982, the Hayes Smartmodem. A small black box with blinking lights on the front.

Modems and Codecs—The Human-Scale Stack

March 18, 2024 / Clinton / 0 Comments

It is not enough to understand computers to understand their proportions and scales. We only know that they are very complex and very fast. But they have been very complex and very fast for about half-a-century now, and it seems culture has all but given up on retaining any sense of scope for computers relative to human experience or meaning. They no longer exist within our subjective universe.

Full-stack media ecology is not just an explanation of what goes on between the top and the bottom of the computer stack; that is, between the high-level, easy-to-use interfaces and the bare metal and silicon. It’s about building the historical context for the development and growth of the stack upward and downwards, as a narrative about our lived environment, culture, and who and what we are as humans. We are embodied beings, …

A scene from the documentary The Social Dilemma, of a teenager being manipulated by digital algorithms.

Nice Average Fellows Who Have Developed a Technique

March 14, 2024 / Clinton / 1 Comment

I’m going through my backlog of half-written pieces over the past eight years, and have decided to just publicly release works which are worthy, even in their incomplete state.

This review of the documentary The Social Dilemma was written in September of 2020, contemporaneous with the film’s wide release.

The concept—that McLuhan’s unpublished 1948 book was a review of this 2020 documentary—was solid. But I couldn’t execute it at the time. My own thoughts on this now 4-year-old documentary will be given in these pages soon.

Marshall McLuhan’s Unpublished Review of ‘The Social Dilemma’

The Matrix

In the climax to The Social Dilemma (2020), the “avatar booty doll,” or digital twin, of the fictional character Ben is revealed to be only one of countless subjects to algorithmic experimentation and prediction by closed source, corporate software. Ben is the politically-radicalized …