Beneath the well-popularized myths of giants like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, computing has fast-moving, highly-technical story involving very many people and places. And in 1984, Howard Rheingold—who had been the embedded writer documenting and communicating the work of the Xerox PARC team as they developed the GUI, Ethernet, and Object Oriented Programming paradigms—saw the very-real possibility of that story going unrecorded, and lost to history. His book Tools for Thought became the definitive work documenting the history of computer development, and was a key resource of mine for creative Silicon and Charybdis. His later books, like The Virtual Community and Virtual Reality, further cemented Howard Rheingold status as the key writer and test-subject for the largest technological shift in history. He was editor of The Whole Earth Catalogue, testified for the ACLU against the 1996 Communications Decency Act, …
Speaker: Howard Rheingold
Welcome to my Website
Hello World! My concerns, fellow netizens, are about how cyberspace has affected our sense of embodiment and existence in our physical world. I study and tutor on Marshall McLuhan, and develop my ideas in what I am calling a Full Stack Media Ecology.
My earnest questioning began in 2014. Answers finally manifested in 2017 with my video documentary series Silicon & Charybdis.
In March 2024 I released a book-length culmination of my work the past decade titled Cheating at Peekaboo Against a Bad Faith Adversary detailing how the work of Jean Piaget was used to hijack early childhood development in kids like TempleOS creator Terry A. Davis.
Read more about the complementarity between media ecology and developmental psychology here in Who You Callin’ a Robot?
In June of 2019 I “Toppled the Pillars of Cyberspace” in Toronto at the 20th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention. Watch or read my presentation and paper to get to know more about how this all started.
I’ve also presented twice at LibrePlanet for the Free Software Foundation. My 2023 talk on the Long History of Metrics Before and After Cybernetics presents a sprawling overview of how mechanical calculation and optimization took over our world, inspired by Marshall McLuhan.
There is lots more to discover on this site and on my YouTube channel!
I write about my recovery from psychosis in a separate blog called Less Mad. More on that here.
Also find me as @clintonthegeek on Twitter
Latest Posts
- On Haidt’s Anxious Generation: Review Part Deux July 24, 2024
- Four Part Resonance July 15, 2024
- Turning the Friggin’ Frogs Gay in Three Easy Steps July 3, 2024
- (Late) Spring Cleaning! June 25, 2024
- Going a little crazy over on Substack… May 3, 2024
- The Overdetermination of le mot juste April 5, 2024
- TechNosis: Get to the Outer Hull March 31, 2024
- On Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation March 26, 2024
- Postmodernism is Cyberspace March 23, 2024
- Information isn’t a Substance and Ideas are not Viruses March 21, 2024