Organic compounds not previously found in nature were identified, such as the twining of plant and animal DNA—the calcium and phosphorus of antler marrow fused with urushiol, the oil secreted by poison ivy; bird feather keratin threaded with chlorophyll, pine sap, and squirrel hair follicles; the glossy chitin of a southern pine beetle’s carapace threaded with white-tailed deer hair; human semen in mosquito proboscises; human teeth with Virginia creeper root fibers

A plague made half of us crueler than ever.

He looked beautiful in some terrible way that makes me want to cry when I think about him.

I heard Derek screaming like his scream was turned on in the middle.

Everything smelled real green.

It sounded like all the floors in my gramma’s house before she died.

He helped to develop new tools for moderators that can automatically blur out faces in disturbing videos, turn them grayscale, or mute the audio

“global resiliency team

Legos and encourage him to play with them to relieve the stress as he worked. Speagle built a house and a spaceship, but it didn’t make him feel better.

Moderators were told they had to watch at least 15 to 30 seconds of each video.

Facebook contractors are required to use a browser extension to report every time they use the restroom

watch a video of a man slaughtering puppies with a baseball bat

Under the policy, the video was allowed to remain on Facebook.

Speagle was put onto the production floor, a manager told him he and a colleague would be reviewing graphic violence and hate speech full time

individual contractors in North America make as little as $28,800 a year. They receive two 15-minute breaks and a 30-minute lunch each day, along with nine minutes per day of “wellness” time

Others ignored the commotion entirely, and continued to moderate Facebook posts as the paramedics worked.

Examining power means naming and explaining the forces of oppression that are so baked into our daily lives—and into our datasets, our databases, and our algorithms—that we often don’t even see them.

We don't need a backbone. We don't need an information backbone. With an ad hoc network

Critique means you have to take a position, and you have to defend it. Likewise, you have to be against something. This produces a dynamic or differential.

open-source licenses replacing or standing in for the idea of being critical or thoughtful.

we now focus a lot of energy on the elevation of the individual's productive capacity

Society is always in flux, and the designer can’t predict how various political, social, and economic systems will come to blunt, augment, or redirect the power of the tool that is being designed

Makers, in other words, are the new hackers.

People still want to use technology for detecting and communicating with ghosts, though the preferred gadgets have evolved into electronic voice phenomena (EVP) recorders and geophones.

communicating with spirits didn’t seem much more impossible than harnessing electricity

the spirit phone’s unbelievable promise invoked technologies like the telegraph and air flight, which were both seen as impossible until proven otherwise

“spirit phone”

In 1920, the inventor shocked the public when he told American Magazine: “I have been at work for some time, building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us.” 

He theorized that like our bodies, our personalities have a physical form, made of tiny “entities” similar to our current view of atoms. He thought these entities might exist after humans passed aw

Edison’s phonograph

Like, who is going to own my information after I pass away?”

He sees it as one way of leaving a legacy—a way to keep contributing to society instead of fading to black

Flybits provides a platform that lets companies tailor

decision support tool

With enough data about how you communicate and interact with others, machine-learning algorithms can approximate your unique personality

Augmented Eternity

Creepy

Waiting icons make us willing to wait longer — three times as long as designs with no visualization to indicate something is happening behind the scenes.

They're in a privileged position where they don't need to think about it.

When things were going smoothly, this friend said nothing. When things break, race comes up. We learn making from breaking. Racism hovers in the background when things are working, which is how race can come up so quickly, when things stop working.

Some of the most dangerous people out there are perfectly happy expressing hate and violence in their own names.

values and seeks to facilitate the greatest amount of speech from the most diverse group of people

he found his history degree had approximately the same effect on employers as a face tattoo

two-tiered moderation system

active moderation

when black people are the go-to choice for nonblack users to act out their most hyperbolic emotions, do reaction GIFs become “digital blackface”?

black reaction GIFs have become so widespread that they’ve practically become synonymous with just reaction GIFs.

Pick a meme, any meme, conceived or co-opted by Black social media — I’ll show you a meme that worms its way toward respectability political rhetoric, with misogynoir at its core.

“misogynoir” to succinctly describe the anti-Black misogynist intersection of racism and misogyny that uniquely impacts the lived experiences of Black women.

white and non-Black people making anonymous claims to a Black identity through contemporary technological mediums such as social media.

a smartphone streaming an hour of video on a weekly basis uses more power annually than a new refrigerator

Streaming is a tech-nology that allows content providers to “keep” the file

more than 80 percent of Netflix’s data traffic is served from the local Internet service provider’s data center, saving the company transit, transport, and other upstream scaling costs.

one billion hours of content per month

“data center corridor,”

this insurance built into the design of data centers

persuasive designs: as artifacts that aim to steer user be-havior and attitudes in an intended direction while constraining others

“poetic mode” of infrastructure

in order to understand how control is exerted through media infra-structure, it’s rather naïve to simply ask who owns it

even more beautiful because of the giant data center in the picture.

“boring backstage elements”

toward the notion of transparency, all while working to conceal or ob-scure less picturesque dimensions of cloud infrastructure.

“politics of artifacts”:

a marketing concept

offers particularly dramatic sights, complete with German submarine diesel engines for backup,

offering virtual tours through photo galleries of the tech-nology, the people, and the places making up their data centers.1

“Why would I ever need a [insert name or function of new technology here]?”

Essentially, the kaleidoscope had been “domesticated.”

Of the millions who have witnessed its effects, there is perhaps not one hundred who have any idea of the principles upon which it is constructed, and of the mode in which those effects are produced.”

He felt betrayed, “deceived into believing that what he saw was at least the shadow of something real and beautiful, when in truth it was only a delusion.”

462,880,899,576 years and 860 days

immersed

kaleidoscomanics

laptops do not enhance classroom learning

participants spent almost 40 minutes out of every 100-minute class period using the internet for nonacademic purposes

But sometimes repairing means creating a novel tool;

three key concepts speak to an elevated degree of  subversion

a growing disrespect for an object’s identity and for the truth and authority it embodies

where the remixed version challenges the aura of the original and claims autonomy even when it carries the original's name.

offer resistance to dominant narratives

Vidding, she explains, "is a form of grassroots filmmaking in which clips from television shows and movies are set to music" such that the images are read through the interpretive lens of the song

Homer stitched together prefabricated parts. Instead of a creator, you had an assembly-line worker"

viewing remix as a digital speech act would rid of us terms like appropriation and recycling, which suggest the primacy of an original author or text

a digital utterance expressed across the registers of the verbal, the aural, and the visual

a claim for which evidence is provided, that also retains a dialogic or conversational nature

We carry personal computers in our pockets—nothing could be more decentralized than this!—but have surrendered control of our data, which is stored on centralized servers, far away from our pockets.

“Should I keep it running as some kind of memorial?”

Bots are “processes, not artifacts

meaningwithin(digital)communicationsystemsthatresultsinaperceivedaccidentor

By rendering a virtual Middle East as a frontier inhabited primarily by male terrorists where the American military (and by invitation of the gaming industry, all subjects with a reasonably modern computer) can engage in a cleansing and perpetual war, the world finally begins to resemble the one outlined by George W. Bush shortly after 9/11

it’s pretty much the only thing in a book’s toolbox for creating immersion, and it works in games too

players forming a mental model of the game’s make-believe space

The aim of her technique here is to link the player to mental instability through use of the cube (both in language and game world). Of course, the technique is an obvious failure since the player does not feel any strong personal attachment to the cube to the point of mental instability. It's a hole in the performance, but one I doubt many players realized due to the layers of implementation.

make fun of institutional processes

understating of the possibility of danger are standards of institutional talk, yet the consequences are usually kept behind doors.

the typical, false politeness that one receives in such institutional contexts.

visually portrays itself as an institution

the idea of a front and backstage

All institutions have a backstage that mask their inner workings.

we have a place where we manage the performance and a place where we give that performance

Play is free activity but Portal only offers this in constrained doses.

Portal is an algorithmic exploration of human struggle against algorithmic processes.

It is the tension between the cold, hard certainty of algorithms and the creativity

Portal's art-worthiness is in its exploration of the increasingly algorithmic nature of the world.

In Portal, the gun’s apparent freedom always opens up into the same trap.

test chambers embrace the limitations of level design

This murderous intent brings together multiple narrative elements foreshadowed in the game,

Rattmann’s scribbles, therefore, warn Chell to beware the player. The game is a lie.

Even here, when the Milgram-like nature of the experiment is clear

GLaDOS compels the player to be part of the algorithmic process.

Some players may even assume that they are Chell - akin to Heidegger’s notion of a tool being ready to hand rather than present at hand

sure the voice is a computer

Aperture Science Computer-Aided Enrichment Center. We hope your brief detention in the relaxation vault has been a pleasant one.

there are ways that only games can signify

The key mechanic1 - a gun that shoots portals or tunnels that allow physical movement between unconnected spaces - explores the meaning of freedom when trapped in the algorithmic processes of what we perceive as reality. 

As algorithms are used in and applied to social situations they become forces that shape and persuade.

since the categories are neither narrative nor game-like in themselves: order, speed, frequency, duration, simultaneity, and time of the action.

In simulations, knowledge and experience is created by the player’s actions and strategies, rather than recreated by a writer or moviemaker.

games are not intertextual

Likewise, the dimensions of Lara Croft’s body, already analyzed to death by film theorists, are irrelevant to me as a player, because a different-looking body would not make me play differently

So why should not games also be a type of story?

Annotation

the makerspace community continues to judge itself on the basis of startup metrics:

Kickstarter has a thirty-seven percent failure rate

And while the case for makerspaces has centered on educational and economic impact

bleeding-edge application and grown-up play,

a new amalgam of art, craft, and technology.

Trenton

Rachel Maines's work

Make magazine brand of making usually involve building things with Arduinos, making LEDs light up, and using 3D printers--in many ways, this seems like just of another style of technology consumer.

Today, everyone is a maker, but no one is really making anything.

So let's learn how to code, but let's also read Plato.

“Towards a Liberatory Technology,”

Ivan Illich’s “Tools for Conviviality,”

Inequality here is not just a matter of who owns and runs the means of physical production but also of who owns and runs the means of intellectual production—the so-called “attention economy”

Department of Defense

Anderson starts by confusing the history of the Web with the history of capitalism and ends by speculating about the future of the maker movement, which, on closer examination, is actually speculation on the future of capitalism

our hackers aren’t smashing the system; they’re fiddling with it so that they can get more work done.

He distinguished the hackers from the planners

“The modern man, who should be a craftsman, but who, in most cases, is compelled by force of circumstances to be a mill operative, has no freedom,”

“when the philosopher goes to work and the working man becomes a philosopher.”

A Five Element Model

Process intensity is the degree to which a program emphasizes proces­ses instead of data. All programs use a mix of process and data. Pro­cess is reflected in algorithms, equations, and branches. Data is re­flected in data tables, images, sounds, and text.

I mean the arts that call our atten­tion to language, present us with characters, unfold stories, and make us reflect on the structures and common practices of such activities.

he Manchester Mark I

I’m hot and sweaty

But if we abandon the lecture format because students may find it difficult

“It is not a recitation of facts, but the building of an argument.”

It keeps students’ minds in energetic and simultaneous action.

Lectures are essential for teaching the humanities’ most basic skills: comprehension and reasoning

Bottlenecks are important because they signal where students are unable to grasp crucial ways of knowing in our fields.

I see the maker movement as taking the controversy and politics out of hacking.

The problem is not in our imagination. The problem is in our activity.

we don't have a speculation deficit; we have a motivation deficit.

machines of serendipity

political, ludic, programmatic and inadvertent

they are both examples of the fascination of digital artists with the dysfunctional

New technologies help maintain two crucial Euro-American myths: (1) the myth of progress and (2) the myth of white, Western superiority .