HERE'S A QUICK typology of tech journalism today: news reporting ("Amazon Announces Layoffs Affecting 18,000 Employees"), gadget reviews, company and founder profiles, opinion essays (Zeynep Tufekci et al.), investigative work ("The Uber Files"), industry digests (TechCrunch), personal blogs, Substacks, and if you're feeling generous-Hacker News comments and GitHub "issues." It's an incomplete catalog, but you get the idea. Yet surveying this landscape reveals a curious lacuna: software criticism.
To be clear: Technology criticism is nothing new. Depending on who you ask, it goes way back to Lewis Mumford, Herbert Marcuse, Martin Heidegger, and Marshall McLuhan. More recently, I assume you've at least heard of popular books like The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and The Attention Merchants and may even be familiar with technology critics like Jaron Lanier, Evgeny Morozov, and Ellen Ullman. Or Fred Turner, Gabriella Coleman, and Sherry Turkle, to name a few from the academic flank.
But software criticism is not the same as technology criticism. A work of software criticism is to Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" what a New York Times book review is to Virginia Woolf's "Modern Fiction." The latter is a more synoptic assessment of the field, while the former is a focused interrogation of a single work.
So where are software critics? Like the rise of novels in the 18th and 19th centuries or jazz in the 1920s, isn't software a defining artifact of our time? How in Turing's name hasn't a culture of software criticism emerged?
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July - August 2023-Ausgabe von WIRED.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July - August 2023-Ausgabe von WIRED.
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Spin Cycle - To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers).
To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers). When the Dominator is about to intercept a tornado, Timmer uses a two-prong system to anchor the vehicle. Air compressors lower the car so its thick rubber skirt nearly touches the ground, and spikes wedge 6 inches into the earth to firmly prevent the vehicle from liftoff. Timmer and ONeal have seen roughly 65 tornadoes in the past six months. It was a historic amount, ONeal says. A lot of meteorological setups are busts, but every day we drove out this year, we felt like we would see a tornado.
Fantastic Plastic - a plastic bag might be the most overengineered object in history.
Stretchy seaweed. Reverse vending machines. QR-coded take-out boxes. To cure our addiction to disposable crap, we'll all need to get a little loony.
Piece of Mind - This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition.
This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition. Although this image wouldn't look out of place on a gallery wall alongside other splashy works of abstract art, it represents something very real: a 1-cubic-millimeter chunk of a woman's brain, removed during a procedure to treat her for epilepsy. Researchers at Harvard University stained the sample with heavy metals, embedded it in resin, cut it into slices approximately 34 nanometers thick
I Am Laura Kipnis-Bot, and I Will Make Reading Sexy and Tragic Again
WHEN A FLATTERING EMAIL ARRIVED inviting me to participate in an AI venture called Rebind that I'd later come to think will radically transform the entire way booklovers read books, I felt pretty sure it was a scam.
DAMAGE CONTROL
According to Léna Lazare, the 26-year-old face of the radical climate movement, they're also acts of joy.
AN IMPERFECT STORM
CAN THE U.A.E. REALLY MAKE RAIN ON DEMAND OR IS IT SELLING VAPORWARE?
THE HOLE IN THE MAP OF THE WORLD
ON THE SURFACE, THERE'S NOTHING UNUSUAL ABOUT IT. JUST A SPOT OF OCEAN. BUT BENEATH THE WAVES LURKS SOMETHING INCREDIBLE: A MASSIVE WATERFALL. AND IN ITS MYSTERIOUS DEPTHS, THE FATE OF THE WORLD CHURNS.
COOLER HEADS
The deadliest environmental threat to city dwellers worldwide isn't earthquakes, tornadoes, flooding, or fire. It's heat.
TERMINAL VELOCITY
IT WAS 2 AM at Denver International Airport, and Jared Murphy was only a few hours into a planned 17-hour layover.
THE ETERNAL TRUTH OF MARKDOWN
If the robots take over, we should at least speak their language.