David Golumbia
Virginia Commonwealth University, English, Faculty Member
- New Media, Computer And Society, Philosophy of Computer Science, Theory Of Computation, Structuralism/Post-Structuralism, Digital Humanities, and 40 moreLanguage and Ideology, Language Ideology, Language Technologies, Digital Media, Literature, Contemporary American Literature, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Postcolonial Literature, Science Fiction, Postcolonial Theory, Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Media Studies, Hilary Putnam, Deconstruction, Gayatri Spivak, Google, Internet freedom, Web 2.0, Jacques Derrida, Media Literacy, Media, Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Theory, Humanities, Philosophy, Culture, High frequency trading, Bitcoin, Ideology, Right-Wing Extremism, Stanislaw Lem, Philip K Dick, Plato, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Frankfurt School (Philosophy), Comics Studies, and Comics and Graphic Novelsedit
The "first comprehensive account of Bitcoin's underlying right-wing politics" argues that far-right political theory is not just widespread in the communities around Bitcoin, but is built into the software design of Bitcoin, and that... more
The "first comprehensive account of Bitcoin's underlying right-wing politics" argues that far-right political theory is not just widespread in the communities around Bitcoin, but is built into the software design of Bitcoin, and that Bitcoin and the blockchain serve as surprisingly effective tools for spreading economic and political ideas that until very recently were thought to have been altogether discredited.
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Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Human Computer Interaction, Philosophy of Mind, Game studies, and 27 moreTechnology, Media Studies, New Media, Digital Humanities, Globalization, Internet Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Digital Media, Poststructuralism, Literary Criticism, Cultural Theory, Machine Translation, Deconstruction, Democratization, Digital Culture, Software Studies, Literary Theory, Post-Colonialism, Capitalism, Writing, Hilary Putnam, Jacques Derrida, Linguistics, Noam Chomsky, Critical Code Studies, Jerry Fodor, and Corporatism
The history of philology provides an exceptionally rich vein for locating what Derrida came to call deconstructions: nodes or pseudo-events in the development of discourse where it appears that foundations collapse, only to be rebuilt in... more
The history of philology provides an exceptionally rich vein for locating what Derrida came to call deconstructions: nodes or pseudo-events in the development of discourse where it appears that foundations collapse, only to be rebuilt in forms that may or may not have changed. The history of philology engages language, the sciences (especially evolutionary biology), and race, all of which are evidenced in the work of the German philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt. The relationships among these discourses have been repeatedly subject to deconstruction, sometimes so as to enhance appreciation of human diversity, and at other times against it. Understanding the history of philology is critical to understanding our present, but there remains significant work to do to reconstruct its liberatory aspects in the service of a more egalitarian future.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Philology, Cultural Studies, Philosophy Of Language, Historical Linguistics, and 10 moreRace and Racism, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction, Critical Race Theory, Enlightenment, Literary Theory, Intellectual History of Enlightenment, Jacques Derrida, Linguistics, and Wilhelm von Humboldt
The question of the militarization of language emerges from the politics surrounding cryptography, or the use of encryption in contemporary networked digital technology, and the intersection of encryption with the politics of language.... more
The question of the militarization of language emerges from the politics surrounding cryptography, or the use of encryption in contemporary networked digital technology, and the intersection of encryption with the politics of language. Ultimately, cryptographic politics aims to embody at a foundational level a theory of language that some recent philosophers, including Charles Taylor and Philip Pettit, locate partly in the writings of Thomas Hobbes. As in Hobbes's political theory, this theory of language is closely tied to the conception of political sovereignty as necessarily absolute and as the only available alternative to absolute sovereignty being a state of nature (or more accurately what Pettit 2008 calls a “second state of nature,” one in which language plays a key role). In that state of nature, the only possible political relation is what Hobbes calls a war of “all against all.” While Hobbes intended that image as a justification for the quasi-absolute power of the political sovereign, those who most vigorously pursue cryptographic politics appear bent on realizing it as a welcome sociopolitical goal. To reject that vision, we need to adopt a different picture of language and of sovereignty itself, a less individualistic picture that incorporates a more robust sense of shared and community responsibility and that entails serious questions about the political consequences of the cryptographic program.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Constitutional Law, Political Philosophy, New Media, Digital Humanities, and 28 moreInformation Security, Human Rights Law, Cybercrimes, International Law, Digital Media, Network Security, Hobbes, Political Science, First Amendment Law (USA), Anarchism, Ideology, Philosophy Of Law, Digital Media & Learning, Cyber Warfare, Freedom Of Expression, Cryptography, Anonymity, Ideology and Discourse Analysis, Encryption, Libertarianism, Freedom of Speech, Hacking, Ethical Hacking, Right-Wing Extremism, Anarcho-capitalism, Cyber Security, Arms Control and Disarmament, and Infosec
Open Access (OA) is the movement to make academic research available without charge, typically via digital networks. Like many cyberlibertarian causes OA is roundly celebrated by advocates from across the political spectrum. Yet like many... more
Open Access (OA) is the movement to make academic research available without charge, typically via digital networks. Like many cyberlibertarian causes OA is roundly celebrated by advocates from across the political spectrum. Yet like many of those causes, OA's lack of clear grounding in an identifiable political framework means that it may well not only fail to serve the political goals of some of its supporters, and may in fact work against them. In particular, OA is difficult to reconcile with Marxist accounts of labor, and on its face appears not to advance but to actively mitigate against achievement of Marxist goals for the emancipation of labor. In part this stems from a widespread misunderstanding of Marx's own attitude toward intellectual work, which to Marx was not categorically different from other forms of labor, though was in danger of becoming so precisely through the denial of the value of the end products of intellectual work. This dynamic is particularly visible in the humanities, where OA advocacy routinely includes disparagement of academic labor, and of the value produced by that labor.
Research Interests: Labor Economics, New Media, Digital Humanities, Marxism, Open Access, and 15 moreOpen Access Publishing, Digital Media, Political Science, Open Source Software, Ideology, Digital Culture, Copyright, Immaterial Labour, Labor History and Studies, Digital Theory and Culture, Free Culture, Digital Library, Autonomist Marxism, Copyright Law, and Cyberlibertarian
Almost from its inception, one of the most notable features of Noam Chomsky’s “revolution in linguistics” has been his insistence that linguistics, or at least the most interesting and important aspects of linguistics, must be understood... more
Almost from its inception, one of the most notable features of Noam Chomsky’s “revolution in linguistics” has been his insistence that linguistics, or at least the most interesting and important aspects of linguistics, must be understood as a part of natural science. Its status as natural science is frequently posited as a critical distinction between Chomskyan linguistics and all (or almost all) other approaches to the subject. While much attention has been directed to the way Chomsky’s definitions of language and linguistics structure his research program, Chomsky’s conception of science has been subject to much less scrutiny, and turns out to be both very specific and controversial. Chomskyan science rules out, rather than in, many practices associated with contemporary scientific investigation, particularly direct empirical investigation of ordinary social and mental phenomena. Instead, Chomsky has long explicitly endorsed what he calls “Cartesian rationalism,” a view that proceeds from just those Aristotelian precepts to which modern science is typically understood to have developed in opposition. Chomsky’s project resembles and in many ways follows in lock-step that of Edmund Husserl, the first major figure to discuss “universal grammar” and to name it as such; while Chomsky rarely discusses Husserl, Chomsky’s attempts to erect a science by ruling out metaphysics are notably Husserlian, in that they continually return to metaphysical propositions that are not recognized as such, and in that this continual return in the name of science is typically marked by the name of Descartes.
Research Interests: History of Linguistics, Cultural Studies, Philosophy of Science, Languages and Linguistics, Poststructuralism, and 14 moreHistory of Science, Deconstruction, Language Evolution, Literary Theory, Edmund Husserl, Jacques Derrida, Linguistics, Linguistic Theory, Biolinguistics, Descartes, Poststructuralist Theory, Noam Chomsky, Generative linguistics, and Chomsky
The theoretical movements known as Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology depend on the “critique of correlationism” offered by the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux in his 2009 After Finitude. There Meillassoux claims to... more
The theoretical movements known as Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology depend on the “critique of correlationism” offered by the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux in his 2009 After Finitude. There Meillassoux claims to have shown that Kant and all philosophers following him committed a grave and unseen philosophical error that he calls “correlationism,” in failing to see that humans can have access to absolute knowledge. Meillassoux’s demonstration fails to deliver on this promise by equivocating on just the key argumentative points that philosophers from Kant onward have worked to clarify with precise language and argument, and by ignoring tremendous amounts of countervailing textual evidence. Far from blindly committing the correlationist “error,” much of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy takes the issues Meillasoux raises as central ones for any philosophical investigation, with a significant number of philosophers and theorists adopting the realist position Meillassoux claims has been eliminated.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Metaphysics, Analytic Philosophy, Epistemology, History of Analytic Philosophy, and 14 morePhilosophy Of Mathematics, Idealism, Continental Philosophy, Literary Theory, Hilary Putnam, Speculative Realism, Wittgenstein, Immanuel Kant, Alain Badiou, Object Oriented Ontology, Realism vs Anti-Realism, Continental (vs.) Analytical Philosophy, Quentin Meillassoux, and Realism
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In 2003, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak published Death of a Discipline, an exhortation to create “an inclusive comparative literature,” one that “takes the languages of the Southern Hemisphere as active cultural media rather than as objects... more
In 2003, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak published Death of a Discipline, an exhortation to create “an inclusive comparative literature,” one that “takes the languages of the Southern Hemisphere as active cultural media rather than as objects of cultural study.” To many literary scholars such a development seemed welcome and even likely. Instead, ten years later, an entirely different transformation has taken place via the development of the Digital Humanities (DH), in which the close study of literature and the languages in which it is embedded have themselves been demoted, in favor of “distant reading” and other forms of quantitative and large-scale analyses, and whose language politics have regressed rather than progressed from the state Spivak described. DH advertises itself as an unexceptionable application of computational techniques to literary scholarship, yet its advent has accompanied an almost complete reorientation of literary studies as a field—a virtual death of the vision described by Spivak. The advent of DH is quite unlike the ones accompanying the introduction of computers into other disciplines, whose basic precepts have remained largely intact in the face of digitization. DH’s paradoxical use of the adjective “digital” to describe only a fraction of research methods that engage with digital technology creates a tension that must be resolved: either by the DH label being reabsorbed into literary studies, or by literary scholarship itself being fundamentally altered, a goal which DH has already in part achieved.
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Despite the proliferation of critical studies of communication, the meanings of the words “communication” and “critical” remain deeply contested. Attending to the history of the use of these terms inside and outside of the academy offers... more
Despite the proliferation of critical studies of communication, the meanings of the words “communication” and “critical” remain deeply contested. Attending to the history of the use of these terms inside and outside of the academy offers a broader perspective on some of the most pressing issues confronting scholars of communication today.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Information Technology, Kant, Communication, and 13 moreTechnology, New Media, Languages and Linguistics, Social Networks, Film Theory, Research Methodology, Higher Education, Digital Media, Cultural Theory, Literary Theory, Social Media, Immanuel Kant, and Harold Innis
The development of High-Frequency Trading (HFT)—automated trading of stocks, as well as bonds, options, and other investment instruments—provides a signal example of the political effects of computerization on a discrete social sphere.... more
The development of High-Frequency Trading (HFT)—automated trading of stocks, as well as bonds, options, and other investment instruments—provides a signal example of the political effects of computerization on a discrete social sphere. Despite the widespread rhetoric that computerization inherently democratizes, the consequences of the introduction of HFT are widely acknowledged to be new concentrations of wealth and power, opacity rather than transparency of information flows, and structural resistance to democratic oversight and control. Even as computerized tools undoubtedly provide individual investors with more power relative to what they had before, they also provide powerful actors with relatively more power as well, in some cases effectively excluding the majority of individuals from insight or meaningful participation whatsoever, especially with regard to the political impacts of market activities. Reports on recent financial crises, and the 2011 film Margin Call provide narrow windows into the operations of HFT and the challenges it poses to democracy; these in turn raise significant problems for the view that computerization inherently democratizes.
Research Interests: Finance, Cultural Studies, Algorithms, High Performance Computing, Financial Economics, and 37 moreCommunication, Media Studies, New Media, Media and Cultural Studies, Journalism, Film Studies, Securities Law, Digital Media, Development communication, Cultural Theory, Democratization, Politics, Media Education, Securitization, Digital Culture, Banking, Media Literacy, Social Media, Media and Democracy, Facebook, Media, Online Journalism, International Finance, Google, Youtube, Financial Derivatives, Media Research, Digital Marketing, Social Communication, Media Impact and Effects and Usages, Digital Story Telling, Iphones, Asset and investment valuation, HFT, Paywalls, Virtual Revolution, and Alternate Media
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Game studies, Media Studies, New Media, and 18 moreMedia and Cultural Studies, Play, Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Theory, Deconstruction, Video Games, Critical Race Theory, Race and Ethnicity, Software Studies, Literary Theory, Jacques Derrida, Postcolonial Theory, Structuralism/Post-Structuralism, Games (Computer Science), Post-Structuralism, MMORPG, Gayatri Spivak, and Wow
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Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Cognitive Science, Gender Studies, Philosophy of Mind, Technoculture, and 17 moreEthnography, Digital Media, Computational Intelligence, Cultural Theory, Cognition, Phenomenology, Video Games, Digital Culture, Gender, Martin Heidegger, Structuralism/Post-Structuralism, New Media Studies, Everyday Life, Alan Turing, Turing Test, Computationalism, and Microethology
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Languages, Cultural Studies, Psychoanalysis, Humanities Computing (Digital Humanities), and 62 moreGender Studies, Philosophy Of Language, Communication, Indigenous Studies, Indigenous or Aboriginal Studies, Media Studies, New Media, Media and Cultural Studies, Intellectual Property, Digital Humanities, Languages and Linguistics, Web Design, Literature, Innovation statistics, Postcolonial Studies, Digital Media, Media History, Experimental Media Arts, Subjectivities, Multimedia, Textual Scholarship, Textual Criticism, Cultural Theory, Deconstruction, Identity (Culture), XML, Race and Ethnicity, Endangered Languages, Politics, Identity politics, Web Technologies, Gender, Literary Theory, Web Development, Indigenous Knowledge, Post-Colonialism, Jacques Derrida, Media, Postcolonial Theory, Technological Innovation, Structuralism/Post-Structuralism, Linguistics, Postcolonial Literature, Hypertext theory, Semantic Web, Text And Image, Experimental Literature, Multimodality, Walter Ong, Hypertext Fiction, Experimental Film, Paul Virilio, CSS, Jean-François Lyotard, John Cage, jQuery, Scripting, Net.art, WebGL, Javascript, HTML, and Experimental Scholarship
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Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, New Media, Marxism, Internet Studies, and 24 moreDigital Media, XML, Capitalism, Tcp/Ip, Postmodernism, Jacques Derrida, Facebook, Hypertext theory, Online Journalism, Freedom of Information, Cyberspace, CSS, Google, Youtube, jQuery, Commerce, WebGL, Javascript, Digital Marketing, HTML, Digital Story Telling, Iphones, Paywalls, and Virtual Revolution
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Manipulations of reality and appearance are surely the most prominent formal devices in Philip K. Dick's science fiction. Critical writing on Dick's novels is extensive, and some of the best of it offers... more
Manipulations of reality and appearance are surely the most prominent formal devices in Philip K. Dick's science fiction. Critical writing on Dick's novels is extensive, and some of the best of it offers important insights into these manipulations. Nevertheless, the critical literature ...
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... I benefited greatly in preparing this essay for publication from long-past, fondly remembered, and intense conversations with Lyall H. Powers ... Aware and Richly Responsible,'" especially in the first of these, wherein... more
... I benefited greatly in preparing this essay for publication from long-past, fondly remembered, and intense conversations with Lyall H. Powers ... Aware and Richly Responsible,'" especially in the first of these, wherein Nussbaum argues that the reader should view Maggie as a ...
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Dorothy Kim and David Golumbia reflect on the histories of fascism and white supremacy in relation to university institutional practices, the digital and what it means to reckon with digital humanities’ fascist politics and historiographies
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Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, History Of Computing, Computers and Philosophy, New Media, and 21 moreMedia and Cultural Studies, Feminist Theory, Marxism, Postcolonial Studies, Digital Media, Cultural Theory, Ideology, Software Studies, Literary Theory, Post-Colonialism, Facebook, Structuralism/Post-Structuralism, Online Journalism, Google, Youtube, Critical Code Studies, Digital Marketing, Digital Story Telling, Iphones, Paywalls, and Virtual Revolution
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Future Studies, Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Mind, Media Studies, and 22 moreNew Media, Television Studies, Digital Media, Cultural Theory, Future Media, Facebook, Online Journalism, Singularity Theory, Google, Futurology, Youtube, Joss Whedon, Battlestar Galactica, Digital Marketing, Dollhouse, Mind Uploading, Ray Kurzweil, Caprica, Digital Story Telling, Iphones, Paywalls, and Virtual Revolution
Bitcoin is promoted as an alternative to currency, and even at times as an alternative to money, but neither Bitcoin’s development nor its promulgation emerge from thoughtful analyses of money or currency as they currently exist, let... more
Bitcoin is promoted as an alternative to currency, and even at times as an alternative to money, but neither Bitcoin’s development nor its promulgation emerge from thoughtful analyses of money or currency as they currently exist, let alone the thought and history that have figured in their development. The grounding problems that Bitcoin advocates consider central are not the ones that major thinkers about money or currency, from the Right or the Left, have deemed important. On the contrary, those grounding problems are largely ideological: the desire to bypass the (apparently lawful) credit card and PayPal “blockade” of WikiLeaks, on the one hand (usually mentioned as the instigating event in the widespread use of Bitcoin), and the desire to bypass central and/or commercial banks for either the creation of money (as many of the more rabid advocates insist) or the provision of financial services (the main interest of Satoshi Nakamoto’s original Bitcoin paper), on the other. The former ideas emerge from a libertarian, anti-state politics familiar from much of the WikiLeaks story. The latter ideas emerge from the profoundly ideological and overtly conspiratorial anti-Central Bank rhetoric propagated by the extremist Right in the US, and which despite its overt “anti-bank” rhetoric, on most thoughtful analysis, serves rather than resists the interests of banks and big finance (much as despite its anti-bank rhetoric, Bitcoin itself is now promoted by banks, investors, and venture capitalists). Scholars of money like Mary Mellor and Ann Pettifor have suggested meaningful alternatives to the current money system, but Bitcoin has very little in common with their proposals, which would require societal assent as well as technical innovation. The lack of any thorough, non-conspiratorial analysis of existing financial systems means that Bitcoin fails to embody any true alternative to them. The reasons for this have little to do with technology and everything to do with the existing systems in which Bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies are embedded, systems that instantiate the forms of social power that cannot be eliminated through either wishful thinking or technical or even political evasion: the rich and powerful will not become poor and powerless simply because other people decide to operate alternate economies of exchange. Lacking a robust account of transforming these systems of power, even without Bitcoin’s flaws, a “perfect” cryptocurrency would exacerbate, rather than address, the existing serious problems with our monetary and financial systems. Because it operates without such an account, Bitcoin’s real utility and purpose (and that of the cryptocurrency movement in general) can be better understood as a “program” for recruiting uninformed citizens into a neoliberal anti-government politics, understanding the nature and effects of which requires just the attention to political theory and history that Bitcoin enthusiasts rail against.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Monetary Economics, Political Philosophy, New Media, and 21 morePolitical Theory, Marxism, Digital Media, Cultural Theory, Democratization, Ideology, Money and Banking, Neoliberalism, Democracy, Money, Commodity Trading, Monetary Policy, Hacking, Ethical Hacking, Right-Wing Extremism, Federal Reserve, Bitcoin, Cyberlibertarian, Cryptocurrency, John Birch Society, and Blockchains
This paper reflects on the phrase “seeing like a machine.” It argues that its appeal depends on the multiple meanings of the word “seeing,” which includes both the senses of registering visual characteristics, as cameras and mirrors do,... more
This paper reflects on the phrase “seeing like a machine.” It argues that its appeal depends on the multiple meanings of the word “seeing,” which includes both the senses of registering visual characteristics, as cameras and mirrors do, and of comprehending and understanding the thing seen, a capability that is closely allied with the capability of judgment. The paper examines the political role of judgment in Kant and Arendt, and shows how recent attempts to use machines for the purpose of judging reject these insights. It addresses some current proposals to automate the administration of justice, and argues that they entail the outsourcing of what Kant and Arendt argue is the signal human capability and the signal human responsibility.
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What might a society look and feel like in which the free expression rights of for-profit corporations eclipse and override persons' rights to privacy, and interests in fair political representation? And how might the acceleration of... more
What might a society look and feel like in which the free expression rights of for-profit corporations eclipse and override persons' rights to privacy, and interests in fair political representation? And how might the acceleration of current trends toward corporate personhood erode the autonomy of actual persons? This chapter explores these questions through two prisms: U.S. jurisprudence of corporate free speech rights, and an imaginative evocation of one fictional world this jurisprudence is leading towards.
The first section makes the case that many aspects of American legal culture pave the way to a public sphere in which corporations have far more meaningful political agency and capacity for planning than citizens or even political parties. The second section introduces the setting of M.T. Anderson’s Feed, a dystopian novel with surprisingly rich insight into the habits of mind and character that would naturally thrive in an automated public sphere (and kaleidoscopic personalized feeds) even more dominated by for-profit corporations than our own. We conclude by reflecting on the fragility of opportunities for autonomous self-creation when communications are increasingly monitored, shaped, and monetized for profit.
The first section makes the case that many aspects of American legal culture pave the way to a public sphere in which corporations have far more meaningful political agency and capacity for planning than citizens or even political parties. The second section introduces the setting of M.T. Anderson’s Feed, a dystopian novel with surprisingly rich insight into the habits of mind and character that would naturally thrive in an automated public sphere (and kaleidoscopic personalized feeds) even more dominated by for-profit corporations than our own. We conclude by reflecting on the fragility of opportunities for autonomous self-creation when communications are increasingly monitored, shaped, and monetized for profit.
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In this chapter, David Golumbia argues that computationalist ideology – the view that everything in reality is ultimately made up of computation – can be seen with particular clarity in what he calls “the uploading story.” According to... more
In this chapter, David Golumbia argues that computationalist ideology – the view that everything in reality is ultimately made up of computation – can be seen with particular clarity in what he calls “the uploading story.” According to this story, we human beings are on the verge of losing our human embodiment and our contact with everyday reality, and moving into a world where our minds merge with computers and we inhabit virtual realities much like those seen in videogames. A prominent exemplar of this story is found in the work of inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who claims that we are heading toward a profound transformation he and others call “The Singularity.” Golumbia argues that the premise of Kurzweil's “Singularity” reads very much like the fantastic versions of “uploading” that have been widespread in computational thought for decades. To expose the conceptual flaws in the uploading story and its incarnation in Kurzweil's “Singularity,” Golumbia examines a selection of recent television series and films that use this story as their narrative foundation. Dollhouse, Battlestar Galactica, and Gamer constitute a kind of demonstrative interrogation of the uploading fantasy, Golumbia argues, revealing its central contradiction – namely, that it relies not on actual technological advances but on distortions beyond any recognizable limits of our conceptions of the human, the mind, and the body. Keywords: Singularity; Ray Kurzweil; digital culture; uploading; minds and computers; Dollhouse; Battlestar Galactica; Gamer (film); cultural studies; digital media; brain in a vat; Jacques Derrida; Hilary Putnam
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Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Economics, Monetary Economics, Marxism, and 15 moreDigital Media, Cultural Theory, Democratization, Ideology, Democracy, Commodity Trading, Monetary Policy, Hacking, Ethical Hacking, Federal Reserve, Bitcoin, Cyberlibertarian, Cryptocurrency, John Birch Society, and Blockchains
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, New Media, Media and Cultural Studies, Climate Change, Digital Media, and 14 morePropaganda, Cultural Theory, Politics, Ideology, Civil Society and the Public Sphere, Social Media, Capitalism, Democracy, Libertarianism, Wikipedia Studies, Social Science Research Network, Wikipedia, Trolling, and Cyberlibertarian
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The entire space cryptocurrency/blockchain space is dominated by false claims, conspiracy theories, muddled thinking, and outright fraud of many kinds. It is remarkable how much academic, journalistic and popular writing on blockchain... more
The entire space cryptocurrency/blockchain space is dominated by false claims, conspiracy theories, muddled thinking, and outright fraud of many kinds. It is remarkable how much academic, journalistic and popular writing on blockchain accepts at face value dogma that any dispassionate investigation shows to be false, This paper consists mainly of two lists: falsehoods that nobody who is interested in the world as it really is should ever repeat, at least not without heavy qualification; the second a list of truths and rules of thumb about cryptocurrency and blockchain that have been demonstrated repeatedly (often for many years) but escape notice far too often. Each item in the list is accompanied with some, but only a small subset, of the evidence available to support it.
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Advocates understand the idea that “code is speech” to create an impenetrable legal shield around anything built of programming code. When they do this they misunderstand, or misrepresent, free speech law (and rights law in general),... more
Advocates understand the idea that “code is speech” to create an impenetrable legal shield around anything built of programming code. When they do this they misunderstand, or misrepresent, free speech law (and rights law in general), which rarely creates such impenetrable shields, the principles that underlie that law, and the ways those principles should and might apply to code. The idea that government cannot regulate things because they are made of code cannot be right. That principle not only lacks support in most theories of freedom of speech, but is actively rebutted in the very case law that advocates claim to be marshalling in favor their position. Further, in promoting this position, advocates misrepresent—in a manner it is hard not to see as willful—the very nature of the programming code they care so much about.
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Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Information Technology, Political Philosophy, Technology, and 41 moreNew Media, Media and Cultural Studies, Educational Technology, Globalization, Political Theory, Marxism, Academic Freedom, Human Rights, Open Access, Digital Media, Propaganda, Cultural Theory, Open Source Software, Ideology, Social Media, Hacktivism, Neoliberalism, Philosophy Of Freedom, Social Exclusion, Freedom Of Expression, Ayn Rand, Freedom of Information, Utopianism, Open Source and Free Software Studies, Libertarianism, Minority Rights, The Internet, Wikipedia Studies, Hayek, Classical Liberalism, Power, Ethical Hacking, Computers, Hackers, Marxismo, Right-Wing Extremism, Freedom, Wikipedia, Technological Determinism, Economic freedom, and Cyberlibertarian
While “trolling” originally named and is today often thought to be the activity of recalcitrant or obstreperous individuals with too much time or their hands or axes to grind about particular issues, a great deal of trolling on today’s... more
While “trolling” originally named and is today often thought to be the activity of recalcitrant or obstreperous individuals with too much time or their hands or axes to grind about particular issues, a great deal of trolling on today’s social media platforms is crafted not by such individuals but instead by persons (or even computer programs) acting on behalf of (and usually employed by) powerful interests, including corporations, institutions, governments, and lobbying groups, and whose goal is not so much contributing to real exchange of political views, but instead the tilting of the discursive field to make some positions appear reasonable or even popular, and to marginalize other opinions (and those who hold them). Such action is visible in the range of ongoing intrusions by corporate actors into Wikipedia, which is reflected in the elaborate infrastructure the site maintains to police such intrusions, an infrastructure not available to much of the rest of the internet. It is even more obvious in Anti-Global Warming (AGW) discourse, by agents of industry lobbying groups and energy companies, in many locations across the web. Given the ease with which capital can purchase the services of agents to advocate effectively for views that are disfavored by a large portion—at times, such as in the climate change debate, a large majority—of the population, questions are raised about the apparently inherent democratic nature of information distribution on the web, and about what means might be utilized to level the playing field between good-faith contributors to discourse on the one hand, and institutionally-directed contributors on the other.
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Calls to Limit the Use of Bad Technologies Only by Law Enforcement and Governments, Largely Via “Ethics” and Self-Regulation, Exacerbate Rather than Ameliorate the Anti-Democratic Harms of Digital Technology
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a structural analysis that starts from an acknowledgment of the ways that race and whiteness work in our society, and how they connect to other phenomena that may seem distant from them. In the case of AGI, there is an odd persistence of... more
a structural analysis that starts from an acknowledgment of the ways that race and whiteness work in our society, and how they connect to other phenomena that may seem distant from them. In the case of AGI, there is an odd persistence of discourse that seems far in excess of what science allows, and those most captivated by that excess are often the same people captivated by excesses about race. Part of this is visible through the unusual amount of overlap between AGI promoters and those who believe in a strong correlation between what they call “race” and what they call “IQ.”
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, and 14 moreMedia Studies, Intelligence, Digital Media, Race and Racism, Ideology, Political Extremism/Radicalism/Populism, Consciousness, Whiteness Studies, Media, Critical Race Theory and Whiteness theory, White Supremacy, Ideology and Discourse Analysis, Right-Wing Extremism, and Extreme and Far Right
While digital promoters love to focus on the great things that will come from some new version of something over its existing version, I can’t help focusing on what their promotion says—implicitly or explicitly—about the thing they claim... more
While digital promoters love to focus on the great things that will come from some new version of something over its existing version, I can’t help focusing on what their promotion says—implicitly or explicitly—about the thing they claim to be replacing, typically at profit to themselves, whether in terms of political or personal power (broadly speaking) or financial gain.
Research Interests: New Media, Rhetoric, Digital Media, Video Games, Politics, and 4 moreReading, Nihilism, Books, and Cyberlibertarian
reflections on how the arguments made in The Politics of Bitcoin play out in the current US Presidential election.
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The word “neoliberalism” comes up frequently in discussions on and of digital media and politics. Use of the term is frequently derided by actors across the political spectrum, especially but not only by those at whom the term has been... more
The word “neoliberalism” comes up frequently in discussions on and of digital media and politics. Use of the term is frequently derided by actors across the political spectrum, especially but not only by those at whom the term has been directed. Sometimes the derision indicates genuine disagreement, but even more frequently it is part of an outright denial that there is any such thing as “neoliberalism,” or that the meaning of the term is so fuzzy as to make its application pointless.
There are many causes for this, but one that can be identified and addressed is fairly straightforward once it’s identified: neoliberalism has two meanings. Of course it has many more than two meanings, but it has two important, current, distinct, somewhat related meanings, and they get invoked in close enough proximity to each other so as to sometimes cause serious confusion.
There are many causes for this, but one that can be identified and addressed is fairly straightforward once it’s identified: neoliberalism has two meanings. Of course it has many more than two meanings, but it has two important, current, distinct, somewhat related meanings, and they get invoked in close enough proximity to each other so as to sometimes cause serious confusion.
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The 8th interview in a 12-part series about digital humanities at the Los Angeles Review of Books
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Despite the aggressive promotion of Digital Humanities as a radical insurgency, its institutional success has for the most part involved the displacement of politically progressive humanities scholarship and activism in favor of the... more
Despite the aggressive promotion of Digital Humanities as a radical insurgency, its institutional success has for the most part involved the displacement of politically progressive humanities scholarship and activism in favor of the manufacture of digital tools and archives. Advocates characterize the development of such tools as revolutionary and claim that other literary scholars fail to see their political import due to fear or ignorance of technology. But the unparalleled level of material support that Digital Humanities has received suggests that its most significant contribution to academic politics may lie in its (perhaps unintentional) facilitation of the neoliberal takeover of the university.
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The solution to the VW scandal is to empower regulators and make sure they have access to any and all parts of the systems they oversee. The solution is not to open up those systems to everyone. There is no “right to repair,” at least for... more
The solution to the VW scandal is to empower regulators and make sure they have access to any and all parts of the systems they oversee. The solution is not to open up those systems to everyone. There is no “right to repair,” at least for individuals. Whether or not it deserves to be called a “freedom,” the “freedom to tinker” is not a fundamental freedom. The suggestion that auto manufacturers be forced to open these systems is wrongheaded at best and disingenuous at worst. We have every reason to think that opening up those systems would make matters worse, not better.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, New Media, Intellectual Property, Digital Humanities, and 11 moreDigital Media, Open Source Software, Copyright, Interactive and Digital Media, Intellectual Property Law, Open Source and Free Software Studies, Free Software, New Media Studies, Malware Analysis, Hacking, and Ethical Hacking
Amazon’s success lies in worker exploitation and intrusions into consumers’ private lives.
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Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Economics, New Media, Media and Cultural Studies, Rhetoric, and 19 morePrivacy, Digital Media, Health Informatics, Digital Rhetorics, Ideology, Cultural Politics, Social Media, Neoliberalism, Facebook, Cultural Political Economy, Crowdsourcing, Neighborhood Effects, Social Contagion, Network Effects, Crowdfunding, Crowd Behaviour and Psychology, Externalities, Sharing Economy, and Airbnb
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, New Media, Privacy, Digital Media, Geopolitics, and 12 morePolitical Science, Conspiracy Theories, Surveillance Studies, Cryptography, Encryption, Social Influence, Spying and Intelligence, Social Networking Security and Privacy, Trolling, Radio Free Europe, Edward Snowden, and NSA Domestic Surveillance
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No matter how carefully and thoroughly you develop your own encryption scheme, the very act of doing that does not merely suggest but ensures—particularly if your new technology gets adopted—that your opponents will use every means... more
No matter how carefully and thoroughly you develop your own encryption scheme, the very act of doing that does not merely suggest but ensures—particularly if your new technology gets adopted—that your opponents will use every means available to defeat it, including the (often, very paradoxically if viewed from the right angle, “open source”) information you’ve provided about how your technology works.
Research Interests: Information Technology, Military Intelligence, Technology, New Media, Privacy, and 14 moreDigital Media, Secrecy, Social Media, Cryptography, Militarization & Power, Hackers, CIA, Arms Control and Disarmament, Dual Use Techmology Defense Industry, Cypherpunk, The right to be forgotten, Edward Snowden, NSA Domestic Surveillance, and Public Policy
Research Interests: New Media, Behavioral Sciences, Data Mining, Human Rights, Privacy, and 17 moreDigital Media, Propaganda, Political Campaigns, Political Science, Surveillance Studies, Informed Consent, Social Media, Facebook, Google, Data Science, IRB Regulations, Obama's Electoral Compaign 2008, Cyberlibertarian, Edward Snowden, Mass Surveillance, NSA Domestic Surveillance, and Right of Publicity
Research Interests: Information Technology, Technology, New Media, Digital Media, Regulation And Governance, and 19 moreComputer Networks, Democratization, Governance, Politics, Internet Governance, Capitalism, Regulation, Neoliberalism, Democracy, Environmental Sustainability, Databases, Libertarianism, Disruptive Technologies, Software, Right-Wing Extremism, Cyberlibertarian, Market Fundamentalism, Public Policy, and Science and Technology Studies
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Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Algorithms, New Media, Humanities, and 33 moreDigital Humanities, Innovation statistics, Higher Education, Narrative, Digital Media, Literary Criticism, Governance, Politics, Digital Culture, Literary Theory, Web Studies, Bernard Stiegler, Hacktivism, Meaning, Democracy, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Marshall McLuhan, Libertarianism, Anonymous, Wikipedia Studies, Google, Ethical Hacking, Wikileaks, Hackers, Voltaire, University, Freedom, Julian Assange, Cyberlibertarian, Google Glass, Nicholas Carr, Centralized and Decentralized Communication Networks, and Alexander R. Galloway
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Finance, Cultural Studies, New Media, Rhetoric, and 17 moreDigital Media, Regulation And Governance, Cultural Theory, Anarchism, Democratization, Politics, Ideology, Securitization, Democracy, Money, Libertarianism, Gold, Currency, Bitcoin, Gold Standard, Cyberlibertarian, and Virtual Revolution
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Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Indigenous Studies, Indigenous or Aboriginal Studies, Digital Humanities, Languages and Linguistics, and 24 moreLiterature, Sociolinguistics, Linguistic Anthropology, Postcolonial Studies, Digital Media, Indigenous Politics, Language Documentation, Endangered Languages, Politics, Cultural Politics, Archives, Oral Traditions, Literary Theory, Indigenous Knowledge, Linguistic diversity, Postcolonial Theory, Indigenous Peoples Rights, Linguistics, Postcolonial Literature, Minority Languages, Indigenous Peoples, Aboriginal education, Linguistic Typology, and Dell hymes
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Law, Gender Studies, Game studies, and 36 moreNew Media, Humanities, Feminist Theory, Digital Humanities, Social Sciences, Internet Studies, Serious Games, Privacy, Postcolonial Studies, Digital Media, Regulation And Governance, Cultural Theory, Critical Thinking, Video Games, Critical Race Theory, Legal Theory, LGBT Issues, Multiplayer Online Games, Surveillance Studies, Digital Media & Learning, Capitalism, Neoliberalism, Facebook, Postcolonial Theory, Digital Games, Internet & Society, Online Journalism, The Internet, Google, Youtube, Digital Marketing, Digital Story Telling, Iphones, MOOC, Paywalls, and Virtual Revolution
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Computer Science, Human Computer Interaction, Computing In Social Sciences, Arts And Humanities, Professions, Humanities Computing (Digital Humanities), and 31 moreQueer Studies, Communication, Media Studies, New Media, Humanities, Digital Humanities, Marxism, Higher Education, Postcolonial Studies, Digital Media, Queer Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Literary Criticism, Critical Race Theory, Race and Ethnicity, Literary Theory, Pedagogy, Facebook, Postcolonial Literature, Online Journalism, Interpretation, Google, Youtube, Research Funding, Digital Marketing, Digital Story Telling, Iphones, Paywalls, Virtual Revolution, #TransformDH, and #DHPoco
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Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Algorithms, Humanities Computing (Digital Humanities), History Of Computing, and 24 morePhilosophy of Technology, New Media, Media and Cultural Studies, Feminist Theory, Digital Humanities, Technoculture, Ethnography, Higher Education, Digital Media, Video Games, Software Studies, Surveillance Studies, Bernard Stiegler, Speculative Realism, Structuralism/Post-Structuralism, New Media Studies, Everyday Life, Critical Code Studies, Philosphy of mind, High frequency trading, Drones, OOO, HFT, and Microethology
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Human Computer Interaction, Media Studies, New Media, Humanities, and 14 moreInternet Studies, Human Rights Law, International Law, Human Rights, Digital Media, Simulation (Simulation), Computer Games Technology, Video Games, Uav, Militarization & Power, Gamification, Drones, Targeted Killing, Ethics of War, Jane McGonigal, Katie Salen, Johan Huizinga, and Drones
In the developed world, blockchain promoters insist the technology will solve what they call problems of governance, finance and trust, though historically these have almost exclusively been considered “problems” by the far right. In the... more
In the developed world, blockchain promoters insist the technology will solve what they call problems of governance, finance and trust, though historically these have almost exclusively been considered “problems” by the far right. In the developing world, promoters invert the terms of the bargain, arguing that the world’s most impoverished people need blockchain to make themselves more politically and economically equal. These suggestions reiterate in remarkable ways the “white man’s burden” discourse of earlier colonial periods, far in excess of more recent (and still often misguided) schemes to improve the circumstances of people in the Global South. Further, where those recent schemes can at least claim at some level to be honestly committed to helping people, blockchain promoters transparently pursue their own self-interest, often at very significant cost to exactly the people they claim need the technology. In this way as well as many others, and despite its claims to technical innovation, blockchain represents a return to forms of politics many of us thought had long been eliminated from serious consideration in the global polity.
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Although Philip Mirowski’s work has been profoundly influential in fields as diverse as economics, history of science, political theory, and even literary studies, it is less well-known in the emerging complex of fields which are... more
Although Philip Mirowski’s work has been profoundly influential in fields as diverse as economics, history of science, political theory, and even literary studies, it is less well-known in the emerging complex of fields which are sometimes referred to as “digital studies,” meaning all the fields that directly analyze the social, cultural, and political-economic impact of the computer. This is unfortunate enough from the perspective of political economy, since Mirowski’s writings on neoliberalism resonate strongly with some of the most incisive political-economic work in digital studies. It is even more unfortunate when Mirowski’s work is seen at a larger scale, wherein he emerges as one of the most serious thinkers anywhere regarding the myriad impacts of the computer, especially but not only on intellectual practice over the last hundred or so years. From his writings on the neoliberal grounding of concepts like “open science,” to his recent “fictionalist” account of the function of information in economics, and especially in his thorough and uncompromising analysis of the computer and its metaphorics across a variety of disciplines in Machine Dreams, Mirowski’s work constitutes an unmatched source of critical thought that deserves to be far more widely disseminated among scholars of the digital.
Research Interests: History Of Computing, Economics, New Media, Cyborg Theory, Digital Humanities, and 13 moreOpen Access, Digital Media, History of Science, Digital Media & Learning, Neoliberalism, History of Economics, Theory of Automata, Cellular Automata, Right-Wing Extremism, Open science, John von Neumann, Science and Technology Studies, and Philip Mirowski
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Political Philosophy, Technology, New Media, and 38 moreMedia and Cultural Studies, Globalization, Political Theory, Marxism, Academic Freedom, Human Rights, Open Access, Digital Media, Propaganda, Cultural Theory, Open Source Software, Ideology, Web Technologies, Social Media, Hacktivism, Neoliberalism, Philosophy Of Freedom, Social Exclusion, Freedom Of Expression, Ayn Rand, Freedom of Information, Utopianism, Libertarianism, Minority Rights, The Internet, Wikipedia Studies, Hayek, Classical Liberalism, Power, Ethical Hacking, Computers, Hackers, Right-Wing Extremism, Freedom, Wikipedia, Technological Determinism, Economic freedom, and Cyberlibertarian
Research Interests: Computer Science, Distributed Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Human Computer Interaction, Game studies, and 20 moreNatural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Posthumanism, Computational Linguistics, Poststructuralism, Protein Folding, Deconstruction, Artificial Life, Systems Theory, Biology, Life Sciences, Transhumanism, Jacques Derrida, Speculative Realism, Object Oriented Ontology, Singularity Theory, Descartes, René, Robert Rosen, Transhumanism/Posthumanism, and N. Katherine Hayles
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Languages, Cultural Studies, Print Culture, Media Studies, and 20 moreNew Media, Digital Humanities, Languages and Linguistics, Digital Media, Literary Criticism, Cultural Theory, Digital Culture, Literary Theory, Social Media, Linguistics, Spelling, Orthography, Wikipedia Studies, Vernacular, Google, Standardization, Unicode, HTML, Global Englishes, and ASCII
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cognitive Science, Programming Languages, Object Oriented Programming, New Media, and 16 moreDigital Humanities, Languages and Linguistics, Digital Media, Poststructuralism, Orality-Literacy Studies, Politics, Linguistic diversity, Metaphor, Jacques Derrida, Structuralism/Post-Structuralism, Walter Ong, Noam Chomsky, Cultural and Linguistic Diversity, George Lakoff, Computationalism, and OOP
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... This argument has been pursued elsewhere (eg Barnes 2002, Myers 2003), but it is not directly taken up by Blevins and Garrett. ... J exposes a great deal that is previously unknown aboutFerdinand de Saussure's place in the... more
... This argument has been pursued elsewhere (eg Barnes 2002, Myers 2003), but it is not directly taken up by Blevins and Garrett. ... J exposes a great deal that is previously unknown aboutFerdinand de Saussure's place in the formation of American thought about language. ...
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The author provides abundant evidence from classroom data to develop these theoretical view-points. The data regarding benefits from peer interac-tive tasks is classified into such categories as general development, grammar,... more
The author provides abundant evidence from classroom data to develop these theoretical view-points. The data regarding benefits from peer interac-tive tasks is classified into such categories as general development, grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, and interactional style. Her ...
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Arguments against universality play a crucial role in cultural studies. In this dissertation I reach outside of literary studies--especially, though not at all exclusively, to contemporary analytic philosophy--to work at a... more
Arguments against universality play a crucial role in cultural studies. In this dissertation I reach outside of literary studies--especially, though not at all exclusively, to contemporary analytic philosophy--to work at a well-articulated, anti-objectivist, and therefore (I argue) anti-universalist ...
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Black Studies Or African American Studies, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy Of Language, and 21 moreAnalytic Philosophy, Media Studies, Feminist Theory, Languages and Linguistics, Postcolonial Studies, Queer Theory, Cultural Theory, Deconstruction, Critical Race Theory, Literary Theory, Cross-Cultural Studies, Hilary Putnam, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Structuralism/Post-Structuralism, Linguistics, Critical Theory and Difference, Universals, Toni Morrison, Linguistic Typology, and Jerry Fodor
Using the philosophy of language articulated by Charles Taylor in THE LANGUAGE ANIMAL, this paper sketches out some elements for a theory of what fascist language might be, drawing in particular on recent texts by Dinesh D'Souza and to a... more
Using the philosophy of language articulated by Charles Taylor in THE LANGUAGE ANIMAL, this paper sketches out some elements for a theory of what fascist language might be, drawing in particular on recent texts by Dinesh D'Souza and to a lesser extent Jonah Goldberg and Frank Luntz.
