Ineffable Parts. The Uncanny Valley of Facebook’s Timeline
I remember reading about the Singularity for the first time. It seemed an achievable – if not probable – dream (I was young) and I remember being excited about noticing the smallest of steps towards it.
One of those would be, I thought, the gradual quantification of everything that is subjective and ineffable. That would be the last conceptual barrier that machines would need to overcome before being able to contain us (because “understand” would be too romantic a term). Continue reading »
Studying Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London.
Free Digital World
A couple of weeks ago, I took the train up to Oxford in Britain along with my classmates to listen to Richard Stallman speak.
Stallman, or RMS as he is known, is a renowned software freedom activist most known for starting the Free Software Foundation in 1985. The FSF is a non-profit corporation, which aims “to promote computer user freedom and to defend the rights of all free software users”.
In his talk, titled “For A Free Digital Society”, RMS spoke about numerous ways in which digital and political masters are using technology to control the general public. He said that in fact, it should be the public who holds the power.
Niki Cheong is currently reading his MA Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London. He was formerly the editor of R.AGE, the youth platform of Malaysia’s leading English daily, The Star.
Guns, Hackers, and Cash: Failures of Collective Action
As the recent murder of several bloggers and the kidnapping of a suspected member of Anonymous by the Los Zetas Cartel has shown us, online collective action might have a positive real-world effect when it spawns protests and DOS attacks, but when it comes to attacking an institution which involves itself primarily in the meatspace, it has little effect. Continue reading »
Crowdsourcing meatspace: why I don’t understand the Occupy movement
Our world may not be built to sustain or comprehend the Occupy type of protest. Its lack of structure is specific to the Internet, it is what made the Pirate Bay trials so baffling and unsolvable and what keeps Anonymous alive and successful.
An inherent lack of organization, leadership and statement of purpose is not compatible with how we, as a society, function today. It is incomprehensible not because it lacks efficiency or power or motivation, but because we cannot hear it. Continue reading »
Studying Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London.