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"design fiction" entries
Classic Programmer Paintings, Equality at Work, Bitcoin as Politics, and Raising Robotic Natives
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Classic Programmer Paintings — hilarity has ensued. The captions are brilliant.
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Equality Takes Work — Women do not prefer saying less: They anticipate the treatment they will receive when they say more.
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Bitcoin as Politics: Distributed Right-Wing Extremism — 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. […] 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. So … not a fan, then?
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Raising Robotic Natives — design/art artefacts for generations growing up with robots.
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Technology Ideals, Saying No, Future Things, and a Sweet Article Format
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How Will We Live? — we tend to imbue technology with the ideals of the people who have created it, and the messages of those who market it. However, creators and marketeers only ever set the affordances and suggest a use case. A technology’s true impact will always be defined by those who use it. Whether that’s knitting groups or fascist regimes, technology becomes an amplifier and accelerator of the social, cultural, and political values of the groups who use it, not those who made it. And it will continue to be used in ways you can never imagine.
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Fortunate People Say No (Ian Bogost) — you have to say ‘yes’ for a long while before you can earn the right to say ‘no.’ Even then, you usually can’t say ‘no’ at whim. By the time you can say ‘no’ indiscriminately, then you’re already so super-privileged that being able to say ‘no’ is not a prerequisite of success, but a result of it. (via Austin Kleon) (via Cory Doctorow)
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The Thing From The Future (Stuart Candy) — a game for creating thought-provoking artifacts from the future. Design fiction idea generator, in other words.
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Sweet Article Format — big lede with shortcuts to relevant sections. As Courtney says, “while I don’t know what I’d use this for, I like it.” (via Courtney Johnston)