When Obedience Becomes a Sin: Heinlein and the Anatomy of a Successful Revolution
Clifford Angell Bates
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Luce Irigaray, Feminist Theory, and the Essentialism Debate
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In 1974, following the publication of her thesis, Luce Irigaray was effectively excommunicated from Jacques Lacan’s circle and from the École Freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris), the institution where she had trained and which Lacan founded. She was, as one of her commentators puts it,...
The Uncanniness of the Harvest: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and the Technological Enframing of Balkan Villages
Aleksandar Todorovski
Introduction: The Mood of the Land There is a mood that pervades the rural Balkans today, and it is not one that lends itself to the optimistic vocabularies of development policy. It is a mood of quiet depletion, of watching something drain away without being able to name precisely what is being...
Metanationals-Transnationals as a Political Form: Corporate Sovereignty in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy
Clifford Angell Bates
The Emergence of Metanationals Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy presents a near-future history in which transnational corporations rise to power and assume the roles of sovereign states. The story begins in the mid-2020s and extends to the 22nd century. In this world, traditional nation-states...
The Vanishing Knight of Virtue: On Žižek’s Reading of Hegelian Moral Consciousness
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“The universal itself is precisely as idiotic as its concrete and individual appearance.” Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy In Absolute Recoil, Slavoj Žižek offers a Lacanian reading of two Hegelian figures of moral consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the “Beautiful Soul” and...
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On Privacy Nihilism
Adam Caudill
Amongst the steady stream of marketing emails for gift cards and other last minute gifts in the days before Christmas, buried in the noise sent when people are least likely to see it, was a notice. It was an all-too-familiar “we take your privacy seriously, but” email. Perfectly timed to make it...
Whose Monkeys Are These?
Adam Caudill
Over the course of my career, I’ve found that there are some principles that are key for people and teams to be effective. One of these is that everything should have an owner. Everything should have someone that is responsible. Everything should have a designated person whose job it is to care...
Good Faith, Moral Duty, and Selfishness
Adam Caudill
What do we owe to each other? This is a classic question of moral philosophy, and a critical question that defines how society itself functions. It’s also a key question to understand what role each of us plays to make society successful. These words were started as society was entering a seismic...
On AI, Art, Writing, and the Distillation of Creativity
Adam Caudill
Can generative AI create art? Two years ago I took my first swing at answering that, at least from my perspective.1 As AI systems become more advanced, this question, and the issues surrounding it have become of greater import. With a new release from OpenAI, it’s become a topic of great passion,...
When AI Becomes I
Adam Caudill
One of the many joys of being human, is that we constantly face questions about our existence, from the seemingly simple (why is the sky blue), to the labyrinthine (what is the meaning of life, does pineapple go on pizza). Thanks to growing up watching Star Trek, one of these that has fascinated...
Millions of Jobs
Adam Caudill
It has been 20 years since I first used machine learning to solve a complex business problem. The underlying problem was simple: the company was selling a new service and wanted to know who was most likely to buy it. We had millions of records, and each record had hundreds of fields. A vast amount...
Security Is a Shell Game
Adam Caudill
In the world of security, everything comes down to trust; sooner or later you have to trust something. Often, this something is a human. While we are busy building advanced cryptosystems that will survive the heat death of the universe, sooner or later, digging down layer by layer, you get down to...
TENET: We Live In A Twilight World
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Christopher Nolan’s 2020 sci-fi action thriller Tenet is a heist film in which the titular organization attempts to stop the end of the world through time travel.1 Due to the sensitivity of the main characters mission, they use a call-and-response passphrase: “We live in a twilight world.” and...
A Year of Tech Layoffs - A Hundred and Twenty Five Days Off
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Welcome back, stranger. Remember, its about their needs, not yours. From Q4 2022 through Q1 2024 the tech industry has seen a shit-ton of layoffs. These are due to a combination of factors: The end of the ZIRP: Zero Interest Rate PolicyZIRP era, higher interest rates means investors demand...
One (more) Year with Ember: Thoughts on Ember vs React, Eight Years Later
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Six years ago, I wrote a summary of my experience working with Ember for a year. I had been with Cinch Financial for a year, building their web & mobile apps with Ember and Elixir/Phoenix. After Cinch I joined Salsify, a leader in the Ember ecosystem, and shipped some great products built with...
AI: Art Without Expression?
Adam Caudill
Generative AI1 is changing the world, and is doing so faster than most of us could realise. While I don’t share the fear that it’ll destroy humanity (something we’re doing quite well at, without help), I do see that it’s having an impact on how we work, how we interact, and will have a growing...
I am not a software engineer
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Software engineering, knowledge work, or most broadly any type of white collar labor is, primarily, the production of our own psychology. Our mental capacity is our means of production. We embody the values of our work. Our identity is tightly bound up with our careers, knowledge, skills, methods,...
The Society of the Spectacle: Foreword
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Readers of my site may have noticed the many references to Guy Debord in my writing over the years, and especially since 2016. This is largely because I’ve been writing a new edition of his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle adapted for our present moment. This edition is out now on the web. A...
The U.S. is a Failed Experiment
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The United States was started as a rational experiment in democratic capitalism based on ideas that inspired its forefathers. They were influenced by ideas coming out of the Enlightenment, specifically Adam Smith, Locke, Rousseau, and the conception of humans resorting to “the state of nature” and...
Testimony to Defund the Police in Somerville
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Good Evening, my name is ███████ I am a 10 year resident of Ward █ in Somerville. The first steps to address the problem of systemic racism in Somerville is two-fold: Defund the police by at least 60% or more; and Hold the Mayor accountable to direct these funds to non-disciplinary social...
On Looting
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Looting is an obvious response to the glorification of consumer products— commodities in a society that worships conspicuous consumption. The very act of looting is resistance to the celebrity status of these commodities and what they imply: inanimate objects celebrated for the image, status, and...
Elasticity Versus Discipline
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A central issue of contestation is elasticity versus discipline, elasticity for me and discipline for you, alchemy of banking and money funding for me, austerity and borrowing/payment for you. Like 2009, the (coming/arriving) financial collapse of 2020 will reveal the asymmetry of power between...
On Fascism
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Fascism is an expensive to maintain state-of-siege by the capitalist economy attempting to defend itself by an irrational means. Fascism rallies to the defense of the conservative bourgeois ideology of the family, private property, the moral order, and patriotic nationalism. It unites the...
The City and The Freezing of Life
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Gibsons “San Francisco’s Slow-Motion Suicide” is worth reading, his take is that San Francisco has become too successful… inevitable to decline into some expensive backwater due to “the rent is too damn high”. He paints a compelling vision of the ills of appalling levels of income inequality, the...
Against Facebook
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Alarm goes off, time to wake up. Snooze alarm, and then repeat: check email, check Facebook, check Twitter, check Snapchat, rinse; repeat again; no new posts? Check again. No second spared to compose a thought; dreams fade away. Day continues just the same way — rise, rinse, repeat, repeat. Can’t...
How Do Not Track and The EU GDPR Promise to Disrupt the Future of Web Advertising
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Privacy is a fundamental human right. It is the right to control to whom and to what information is shared with others. Privacy protects the criteria used to determine how information is deemed private. Simply put, it’s ones right to keep or share information they themselves deem as private;...
One Year with Ember
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In early 2015, I was working at an artificial intelligence startup. My team was planning to build a web application to connect to our neural network platform. The team as a whole had experience (on the AI–side) with Python, and the web team had a lot of experience using Django. We’d implemented a...
Before Trump Takes Office
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Before Trump takes office, I want to create a picture of the high-water mark, something I can point to and say “That was how it was” without the fog of time, or the distortions of propaganda and ideology. I was inspired by Sarah Kendzior: Fellow Americans, I have a favor to ask you. Today is...
Travel Writing - Redux, Italy & Switzerland Edition
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In 2011 I wrote: Travel opens my mind to new perspectives and allows me to recontextualize existing systems of thought. While true for me at that time, for that trip; there is nothing magical about travel itself that opens the mind to new perspectives nor helps to “recontextualize existing...
A Retrospective — Responsive Design
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Not too long ago, there was a great debate between two sides of the web. The “Responsive” web vs the “m.” web. One pushing for a single codebase that responds to user-context and another pushing for a second, mobile-only approach (typically using a subdomain starting with m.) It’s clear now, the...
Development Lifecycle with Docker and Elastic Beanstalk
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Docker is getting a lot of hype these days, for good reason. There are plenty of articles touting the merits of Docker but most are written without context and are limited to examining the the benefits of Docker independently of its’ practical everyday use in a software development project...
When to Use Git Merge vs Git Rebase
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I’ve seen many articles and discussions online discussing the merits of merge and rebase when integrating parallel branches into the main branch. It seems there are two camps arguing “which is better” when in reality, both have their own use cases. The task we need to accomplish is to determine...
“So what do you do?” — How Idle Conversation Escalates Tensions in Class Inequality
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When introduced to someone for the first time, I stay away from asking the cliché question “so what do you do?” This seemingly benign question is steeped in the cultural heritage of the New England colonial Puritan/Protestant work-ethic. Hard work, frugality, perseverance in the face of hardship...
Approaches for Pushing Do Not Track to the edges
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Lets face it, Do Not Track (DNT) is dying a slow death. Content providers are either ignoring the setting, or giving lip service to DNT while taking no action behind the scenes. Worse yet, if users are able to find the browser preference, they don’t understand its purpose or value. Enabling the...
Understanding Media, Reversal of the Overheated Medium
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In Understanding Media, McLuhan describes the shift in western society from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy as a template for the next shift from an industrial economy to an information economy. Another characteristic reversal after passing a road break boundary is that the country...
Best Practices for Writing CSS
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Every selector you write is additional complexity that will need to be maintained. Can you generalize or abstract that selector so other components can use it? Write your CSS selectors to be as concise as possible Write your CSS selectors to be as performant as possible, efficient as possible and...
Travel Writing
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Travel opens my mind to new perspectives and allows me to recontextualize existing systems of thought. I had casually studied Roman history over the course of a few years, prior to my travels to Italy. My understanding was built upon a small collection of books and two excellent podcast series....
Speech Segmentation in Japanese and English Bilinguals
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A Literature Review The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the existing literature concerning speech segmentation, categorical perception, and some other issues concerning bilinguals of English and Japanese. It will touch on some of the differences in the two languages and how...
Hikikomori/Otaku Japans Latest Out-Group - Creating Social Outcasts to Construct a National Self-identity
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Introduction Hikikomori (Jap. 引きこもり) and otaku (Jap. おたく) are considered today’s most prominent social problems. Hikikomori refers to the recent state of middle and high school students who drop out of school, and withdraw completely from society. Otaku are the deeply obsessed fans of a particular...