machine

Craftsmanship, says Richard Sennett, names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. The computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen all engage in a craftsman’s work. In this thought-provoking book, [...]

Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8157

Edmund C. Berkeley: Giant Brains, or Machines That Think (1949/1961)

Giant Brains is one of the first books on electronic computers for a general audience. In it, the co-founder Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Edmund Berkeley described the principles behind computing machines (called then “mechanical brains”, “sequence-controlled calculators”, or various other terms), and then gave a technical but accessible survey of the most prominent examples [...]

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Catherine Liu: Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton (2000)

Anxieties about fixing the absolute difference between the human being and the mechanical replica, the automaton, are as old as the first appearance of the machine itself. Exploring these anxieties and the efforts they prompted, this book opens a window on one of the most significant, if subtle, ideological battles waged on behalf of the [...]

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Cybernetic: The Magazine, Vol 1-2 (1985-1986)

Editorial board: Gordon Pask, Humberto Maturana, Heinz von Foerster, Terry Winograd, Larry Richards (Vol 2 only) Editor Paul Trachtman (Vol 1) Publisher The American Society for Cybernetics ISSN 0883-4202 Download (Vol 1, No 1, Summer-Fall 1985, 148 pp) Download (Vol 2, No 1: “Social Violence”, 1986, 82 pp)

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If You Are Reading This Here You Have Already Failed At Unplugging – TechCrunch

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Are you noticing that some things are a bit different today? People in cafes are actually talking to each other, no laptops in sight? Drivers at stoplights are accelerating as soon as the light turns green, without that “oops I was just finishing this text” lag? http://m.techcrunch.com/2013/03/02/the-machine-stops/Related PostsBrian Clegg: Light Years: An Exploration of Mankind’s [...]

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Scientists create automated ‘time machine’ to reconstruct ancient languages

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Ancient languages hold a treasure trove of information about the culture, politics and commerce of millennia past. Yet, reconstructing them to reveal clues into human history can require decades of painstaking work. Now, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have created an automated “time machine,” of sorts, that will greatly accelerate and improve the [...]

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Lucy Suchman: Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions, 2nd ed (2007)

This 2007 book considers how agencies are currently figured at the human-machine interface, and how they might be imaginatively and materially reconfigured. Contrary to the apparent enlivening of objects promised by the sciences of the artificial, the author proposes that the rhetorics and practices of those sciences work to obscure the performative nature of both [...]

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Andy Greenberg: This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information (2012)

At last, the first full account of the cypherpunks who aim to free the world’s institutional secrets, by Forbes journalist Andy Greenberg who has traced their shadowy history from the cryptography revolution of the 1970s to Wikileaks founding hacker Julian Assange, Anonymous, and beyond. WikiLeaks brought to light a new form of whistleblowing, using powerful [...]

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Stephen Ramsay: Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism (2011)

Rethinking digital literary criticism by situating computational work within the broader context of the humanities Besides familiar and now-commonplace tasks that computers do all the time, what else are they capable of? Stephen Ramsay’s intriguing study of computational text analysis examines how computers can be used as “reading machines” to open up entirely new possibilities [...]

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Donald MacKenzie: Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change (1996)

Ranging from broad inquiries into the roles of economics and sociology in the explanation of technological change to an argument for the possibility of “uninventing” nuclear weapons, this selection of Donald MacKenzie’s essays provides a solid introduction to the style and substance of the sociology of technology. Two conceptual essays are followed by seven empirical [...]

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Erkki Huhtamo, Jussi Parikka (eds.): Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (2011)

This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media – one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand [...]

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Eden Medina: Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (2011)

In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile’s experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile’s economy. Neither vision was fully realized–Allende’s government ended with a [...]

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Muriel Combes: Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual (1999/2012) [French/English]

Gilbert Simondon (1924–1989), one of the most influential contemporary French philosophers, published only three works: L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (The individual and its physico-biological genesis, 1964) and L’individuation psychique et collective (Psychic and collective individuation, 1989), both drawn from his doctoral thesis, and Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (On the mode of existence [...]

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Alexander Bard, Jan Söderqvist: The Futurica Trilogy (2012)

In the late 1990’s, Swedish social theorists Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist started working on a radical new theory, since referred to as The Netocracy Hypothesis. At this early stage Bard & Söderqvist foresaw that the control of the internet would be the subject of the main power struggle for the next century; an outright [...]

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Andy Greenberg’s ‘This Machine Kills Secrets’ reveals WikiLeaks, Anonymous and other document leakers as either heroes or anarchists — or both

Forbes magazine journalist Andy Greenberg takes readers on a terrific and revealing — if considerably unsettling — investigation into the shadowy war rooms behind our computer screens in “This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information.” What we find can be idealistic, anarchistic and futuristic. Sometimes all at [...]

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A-infos: (en) Brazil, Aurora Obrera #21 – Unionists Revolutionary United! (pt) [machine translation]

Companheirxs is more than past time for our union, every minute the system oppresses and
exploits million other trabalhadorxs million worldwide. If our organization does not form
and grow to resist these advances, we are increasingly submetidxs the…

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A-infos: (en) France, Alternative Libertair #222 – Debate: Prostitution – misunderstandings out (fr) [machine translation]

As part of the festival Equals Equals, held a debate on prostitution to explain two
opposing positions on this issue within the feminist movement.
On a subject that often brings passionate debates and polemics and passions, the
collective festival tried to put in place a mechanism allowing each party to explain its
differences, but also to show its points of agreement. The plateau was formed as follows.
Gaëlle Thébaud member of the group, has ensured the presentation of the evening.

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A-infos: (en) Brazil, Socialismo LibertÃrio #28 -Create a strong people!+ (pt) [machine translation]

Create a strong people!–The Anarchist Brazilian Coordination (CAB) is an organizational
space founded in 2012 that articulates Especifists anarchist organizations nationally. The
CAB arises as a result of ten years of a process of organization, st…

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