Four short links: 18 April 2016
Classic Programmer Paintings, Equality at Work, Bitcoin as Politics, and Raising Robotic Natives
- Classic Programmer Paintings — hilarity has ensued. The captions are brilliant.
- Equality Takes Work — Women do not prefer saying less: They anticipate the treatment they will receive when they say more.
- 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?
- Raising Robotic Natives — design/art artefacts for generations growing up with robots.
