A response to Cameron Kunzelman
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not exactly sure what blogging means to me these days. But whether by accident or design, I’ve been avoiding some of the back-and-forth debate that both helps and hinders the work of philosophy online these days. That said, this is one of those back-and-forth response posts, this on answering some of the… read more
Notes on the Rise and Fall of Blackberry
In January 1995, a year and a half before Hotmail launched the world’s first web-based email service, a landmark California law banning smoking in most public places went into effect. Back then smoking was already on the decline, especially in California, but it was probably still more common than having an email account. The change was most immediately noticeable in… read more
A question for authors...
I’ll admit it, I don’t usually read my book royalty reports. Sometimes I look at the total sales, but the rest is too complex and detailed to bother with. I deposit the checks. But today I received one and noticed something that I’d never really thought about before. A bit of background. Most book contracts are insanely complicated in their… read more
Initial reactions to Alien Phenomenology
This is just a quick post to point you to a few early reactions to Alien Phenomenology. First, Levi Bryant has two posts up, From an object’s point of view and A brief note on units and operations. Substantive stuff as usual. Levi draws productive connections to Jakob von Uexküll, for example. Second, Alex Reid discusses the connections between alien… read more
Anna Anthropy's new book
These days, everybody can make and distribute a photograph, or a video, or a book. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters shows you that everyone can make a videogame, too. But why should they? For Anna Anthropy, it’s not for fame or for profit, but for the strange, aimless beauty of personal creativity. That’s my back cover blurb for Anna Anthropy’s… read more
An update on my next book
I talked to my publisher this week and got news that Alien Phenomenology is scheduled to land in the warehouse by March 7. It should be shipping to booksellers immediately thereafter. If you preorder from Amazon.com, you’ll see it ship out that very week. While I can’t make any promises, sometimes these dates move up thanks to happy accident, so… read more
A response to Stanley Fish, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and others
For the first time in five years, I attended the Modern Language Association (MLA) conference. This is the main conference for scholars of language and literature, with about 8,000 attendees at this year’s event in Seattle. Among the big things going down this year: the ongoing clash of cultures between the “traditional humanities”—the scholars who read books and write books… read more
Responses to Parikka
Jussi Parikka, author of Insect Media among numerous other books, recently posed a series of questions about object-oriented ontology. Levi Bryant has already responded, as has Paul Caplan, and I like both of their responses. I thought I’d offer my own here, so here goes. (The block quotes are Jussi’s questions.) Is not the talk of “object” something that summons… read more
Thoughts on the material conditions of programming practice
I was corresponding yesterday with Jock Murphy, a Portland-based photographer, software engineer, and mobile game developer. Jock had read Racing the Beam, and we were talking about the relative differences between the 6502 and the Z80 microprocessors. This subject led us to different programming practices, a topic Nick and I discuss in RtB in relation to the Atari, but for… read more
Cover art and Blurb
Here’s the cover design, tagline, and blurb for my forthcoming book Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, which will be published by University of Minnesota Press in early 2012. It’s hard to express how exciting it is to have a hot wing on the cover of one of my books. And a cute panda. Other objects… read more