Some responses to the Alien Phenomenology reading group
Following the discussion of chapter 1, Darius Kazemi has posted discussion notes for chapters 2 and 3 of Alien Phenomenology—Ontography and Metaphorism, respectively. I thought I’d make a few comments on the topics discussed there. Time Time is discussed as a particularly mind-bending topic in OOO. AP doesn’t offer a theory of time; the conversation chez Darius is about meanwhile… read more
Consequences of poststructuralism
Today I posted a reply to a mailing list which has been discussing OOO off and on. One complaint registered was that OOO is not “fuzzy” enough, and fuzzy or “soft” things are more desirable. It may not seem a very substantive comment, but I think it hits on what’s really going on with many rejections of OOO on purportedly… read more
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
Some comments on "The Facebook Illusion"
There’s an interesting opinion column in today’s New York Times by Ross Douthat, The Facebook Illusion. The gist of the article is that the Internet economy is not capable of producing the economic growth, prosperity, and support of previous economies. …the problem is not that Facebook doesn’t make money. It’s that it doesn’t make that much money, and doesn’t have… read more
On the surprising design features of Johan Sebastian Joust. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.
In 1987, game designer Chris Crawford introduced the concept of process intensity, “the degree to which a program emphasizes processes instead of data.” Process, Crawford explains, involves “algorithms, equations, and branches,” while data refers to “tables, images, sounds, and texts.” A process-intensive program “spends a lot of time crunching numbers; a data-intensive program spends a lot of time moving bytes… read more
A new book in software studies
My next book is even stranger than my last. It’s an entire book, 65,000+ words worth, about a single-line Commodore 64 BASIC program that is inscribed in the book’s title, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. And if that isn’t strange enough, I wrote the book with nine other collaborators (Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C.… read more
D. Scott Williamson's "impossible" adaptation
In the fifth chapter of Racing the Beam, Nick and I discuss Howard Scott Warshaw’s popular Atari game Yars’ Revenge. The game is often called Atari’s most successful original game for the Atari 2600, but in fact it was originally meant to be an adaptation of Star Castle, a then-popular vector-graphics game by Cinematronics. But, because of the very different… read more
...might be more interesting than my human ones
Yesterday I participated in a panel on the life and work of Alan Turing, for whom 2012 marks a centennial. As you’d probably expect, the discussion included conversation about artificial intelligence, what counts as “intelligence,” and when AI is “good enough.” The Turing Test, of course, is famous for reframing “thinking machines” as imitating machines. The machines must have been… 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
In the New Scientist "Big Ideas" column
Are everyday objects, such as apple pies or microchips, aliens? It depends how you think about what it’s like to be a thing. This essay appeared in the