A brief note on Chick-fil-A
After weeks of protests, counter-protests, public outcry, kiss-ins, and other assorted drama surrounding Chick-fil-A’s beliefs about and contributions against gay marriage, news today claims that the company has agreed to various concessions, including ceasing donations to organizations that promote discrimination, specifically against LGBT civil rights. Watching people post this story to Facebook today, I noticed that many were cynical about… read more
Some responses to some responses to some responses
All right, this one of those posts that responds to conversations taking place on multiple blogs and on Facebook, so it’s going to be confusing if you haven’t read everything. Let me try to give you the backstory: First, Levi wrote On Ontology, another account of the difference between ontology and politics. Alex Galloway linked to this post on Facebook,… read more
Some changes in my role and new initiatives
As my college just announced yesterday, I’ll be taking on a slightly different role at Georgia Tech. You can read the full release, but the relevant bits are as follows: I have been named Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies I am also now jointly appointed in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing I… read more
Žižek on "radical" academics
This excerpt from a 2008 article by Slavoj Žižek has been sitting in my notebook for a while, and I thought I’d post it. My personal experience is that practically all of the “radical” academics silently count on the long-term stability of the American capitalist model, with the secure tenured position as their ultimate professional goal (a surprising number of… read more
September 11 and Distributed Networks
On September 11, 2001 I was supposed to meet with Rick Harshman, an Akamai account executive, in my Los Angeles office. I only remember Rick’s name eleven years later because it kept staring at me from my Outlook calendar that morning suggesting an alternate timeline. I can’t remember why we were going to meet; I was working at a design… read more
Get A Slow Year and Racing the Beam when you support this indie film about videogames in 1982 on Kickstarter
A few months ago Brett Neveu sent me a script for a movie he is producing, about a group of teenagers hoping to get an Atari VCS for Christmas 1982. The script is fun and charming, sitting somewhere just between Dazed and Confused and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. There’s now a Kickstarter for the film, Christmas Bytes, meant to cover… read more
The office work of research
Partly responding to my recent post on ideas versus their commercialization among writers and intellectuals, I came across this excellent and tragic paragraph on the state of intellectual work in this post: â??Meanwhile, academic life is becoming an increasingly ordinary affair, a job in which you hurry from task to task in an attempt to satisfy the demands of your… read more
The facile scourge of paid speaking
Writing for Esquire, Stephen Marche writes about The real problem with Niall Ferguson’s letter to the 1%, which amounts to “paid speaking gigs.” Here’s the money quote: Ferguson’s critics have simply misunderstood for whom Ferguson was writing that piece. They imagine that he is working as a professor or as a journalist, and that his standards slipped below those of… read more
A quick image litanizer
You may be familiar with my Latour Litanizer, a simple example of what I call “carpentry” in Alien Phenomenology. It uses Wikipedia’s API to assemble randomized lists of objects of the sort I refer to as “Latour Litanies.” If you’ve read Alien Phenomenology, you may also remember a related example, that of the “image toy” I made to add some… read more
A lesson in fiction and reality
My kids just delivered some hand-made get-well cards. I was instructed to deliver them to Galen, the main character in the Wizard 3000 videogame series, a series of my kids’ invention which is not only fictional but fictionally fictional. Pop culture being what it is, Hollywood has started to make films based on the Wizard 3000 (fictionally speaking, that is).… read more