Sublime

The issue here does not concern how many jobs will be created, how much income generated, how many pollutants added... Rather, the issue has to do with the ways in which choices about technology have important consequences for the form and quality of human associations.

American Architect Keller Easterling is well known for her book  Extrastatecraft  (2014), which looked at the power of infrastructural space and how this defines the operating system of the modern world. Her most recent text,  Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World   (2021) looks at the spaces between things, syste

Yet the cultural dominance of the iPhone — and the transformation of the open internet into “walled gardens” and apps focused on simplifying the user experience — has taken the “triumph of seamless usability” to a new level. This “tyranny of convenience,” to borrow Tim Wu’s phrase , should sensitize us to what may be lost when democratization proc

In many instances, to say that some technologies are inherently political is to say that certain widely accepted reasons of practical necessity–especially the need to maintain critical technological systems as smoothly working entities–have tended to eclipse other sorts of moral and political reasoning.