Category Archives: geekology 101

Geek stuff – websites, articles, games etc.

Dear Google – is there anyone home?

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This morning, Google have announced that they’re going to retire their Reader service in the face of the declining popularity of RSS feeds.

googlereader

seeya, reader. you’ve been super dooper.

The reaction from the masses, or those who I follow on Twitter at least, suggests that this is quite a strange move. It seems that everyone’s still using the service, and consistently, too.

I’ve been using Google Reader for approximately forever. There’s no point on putting a number on it; I’ve been using it since it came in to being. And now, it’s going.

I recently cut the list of blogs I follow from over a thousand down to about 100. It felt marvelous, like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders, but obviously there was a sadness in that, too, for Google Reader was like an archive of my tastes from the last however many years. Writing blogs for when I was seriously pursuing creative writing; running blogs from when I ran; political blogs from when I was more in to politics; and so on. I certainly don’t check all of them, or even most of them, regularly – my PhD has kind of killed my enthusiasm for many blogs, and (slowly) for social media in general, although I have no doubt that this will change as the thesis tapers off and I rejoin the world of actual living human beings.

It’s sad to see this service go, but it’s a reflection of the times. We don’t need RSS as much as we used to, because we get updates elsewhere – on Twitter and Facebook from accounts set up by bloggers to attract and retain a wider audience. From in-built readers like that offered by WordPress, which make it easy to follow any other WordPress blog.

Perhaps it’s even a sign that we’re reading less blogs. Are they on the decline, finally? Or is it just that few people are simply bloggers these days?

As for me – I don’t know what I’ll use instead. What I love about the Google empire is the fact that I can access everything I need or want to access from anywhere else in the world. The exact same content is available on my laptop as on my desktop, and on my iPad as on my Samsung phone. The brand, device, or platform doesn’t matter because Google have really aced the cloud- and web-based computing market.

Therein lies the problem, though: many of us so heavily rely upon the flexibility of Google’s services that we’re at the mercy of its decision makers. For the millions of people still actively using Google Reader, the decision to axe it seems illogical – but we’ll adapt, as we always have, and will continue to do. Google has us where it wants us, and it does a damn good job of keeping us there – and I say that as a Google enthusiast.

Could this be part of Google’s push to revamp and raise the profile of its never-really-got-off-the-ground social network site, Google Plus?

Cyber- digital- virtual- … space?

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Following on from my post earlier, I’ve been thinking about another issue that I discuss in my thesis. It’s related to the notion that there’s really no use for digital dualisms (real/virtual, offline/online, etc) that are often deployed when talking about the Internet.

Something I didn’t get around to mentioning but intended to was the fact that I still find the concept of cyberspace useful, but I am struggling with the terminology.

Due to the fact that my research investigates geography and place identity (i.e. our relationship and identification with the environments we inhabit – taking ‘place’ as different to ‘space’ in that place is “location (space) made meaningful” [see Tuan, Cresswell]) and social networks, I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about what cyberspace means in the early twenty first century.

cyberspace

cyberspace: not quite this hectic, as far as i know. is that a body? do we even need bodies in cyberspace?? (hint: yes) //source//

I’m sure it has different meaning today than it did in the early 1990s, when cyberspace was posited as a futuristic, disembodied, dislocated Other world. It was firmly situated within the realm of the online/virtual, and in cyberculture studies the tension between our physical reality (perceived as flawed, restrictive; at a time when the (western) world was experiencing the first true dissolution of geographical boundaries, the body was an encumbrance to freedom) and the desire to exist purely as data inside the network.

Have you seen The Matrix? That, really. Jacking in, logging on, and dropping out: it was all about information, where to find it, and how to absorb as much as possible.

The only real problem with this was that it wasn’t entirely feasible. As far as I know, in 2013 science has still not found a way to separate mind and body, allowing the psyche to be uploaded to the network in order that one may live as a series of ones and zeroes, free from the constraints of ill-health, age, race, gender, death, and the need to pee. And that’s not to mention the ethical issues. I receive emails from my department reminding me to review ethics clearance for my research, which involves trawling blogs and social media and waxing lyrical about them. I can’t even imagine trying to get ethics clearance for a project that would essentially kill the physical body whilst preserving the human mind inside a machine.

Tres complique!

So it’s fair to say that cyberspace, as the ultimate pre-dot-com-bubble-burst buzzword, is probably no longer useful in the 1990s sense. However – and this is where it might get a bit mind-blowy (or maybe not) – I firmly believe that we now live in cyberspace.

This is where I come back to Nathan Jurgenson’s post that I commented on previously. He argues that there’s no need for digital dualisms, and I agree. When was the last time you used Google Maps your mobile phone to find your way to a friends’ house? Have you ever used Urbanspoon to find a restaurant recommendation when you’ve been out in town and want something good that’s within walking distance? Have you checked in on Foursquare or Facebook Places, or uploaded a photo to Instagram (they’re geotagged, you know), or tweeted from a festival? Have you asked for recommendations, or visited your national news website and automatically been directed toward the local news?

This is cyberspace, friends.

In many ways, ‘cyberspace’ forms a useful portmanteau – cyber referring to information (rather than virtual or fake), and ‘space’ to, well, geographical space – for labeling the relationship between data and materiality. When we participate and contribute content (status updates, photographs, videos, music downloads, check ins, reviews, ratings), we’re telling the network something about us, and about the places we inhabit. Our interaction with our physical surroundings is richer and more complex because “it” (the Internet – or more accurately, the algorithms and programming that allow information to be fed back to us as users) knows so much about us, our world, and what we want. Isn’t that a grand thing?

Like I said at the beginning though, I do struggle with the term ‘cyberspace’, probably because it is difficult to shake off the 90s connotations. The second you say ‘cyberspace’, it conjures up images of ones and zeroes and terrible (but awesome) movies like Hackers.

It’s also a term that I can’t help but want to use ironically, because it’s just really naff. But what should we say? Is there a good way to describe this network of information that coexists with our physical world?

On digital dualism (or why, in 2013, are people still fear mongering the Internet?)

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I’ve spent the better part of the past 48 hours editing a chapter of my thesis called ‘Always online: How social networks and mobile phones re-embodied and re-placed digital narratives’.

The crux of the piece is that over the course of the past ten years (what some might call the ‘Web 2.0‘ era), and particular over the past five years since smartphone ownership rates skyrocketed and Internet-enabled mobile devices became the norm, the dichotomies of online/offline and virtual/real have become less meaningful, and certainly less useful, ways of describing the relationship that we, the users, have with the Internet. Not only has the Internet moved rapidly from being the haunt of geeks and researchers to a tool that everyone uses, but really, we’re always online. Having access is something that we take for granted; the trade off of ubiquity is that we’re never really alone, and never really ‘offline’.

I read this blog post by Nathan Jurgenson, a doctoral researcher from the University of Maryland, about the tendency of society – particularly the mainstream media – to still reduce life to digital dualisms, despite the fact that the notion of there being anything at all ‘fake’ about the Internet is far out of date. It was a timely post for me, as he’s managed to say in 500 words what I’ve been battling with for the past two days (more eloquently, of course).

The term that Jurgenson uses is digital dualisms. This is the notion that the dichotomies I mentioned above – online/offline, virtual/real (and others, like disembodied/corporeal, mind/body) – are absolutes when it comes to the Internet. It is the idea that everything that happens online is fake – and that, somehow, we possess the ability to switch ourselves on and off – connecting and disconnecting from ‘the matrix’ (hi, 1980s cyberpunk fantasies).

Digital dualism is the attitude that regards the Internet as some kind of digital other-space, and the interactions and relationships that are enacted within that space as entirely fictional.

virtual-reality-8

zomg virtual reality. this is how i access the internet. /source/

For most of us in the field of Internet research, online space stopped being perceived as a virtual Other a long time ago. For me, it began with the move toward an increasingly social web. Once upon a time (in a land far away), people would go online and construct alternate identities for themselves. They weren’t necessarily fake, digital representations of the self, but they weren’t quite the same as the everyday offline self, either. It was not always the norm to use our real names and post photos of ourselves on publicly accessible profile pages, nor was it the norm to connect online (via social network ‘friendships’) with people we knew offline. It happened, definitely, but not on the scale that we today perceive as standard, thanks to Myspace, Facebook, and the like. Without going in to the details of how Jurgenson’s post arose (you can read the full story here – basically it involves an American college footballer being duped into a relationship with a woman who didn’t exist, and the media are calling it a “digital hoax”), I instead wanted to highlight some of the things that he’s said that really exemplify how incorrect many attitudes are to the way so-called “digital” life works.

For some reason, users – especially young ones – are depicted in the mainstream media as possessing a plethora of social ineptitudes as a result of always having their eyes glued to their smartphones. Their only real skills, some would have you believe, are taking selfies and demonstrating nonchalance toward anything that happens in the ‘real’ world. They’re portrayed as so disconnected that they’re more zombie than human, lost causes aimlessly wandering the digital (ahem) streets of cyberspace. Probably on the Information Superhighway. When they’re not too busy surfing the net. And sexting.

Jurgenson writes:

The point isn’t that there exists a digital world that’s fake; it’s that there isn’t a digital world. The hoax is the invention of some cyber reality we’ve traded the offline for, where interaction is fake. The hoax is this conceptual error that Egan and other digital dualists rely on to make many of their arguments.

These writers get mileage out of calling this a “digital deception” and declare the Internet “fake” in order to have a convenient answer (“technology!”) for real, messy, complicated, human problems like celebrity, romance, and deception. Blaming technology also provides a simpler solution: “less technology!” And as I discuss in my IRL Fetish essay, by constructing the digital as some “other” place, and then judging that as “virtual” and less real, one can then value their own non-use as more human and deep.

I couldn’t agree with this any more. For some reason that makes absolutely no sense to me, but complete sense to most, the Internet and its goings-on are still a convenient scapegoat for real, complicated human problems. Young person has a naked photograph plastered all over the web? Blame Facebook! Celebrity attacked by the public via social media? Blame Twitter! Parents don’t know how to control their children? Blame teh intarwebz!

Here’s a thought. Perhaps the reason that the media and, it must be said, many parents, are still demonising the Internet is because they’re from a generation that didn’t grow up online, and this technology is still relatively new to them. As such, they lack the skills to adequately interpret the place that it has in society. It’s like that idea that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Likewise, the Internet (which is not actually a sentient, autonomous being, incidentally) doesn’t create hoaxes – people do. People attack and hurt and deceive each other, and it’s high time that we (the collective We – society) realised that. The Internet is merely a communications tool. It’s the same as a telephone or a CB radio or a letter, for god’s sake. Without people, these are inert objects and systems.

Map-of-the-Internet

the internet: not as terrifying as you think. //source//

I’d really recommend that you read Nathan Jurgenson’s post. He makes a lot of sense. More than me. My prediction is that to the society-leading adults of the future, this malarkey over cyber-hoaxes and general digital fear mongering will seem completely ridiculous. They’ll have grown up online, they’ll have already made the mistakes that we’re accusing them of now making, and they’ll have come up with ways to deal with it – from different parenting skills, to formal education, to the relaxation of hype in the media. More to the point, online behaviour will just be common sense because it will be normal. Nobody who grew up with a telephone fears the unseen dangers that lurk on the other side of the line, and the media has, for the most past, stopped with the moral panic about television.

It’s called technology, everyone. It changes, and sometimes it’s a bit scary, but it’s not always a bad thing.

Does the world need the new Myspace?

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Imagine this: The Internet holds a party. All the usual suspects come: Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, Soundcloud, Pinterest, Instagram, and a bunch of others, plus some quality A-list celebrities for good measure. It’s fun, but eventually things get a bit too rowdy and, like any good party*, debauchery occurs and everyone wanders home in the morning missing items of clothing and feeling a little bit sorry for themselves.

Then, down the track, out pops a baby. That baby is the new Myspace.

newmyspace

‘your stream is empty’: the nice way of saying ‘you have no friends and no interests, you boring shit’

Not to be confused with the hectic, migraine-inducing disaster of the old Myspace, the new Myspace is slick, algorithmic (it knows exactly what I want! Or does it?), and full of Justin Timberlake.

But is it really necessary?

I mean sure, it looks good, and chances are that there will be a whole new user base that never used the shitty old Myspace platform. Combined with a bunch of people who liked it enough to sign up again, the new Myspace might have potential. On the other hand, it might prove to be just another social media platform. And don’t get me started on the fact that it’s being called “the new Myspace” in the media. It feels like “The New iPad”. Wank less, please.

It’s more than a social network, more than a photo sharing site, more than a place for musicians and artists to be discovered. It’s kind of all of these things at once, but the way I see it, I already have so many other platforms that are allowing me to share, connect, and discover. I have more than enough ways of connecting with the people I already know, to the extent that I have little interest in searching for my Twitter or Facebook friends on Myspace (although this is possible. It’s also possible to sign in with Twitter or Facebook – a feature that increasingly makes me roll my eyes. Sometimes I just don’t want all my online activity to be strung together and interlinked). I connect with friends, acquaintances  and people of interest all over the web and on mobile-native platforms, so do I really need Myspace?

I feel like Google+ was the great white hope for a viable alternative to Facebook, but it hasn’t really picked up steam on a broad scale… even though people continue to whinge about Facebook and its various displeasing terms and conditions. Perhaps the new Myspace will do what G+ hasn’t yet been able to do, and succeed in drawing people across from Facebook. Is there a need for another major social platform to coexist with Facebook, though? Or are we finally growing tired of Facebook’s dominance?

Admittedly, I probably won’t use the new Myspace, so my questioning of its value may be biased. I didn’t use the old Myspace because it was an eyesore and a shining example of Why People Shouldn’t Be Allowed The Internet (i.e. too much teen angst + too much attitude + too much sex + too many colours and fonts and flashing things makes Erin something something). I probably won’t use the new Myspace because I already feel like my web presence is spread fairly thin, and at this point in time I’m looking for something to make managing my distributed self a little easier, rather than something that’s just going to add to my presence without really bringing anything new to the table.

Maybe, though, it will be a massive success. It’s prettier than Facebook, that’s for sure, although it’s not terribly intuitive (I saw the link to add my Facebook friends when I first signed up, but now I can’t find it. That’s annoying.), but I do like the ability to search for people by location (both users and artists). I also find it kind of creepy. Immediately I see some of my former students in the list of other users from Perth who are, incidentally, disproportionately male. I didn’t specify my gender when I signed up, but it’s almost if it somehow knows I am female, and then assumes that because I am female, I will be looking for men in my area. Is this a dating service, or a social networking site?

That’s another thing. It’s definitely more of a social networking site rather than a social network site, given the emphasis on discovery and being able to locate potential ‘friends’ by location. In that way, it’s almost as though Myspace have acknowledged that you might be kinda bored by connecting with people you already know by this stage – or, maybe, they’re just covering all their bases. The new Myspace: a place for people to find potential lovers and articulate once more how many friends they have (and then show all those friends how eclectic and obscure one’s taste in music is).

I don’t know. I’m skeptical. Maybe I’ll keep an eye on this development and check back in six months time to see whether the new Myspace has changed the world… or whether it’s just old hat.

The curious case of GOMI: The dark side of having an audience.

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The web is seriously creeping me out today.

Or, more accurately, I should say that the people on the web are creeping me out. For the first time in the more-than-a-decade that I have been blogging, I suddenly feel quite uncomfortable with the idea that people, for no good reason other than to express themselves, share the minutiae of their lives online for the entertainment of strangers.

Perhaps it’s because I spent far too long today trawling the forums of the Internet’s bitchiest hate site, Get Off My Internets!, taking screen shots of conversations that I will reference in my thesis… and then doing some very internet-stalkerish back-trawling of the blog posts that were the subject of those conversations, relying upon the fact that many of the blogs they referred to were blogs I knew so well that all I had to do was look in the archives at a particular month, and (generally) locate the post in question without too much trouble. All in all, I feel a little bit dirty.

GOMI isn’t a particularly nice site, but it’s a free Internet, right? We’re all entitled to our opinions. Perhaps why I feel so strange about it is because the users express many of the opinions I’ve had, but kept to myself. An unfortunate side effect of researching blogging for the past four years is that there are blogs and bloggers that I am sick to death of, but keep reading because I have to for my research.

I still feel like bloggers are real people, and should therefore be exempt from the dissection and character assassination that celebrities are subject to. At the same time, the moment that you choose to put your life online, you essentially have to accept the fact that you will be criticised, for everything from your poor grammar, to the fact that one of your eyes crinkles a bit when you smile, to the fact that your baby is a bit too chubby to be cute – and he has a weird name, anyway. And that’s not to mention picking apart the financial situation of those bloggers who are able to work from home, or (good heavens!) not work at all. (These are all examples of real posts that I read today, and are far from the most vitriolic.)

I’ve been blogging in some form since before I even knew it was called blogging. I blogged at LiveJournal (remember that??) from 1999-2002 before starting my previous blog, and this is what i think: (atiwit:), in 2004. I stopped posting to atiwit: at the start of this year during another crisis of confidence in which I suddenly began to feel a bit too exposed.

Neither of my blogs ever drew particularly big audiences. At best, atiwit: had up to around 500 visitors per day, and the only thing I ever saw written about it on a site (other than blogs written by friends) was when someone referred to my smoke detector battery removal method on a forum. Perhaps there were other things, but I never saw them, so as far as I am concerned, they don’t exist. (Yes, I vanity Google, but the forum post was actually discovered via link trackback.)

I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with the idea of online celebrity. Being Big on the Internet always seemed a bit too… invasive, I guess, and after reading GOMI today I’m pretty sure that I’ll never be striving to do anything exceptional with my blogging (not that I need to work on that – now that I’ve converted to research blogger, I’m getting 1/10th the visitors that I used to).

Get Off My Internets is such a peculiar site, and more than a little disturbing – but then again I’ve always subscribed to the policy of ‘Don’t like it? Turn it off!’. I will turn off the radio in my car if I don’t like a song. I will skip an episode of a TV show that I don’t like if I’m re-watching the series for the fiftieth time. I won’t read blogs that shit me to tears unless I absolutely have to – and I certainly won’t post about how much I hate it on the Internet.

I’m writing a chapter at the moment about identities and audiences, and I’ve included a case study of one particular blogger (who I won’t name here, as I don’t particularly enjoy her blog anymore, but I don’t think she needs extra negative attention) who received an immense amount of backlash from her readers when she changed the genre of her blog. She’s a perfect case study in how identity and authorship are really discordant concepts online. The audience of a blog has much more of a say in identity and authorship than they ever would “in real life”, and yet they’re only privy to part of the story – the identity that the blogger chooses to display. Bloggers essentially separate that part of themselves that is the blog-subject when they publish online, particularly when they become ‘successful’ bloggers. Audiences (or, in the case of face-to-face interactions, those that we engage with) always have a say in the person that we feel ourselves to be, but it’s never more visible than it is online.

I can’t help but feel that the reason so many people on GOMI are determining that bloggers are complete ‘flakes’ and nutjobs is because we, the audience, are causing them to be so.

Proceed with caution.

Oh, the irony.

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Just last week I posted about the fact that people mistakenly think that because I am doing a PhD in Internet Studies, I know how to fix computers.

getting all meta and screenshotting my own blog. yeah.

getting all meta and screenshotting my own blog. yeah.

I don’t know how to fix computers. And yet I just caught myself sending my sister a text, telling her to bring her computer up to Perth with her this weekend… so I can fix it. She has that AFP virus that’s going around. I’m only going to follow instructions I’ve found online to remove it, but, I wonder if this is why people think I’m more useful with computers than I really am? :/

[In other news, I definitely just took advantage of super cheap airfares to book a two week long post-thesis holiday to South East Asia. I guess that means I now have a definitive due date!]

Flickr – the web’s most successful SNS?

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As the picture above suggests, I’ve been an Flickr user for 8 years, and Instagram (though I do use it) does not even compare. One of my main reasons, other than research purposes, for using Instagram was the fact that my social network on Flickr was limited. There was nothing wrong with the site – it’s just that the kids (i.e. my friends) hadn’t caught on.

Flickr has recently launched a new smartphone app (as far as I know it’s on Android & iPhone – I’ve got an Android and it’s definitely available there) that makes navigating, sharing, and socialising easier than ever, whilst the web-based site remains as good as ever.

I’m going to comment more on the whole Instagram-photo-ownership-shebang when I’ve had my morning coffee and sorted out what this day has in store for me, but in the mean time you can read what Tama Leaver had to say about the service’s updated terms of use.

I don’t know if I’ll jump ship on Instagram entirely, but I’m going to preference Flickr once more – just like I did for 7.5 of the past 8 years.

8,993 photos in to a flickr love affair

 

Hey, Erin… can you fix this?

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People assume I am good with computers.

I suppose it arises from the fact that I am doing a PhD in Internet studies, and I’m a bit of a geek and regularly talk about computers and other computer-y devices like phones and tablets, and I understand a lot about the cultural side of computers and sometimes (often) let tidbits of random geekery slip into every day conversation.

And people don’t really always know what Internet studies is, which is fine, because I probably wouldn’t either if I hadn’t spent the past six years of my life with one foot planted firmly on either side of the screen. If I didn’t know what it was that I studied, I might assume that I do something with computers – or at least something more to do with computers than what I currently do (which, I will admit, has an awful lot to do with computers – but not the way they work).

Tonight, my dad asked me to help him “fix” his laptop.

Calling it a laptop is probably being a little liberal as it suggests that this device is capable, on some level, of perhaps resembling a computer. Dad’s laptop, however, is less computer and more useless thing cobbled together out of wire and metal and plastic and electricity. He was installing Photoshop Elements 11, you see, but there wasn’t enough room for it on his harddrive, even though he’d deleted everything, but that’s fine because he had attached a 2TB external harddrive.

For some reason though, it wouldn’t work, and I don’t know the answer.

Everything appears to be deleted off the computer itself, save for the essentials, though I’m not convinced this is the case. If his laptop is anything like my computer, it has ways of making sneaky copies of things and filing them away for later. But, I don’t know much about Windows computers and search as I may, I couldn’t find anything that appeared to be taking up much space. For tonight, it will remain a mystery, and Elements will remain uninstalled.

I always feel bad when people assume I am good with computers, because it’s usually followed by a prompt but polite request for help, and the truth is that I’m absolutely rubbish with computers. Pretty much everything I know about computers I’ve learned from Google. Need to find a formula to make this complex eXcel data easier to manage? Google it. Trying to install something that doesn’t want installing? Google it. Frozen iPad? Google it. Everything? Google it.

I want to be better at computers. I aim to get slightly better by learning Something Official, like programming or computer science or something, because I feel like I really ought to know a bit more about computers and networks and how the things I see on the screen end up on the screen. I would also like to be able to actually help people when they ask for help with their computers, rather than just faffing about Googling and clicking things in the blind hope that I’ll eventually click on the correct thing and magically fix whatever problem they were having.

I feel like a bit of a fraudulent geek. truthfully. I talk the talk but I don’t walk the walk.

Is it normal to aspire to being more of a geek?

The Computer for the 21st Century

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I just came across this article as I was doing some last-minute research for the chapter on mobile Internet, place, and embodied identity that I’m currently finishing up.

The Computer for the 21st Century, by Mark Weiser (1991) is probably one of the best early articles I’ve read about ubiquitous computing that actually hits the nail on the head, and doesn’t sound entirely fantastic and (in light of knowing the direction that ubiquitous, invisible computer seems to be going in) completely off the mark.

In fact, some of what they were working on at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1991 resembles closely the technologies that we’re using today:

Ubiquitous computers will also come in different sizes, each suited to a particular task. My colleagues and I have built what we call tabs, pads and boards: inch-scale machines that approximate active Post-it notes, foot-scale ones that behave something like a sheet of paper (or a book for a magazine) and yard-scale displays that are the equivalent of a blackboard or bulletin board (p. 98).

Referring to tabs as “the smallest components of embodied virtuality”, Weiser recognises that in order to be truly effective, technologies must “disappear into the background”, “interconnected in a ubiquitous network” and possessing some kind of ability to determine physical location (p. 98).

Sound familiar?

It seems that, despite forays into the world of handheld, wireless computing in the early 1980s, many projects were sidelined in favour of desktop and laptop based computing that dominated the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century. This isn’t something that I’ve read into substantially, but perhaps it was only with the various technological stars – bandwidth, GUIs, cost, processor capability – aligning over the past few years that the potential of handheld computing has again been realised.

By pushing computers into the background, embodied virtuality will make individuals more aware of the people on the other ends of their computer links… Ubiquitous computers…reside in the human world and pose no barrier to personal interactions. If anything, the transparent connections that they offer between different locations and times may tend to bring communities closer together (p. 104).

Although there is most certainly still a place for computers in this world, the growing impact of handheld devices – particularly smartphones, but also tablets – isn’t to be ignored, and speaks back to much earlier intuitions of the place that computing technology would one day take in our societies.