I-202 Test 2
Garage myths:
"evokes the image of the lone individual who relies primarily on his or her extraordinary efforts and talent"
Heath and Heath "The Myth About Creation Myths
A) Main points • "evokes the image of the lone individual who relies primarily on his or her extraordinary efforts and talent • The reality is that successful founders are usually "organizational products." A separate study of VC-backed companies found that 91% were related to the founders' prior job experience. Audia and Rider say entrepreneurial triumphs aren't due to lonely, iconoclastic work--they're "eminently social." Wait a minute: Entrepreneurs aren't rebels, then, so much as recently departed organization men. B) New vocabulary introduced C) Examples used • Consider two of the founders of YouTube, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley. Both cut their teeth at PayPal--in fact, Hurley was one of PayPal's first employees and even designed its logo. (He is also the son-in-law of James Clark, who founded Netscape and Silicon Graphics.) Top-tier venture-capital firms were calling them, offering money, counsel, and connections, within months of launch. That's not quite as uplifting as hearing that twentysomething buddies created a cool site to swap videos with friends
Pringle, "When technology discriminates: How algorithmic bias can make an impact
A) Main points • As more industries turn to technology — and specifically algorithms — to cut costs and increase efficiency, a new consideration arises: When it comes to some of those difficult decisions, can algorithms really yield fairer results? • Algorithms should be immune to the pitfalls of human bias. But despite their seemingly neutral mathematical nature, algorithms aren't necessarily any more objective than humans. In fact, without proper checks and balances, their use could perpetuate, and even accentuate, social inequality • Organizations are increasingly turning to algorithms to help make decisions about things like insurance rates, credit scores, employment applications and school admissions • The techno-utopian belief is that an algorithm can be more objective because it doesn't carry with it all of the human baggage of preconceptions or prejudices. After all, it's just code and data. • Our desire to believe computerized systems can offer a cure-all to overcoming human shortcomings "reflects the mythology of technology and our desire to give these systems power that they do not deserve." • An algorithm will be biased when "the data that feeds the algorithm is biased." • Algorithms are informed by our own prejudices, beliefs and blind spots — all the way from the design of the algorithm itself, to the data it is inputted with. Bad data in equals bad data out. • the algorithm is there to supplement, not replace, human intelligence B) New vocabulary introduced C) Examples used • So when a system learns based on an inherently biased model, it can, in turn, incorporate those hidden prejudices. For example, in a well-known study in which recruiters were given identical resumes to review, they selected more applicants with white-sounding names • We already know our Facebook timelines are organized based on what the algorithm deems most relevant to us. And we may take for granted the fact that Netflix uses algorithms to help suggest what movie or television show we want to watch next
Pariser, "The Filter Bubble" Ted Talk
A) Main points • Google, Facebook, Search Engines, News Sites, TV streaming, and Social Media filtering your feed of information based upon your interests and trends • Don't Get to choose what you see or what gets edited out, based off of what different engines think you want to see • "It's going to become impossible for someone to consume or watch something that wasn't tailored for them in some way" • Need to change filters that allow for challenging and new ideas to be exposed to users B) New vocabulary introduced C) Examples used • Friends Googling Egypt getting different results • Netflix: Impulsive self vs Improvement Based self (pleasure movies vs movies that inform/we think we should see), queue has specific movies pop to the forefront that should balance both types of thought but is actually based off of what you first click on (shifts and ruins balance)
Martiniere, "Hack the World: How the Maker Movement in Impacting Innovation
A) Main points • In March 2011, an earthquake and following tsunami rocked Japan, culminating in the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. While the government focused on stabilizing the situation, the people of Japan were terrified of radiation, unaware whether it was safe for their families to stay in their homes. • A group of makers out of Tokyo Hackerspace found a quick solution to lack of information by building a cheap and easy-to-use pocket radiation detector using an Arduino (a pint-size computer that's relatively easy for anyone to program). They began making them, and most importantly, sharing the instructions online for anyone to reproduce. Through a partnership with Safecast, they were able to get the radiation data off of people's phones and onto an online platform. Within a month, thousands of data points had been picked up, and people could determine whether they should evacuate. Even today, people all over the world are building these radiation detectors, iterating on the original design for new purposes. Fikra Space, a hacker group in Baghdad, has amended the design to track Depleted Uranium pollution in their region. • Makers Lifestyle: fundamental belief that the world is made better by building, and taking things apart • Thrive on: Finding novel applications of existing technology (first 2 examples listed), Exploring the intersections between seemingly separate domains (3d Printers), and Curiosity and voracious appetite for continued education and Do-It-Yourself (Learning to solder, building whatever you need and learning how to do it). • Rarely work alone, thrive in makers communities (gyms for your brain) B) New vocabulary introduced C) Examples used • ArcAttack is a band of musicians using massive Tesla Coils, alongside live and robotic musicians to create a spectacular show of musical prowess and technological innovation. • Anouk Wipprecht, fashion designer and former Autodesk Artists in Residence created a Faraday Cage dress for this past Maker Faire in San Mateo, and people watched in awe as she performed alongside ArcAttack as bolts of lightning struck her on all sides without doing any harm.
Blum, Prologue of Tubes
A) Main points • Intro: Internet for the author isn't working properly, modem is indicating a poor connection. • Repairman comes to fix the internet, goes out to switch box and repairs switches, proving the connection between the box and the modem by finding the whistling switch. • Internet viewed as a specific place and individualized, but it actually is a massive entity existing everywhere with a connection • Cyberspace like the milkyway galaxy, huge web of interconnected things
Lessig, "Property
A) Main points • Jack Valenti has been the president of the Motion Picture Association of America since 1966. • In his almost forty years of running the MPAA, Valenti has established himself as perhaps the most prominent and effective lobbyist in Washington • The MPAA is the American branch of the international Motion Picture Association. It was formed in 1922 as a trade association whose goal was to defend American movies against increasing domestic criticism. The organization now represents not only filmmakers but producers and distributors of entertainment for television, video, and cable. Its board is made up of the chairmen and presidents of the seven major producers and distributors of motion picture and television programs in the United States: Walt Disney, Sony Pictures Entertainment, MGM, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Studios, and Warner Brothers. • Radical Idea of Valenti and MPAA: Creative property owners must be accorded the same rights and protection resident in all other property owners in the nation • Point of Chapter: The first is to convince you that, historically, Valenti's claim is absolutely wrong. The second is to convince you that it would be terribly wrong for us to reject our history. • to make them the same would be to fundamentally weaken the opportunity for new creators to create. Creativity depends upon the owners of creativity having less than perfect control. • Constitution: Compensation for taking of physical property, no compensation for taking of creative property (end of copyright recycles idea back to the public) • Model for regulating creative property: Center is holder of the right, with 4 factors influencing it: Norms (imposed by community), Laws (imposed by state), Market (imposed by conditions), Architecture (constraint on behavior *ex* A fallen bridge might constrain your ability to get across a river) • All four factors interact, Law has a special factor in all of the other three • Technology has changed, the warriors say, and the effect of this change, when ramified through the market and norms, is that a balance of protection for the copyright owners' rights has been lost • there's nothing wrong or surprising in the content industry's campaign to protect itself from the harmful consequences of a technological innovation (ex: Farmers have no hesitation appealing to the government to bail them out when a virus (architecture) devastates their crop. Unions have no hesitation appealing to the government to bail them out when imports (market) wipe out the U.S. steel industry) • just because a particular interest asks for government support, it doesn't follow that support should be granted. And just because technology has weakened a particular way of doing business, it doesn't follow that the government should intervene td support that old way of doing business. • A world in which competitors with new ideas must fight not only the market but also the government is a world in which competitors with new ideas will not succeed. It is a world of stasis and increasingly concentrated stagnation. It is the Soviet Union under Brezhnev. • copies were the obvious trigger for copyright law, upon reflection, it should be obvious that in the world with the Internet, copies should not be the trigger for copyright law. More precisely, they should not always be the trigger for copyright law. This is perhaps the central claim of this book • the same book as an e-book is effectively governed by a different set of rules. Now if the copyright owner says you may read the book only once or only once a month, then copyright law would aid the copyright owner in exercising this degree of control, because of the accidental feature of copyright law that triggers its application upon there being a copy. Now if you read the book ten times and the license says you may read it only five times, then whenever you read the book (or any portion of it) beyond the fifth time, you are making a copy of the book contrary to the copyright owner's wish B) New vocabulary introduced C) Examples used • consider the "freedom" to drive a car at a high speed. That freedom is in part restricted by laws: speed limits that say how fast you can drive in particular places at particular times. It is in part restricted by architecture: speed bumps, for example, slow most rational drivers; governors in buses, as another example, set the maximum rate at which the driver can drive. The freedom is in part restricted by the market: Fuel efficiency drops as speed increases, thus the price of gasoline indirectly constrains speed. And finally, the norms of a community may or may not constrain the freedom to speed. Drive at 50 mph by a school in your own neighborhood and you're likely to be punished by the neighbors. The same norm wouldn't be as effective in a different town, or at night. • Farmers have no hesitation appealing to the government to bail them out when a virus (architecture) devastates their crop. Unions have no hesitation appealing to the government to bail them out when imports (market) wipe out the U.S. steel industry (ex of justification of creative property right increases) • Evidence Against: Kodak, for example, has lost perhaps as much as 20 percent of their traditional film market to the emerging technologies of digital cameras.5 Does anyone believe the government should ban digital cameras just to support Kodak? Highways have weakened the freight business for railroads. Does anyone think we should ban trucks from roads for the purpose if protecting the railroads? Closer to the subject of this book, remote channel changers have weakened the "stickiness" of television advertising (if a boring commercial comes on the TV, the remote makes it easy to surf), and it may well be that this change has weakened the television advertising market. But does anyone believe we should regulate remotes to reinforce commercial television? (Maybe by limiting them to function only once a second, or to switch to only ten channels within an hour?) • In 1873, the chemical DDT was first synthesized. In 1948, Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Muller won the Nobel Prize for his work demonstrating the insecticidal properties of DDT. By the 1950s, the insecticide was widely used around the world to kill disease-carrying pests. It was also used to increase farm production. No one doubts that killing disease-carrying pests or increasing crop production is a good thing. No one doubts that the work of MUller was important and valuable and probably saved lives, possibly millions. But in 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, which argued that DDT, whatever its primary benefits, was also having unintended environmental consequences. Birds were losing the ability to reproduce. Whole chains of the ecology were being destroyed. No one set out to destroy the environment. Paul MUller certainly did not aim to harm any birds. But the effort to solve one set of problems produced another set which, in the view of some, was far worse than the problems that were originally attacked. Or more accurately, the problems DDT caused were worse than the problems it solved, at least when considering the other, more environmentally friendly ways to solve the problems that DDT was meant to solve.
House, "The Real Cyborgs
A) Main points • Paralyzed in car accident, OSU medical center, hand movement, technology that made this possible, Neurobridge, had successfully reconnected Burkhart's brain with his body. It was probably the most advanced intertwining of man and machine that had so far been achieved. • entered the age of the cyborg, or cybernetic organism: a living thing both natural and artificial • biohackers" or "grinders" — has been experimenting with implantable technology for several years • Numerous real cyborgs dot the earth now B) New vocabulary introduced • Bio Hackers: DIY cyborgs who are upgrading their bodies with hardware without waiting for corporate development cycles or authorities to say it's OK C) Examples used • A growing cadre of innovators is taking things further, using replacement organs, robotic prosthetics and implants not to restore bodily functions but to alter or enhance them. When he lost his right eye in a shotgun accident in 2005, the Canadian filmmaker Rob Spence replaced it with a wireless video camera that transmits what he's seeing in real time to his computer
Bessen, "How the Patent Troll Crisis is Really a Software Crisis
A) Main points • Patent trolls are nothing new. In the nineteenth century, they were called "patent sharks" and they went after farmers in large numbers, armed with patents on barbed wire and sliding gates. But lately, patent trolls have become a hot-button issue in a way they haven't been for decades. That's because trolls are filing an unprecedented number of expensive lawsuits. Over 5,000 firms were named as defendants in patent troll lawsuits in 2011, costing them over $29 billion out-of-pocket. Today's patent trolls are wreaking damage on a scale not seen in the past. And there's a specific reason for this: The last two decades saw a dramatic increase in the number of patents on software, and these patents are particularly prone to abuse, both by trolls and by other types of patent holders. • the patent crisis is mostly about patents on software. • The report states that "many recent patent infringement lawsuits are related to the prevalence of low quality patents; that is, patents with unclear property rights, overly broad claims, or both. Although there is some inherent uncertainty associated with all patent claims, several of the stakeholders with this opinion noted that claims in software-related patents are often overly broad, unclear or both. • Unclear patent boundaries mean that innovators cannot avoid inadvertently infringing a patent. Also, unclear boundaries mean that patent examiners cannot really tell whether the patent is novel — if you don't know exactly what the patent covers, you can't tell if it is different from previous inventions. • software patents are particularly prone to such abuses because software is inherently conceptual. Software is a technology that represents broad classes of interactions abstractly. That makes it inherently difficult to tie down a software patent to a specific inventive concept B) New vocabulary introduced • Patent trolls: people who get patents to inventions they have had no hand in developing or progressing with the intention of gaining royalties C) Examples used • Patent Troll: In 1903, a patent attorney named George Selden sued Henry Ford and four other car manufacturers, demanding a royalty on every car sold. Although he had done nothing to advance automotive technology, Selden held a patent claiming to cover the automobile • A company called Lodsys has been threatening to sue hundreds of smartphone app developers for patent infringement. Its patent cover "Methods and systems for gathering information from units of a commodity across a network." App developers have little idea what that means and the specific claims within the patent are written in similarly abstract language. Needless to say, the patent's inventor did not actually develop a practical technology based on this patent and the original patent filing was made in 1992, long before there even were smartphone apps • For example, there are dozens of patents on ways to unlock smartphones. Some use the words "slide to unlock;" others use words such as "activate the function." Neither patent examiners nor technology developers can tell exactly what these patents cover. Software patents with unclear boundaries are often invalid because they cover something already invented or are an obvious improvement over what was previously invented. Indeed, one economist estimates that at least 38 percent of software patents are at least partially invalid for these reasons; 59 percent of patents used by trolls are likely invalid. Moreover, there are now hundreds of thousands of software patents, making it impossibly expensive for developers to do a pre-development clearance search.
Russell and Vinsel, "Hail the Maintainers," Aeon Magazine
A) Main points • What happens after innovation, they argue, is more important. Maintenance and repair, the building of infrastructures, the mundane labour that goes into sustaining functioning and efficient infrastructures, simply has more impact on people's daily lives than the vast majority of technological innovations. • Over the course of the 20th century, open societies that celebrated diversity, novelty, and progress performed better than closed societies that defended uniformity and order • To take the place of progress, 'innovation', a smaller, and morally neutral, concept arose. Innovation provided a way to celebrate the accomplishments of a high-tech age without expecting too much from them in the way of moral and social improvement • Beginning in the late 1950s, the prominent economists Robert Solow and Kenneth Arrow found that traditional explanations - changes in education and capital, for example - could not account for significant portions of growth. They hypothesised that technological change was the hidden X factor. Their finding fit hand-in-glove with all of the technical marvels that had come out of the Second World War, the Cold War, the post-Sputnik craze for science and technology, and the post-war vision of a material abundance. • Innovation policy turned to focus more and more on 'regional innovation systems' and 'innovation clusters' • Technology is not innovation. Innovation is only a small piece of what happens with technology. • Infrastructure failures - train crashes, bridge failures, urban flooding, and so on - are manifestations of and allegories for America's dysfunctional political system, its frayed social safety net, and its enduring fascination with flashy, shiny, trivial things. But, especially in some corners of the academic world, a focus on the material structures of everyday life can take a bizarre turn, as exemplified in work that grants 'agency' to material things or wraps commodity fetishism in the language of high cultural theory, slick marketing, and design • Innovators and Inventors small percentage of the workforce, labor is more required and needed to keep the infrastructure going. • We can think of labour that goes into maintenance and repair as the work of the maintainers, those individuals whose work keeps ordinary existence going rather than introducing novel things. Brief reflection demonstrates that the vast majority of human labour, from laundry and trash removal to janitorial work and food preparation, is of this type: upkeep. This realisation has significant implications for gender relations in and around technology. Feminist theorists have long argued that obsessions with technological novelty obscures all of the labour, including housework, that women, disproportionately, do to keep life on track. Domestic labour has huge financial ramifications but largely falls outside economic accounting, like Gross Domestic Product • One of the most significant problems is the male-dominated culture of technology, manifest in recent embarrassments such as the flagrant misogyny in the '#GamerGate' row a couple of years ago, as well as the persistent pay gap between men and women doing the same work • emphasising maintenance involves moving from buzzwords to values, and from means to ends B) New vocabulary introduced • A new term - 'innovation policy' - arose, designed to spur economic growth by fostering technological change, particularly in the face of international economic competition from Japan. Silicon Valley, a term that had just emerged in the late 1970s, became the exemplar of innovation during this time. • During the 1990s, scholars and pop audiences also rediscovered the work of Joseph Schumpeter. Schumpeter was an Austrian economist who championed innovation and its partner term, entrepreneurship. Schumpeter pictured economic growth and change in capitalism as a 'gale of creative destruction', in which new technologies and business practices outmoded or totally destroyed old ones. • Dropping innovation allows us to recognise the essential role of basic infrastructures C) Examples used • The ambition to disrupt in pursuit of innovation transcended politics, enlisting liberals and conservatives alike. Conservative politicians could gut government and cut taxes in the name of spurring entrepreneurship, while liberals could create new programmes aimed at fostering research. The idea was vague enough to do nearly anything in its name without feeling the slightest conflict, just as long as you repeated the mantra: INNOVATION!! ENTREPRENEURSHIP!! • Evidence has emerged that regions of intense innovation also have systemic problems with inequality. In 2013, protests erupted in San Francisco over the gentrification and social stratification symbolised by Google buses and other private commuter buses. These shuttles brought high-tech employees from hip, pricey urban homes to their lush suburban campuses, without exposing them to the inconvenience of public transportation or to the vast populations of the poor and homeless who also call Silicon Valley their home. The dramatic, unnecessary suffering exposed by such juxtapositions of economic inequality seems to be a feature, not a bug of highly innovative regions. • Infrastructure (a focus on the material structures of everyday life can take a bizarre turn): Bloomsbury's 'Object Lessons' series features biographies of and philosophical reflections on human-built things, like the golf ball. What a shame it would be if American society matured to the point where the shallowness of the innovation concept became clear, but the most prominent response was an equally superficial fascination with golf balls, refrigerators, and remote controls
Turner, "Where Counterculture Met the New Economy
A) Main points • Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, or the WELL: a virtual community that for the last eight years, Howard Rheingold explained, he had been dialing in to a San Francisco Bay-area bulletin-board system (BBS) • Whole Earth Catalogue: took shape within a network of individuals and publications that first came together long before the advent of ubiquitous computer networking, with the publication of the Whole Earth Catalog; presented reviews of hand tools,books, and magazines arrayed in seven thematic categories: understanding whole systems, shelter and land use, industry and craft, communications, community, nomadics, and learning. Over the next four years, in a series of biannual issues,the Catalog ballooned to more than four hundred pages,sold more than a million-and-a-half copies, won a National Book Award, and spawned dozens of imitators. It also established a relationship between information technology,economic activity, and alternative forms of community that would outlast the counterculture itself and become a key feature of the digital world. • For reviewers and for many of its other readers as well, the Catalog represented in text and pictures a geographically dispersed—and in that sense virtual—network of people with countercultural leanings. "I think the whole scene is tantamount to a sort of community in print, with the crafty taciturn old bastards hawking and spitting into the fire, and occasionally laying one on us out of the experience store," wrote reader Rolan Jacopetti in March 1969."'Sheeeeeeeit, son, you talkin' geodesic domes ...hell, I recollect me and Bucky once ... • This article in turn shows that, as a network forum, the Catalog displayed properties of both concepts (Boundary Objects and Trading Zones) • For the Bay Area's engineers and symbolic analysts, the WELL became a place to exchange the information and build the social networks on which their future employment depended.14 In this new climate, notions of virtuality, community, and the socially transformative possibilities of technology associated with the counterculture became key tools with which WELL users managed their economic lives • the virtual community that emerged on the WELL not only modeled the interactive possibilities of computer mediated communication but also translated a countercultural vision of the proper relationship between technology and sociability into a resource for imagining and managing life in the network economy • Marketed how to look at life, advice, rather than specific products • Made money off of Catalog via specific advice and recommendations/reviews rather than product advertisement in catalog • Brand's Catalog served as the network base for the WELL • the WELL team had seven design goals at the start: 1. That it be free. This was a goal, not a commitment. We knew it wouldn't be exactly free but it should be as free (cheap) as we could make it.... 2. It should be profit making. . . .After much hard, low-paid work by Matthew and Cliff, this is happening. The WELL is at least one of the few operating large systems going that has a future. 3. It would be an open-ended universe. . . . 4. It would be self-governing. . . . 5. It would be a self-designing experiment. . . . The early users were to design the system for later users. The usage of the system would co-evolve with the system as it was built. . . . 6. It would be a community, one that reflected the nature of Whole Earth publications. I think that worked out fine. 7. Business users would be its meat and potatoes • Just as readers of the Whole Earth Catalog skipped from "Whole Systems"to "Nomadics,"linking their reading as they went, so the user of the WELL could move from topic to topic, jumping in and out at will,and starting a new conversation if she liked.Like the Whole Earth Catalog, the WELL marketed its users' contributions back to them, but it did so under very different terms than competitors such as Prodigy or General Electric's GEnie system B) New vocabulary introduced • Boundary Objects: specialists found ways to collaborate and yet retain their individual allegiances to their fields of origin in part through the creation and circulation of "boundary objects"—objects such as maps and diagrams "that both inhabit several intersecting social worlds and satisfy the informational requirements of each." • Trading Zones: in which members of subspecialties develop "contact languages" for the purpose of coordinating their activities within the laboratory • Transcendence: existence or experience beyond the normal or physical level, belief set of the counterculture movement
Materiality of Internet infrastructure:
Argument: •When we think about technology, we should be concerned with the consequences of its use. •However, those consequences are largely invisible to us as consumers of technology •In other words: •The internet Is inextricably material, and the consequences of that materiality are significant. •We just don't see them
Latour, Science in Action
A) Main points: • learned how to travel through technoscience without being intimidated either by the technical literature or by the laboratories - three principles of method presented: first, we had to give up any discourse or opinion about science as it is made, and follow scientists in action instead; second, we had to give up any decision about the subjectivity or the objectivity of a statement based simply on the inspection of this statement, and we had to follow its tortuous history instead, as it went from hand to hand, everyone transforming it into more of a fact or more of an artefact; finally, we had to abandon the sufficiency of Nature as our main explanation for the closure of controversies, and we had instead to count the long heterogeneous list of resources and allies that scientists were gathering to make dissent impossible • dissenters are very rarely engaged in a confrontation such that, everything else being equal, the winner is the one with the bigger laboratory or the better article • To picture the task of someone who wishes to establish a fact, you have to imagine a chain of the thousands of people necessary to turn the first statement into a black box and where each of them may or may not unpredictably transmit the statement, modify it, alter it or turn it into all artifact. • It is not only collectively transmitted from one:; actor to the next, it is collectively composed by actors • No matter how clumsy these traditional terms are in describing the building of facts, they are useful in accounting, that is for measuring how much money and how many people are invested (as we will see in the next chapter). From invention to development and from there to innovation and sale, the money to be invested increases exponentially, as does the time to be spent on each phase and the number of people participating in the construction. The spread in space and time of black boxes is paid for by a fantastic increase in the number of elements to be tied together. Bragg, Diesel or West (see Introduction) may have quick and cheap ideas that keep a few collaborators busy for a few months. But to build an engine or a computer for sale, you need more people, more time, more money. The object of this chapter is to follow this dramatic increase in numbers. • In order to spread in space and to become long-lasting they all need (we all need) the actions of others. B) New vocabulary introduced C) Examples used • Diesel Engine as Black Box: Diesel Father of Diesel Engine, not extremely direct, idea is started and then influenced and modified by other companies/inventors, drifts from his idea to a new design inspired by his original one, innovation doesn't just end, ends up in hands of consumer without any knowledge of all of the work/stories/ideas that went into product, finally black box.
Fair use:
Date of First Use in Commerce Law and Legal Definition. The date of first use in commerce is the date when the goods were first sold or transported under the mark in a type of commerce. It can also be the date when the services were first rendered, under the mark in a type of commerce
Connection of Catalog and WELL:
Fifteen years later, when Larry Brilliant, a former resident of the Hog Farm commune (whose members famously provided crowd control at Woodstock),approached Stewart Brand with the notion of putting the various items in the Whole Earth Catalog on-line, that community in print became the model for the WELL
Filter bubble:
Google, Facebook, Search Engines and Social Media filtering your feed of information based upon your interests and trends, prevents exposure to different viewpoints and ideas
Lone inventor myth:
States that one individual invented an innovative product individually. Proved false, as most products require a group or company and have multiple influences.
Patent:
a government authority or license conferring a right or title for a set period, especially the sole right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention.
First sale:
a legal principle allowing the purchaser of a lawfully made copy of a copyright-protected work to sell or give away that copy without permission but not to reproduce it.
Innovation:
a new method, idea, product, etc
Makerspaces:
a place in which people with shared interests, especially in computing or technology, can gather to work on projects while sharing ideas, equipment, and knowledge
E-waste:
a popular, informal name for electronic products nearing the end of their "useful life." Computers, televisions, VCRs, stereos, copiers, and fax machines are common electronic products. Many of these products can be reused, refurbished, or recycled
Maker movement:
a trend in which individuals or groups of individuals create and market products that are recreated and assembled using unused, discarded or broken electronic, plastic, silicon or virtually any raw material and/or product from a computer-related device. a movement combining simple technology with the right culture of innovation and collaboration.
Black boxing:
a usually complicated electronic device whose internal mechanism is usually hidden from or mysterious to the user
The WELL:
a virtual community that for the last eight years, Howard Rheingold explained, he had been dialing in to a San Francisco Bay-area bulletin-board system (BBS), allows to recapture the sense of cooperative spirit that so many people seemed to lose when we gained all this technology."2 In the disembodied precincts of cyberspace, we could connect with one another practically and emotionally and "rediscover the power of cooperation, turning cooperation into a game, a way of life—a merger of knowledge capital, social capital, and communion
Intellectual property:
a work or invention that is the result of creativity, such as a manuscript or a design, to which one has rights and for which one may apply for a patent, copyright, trademark, etc
Stages of digital device manufacturing:
iPhone Life Cycle 1.Raw Materials: What goes into an iPhone?•Tin•Solder•Rare earth elements•Useful physical properties•Lithium•Batteries•Precious metals•Circuit boards•Petroleum•Plastics, Source of materials could have dark origin (Mines of congo) 2.Transport: Most manufacturing facilities are located in North America and Asia. Transport of raw materials occurs via large container ships, which use a lot of fuel. 3.Manufacturing: Electronics manufacturing, especially for Apple devices such as the iPhone, often occurs in very large facilities that are not unlike the industrial complexes of 20thcentury America. (electronic sweatshop) 4.Transport: Via boat or plane from factories to distribution centers/stores 5.Use: This is where you come in. •The period of time during which you are using your device is arguably the least harmful part of its lifespan. •This means that the longer you use and maintain your device, the better. 6.Obsolescence: This is the stage in which your device becomes "e-waste" •Where does it go when you discard it?•E- waste management is a very complicated international issue 7.Disposal / Reuse: Thrown into junkyards or recycled for scrap parts or put back into circulation, disposal poses an environmental threat.
Electronic sweatshop:
it is a pejorative term describing a company or entity that exploits digital workers by under-paying them, extending the hours of their workday without commensurate compensation or other violations of federal or state Labor Laws
1960s Counterculture (New Communalists):
many of his friends had begun to leave the city for the wilds of New Mexico and Northern California. As sociologists and journalists would soon explain, these migrants marked the leading edge of what would become the largest wave of communalization in American history. It bubbled up from a wide variety of cold war-era cultural springs, including beat poetry and fiction, Zen Buddhism, action painting, and, by the mid-1960s, encounters with psychedelic drugs. -Believed in changing the consciousness of other individuals
1960s Communal Life:
starting their own civilization hither and yon in the sticks, those who headed back to the land suffered a deep ambivalence toward technology. On the one hand, like their counterparts on the New Left they saw the large-scale weapons technologies of the cold war and the organizations that produced them as emblems of a malevolent and ubiquitous technological bureaucracy. On the other, as they played their stereos and dropped LSD many came to believe that small-scale technologies could help bring about an alternative to that world. Dancing at the Trips Festival or simply sitting around getting high with friends, many experienced a sense of spiritual interconnection. By the late 1960s,social theorists such as Charles Reich and Theodore Roszak had begun to argue that this interconnection could become the basis for a new social order—nonhierarchical, intimate, and free of the bureaucratic mindset that many thought plagued mainstream America.
Biohacking:
the activity of exploiting genetic material experimentally without regard to accepted ethical standards, or for criminal purposes
Transhumanism:
the belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology
Maintanence:
the building of infrastructures, the mundane labour that goes into sustaining functioning and efficient infrastructures, simply has more impact on people's daily lives than the vast majority of technological innovations
Copyright:
the exclusive legal right, given to an originator or an assignee to print, publish, perform, film, or record literary, artistic, or musical material, and to authorize others to do the same
Public domain:
the state of belonging or being available to the public as a whole, and therefore not subject to copyright.
Whole Earth Catalogue:
took shape within a network of individuals and publications that first came together long before the advent of ubiquitous computer networking, with the publication of the Whole Earth Catalog; presented reviews of hand tools, books, and magazines arrayed in seven thematic categories: understanding whole systems, shelter and land use, industry and craft, communications, community, nomadics, and learning. Over the next four years, in a series of biannual issues, the Catalog ballooned to more than four hundred pages, sold more than a million-and-a-half copies, won a National Book Award, and spawned dozens of imitators. It also established a relationship between information technology, economic activity, and alternative forms of community that would outlast the counterculture itself and become a key feature of the digital world. - functioned as a pointer
Innovation-speak:
worships at the altar of change, but it rarely asks who benefits, to what end? A focus on maintenance provides opportunities to ask questions about what we really want out of technologies. What do we really care about? What kind of society do we want to live in? Will this help get us there? We must shift from means, including the technologies that underpin our everyday actions, to ends, including the many kinds of social beneficence and improvement that technology can offer. Our increasingly unequal and fearful world would be grateful.
Algorithmic black box:
youtube algorithm of how to maximize views was abused and exploited by hackers, changed the way youtubers made videos, machine learning allows the algorithm to change and shape itself without ethical influence or bearing, "black box" given input - constructs and tests output- results are put back into box and it learns- process repeats, No one knows how it really works, is bad because it isn't in a structured system with rules like a game with a points system, has to figure out what "winning" is based upon youtube criteria, hence trend of videos geared towards more views/watch time