2011/12/21

Regardless of your opinion on homosexuality, gender-based stereotyping is entirely cultural and limits our self-expression

One teachers approach to preventing gender bullying in a classroom

"Gender is not a subject that I would have broached in primary grades a few years ago. In fact, I remember scoffing with colleagues when we heard about a young kindergarten teacher who taught gender-related curriculum. We thought her lessons were a waste of instructional time and laughed at her “girl and boy” lessons."

2011/12/20

Wikileaks is not necessarily the apotheosis of the Cypherpunk movement

The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution › I went to the same school as Julian Assange, but we learned different lessons:
"Not being able to go to The State for help, if the situation I’d been in escalated to Men With Guns, left me with a clear understanding: I needed the State’s protection to be a full human being. Now, let me say that again: I needed the State’s protection to be a full human being. This is the start of my divergence from the classical cyperpunk’s anti-State crypto-anarchist market capitalist stance."

2011/12/09

Anthropomorphising [parts of] the Internet is intellectually crippling and denies us agency

The New Inquiry - What We Talk About When We Talk About the Internet:
"When I hit a nail with a hammer, I think: witness the power of my will! But when I google “How do I build a birdhouse?” it appears that I have asked Google a question and that it has answered. As though Google were a conscious entity, not the world’s most complex hammer."

2011/12/07

Using a service without paying? If you're not the customer, you're the product...

Don't Be A Free User:
"Were you a big Gowalla fan? Did you like Dodgeball? Did you think Trunk.ly (gasp!) was better than Pinboard? Did you make a lot of contributions to Nextstop? Do you miss Aardvark and EtherPad? Did "I Want Sandy" change your life?

These projects are all very different, but the dynamic is the same. Someone builds a cool, free product, it gets popular, and that popularity attracts a buyer. The new owner shuts the product down and the founders issue a glowing press release about how excited they are about synergies going forward. They are never heard from again."

The art of not drowning: a critique of airline safety cards through the ages :-)

Paris Review – The Unlikely Event, Avi Steinberg
"The artist behind a current AeroMexico safety card is not convinced. In an echo of The Son of Man, the 1964 painting by Belgian Surrealist RenĂ© Magritte, the AeroMexico man is rendered in realistic detail—from rolled up sleeves to tousled hair—all of which is, however, a set up for the darkly comic punch line: the man has no face. This bit of surrealistic surgery, more than the yellow life preserver, is what we remember. It is plain to us that this creepily inanimate son of man is, in struggling to preserve his life, in some sense already dead."