Technology Archives - Public Seminar

Sex & Gender

Erotic Pleasure and Technological Mastery

An excerpt from The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence

December 17, 2025 • by Benjamin Mangrum

Slavoj Žižek argues that gaming and virtual reality programs figure the computer as “a consistent other, stepping into the structural position of an intersubjective partner.” This claim follows on the heels of a reference to Jacques Lacan’s diagnosis in an infamous koan about the impossibility of sexual relations. For Lacan, ...

Erotic Pleasure and Technological Mastery

Finance

Platforms, Payments, and Ponzi Schemes

A review of Rachel O’Dwyer’s Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform

May 1, 2024 • by Paulo L. dos Santos

Electronic platforms can also be thought of as a distinctive type of “terrain” that, like land, can define specific types of revenue and power for those who control them. ...

Artificial Intelligence

The Rise of AI Ethics

The focus on far-off consequences distracts from existing threats to human rights, fairness, justice, equality, and safety

February 21, 2024 • by Peter M. Asaro

AI ethics is not really a distinct field or coherent discourse, but more of an amalgamation of different perspectives considering the potential implications of automated systems and algorithms making decisions with consequential impacts on human lives. ...

Climate & Ecology

A Globe, Clothing Itself with Ears

Stories of speaking with animals are as old as human history

November 3, 2022 • by Karen Bakker

Human ambivalence about animal language persists and is linked with our uncertainty about human status: Are we one animal among others, or does something truly set us apart? Debates over animal language are a touchstone for human uncertainties about our role in the cosmos....

Technology

Truth, Damned Truth, and Statistics: A Quiet Mathematical Revolution Reshaping our Algorithmically-Mediated World

An interview with Justin Joque

July 20, 2022 • by Lydia Nobbs and Justin Joque

There’s a shift in statistical approaches from one driven by what we traditionally think of as knowledge—knowing ‘the truth’—to a more economic approach. That shows what's always been the case but admits it in a more clear-eyed way: knowledge production is always tied to political economy. In fact, the ways ...

Truth, Damned Truth, and Statistics: A Quiet Mathematical Revolution Reshaping our Algorithmically-Mediated World

Artificial Intelligence

AI Spy With My Little Eye: Facial Recognition

Cautioning the increased use of AI in law enforcement

March 23, 2022 • by Patrick K. Lin

The diversity of faces used to train an algorithm can influence the kinds of photos and faces that an algorithm is most adept at examining. If the set of face images is skewed towards a certain race, the algorithm may be better at identifying members of that group as compared ...

AI Spy With My Little Eye: Facial Recognition

Technology

The Chip Wars Heat Up

Chips with a side of CHIPS

February 7, 2022 • by Pat Garofalo

"...there’s something much bigger at work here: The Chip Wars, as I’ve dubbed them, are heating up, and revealing some of the tensions between national needs and extraction from local communities."...

Technology

Water Is Life, and Also a Trade Secret

Google won’t tell you how much water it uses and an Oregon city has its back

November 5, 2021 • by Pat Garofalo

Google may have been cowed into turning down subsidies for new office buildings in a few major cities, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t up to its usual shenanigans outside of those metro areas. Out in Oregon, in fact, Google is embroiled in a controversy in which it’s gotten a town to ...

Technology

Don’t Kill Facebook: Reform It

November 1, 2021 • by Claire Potter

In 2018, as we were all still digesting how disinformation campaigns upended the 2016 election, technologist and internet critic Jaron Lanier published a manifesto. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Henry Holt) introduced readers to the methods by which platforms like Facebook and Twitter not only capture and ...

Technology

What’s Google Up To?

It says it turned down subsidies in three cities. What gives?

October 4, 2021 • by Pat Garofalo

Tech giant Google recently announced that it bought a building in New York City in a massive $2.1 billion deal, which is the largest real estate purchase in the U.S. since the pandemic began. Google also said it would not avail itself of the corporate subsidy programs offered by New ...

Technology

Facebook’s Data Center Fluff

A snazzy new public relations push can’t cover up the truth

September 27, 2021 • by Pat Garofalo

Last week Facebook rolled out a new website dedicated to the awesomeness of its data centers, the large facilities it builds to house all the data it collects from you, me, and everyone else it surveils on the internet. I’m not kidding. Facebook built and published an entire website extolling the virtues of ...

Capitalism

Welcome to the Chip Wars

Intel wants another HQ2 contest, this time for chip manufacturers.

September 15, 2021 • by Pat Garofalo

_____ The Amazon “HQ2” contest—in which hundreds of cities threw everything including the kitchen sink at Amazon in the hopes of landing a new facility—was a national embarrassment showing just how tight corporate America’s grip on economic development policy is (at least until New York said no way). In a recent interview with ...