I’ve mentioned a few times, perhaps more often in presentations than on the blog, the fact that guidelines for the design of pedestrian crossings in the UK [PDF] recommend that where a crossing is staggered, pedestrians should be routed so that they have to face […]
All posts filed under “Philosophy of control”
On ‘Design and Behaviour’ this week: Do you own your stuff? And a strange council-run ‘Virtual World for young people’
GPS-aided repo and product-service systems Ryan Calo of Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society brought up the new phenomenon of GPS-aided car repossession and the implications for the concepts of property and privacy: A group of car dealers in Oregon apparently attached GPS devices to […]
Deliberately creating worry
Swedish creativity lecturer Fredrik Härén mentions an interesting architecture of control anecdote in his The Idea Book: One of the cafés in an international European airport was often full. The problem was that people sat nursing their coffees for a long time as they waited […]
“The progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination”
Burak Arikan of the MIT Media Lab helpfully pointed me to Gilles Deleuze‘s 1990 essay, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control.’
Breaking Racial Sound Barriers
Via Furdlog, a Washington Post article by Christopher John Farley, “Breaking Racial Sound Barriers”, presents an interesting spin on the likelihood of architectures of control creating/enforcing/reinforcing a marginalised “technology underclass,” as I previously discussed (to some extent, anyway) in Some implications of architectures of control.
“Sign software on the digital line”
Bill Thompson, of the BBC’s ‘Go Digital’ programme, sets out very clearly (‘Sign software on the digital line’) many of the issues involved with ‘trusted computing’ and forcing the use of signed software.
‘Value of your home to be determined by the “freedom” your gadgets exhibit’
In a piece examining GPL v.3 and Linus Torvalds’ recent comments (‘If Linus snubs new GPL, is that it for ‘open source’?’), Andrew Orlowski discusses an idea put to him by a “GPL 3.0 advocate”:
Anti-teenager sound weapon: more comments
This post from last year has been getting a lot of hits over the last few days due to more media coverage of the story – come on & join in the comment debate: Anti-teenager sound weapon in Wales
Richard Stallman’s ‘Right To Read’ dystopia growing closer every day
We seem to be accelerating towards the nightmare vision presented by Richard Stallman in his 1997 article, ‘The Right to Read’, ninety years too early, and investigated so thoroughly by Cambridge’s Ross Anderson. (See also here for more discussion of DRM and ‘trusted’ computing).
Another dystopian vision
I should have posted this very impressive piece last month, but forgot, so here it is: ‘Burnoff: Part 1 – The Bad Guys Win’ by Tarmle.
Boing Boing: House introduces mandatory radio-crippling law
Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing: House introduces mandatory radio-crippling law) brings the news that: