OW #10: “Bruno Latour, Designer” by Cameron Tonkinwise In this issue, Cameron Tonkinwise, Professor of Design Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, reflects on the “annoyingly prolific” production of...

Yes, very likely about Latour as well. On the importance of Latour for design, see this short insightful piece by @camerontw.bsky.social:

buttondown.com/otherworlds/...

Not to mention his involvement with RAND.

Yes, not really a psychologist as far as I know. Although his work did contribute to cognitive and organizational psychology.

Herbert Simon appraising Bruno Latour as "soft, to the point of mushiness" and his work as "a sort of generalized Marxism" is quite noteworthy (albeit not that surprising considering the former's computationalist views of knowledge and the social).

Our computer capabilities have increased at least a hundred fold since then [then = 1957] and we can do better, but not a great deal better; we are not calculation-limited, we are understanding limited.

This caalls for this evergreen quote

From the 1980s Handbook of systems analysis. "Then" is 1957.

This is a helpful review of Jäger’s Hyperpolitics by @alirizataskale.bsky.social

Bruno-stagecraft-is-essential-to-tehcnoscience-Latour nods knowingly in some after-life next to his pal, Louis Pasteur

How did people imagine UNAM's Ciudad Universitaria in Mexico City before it was built?

I took a dive into the archive of unbuilt plans for CU and wrote about them in the Journal of Urban History. Check out "Imagining University City" (open access!): journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

we're all going to be learning about energy markets & contracts like we learnt about derivatives in 2008 lol

In the early 1990s, Bruno Latour was not hired at the Institute for Advanced Study. I wrote an article about that decision and what it reveals about the science wars and the history of science studies, now live @histsocialscience.bsky.social
muse.jhu.edu/article/985884

Jameson: it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism

Trump: why not both?

Reminder about our paid book cover commission - one week left to apply!

the dream of expert systems is back

R.I.P. the adjective "generative". It was fun to use in former times.

y para colmo, lo formulan como pregunta.

An incredible contribution by @loicriom.bsky.social and @taschn.bsky.social to our Forum on Tech Oligarchy.

🔗 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

From crowing about big data and algorithmic governance to the “promises” of the blockchain and Bitcoin and more, the world of the digital is everywhere structured by these fictionalist equivocations over the meanings of central terms, equivocations that derive an enormous part of their power from the appearance that they refer to technological and so material and so metaphysical reality. Perhaps one way of cashing this out, and I offer it only as a very speculative summary of some of Mirowski’s work in this vein, is as a challenge to an unacknowledged Platonism in much of our talk about but also our work with the digital, an idealization that even as it claims to be all about the stuff of the world at the same time turns away from the world in a profound way. Mirowski’s work makes us do exactly the opposite, demanding we take seriously every aspect of the technologies our world actually does present to us, and no less the ways our words and concepts make up that world.

Golumbia on Mirowski

If you missed the news about Elsevier and Wiley (and doubtless the rest to follow) remaking themselves as AI companies with plans to profit from selling AI summaries of academic work back to the institutions that produced the original work:
bsky.app/profile/benp...

Frustratingly relatable. Please take note, Swedish funding agencies.

In case you ever wondered how edtech companies, academic publishers, and big AI corporations, as well as HE institutions, make money out of your academic work, here's our new paper starting to unpack the assetization of academic content

It's the economy, stupid. 🫠

😂

Can you imagine raising a kid without ChatGPT? Sam Altman can’t | Arwa Mahdawi The OpenAI CEO gushed about the bot’s parental-assistance abilities. Is it really his best child-rearing hack?

Both “could” and “cannot”:

“I cannot imagine having gone through figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT,” says Altman.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

analytic phil 🤝 "AI" ethics 🤝 "effective altruism" 🤝 technofinance

Exactly this bsky.app/profile/spav...

Manufacturing the Leviathan: Palantir’s ‘Technological republic’ and the nationalist faction of the tech oligarchy Palantir a ‘superweapon' or a marketing masterclass? This article examines the emergence of a ‘nationalist-militarist' faction within the contemporary tech oligarchy through a critical reading of T...

Lastly, it feels great to publish in Science as Culture, where Barbrook & Cameron’s seminal essay “The Californian Ideology” appeared! I hope my piece helps carry that critique forward into the era of tech oligarchy & algorithmic governance.
50 free copies here. www.tandfonline.com/eprint/QNVIT...

Worth reading this take on forced diffusion of #genAI

⬇️ exactly this & where much of the investment is increasingly coming from, not public markets but private credit, pension and 🥁 insurance funds…

Can anything halt Latin America’s lurch to the right? The Venezuela incursion might have strengthened populist candidates promising law and order ahead of key elections

‘Can anything halt Latin America’s lurch to the right?’

giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

""It’s hard to script a clearer emblem of what I’ve called education’s auto-cannibalism: universities consuming their own purpose while cheerfully marketing the tools of their undoing."