In its second season, Halt tells the story of two women laboring to bring a new, better technology to consumers with an assist from a houseful of gamers. Lean In, Gamergate, and the ongoing under-representation of women in tech hang heavy over the episodes.
A number of Portside readers has asked us to share information about panels they are participating in with other readers. Some of the panel participants include moderators of Portside.(Full conference program includes 400 panels, workshops and events.) The 11 panels below may be of particular interest to Portside readers.
Are the machines coming for our jobs? Dean Baker argues that we need to get beyond the fear of robots and address the real causes of inequality, low wages and changes in the labor market.
“I don’t believe that law enforcement has an absolute right to gain access to every way in which two people may choose to communicate,” said Marc Zwillinger, “And I don’t think our Founding Fathers would think so, either. The fact that the Constitution offers a process for obtaining a search warrant where there is probable cause is not support for the notion that it should be illegal to make an unbreakable lock. These are two distinct concepts.”
Anatomy of a cultural product with the potential to ameliorate social inequities but threatened by digital corporate conglomeration and hijacking by the security state. Book covers the implications for cultural democracy in various sectors-music, film, news, advertising-how battles over copyright, piracy and privacy laws have evolved, counterpoints to invasive data-mining and a "People's Platform" supporting the politics of a fightback.
Viewing war as an engineering problem focuses on technology (which benefits contractors) and destructive physical effects, but ignores and is offset by the fundamental truth of war: Machines don’t fight wars, people do, and they use their minds.
When more and more can be done by fewer and fewer people, the profits go to an ever-smaller circle of executives and owner-investors. It may be that a redistribution of income and wealth from the rich to the rest of us becomes the only means of making the future economy work.
With AMC's Halt and Catch Fire's second season arriving soon, a reflection on the first. Halt and Catch Fire's finale reveals it was anti-capitalist all along. For all the early technical bells and whistles, Halt has a straightforward, pleasing story arc—a ragtag team that against long odds and many obstacles does the near impossible—that toward the season’s end ran into a genuinely thought-provoking hurdle: capitalism.
The scientific body established by a law signed by President Lincoln released two groundbreaking reports today on geoengineering. The reports raise fundamental questions regarding efficacy, safety, economy and governance.
Last year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board concluded, "We can manage our technology, or become victims of it. The choice is ours, and the [Doomsday] Clock is ticking." This year, the board moved the Doomsday Clock to three minutes to midnight and added, "The probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be taken very soon."
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