I spent last Friday at a seminar about algorithms. We discussed everything from health technology and citizenship in the digital era to the structure of neural nets. I got the sense that talk about algorithms is both too hyperbolic and not serious enough at the same time. Technology is not magic, it has very specific ways it works or doesn’t work and knowing the difference helps in avoiding the kind of superstition often related to the power of algorithms. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that there are no neutral pieces of software, separated from our everyday lives. Algorithms will affect how societies work – that is the whole point of using algorithms in problem-solving. ...

I just deleted my accounts on Academia.edu and ResearchGate. I think we are currently in a crucial time in choosing how academia shapes up in the future and they are not helping. Academic publishing is weird. Most of the labour is provided by academics: we write the papers, we do the reviews and we are the editors keeping the journals alive. Yet, the academic publishing giants reap the rewards, selling journal subscriptions to the universities of the very people who create the content on those journals. Sure, there are costs to running those journals, from server space to layout services, but those are marginal compared to the massive academic effort of doing the actual research, review and editing. ...

I gave a talk at National Meeting of English Students about the political use of memes. In case you missed it, here is what I intended to say. It might not be exactly what I said, so consider this the updated and slightly condensed version. First, to understand the political context of memes and how they are used, it helps to know some background. Originally, meme didn’t refer to things like funny pictures on the internet. The concept was introduced by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene (1976), where he described it as a “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation”. He conceived it in broad terms, so that included practices like holidays, ideas like God(s) and texts like The Selfish Gene itself. His way of thinking about memes is problematic in many ways, but the concept itself was less sticky than the word associated with it. ...

You probably didn’t notice that there was a fundamental shift in how technology operates in and integrates into our lives. It used to be that there were custom-built pieces of technology for different purposes. Some of them shared qualities – a tractor was kind of similar to a car – but they were still separate things. This has changed. Increasingly, everything is a computer. Your phone is a small computer that can be used to call people. Your car is a collection of computers on wheels. Your television is a computer that shows a picture (and probably also watches you). The toys you buy for your kids have computers (and they also listen in on them). ...

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit”, Harry Frankfurt wrote in On Bullshit (1986). In some areas of life it’s taken for granted that bullshit prevails. Marketing, for instance, may have some truth to it, but usually people treat most of what comes out of marketing departments as wistful thinking at best and outright lies at worst. Politics, too, has had a perception of having a tenuous relation to the truth. It is, for example, encapsulated in a well-known joke: ...

Hybrid games may not yet be a household name like VR and AR, but they seem to be getting similar attention at least from developers and researchers. The hype around VR and AR is undeniable. Pictures of people with funny contraptions on their heads and expressions of rapture on their faces pop up on news feeds almost as often as articles expressing bewilderment about Pokémon Go. Both share with hybrid games the general lack knowledge and the accompanying large expectations that usually come with new technology, despite the fact that research on these topics goes back decades. Slowly, it is turning from apocalyptic promises of revolution (90’s virtual reality research is particularly adept at this) to practical approaches. ...