It’s been a little while since the inhabitants of Facebookistan got all fired up about something– where are you now Kony2012?— so I was half-delighted and half-disheartened to see the newest brouhaha to hit the social media site, which I’m calling the Facebook Privacy Dis-Agreement (FPD). As these things tend to happen, FPD had been…
Read MoreGary Shteyngart’s new novel Super Sad True Love Story takes place in a not-too-distant future America that reads uncomfortably familiar and, consequently, entirely believable. There, America has suffered a sharp decline in global economic and political importance, and has refashioned itself as an almost unabashedly consumerist Security State– though the Horatio-Alger-esque resolve (and hubris) that…
Read MoreI recently had the good fortune of doing an interview with Chris Long (Penn State University) for his “Digital Dialogues” philosophy podcast discussing my work on “weak humanism.” (You can listen to my interview here.) I’ve been working on the Weak Humanism manuscript all summer now, so it was a welcome respite from that work…
Read MoreWhat difference does a signature make? I’ll assume that the phenomenon of trolling is one familiar to most of us on the interwebs, a phenomenon that is, in turns, infuriating, exasperating, unpleasant, and often genuinely hostile and threatening. There’s much to abhor about trolls– their pettiness and vitriol, their disregard for basic conversational decorum, their…
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