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Technocreep
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Download or read book Technocreep written by Thomas P. Keenan and published by Greystone Books Ltd. This book was released on 2014 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shares examples of online privacy violations brought about by the invasion of technology into people's everyday lives, and identifes some of the sinister consequences of technology's pervasiveness.
Book Synopsis Modern Technology and the Human Future by : Craig M. Gay
Download or read book Modern Technology and the Human Future written by Craig M. Gay and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2018-12-11 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology is not neutral. From the plow to the printing press, technology has always shaped human life and informed our understanding of what it means to be human. And advances in modern technology, from computers to smartphones, have yielded tremendous benefits. But do these developments actually encourage human flourishing? Craig Gay raises concerns about the theological implications of modern technologies and of philosophical movements such as transhumanism. In response, he turns to a classical affirmation of the Christian faith: Jesus Christ, the eternal Word of God, took on human flesh. By exploring the doctrine of the incarnation and what it means for our embodiment, Gay offers a course correction to the path of modern technology without asking us to unplug completely. Gay demonstrates that the doctrine of the incarnation is not neutral either. It presents us an alternative vision for the future of humanity.
Book Synopsis Folding the Red into the Black by : Walter Mosley
Download or read book Folding the Red into the Black written by Walter Mosley and published by OR Books. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walter Mosley is one of America’s bestselling novelists, known for his critically acclaimed series of mysteries featuring private investigator Easy Rawlins. His writing is hard-hitting, often limned with a political subtext, and aimed at a broad audience. Years ago, when Mosley was working on a doctorate in political theory, he envisioned writing very different kinds of books from those for which he has become celebrated. But once you’ve been tagged as a novelist, and in Mosley’s case, a genre writer, even a bestselling one, it is hard to get an airing for ideas that cross those boundaries. Folding the Red into the Black has grown out of Mosley’s public talks, which have gotten both enthusiastic and agitated responses, making him feel the ideas in those talks should be explored in greater depth. Mosley’s is an elastic mind, and in this short polemic he frees himself to explore some novel ideas. He draws on personal experiences and insights as an African-American, a Jew, and one of our great writers to present an alternative manifesto of sorts: “We need to throw off the unbearable weight of bureaucratic capitalist and socialist demands; demands that exist to perpetuate these systems, not to praise and raise humanity to its full promise. And so I propose the word, the term Untopia.”
Book Synopsis Beyond Zero and One by : Andrew Smart
Download or read book Beyond Zero and One written by Andrew Smart and published by OR Books. This book was released on 2015-12-03 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Andrew Smart deftly shows why it’s time for us to think deeply about thinking machines before they begin thinking deeply about us.” —Douglas Rushkoff, author, Escaping the Growth Trap,Present Shock, and Program or Be Programmed “Provocative and cool.” —Cory Doctorow “Forget the Turing test—will the supersmart AIs that we hear so much about these days pass the acid test? In this playful, informative, and prescient book, Andrew Smart brings psychedelics into dialogue with neuroscience in order to challenge the whiz-bang computational views of human and machine sentience that dominate the headlines. Giving robots LSD sounds like a joke, but Smart is dead serious in his critique of the hidden and sometimes dangerous biases that underlie both popular and scientific fantasies of digital minds.” —Erik Davis, host of “Expanding Mind” and author, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information “Philosophy, psychedelics, robots, and the future; consciousness and intelligence, what else do you desire? Here you will see why those machines that reach singularity will be smarter than us and take over the world—and shall need to be conscious…and maybe they can only be conscious if they are human enough. The thesis of the book, and the path shown us by Smart, leads to a great trip, of imagination and philosophy, of maths and neuroscience.” —Dr. Tristan Bekinschtein, Lecturer, Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge Can we build a robot that trips on acid? This is not a frivolous question, according to neuroscientist Andrew Smart. If we can’t, he argues, we haven’t really created artificial intelligence. In an exposition reminiscent of crossover works such as Gödel, Escher, Bach and Fermat’s Last Theorem, Andrew Smart weaves together Mangarevan binary numbers, the discovery of LSD, Leibniz, computer programming, and much more to connect the vast but largely forgotten world of psychedelic research with the resurgent field of AI and the attempt to build conscious robots. A book that draws on the history of mathematics, philosophy, and digital technology, Beyond Zero and One challenges fundamental assumptions underlying artificial intelligence. Is the human brain based on computation? Can information alone explain human consciousness and intelligence? Smart convincingly makes the case that true intelligence, and artificial intelligence, requires an appreciation of what is beyond the computational.
Download or read book Cypherpunks written by Julian Assange and published by . This book was released on 2016-10 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Internet has led to revolutions across the world but a crackdown is now in full swing. As whole societies move online, mass surveillance programs are being deployed globally. Our civilization has reached a crossroads. In one direction lies a future promoting "privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful"; in the other is an internet that transfers power over entire populations to an unaccountable complex of spy agencies and their trans-national corporate allies. Cypherpunks are activists who advocate the mass use of strong cryptography as a way protecting our basic freedoms against this onslaught. Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of an visionary behind Wikileaks, has been a leading voice in the cypherpunk movement since the 1990s. Now, in a timely and important new book, Assange brings together a group of rebel thinkers and activists from the front line of the battle for cyberspace to discuss whether the internet will emancipate or enslave all of us.--
Download or read book Chameleo written by Robert Guffey and published by OR Books. This book was released on 2015-04-23 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A mesmerizing mix of Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, and Philip K. Dick, Chameleo is a true account of what happened in a seedy Southern California town when an enthusiastic and unrepentant heroin addict named Dion Fuller sheltered a U.S. Marine who’d stolen night vision goggles and perhaps a few top secret files from a nearby military base. Dion found himself arrested (under the ostensible auspices of The Patriot Act) for conspiring with international terrorists to smuggle Top Secret military equipment out of Camp Pendleton. The fact that Dion had absolutely nothing to do with international terrorists, smuggling, Top Secret military equipment, or Camp Pendleton didn’t seem to bother the military. He was released from jail after a six-day-long Abu-Ghraib-style interrogation. Subsequently, he believed himself under intense government scrutiny — and, he suspected, the subject of bizarre experimentation involving “cloaking”— electro-optical camouflage so extreme it renders observers practically invisible from a distance of some meters — by the Department of Homeland Security. Hallucination? Perhaps — except Robert Guffey, an English teacher and Dion’s friend, tracked down and interviewed one of the scientists behind the project codenamed “Chameleo,” experimental technology which appears to have been stolen by the U.S. Department of Defense and deployed on American soil. More shocking still, Guffey discovered that the DoD has been experimenting with its newest technologies on a number of American citizens. A condensed version of this story was the cover feature of Fortean Times Magazine (September 2013).
Book Synopsis Welcome to Dystopia by : K. G. Anderson
Download or read book Welcome to Dystopia written by K. G. Anderson and published by OR Books. This book was released on 2018-01-23 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this diverse and vigorous mix of stories by newcomers and luminaries, writers offer their takes on what life might hold for us in the next few years. The resulting visions of war, oppression, and daily struggle are sometimes humorous, sometimes terrifying (and occasionally both), but always thought-provoking.
Download or read book Finks written by Joel Whitney and published by OR Books. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When news broke that the CIA had colluded with literary magazines to produce cultural propaganda throughout the Cold War, a debate began that has never been resolved. The story continues to unfold, with the reputations of some of America’s best-loved literary figures—including Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, and Richard Wright—tarnished as their work for the intelligence agency has come to light. Finks is a tale of two CIAs, and how they blurred the line between propaganda and literature. One CIA created literary magazines that promoted American and European writers and cultural freedom, while the other toppled governments, using assassination and censorship as political tools. Defenders of the “cultural” CIA argue that it should have been lauded for boosting interest in the arts and freedom of thought, but the two CIAs had the same undercover goals, and shared many of the same methods: deception, subterfuge and intimidation. Finks demonstrates how the good-versus-bad CIA is a false divide, and that the cultural Cold Warriors again and again used anti-Communism as a lever to spy relentlessly on leftists, and indeed writers of all political inclinations, and thereby pushed U.S. democracy a little closer to the Soviet model of the surveillance state. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 15.0px; font: 13.0px Helvetica; color: #323333; -webkit-text-stroke: #323333} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 15.0px; font: 13.0px Helvetica; color: #323333; -webkit-text-stroke: #323333; min-height: 16.0px} span.s1 {font-kerning: none}
Book Synopsis We Have Always Lived in the Castle by : Shirley Jackson
Download or read book We Have Always Lived in the Castle written by Shirley Jackson and published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. This book was released on 1967-10 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: The home of the Blackwoods near a Vermont village is a lonely, ominous abode, and Constance, the young mistress of the place, can't go out of the house without being insulted and stoned by the villagers. They have also composed a nasty s
Download or read book Ivyland written by Miles Klee and published by OR Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debut novelist Miles Klee takes a landscape of drugs, decay, loss and, perhaps, hope, and manages to make the ensemble wryly funny: something only a few notable contemporaries such as Jeff Vandermeer and Michael Chabon have been able to do. Post-urban New Jersey is instantly recognizable in this interlinked series of short vignettes. . . . and Lev's living room is puddles of water and sun, and a bunch of those furry caterpillars are hauling themselves from surface to surface. Populated by a bumbling, murderous citizenry of corrupt cops, innocents, ravenous addicts, lovesick geniuses, and cynical adventurers, Ivyland operates in the shadow of a giant pharmaceutical corporation that thrives on people's weaknesses . . . and may have an even more sinister agenda. It's our world, only a bit more extreme, and lovingly, precisely depicted with the adept skills native to a master of dark humor.
Download or read book Watchlist written by Bryan Hurt and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Including work by literary heavy–hitters... the anthology considers the act and weight of watching and being watched... and in Watchlist, these see–to–know quests range from funny to terrifying.” —Los Angeles Magazine In Watchlist, some of today’s most prominent and promising fiction writers from around the globe respond to, meditate on, and mine for inspiration the surveillance culture in which we live. With contributions from Etgar Keret, T.C. Boyle, Robert Coover, Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard, Alissa Nutting, Charles Yu, Cory Doctorow, and many more, WATCHLIST unforgettably confronts the question: What does it mean to be watched? In Doctorow’s eerily plausible ""Scroogled,"" the US has outsourced border control to Google, on the basis that they Do Search Right. In Lincoln Michel’s “Our New Neighborhood,” a planned suburban community’s ‘Neighborhood Watch’ program becomes an obsessive nightmare. Jim Shepard’s haunting “Safety Tips for Living Alone” imagines the lives of the men involved in the US government’s fatal attempt to build the three Texas Tower radar facilities in the Atlantic Ocean during the Cold War. Randa Jarrar’s “Testimony of Malik, Israeli agent #287690” is “a sweet and deftly handled story of xenophobia and paranoia, reminding us that such things aren’t limited to the West” (Sabotage Reviews) and Alissa Nutting’s “The Transparency Project” is a creative, speculative exploration of the future of long–term medical observation. By turns political, apolitical, cautionary, and surreal, these stories reflect on what it’s like to live in the surveillance state.
Book Synopsis Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement by : Carl Cederström and André Spicerm
Download or read book Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement written by Carl Cederström and André Spicerm and published by OR Books. This book was released on 2017-10-20 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these pages, the authors of the widely-acclaimed The Wellness Syndrome throw themselves headlong into the world of self-optimization, a burgeoning movement that seeks to transcend the limits placed on us by being merely human, whether the feebleness of our bodies or our mental incapacities. Cederström and Spicer, though willing guinea pigs in an extraordinary (and sometimes downright dangerous) range of techniques and technologies, had hitherto undertaken little by way of self-improvement. They had rarely seen the inside of a gym, let alone utilized apps that deliver electric shocks in pursuit of improved concentration. But, in the course of a year spent researching this book, they wore head-bands designed to optimize meditation, attempted to boost their memory through learning associative techniques (and failed to be admitted to MENSA), trained for weightlifting competitions, wrote what they (still) hope might become a bestselling Scandinavian detective story, enrolled in motivational seminars and tantra sex workshops, attended new-age retreats and man-camps, underwent plastic surgery, and experimented with vibrators and productivity drugs. André even addressed a London subway car whilst (nearly) naked in an attempt to boost attention. Somewhat surprisingly, the two young professors survived this year of rigorous research. Further, they have drawn deeply on it to produce a hilarious and eye-opening book. Written in the form of two parallel diaries, Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement provides a biting analysis of the narcissism and individual competitiveness that increasingly pervades a culture in which social solutions are receding and individual self-improvement is the only option left.
Book Synopsis People Get Ready! by : Christine Berry
Download or read book People Get Ready! written by Christine Berry and published by OR Books. This book was released on 2019-05-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour stands on the brink of power, promising a fundamental re-ordering of British politics. But what, in practice, will this entail? How can a radical government stand up to an establishment that is hostile to any significant redistribution of wealth and power? People Get Ready!dives into the nitty gritty of what’s needed to bring about transformative change. Unlike a decade ago, the left’s problem is no longer a shortage of big ideas. Inside and outside the Labour Party, an agenda for new forms of public and community ownership is taking shape. Today the biggest danger facing the left is lack of preparedness—the absence of strategies that can make these ideas a reality. People Get Ready! draws on previous attempts at radical change, from the election of Labour at the end of the Second World War and the progressive early days of Mitterrand’s presidency in France, to Tony Benn’s battles with Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher’s icy insistence that there was no alternative to free markets. These stories highlight the importance of knowing your allies and, even more, your enemies, of being ready to deal with sabotage and resistance from the highest levels, of being bold enough to transform the structures of government, and of having a mass movement that can both support the leadership and hold it to its radical programme when the going gets tough. Remarkably, democratic socialism in Britain is closer to government than in any other European country. The responsibilities this brings for those supporting the Corbyn project are as great as the opportunities it presents. But there isn’t much time to get ready …
Book Synopsis Istanbul Istanbul by : Burhan Sönmez
Download or read book Istanbul Istanbul written by Burhan Sönmez and published by OR Books. This book was released on 2016-05-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Istanbul, Istanbul turns on the tension between the confines of a prison cell and the vastness of the imagination; between the vulnerable borders of the body and the unassailable depths of the mind. This is a harrowing, riveting novel, as unforgettable as it is inescapable.” —Dale Peck, author of Visions and Revisions “A wrenching love poem to Istanbul told between torture sessions by four prisoners in their cell beneath the city. An ode to pain in which Dostoevsky meets The Decameron.” —John Ralston Saul, author of On Equilibrium; former president, PEN International “Istanbul is a city of a million cells, and every cell is an Istanbul unto itself.” Below the ancient streets of Istanbul, four prisoners—Demirtay the student, the doctor, Kamo the barber, and Uncle Küheylan—sit, awaiting their turn at the hands of their wardens. When they are not subject to unimaginable violence, the condemned tell one another stories about the city, shaded with love and humor, to pass the time. Quiet laughter is the prisoners’ balm, delivered through parables and riddles. Gradually, the underground narrative turns into a narrative of the above-ground. Initially centered around people, the book comes to focus on the city itself. And we discover there is as much suffering and hope in the Istanbul above ground as there is in the cells underground. Despite its apparently bleak setting, this novel—translated into seventeen languages—is about creation, compassion, and the ultimate triumph of the imagination.
Download or read book #AgainstTrump written by Jeffrey C. Isaac and published by OR Books. This book was released on 2018-11-14 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few predicted the ascendancy of Donald Trump to the US presidency, a development with a huge impact on international relations, trade, environmental policy, and the very possibility of liberal democracy itself. Those of us committed to democratic values, truth, and human rights, feel compelled to resist. And yet the fight against Trump is hardly a united front. In this collection of essays, Jeffrey C. Isaac argues that the threat posed to liberal democracy by illiberal forces today, from Trump and his authoritarian counterparts in France, Hungary, Poland, and Turkey, warrants a strong democratic response, centered on both defending and extending the core commitments of liberal democracy. Isaac articulates a politics that bridges the gap between liberalism and leftism, pointing the way toward more productive disagreements and more meaningful, effective alliances. To acknowledge the challenges of globalization, to confront fear of the foreign and the foreigner, and to defend truth and the deep meaning of words: that is to be for liberal democracy and #AgainstTrump. Published with Public Seminar. Public Seminar is an online publishing project of The New School. PS publishes articles that provide useful, constructive, illuminating or thought-provoking contributions to the conversation of the times. Using the broad resources of social research, PS seeks to provoke critical and informed discussion by any means necessary in order to confront the fundamental problems of the human condition and pressing problems of the day. Jeffrey C. Isaac is James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of many books, including Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, Democracy in Dark Times, and The Poverty of Progressivism, and is a Contributing Editor at Dissent and Public Seminar.
Download or read book Pandemic! written by Slavoj Žižek and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-05-20 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As an unprecedented global pandemic sweeps the planet, who better than the supercharged Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek to uncover its deeper meanings, marvel at its mind-boggling paradoxes and speculate on the profundity of its consequences? We live in a moment when the greatest act of love is to stay distant from the object of your affection. When governments renowned for ruthless cuts in public spending can suddenly conjure up trillions. When toilet paper becomes a commodity as precious as diamonds. And when, according to Žižek, a new form of communism – the outlines of which can already be seen in the very heartlands of neoliberalism – may be the only way of averting a descent into global barbarism. Written with his customary brio and love of analogies in popular culture (Quentin Tarantino and H. G. Wells sit next to Hegel and Marx), Žižek provides a concise and provocative snapshot of the crisis as it widens, engulfing us all.
Book Synopsis John the Posthumous by : Jason Schwartz
Download or read book John the Posthumous written by Jason Schwartz and published by OR Books. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John the Posthumous exists in between fiction and poetry, elegy and history: a kind of novella in objects, it is an anatomy of marriage and adultery, an interlocking set of fictional histories, and the staccato telling of a murder, perhaps two murders. This is a literary album of a pre-Internet world, focused on physical elements — all of which are tools for either violence or sustenance. Knives, old iron gates, antique houses in flames; Biblical citations, blood and a history of the American bed: the unsettling, half-perceived images, and their precise but alien manipulation by a master of the language will stay with readers. Its themes are familiar — violence, betrayal, failure — its depiction of these utterly original and hauntingly beautiful.
