Alan N. Shapiro, Technologist and Futurist

Blog and text archive about media theory, science fiction theory, future design, social choreography, Computer Science 2.0, new media art, robots and androids, Star Trek, The Prisoner, Jean Baudrillard, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, and Marshall McLuhan

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Sartre and Derrida: The Promises of the Subject, by Christina Howells

May 25th, 2011 in Category: Jacques Derrida, Jean-Paul Sartre

The subject of Derrida’s relations with Sartre has preoccupied me for around twenty-five years, since I first discovered Derrida’s work in fact, in 1980, the year of Sartre’s death, and felt certain he owed an enormous amount to the patterns of thinking, if not necessarily the conclusions, of his philosophical predecessor.
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A Critique of the Idea of Neutral Language, by Marc Silver

May 26th, 2010 in Category: Chaim Perelman, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Language, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sigmund Freud, Wikipedia

There has been intense scrutiny brought to bear upon the ways in which various disciplines deploy rhetorical devices to “argue their case,” as well as to consolidate their identities and maintain them intact. Marc Silver builds his argument upon such topical foundations, but also shifts the ground in new and original ways.
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Jacques Derrida and the New Computer Science

May 20th, 2010 in Category: Charles Babbage, Humanities Informatics, Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida was a Jewish-French philosopher born in Algeria who is known as the founder of deconstruction. Derrida’s best known book is “Of Grammatology.” That early work of Derrida is the book by him that most interests me as the basis of the New Computer Science.
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Deconstruction and the Q-Bit

May 8th, 2010 in Category: Alexis Clancy, David Bohm, Humanities Informatics, Jacques Derrida, Mathematics, Roland Barthes

The Q-Bit of quantum computing can acquire the value of 0 or 1 by autonomously perceiving what is going on in a system in real-time, in a “receiving” way, going beyond the explicit setting of the value of a bit as 0 or 1, and bit-based data structures, by the subject-centered programmer.
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Inscribe Philosophy into the Heart of Computer Science

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Alexis Clancy, Humanities Informatics, Jacques Derrida, P.D. Ouspensky

There are many individuals in the technology and cyberculture communities who are not just “engineers” or techie programmers. They are already working to bring software together with art and sociology. However, in their projects, they are working two or three levels removed from the core of computer science.
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Richard Rorty on Radicalism, Liberalism, and Poetic Language

April 13th, 2010 in Category: Jacques Derrida, Language, Polysexuality, Richard Rorty

I was very impressed reading something that Richard Rorty wrote about revolutionaries in his essay "The Contingency of Community" ( in the book "Contingency, irony, and solidarity"). Rorty argues very cogently for a kind of “impossible” deconstructive synthesis of radicalism and liberalism.