Alan N. Shapiro
media theory,
science fiction theory,
future design research
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Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial
Is computer science a science? What is at stake in the question of “the sciences of the artificial”? Herbert A. Simon was a distinguished professor for five decades at Carnegie Mellon University, one of America’s most elite and important technology institutes of higher education. Simon won the Nobel Prize in economics and the Turing Award.
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Armin Nassehi: Complexity Not Capitalism
Armin Nassehi is a sociology professor at a prominent German university in Munich. He is one of Germany’s most well-known and successful public intellectuals. His 2019 book Muster: Theorie der Digitalen Gesellschaft received much praise in numerous book reviewsin Germany’s major newspapers and weekly news magazines.
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D. Fox Harrell’s Phantasmal Media
In his book Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression (2013), D. Fox Harrell strives to establish a new relationship between the human or posthuman imagination and computing. Writing code, or working actively with computational media, are, for Harrell, activities of artistic, cultural, social, critical, and personally empowering expression.
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McKenzie Wark on the Situationists
The media theorist and activist McKenzie Wark has published two books on the Situationists – The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011) and The Spectacle of Disintegration: Situationist Passages Out of the 20th Century (2013).
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Baudrillard’s Importance for the Future
Baudrillard is highly controversial as a thinker. Over the course of time, his work has had as many detractors as it has had defenders and enthusiasts. Some of Baudrillard’s critics absurdly even accused him of celebrating the postmodern media-cultural condition of simulacra and semiotic signs.
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The Third Order of Simulacra: Simulation and Hyperreality
The third order of simulacra in Baudrillard’s genealogy is also known as simulation: the system of objects, the consumer society, the system of models and series, simulated differences generated by “the code,” the post-World War II era of media, shopping mall architectures, and the American way of life.
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Early Baudrillard
The postmodern recombinant culture of cyber-commodities is a system of simulated differences or differences-in-sameness. The sign-object takes on its meaning in a system of marginal or minimal differences from other sign-objects, according to a code of hierarchical significations (Coke and Pepsi, McDonalds and Burger King, the subset of formula-generated episodes of a TV series).
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Gerry Coulter, Sophie Calle and Baudrillard’s “Pursuit in Venice”
I did not know Gerry Coulter well personally. Yet I have considered him to be my friend. Our intellectual, political, and academic perspectives have been very close to one another. We have been comrades-in-arms, fighting for the same cause. We have both been deeply engaged with Jean Baudrillard’s system of thought.
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Baudrillard and Existentialism: Taking the Side of Objects
Jean Baudrillard is well known for his theory of simulation (simulacra, virtuality, hyper-reality, models and codes precede ‘the real’) – expressed most iconically in his book Simulacra and Simulation (1981) – a breakthrough fundamental apprehension about the situation of ‘postmodern’ culture.
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Jean Baudrillard and Consumer Objects
Baudrillard sets out in his first book to “classify a world of objects.” He wants to go beyond a strictly “technological” analysis of how ordinary objects are intended – by the companies that manufacture them – to operate and to be used. He will instead study the “directly experienced psychological and sociological reality of objects.”
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Jean Baudrillard and America
America is no mere impressionistic travelogue, but rather a witty and serious interpretation of American democracy and capitalism today, based on a synthesis of political ideas drawn from many different currents of contemporary thought, notably including left-wing neo-Marxism and right-wing entrepreneurial libertarianism.
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Total War Meets Pure War
This was one of the very first pieces of writing that I did in my life. I wrote it during the first two weeks of the Gulf War in 1991. I was living in New York City at the time. I tried to balance the perspectives of Chomsky and Baudrillard/Virilio.
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Year of Hell (Star Trek: Voyager)
Janeway and Voyager lock in a course correction to avoid a rogue comet, and accidentally enter a region of space rich in Class-M planets that is in dispute between the Zahl and the Krenim. Data from the newly upgraded Astrometrics Lab indicate that the Zahl are preeminent in this Delta Quadrant sector designated as Spatial Grid 005.
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The Physics of Wormholes
According to Lawrence M. Krauss in The Physics of Star Trek, “a surprising amount of modern theo- retical physics research,” clustered in the area of astrophysical wormhole studies, is directed towards establishing the scientific and mathematical prerequisites for timetravel. “Wormhole time machines are easy to design,” explains Krauss.
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The Physics of Warp Drive
Although light from the moon reaches us in about two seconds, and light from Mars in a few minutes, light from Proxima Centauri or Alpha Centauri takes about four years to reach us. A spaceship traveling at current rocketry technology speed would take about ten thousand years to reach any possible Class-M planet.
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