Cory Doctorow: Context: Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · censorship, copyright, creativity, intellectual property, internet, politics, technology
One of the internet’s most celebrated hi-tech culture mavens returns with this second collection of essays and polemics. Discussing complex topics in an accessible manner, Cory Doctorow’s visions of a future where artists have full freedom of expression is tempered with his understanding that creators need to benefit from their own creations. From extolling the Etsy makerverse to excoriating Apple for dumbing-down technology while creating an information monopoly, each unique piece is brief, witty, and at the cutting edge of tech. Now a stay-at-home dad as well as an international activist, Doctorow writes as eloquently about creating internet, real-time theater with his daughter as he does in lambasting the corporations that want to limit and profit from inherent intellectual freedoms.
Foreword by Tim O’Reilly
Publisher Tachyon Books, October 2011
ISBN 978-1-61696-048-3
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license
V2_: The Era of Objects (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, design, internet of things, object, technology
This e-Book, the third in the series of Blowup Readers released by V2_, explores the future of objects, beyond the clichéd fantasy of the flying car.
Blowup is a series of events and exhibitions that explore contemporary questions from multiple viewpoints. Blowup zooms in on ideas, bringing into focus clear pictures of how art, design, philosophy, and technology are transforming our lives — or reinforcing the status quo.
Contributions by Anab Jain, Jon Ardern, and Justin Pickard; Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino; Rob van Kranenburg; Julian Bleecker; Ilona Gaynor; Ana Serrano and Tim Warner; Bruce Sterling
Introduction by Michelle Kasprzak
Publisher: V2_, Rotterdam, September 2011
Blowup Reader #3
53 pages
Levi R. Bryant: The Democracy of Objects (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · object, object-oriented ontology, onticology, ontology, philosophy, speculative realism, systems theory
Since Kant, philosophy has been obsessed with epistemological questions pertaining to the relationship between mind and world and human access to objects. In The Democracy of Objects, Bryant proposes that we break with this tradition and once again initiate the project of ontology as first philosophy. Drawing on the object-oriented ontology of Graham Harman, as well as the thought Roy Bhaskar, Gilles Deleuze, Niklas Luhman, Aristotle, Jacques Lacan, Bruno Latour and the developmental systems theorists, Bryant develops a realist ontology that he calls “onticology”. This ontology argues that being is composed entirely of objects, properties, and relations such that subjects themselves are a variant of objects. Drawing on the work of the systems theorists and cyberneticians, Bryant argues that objects are dynamic systems that relate to the world under conditions of operational closure. In this way, he is able to integrate the most vital discoveries of the anti-realists within a realist ontology that does justice to both the material and cultural. Onticology proposes a flat ontology where objects of all sorts and at different scales equally exist without being reducible to other objects and where there are no transcendent entities such as eternal essences outside of dynamic interactions among objects.
Print and downloadable e-book versions will be available soon from the publisher.
Publisher: Open Humanities Press, September 2011
New Metaphysics series
ISBN 978-1-60785-204-9
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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