What follows is a rough approximation of my brief introductory talk at this year’s Ars Electronica Symposium which I co-curated with Isaac Mao. The presentation is at Slideshare. Videos of all the talks are available on the website. The Revolutionary Meme When Ars Electronica first began over 30 years ago, it was one of the [...]

A few years ago — around the time that the housing bubble went pop — I was having dinner with a group at a swanky soul food restaurant in San Francisco. Just as we were about to order, in walked the boyfriend of one of the girls at the table. Bleached white grin, total captain [...]

The Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria Next month Isaac Mao and I are headed back to Linz, Austria for this year’s symposium, titled “The Public Square, Squared.” I’m thrilled with the list of speakers and can’t wait to learn from them. A lot has happened since the 2009 symposium on Cloud Intelligence. Here’s a [...]

Lo que sigue es mi breve intervención en el panel de “A quien le pertenece la información” que se realizó la semana pasada en Campus Party. Un video de la discusión está disponible en YouTube. Quiero ofrecer una pequeña anécdota para cuestionar como es que entendemos la pertenencia de la información. La anécdota viene de [...]

I have always been shit at falling asleep. Ideally I would fall asleep at 11 p.m. every night. Instead, this is typically when I sit back down at my computer to read all the open tabs and unread emails that have accumulated throughout the day. The I check Twitter one last time. I glance at [...]

As in most countries, unemployment — and especially youth unemployment — is the term that most frequently find its way onto the front pages of Mexican newspapers in recent weeks. The stated concern is that youth unemployment could foreshadow continued economic recession. The unstated concern is that all of these unemployed youth are all of [...]

Tomorrow morning representatives from more than 55 national governments meet in Washington DC to kick off what might be a multilateral, 21st century reboot of good old democracy-building, a term tainted by eight years of George W. Bush. Activists and international media soon associated “democracy promotion” with dropping bombs, shuttling suspects to covert CIA prisons, [...]

The following is a small excerpt of a much larger text I’ve been working on for the past few weeks: To refer to the worldwide protests of 2011 as the Arab Spring is to mark a serious misnomer. In fact, I would argue that it all began in November 2010 with the student protests in [...]

The world spins by ever faster, a phenomenon not just of growing older — accumulating our own extensive, personal archive — but also a product of every generation leaving behind more for us to chew on, despite the same amount of time to chew. We mostly survive by keeping our heads down, locking out the [...]

What follows is my translation of José Merino’s article for this month’s Nexos magazine. With clearly presented statistical analysis, he shows that the deployment of the Mexican military in the so-called “War on Drugs” has led to a sustained increase in the homicide rate in those places where troops have been deployed. I hope that [...]