Unlike the previous model, the display is fused to the glass, which means replacing the LCD requires buying an expensive display assembly. The RAM is now soldered to the logic board—making future memory upgrades impossible. And the battery is glued to the case, requiring customers to mail their laptop to Apple every so often for a $200 replacement. The design may well be comprised of “highly recyclable alu-minum and glass”—but my friends in the electronics recycling industry tell me they have no way of recycling aluminum that has glass glued to it like Apple did with both this machine and the recent iPad.

We care because we care

technologies and practices which rise (or sink) to the level of infrastructure are frequently invisible until breakdown, and that special acts and moments of “infrastructural inversion” may be required to call these phenomena and their associated politics back to the center of thought and action.

Can the fixer know and see different things—indeed, different worlds—than the better-known figures of “designer” or “user”?

vis-ibility may be tied crucially to systems of reward and recognition

This chapter argues that breakdown, maintenance, and repair constitute crucial but vastly understudied sites or moments within the worlds of new media and technology today. It argues that much of what we care about as media and technology scholars is implicated or enacted in exactly such moments, and that the productivist bias of the field obscures this fact. It asks how we might begin to think differently around the phenomena of breakdown, maintenance, and repair, and how we might use this difference to launch other and more hopeful programs of research. And it argues for the contributions that broken world thinking and a repair-centered ethics might make to the project of defining an appropriate moral and practical stance vis-à-vis the world of media and technology today.

human value is preserved and extended

media studies should attend not only to the cloud’s externalities, but also the management strategies common to externalities and data alike. Microsoft’s data center placements, carbon offset purchases, and green energy buys are all structured by fungible mediation. It is this orientation that must be contested.

ata and carbon

In this place, “Plants and animals will be bred to reduce their useless parts: stringless beans, boneless chickens, skinless beets.”1 There would be no parasites, no weeds, no stray ani-mals, no trash, no dirt, no dust, and “no spills, no breakage, no smoke or smog.” Silence would prevail, and “friction” would be “reduced to the minimum needed to keep us erect and keep things in their place.” As part of this friction-free campaign, “the edges of the continents” would even be “smoothed to reduce the tidal losses.”2 This vision of a waste-free society seems as startling as the wasteful one.

Silicon Valley Superfund site, hazardous waste log, 2005. (Photograph by author.)

life-cycle

This natural history method, then, signals a distinct approach to materiality—not just as raw stuff, but, rather, as materiality effects.27Electronic fossils are in many ways indicative of the economies and ecol-ogies of transience that course through these technologies. Electronics are not only “matter,” unfolding through minerals, chemicals, bodies, soil, water, environments, and temporalities. They also provide traces of the economic, cultural, and political contexts in which they circulate. To begin to develop a more material account of these dematerialized tech-nologies requires accounting for the multiple registers of what consti-tutes materiality—not as the raw matter of unproductive nature made productive, nor even as “second nature,”28 but as a complex set of mate-rial processes and relations.

designed with increasingly shorter life spans

discarded monitors and mobile phones, printers and central processing units, scattered on curbsides and stacked in the dark spaces between buildings.

. a lot of people who didn ’ t have a clue what to do to create conversation would just type in their favorite song lyrics, or in the case of people at tech schools like [Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute], recite entire Monty Python routines verbatim.

natural enough business decision

One of the manifestations of this uncertainty is the struggle over metaphors, a struggle with very practical, physical, and technological consequences. What was spam like? To decide the answer to that question was to decide indirectly what the network itself was like and how people and their machines should behave on it. This question was played out to great effect in the shaping of law.

Without having spam in the picture, we do not entirely understand much of the foundational conversations that continue to shape life together online.

One is the failure of previous meta-phors to accurately describe what spam is like for purposes of specifying laws or creating programs.

Furthermore, they complicate the notion andpossibility of control—

After all, junk, trash and waste have not traditionally been among the mostpopular topics in cultural theory.

egarded as little more than an anomaly or a social prob-lem associated with addiction and lack of control

It should also be noted that theproportional share of pornography is inflated for the purposes of filter soft-ware marketing.

33% to 66% ofall global e-mail traffic, although seasonal estimates have been as high as80%

The critical thing to understand is that the internet democratizes, if it does, only through its interaction with preexisting institutions and organizations—working with them and around them, and creating new alternatives that interact with them.

five major failure modes

Adrienne Massanari analyzed the design and algorithms of Reddit, showing how these affordances enabled the Gamergate campaign to take off,15

Gamergate

here are important discrete interventions that can help alleviate the present sense of disorder. In particular, we emphasize efforts to make sure that political advertising becomes more transparent and susceptible to public scrutiny because we see large scale preference manipulation as the core of the platform business, and we see that core business presenting a profound future threat to democracy.

ere, we suggest that a shift in emphasis in how journalists practice objectivity, from demonstrative neutrality to accountable verifiability, could help counteract some of the reinforcement and legitimation that the present practice creates on the background of highly asymmetric propaganda practices.

Those inevitable en-counters will be less traumatic and shocking to th ose who are pre-pared and able to recognize the strategies they use to attack their targets—including how they use Greek and Roman antiquity to bol-ster their credibility.

Kill All Normies

the GamerGate movement

Dead White Men and Angry White Men

Predictably, I became the target of a troll storm, and in the days and weeks following, I received hundreds of anti-Se mitic tweets and emails, many with attached images of my face (and th ose of my family members) photoshopped into a gas chamber or a concentra-tion camp. Others threatened me with sexual assault or detailed which gun they would like to use to shoot me.

when Jay-Z quotes Plato’s Euthyphro.1

If we believe that al-leged rapists are innocent until proven guilty, then on some level, do we also have to believe that victims might be lying until they can prove that they are telling the truth?This apparent paradox is the natura l extension of the approach to rape allegations in the Red Pill. It is also needlessly reductive, since both the accuser and the accused may be telling the truth as they see it, and th ere may not be an objective truth on which all par-ties can agree. Rather than accept this level of nuance, however, many find it easier to assume that women are natura l liars

“Men Should Start Recording Sex with a Hidden Camera,”

We cannot stop th ese men from using and abusing the history and literatu re of the ancient world in service of a patriarchal, white nationalist agenda. But by revealing how this self-mythologizing works, we can develop strategies for counteracting its pernicious influence.

Social media has el-evated misogyny to entirely new levels of viole nce and virulence.

LML`JBXacMQcXA;c(B?AXcXMc!MBX;Q

s
s
s
sJ%

-sJs
s
s%
s - 
s s
s- 

-ss
   
s
s
ss s -


sE  ss 
 s s'

Osiis 

s
s 
s   ss ss  ss
s   s sN



s> 9Gss.s  F. s ss ss  . <s..s<s
ss.
s  
<s.
s 
<s.
s  
ss 
<s s.
s 
ss  
, QSs

s  s

ss   
s

ss
 ss
 s 
Žss
s
)s 
ss
s 
s 
¦  s s

  ss
ss

ss s,s s


s
s
s
s sss


&s
s
s s
s
s sss
s s
ss  s s
s


s s
s ss
 
s  s s   ss#
š9  ,

)JË

3

s s  ss

 s s
s
 
s(s  s

ss ss
s s
s 
s s
 
*s

s
s



s  s

s
§

Yet few were unaware of the ease with which the toad proscrip-tion could be circumvented -- all the toadee had to do (all the ur- Bungle at NYU presumably had done) was to go to the minor hassle of acquiring a new Internet account, and LambdaMOO’s character registration program would then simply treat the known felon as an entirely new and innocent person.

toad

In it, Haakon announced that the wizards from that day forth were pure technicians.

December 1993, The Village Voic

heartfelt calls for Mr. Bungle’s dismemberment

the default internet identity is anecdotally white, male, and middle class, but there is sur-prisingly little research on how internet practice enacts these normative identity markers. J

its lack of efficacy in shepherding mem-bers to “actual” political activity that would benefit Black communities

Networked online identity distributes internal Black community discussions, ren-dering them visible to an audience who is primed to receive and respond to those struggles. Networked Black online identity also makes Black community discourses visible as a textual and multimedia archive to out-group audiences; these audiences are not always directly addressed in internal Black discourses but are always present as signifiers.

he receipts.”

For example, computer scientists based atIBM’sTJWatson Research Centre

The anomalous objects discussed in this volume can therefore be takenas indices of this novel media condition in which complex transformationsoccur.

Neil Postman)

how various assemblages of bodies (whether technolog-ical, biological, political or representational) are composed in interactionwith each other and how they are defined, not by forms and functions, butby their capabilities or casual capacities. In other words, we are interested inhow one assemblage, a heterogeneous composition of forces, may affectanother.15

The term “spam,” which today is interchangeable with “junk mail,” started off as simply denoting annoying behavior. On early chat systems, people would often type “spam, spam, spam, spammity spam”—a reference to a Monty Pythonsketch where a couple’s breakfast is repeatedly interrupted by Vikings singing about Spam

Harassment exists on two spectrums at once—one that is defined by behavior and one that is defined by content.

information “wants to be free.”

“A week before the change, players reported that more than 80% of chat between opponents was negative. But a week after switching the default, negative chat had decreased by more than 30% while positive chat increased nearly 35%. The takeaway? Creating a simple hurdle to abusive behavior makes it much less prevalent.”

You should make a budget that supports having a good community, or you should find another line of work.