Today global civil society and privacy advocates draw attention to the mass surveillance that digital life and tools - and the complicity of corporate entities - has engendered. The NSA and Edward Snowden scandals are just the latest revelations in a crisis that has been growing for years; witness this Wired article that discusses whistleblower… Continue reading Resist Mass Surveillance
Tag: Cold War
Digital Labor, Cold-War Roots
Doing some reading over the past week, I was prompted to think about, then comment on, a chapter by Friedrich Kittler on Cold War computing technology and the implicit (and explicit) ways in which an examination of so-called "defense technology" comes into direct contact with, and within the purview of, media studies, information studies and labor studies. Specifically, I am interested in uncovering the history of these technologies and their development, particularly when the when many defense technologies have been considered value-neutral or even as beneficial (and perhaps were, particularly when they moved from the province of military applications to consumer or mass-market ones). Additionally, the process of uncovering the hidden labor embedded in digital and computing technologies and processes, is inextricalbly tied to the critically important task of uncovering their hidden agendas, applications and roots within the military-academic-industrial complex.