Category Archives: quotes
experience is the life of the law
from The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr: The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal [...]
goodbye learning, hello workforce training
Some sad news regarding the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project: Microsoft has joined forces with the developers of the “$100 laptop” to make Windows available on the machines. According to Wired, Microsoft has had their sights on emerging markets in developing countries for a while now and have viewed low-cost children’s laptops as ideal [...]
Also posted in commodification, education, informationalism, play, work, youth Tagged CD, Krstić, Microsoft, Negroponte, OLPC Leave a comment
we are the ones we’ve been waiting for…
From Chopra & Dexter’s Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software, p173: Jacques Ellul imagined an iron cage constructed of technology (Ellul 1967), but never the possibility that the cage could be unlocked by its prisoners. We began with a historical note on hacking: the significance of hacking should now be clear. [...]
information assimilation and the life of the child
From Dewey’s The School and Society, p100: It was forgotten that the maximum appeal, and the full meaning in the life of the child, could be secured only when the studies were presented, not as bare external studies, but from the standpoint of the relation they bear to the life of society. It was forgotten [...]
Also posted in education, informationalism, youth Tagged assimilation, Dewey, experience, pedagogy, school Leave a comment
congressional oversight
via secrecy news: The Government Accountability Office maintains an office at the National Security Agency but it remains unused since no one in Congress has asked GAO to perform any oversight of the Agency, the head of GAO disclosed last week. Despite multi-billion dollar acquisition failures at NSA and the Agency’s controversial, possibly illegal surveillance [...]
Bloomberg on technology
From the Wired interview with Michael Bloomberg: Wired: Kids sit on the steps of the Brooklyn library trying to get Wi-Fi. Why can’t we solve the problem that roughly half the people in this city don’t have broadband? Bloomberg: We will. That’s what capitalism is all about. As there’s demand, the private sector will come [...]
Also posted in governance, informationalism, youth Tagged bloomberg, capitalism, CD, democracy, technology Leave a comment
A word from the Reverend Billy…
From The Statement of Belief: The corporations want us to have experiences only through their products.
Mitchell on the State
From Society, Economy, and the State Effect: The line between state and society is not the perimeter of an intrinsic entity that can be thought of as a freestanding object or actor. It is a line drawn internally, within the network of institutional mechanisms through which a certain social and political order is maintained.
Geosniff (v.)
From Jonathon Keats, Wired 15.09: To search the web by location, delivering regionally pertinent information to users and regionally pertinent users to advertisers.
Also posted in commodification, informationalism, methodology, surveillance Tagged digital footprint, geosniff, Keats Leave a comment
Berners-Lee on the “insidious” quality of vertical integration