Not exactly new news, but the to my eye yet meager download numbers make spreading it compulsory: Project Gutenberg stores ↑eleven short stories by Philip K. Dick in multiple formats for free and legal download. Additionally ↑open culture links to … Continue reading →
Tom Wolfe’s book on the history of the U.S. Space program reads like a novel, and the film has that same fictional quality. It covers the breaking of the sound barrier by Chuck Yeager to the Mercury 7 astronauts, showing … Continue reading →
↓Barefoot into Cyberspace is an inside account of radical hacker culture and the forces that shape it, told in the year WikiLeaks took subversive geek politics into the mainstream. Including some of the earliest on-record material with Julian Assange you … Continue reading →
The cold was crisp and sharp like flint. (Le Carré 1962: chpt. 1) For a moment Fielding thought of Hecht pasturing in that thick body: it was a scene redolent of Lautrec. Yes, that was it! (Le Carré … Continue reading →
In my ↵post on John le Carré I somehow tried to vindicate my erupted interest in cold war spy fiction and my subsequent digesting of according novels and movies. Now ↑Bryan Alexander sent me excerpts from a ↑recent interview with … Continue reading →
In ↑Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile’s experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer … Continue reading →
‘↓The Machine Stops‘ is a science fiction short story or novella by ↑E. M. Forster, first published in 1909. Here is the story’s setting as ↑Wikipedia’s plot summary has it: The story describes a world in which most of … Continue reading →
[…] academic excursions into the mystery of human behaviour, disciplined by the practical application of his own deductions. (Le Carré 1961: chpt. 1) This part of him was bloodless and inhuman—Smiley in this role was the international mercenary … Continue reading →
Now that some reviews of my book ‘↑Cyberanthropology‘ have seen the light of day, it makes sense to begin to collect them [naturally they’re all in German]: The Titel-Magazin was first with ↑Ein Buch mit System! (27 September … Continue reading →
↑David Graeber‘s book ‘↑Debt: The First 5,000 years‘ (2011) just arrived on my desk. Unfortunately at the moment I don’t have the time to sit down and read it in peace. Nevertheless I skimmed through it, read a bit here … Continue reading →