An independent, ad-free leftist magazine of critical essays, poetry, fiction, and art.
Part V: Keeping the Lights On
by Michael Malloy
I’m getting tired of using the word “technology” in this series. It feels so vaguely retrospective, like I’m referring to some historical phenomenon, and not, for instance, the laptop I’m writing on right now.
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by Mel Gammie
Thousands of Uber and Lyft drivers in multiple countries logged off their apps and went on strike on May 8th to protest Uber’s impending IPO. This unprecedented move by gig economy workers to mobilize against their employer was a noteworthy display of dogged collective organizing— with, unfortunately, underwhelming results.
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by Mel Gammie
Nascent climate activism movement Extinction Rebellion has come under fire recently as videos continue to surface of the group cheering and clapping as their fellow demonstrators are led away in handcuffs. Hundreds of protestors have been arrested in the last few months as the group continues to stage disruptions across the UK and US.
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by Daniel Uncapher
Police are violence workers. The license to violence, like the license to commit rape, daylight abduction, and secret surveillance, has been granted by the state in exclusive perpetuity to the police, who are expected to use these powers to bring people into the justice system.
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by Ben Geier
Zionism is the gangrenous appendage to the body politic of American Jewry. It sits, unexamined and untreated, festering.
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Part IV: The Anxious and the Bored
by Michael Malloy
So now we have left behind the “home computer” and are in the process of replacing the “personal computer” as the primary means of digital communication. Without delving into senseless techno-pessimism or generational abstractions, we have to ask what this technology is doing to us, and how it structures our lives.
Read Moreby Maru Pabón
Depending on how you see it, Alex Honnold has two ways to die: by falling off a mountain, or falling out of the frame. The first would confirm the mortality of the most gifted climber in the world; the second makes amends for its voyeuristic sins by making him immortal.
Read MorePart III: Two Houses
by Michael Malloy
The establishment of the new role, the consumer of computers for the home, was only made possible by the proliferation of new form factors and roles. The demands of institutions and business became less central to the producers of home computers.
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by The Collective
This article appears in our first print issue, Pattern Machines.
The on-demand delivery technology boom, the latest spawn of the gestational revolutions of the app-driven gig-economy, is in full swing. Yet alcoholism and alcohol abuse are already serious problems that are poised to be exacerbated by becoming horrific bedfellows with digital addictions.
Read MorePart II: A Genealogy of Silicon
by Michael Malloy
Computers were fun once. They were fun in the way that rally cars are fun: for the people who got deeply into them, the real joy derived from learning how they worked. Computers of the past were, of course, infinitely more finicky, frustrating, and limited in all respects, disadvantaged by their miniscule memories and slow-as-molasses processors.
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