An independent, ad-free leftist magazine of critical essays, poetry, fiction, and art.
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.
Read MorePart I: Irresistible Impulse
by Michael Malloy
Very recently I found myself adrift, a ghost untethered from the world. I had lost my phone. I didn’t have my watch either—and so, having nothing but time, I went for a walk. It was cold, and my breath fogged in the air.
Read Moreby The Collective
A string of deaths of prominent Ferguson activists and their relatives, as well as others who were murdered in a similar fashion, has left lingering questions about the circumstances.
Read Moreby Tyler Walicek
This fall saw the completion of my first transcontinental road trip: a two-month jaunt out of San Francisco that took my girlfriend and I along the snaking coastlines of Oregon and Washington and into the sylvan quietude of Vancouver, B.C., then on a cannonball run across the Midwest and the Great Lakes to Philadelphia, D.C., and New York City.
Read Moreby Conor Arpwel
In his recent article for New York Magazine, Children of Ted, John H. Richardson ruminates on the recent rise of a fringe political movement centered on the writings of Ted Kaczynski, the ecoterrorist widely known as “the Unabomber.” On its face, Richardson’s article amounts to an eccentric human-interest story for a mainstream publication.
Read Moreby Michael Malloy
The world as we know it—the world of plastics, of cheap consumer goods, of the Internet—exists on a floated loan from the primordial past: a loan that has been silently accumulating interest. Our creditor, however, has not yet come to collect, and our deferments stretch on for lifetimes. We are paying for our lives in carbon, from ash to ash, dust to dust.
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