An independent, ad-free leftist magazine of critical essays, poetry, fiction, and art.
by Michael Malloy
Part VI: Finding Our Phones Again
When we talk about the future today, we envision the valleys and peaks of the modern world in sharp relief. Our flirtation with inadvertent self-extinction through climate collapse brings to some despair, to others a perverse and nihilistic joy. Still others reject in principle that the danger is real.
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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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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.
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Part 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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Part 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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Part 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.
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