amazon
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On Tech: When Amazon flexes its power
To Amazon and its defenders, this feels unfair. Amazon is just doing what stores have always done — just better. This question about whether technology superpowers can play fair by the tried and true rules is a central legal, economic… Continue reading
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Wonder Woman’s Secret Past
Wonder Woman’s origin story comes straight out of feminist utopian fiction. In the nineteenth century, suffragists, following the work of anthropologists, believed that something like the Amazons of Greek myth had once existed, a matriarchy that predated the rise of… Continue reading
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How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine | The Nation
Mechanical Turk is the innovation behind “crowdworking,” the low-wage virtual labor phenomenon that has reinvented piecework for the digital age. Created by Amazon in 2005, it remains one of the central platforms—markets, really—where crowd-based labor is bought and sold. As… Continue reading
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The Hole in Our Collective Memory: How Copyright Made Mid-Century Books Vanish – Rebecca J. Rosen – The Atlantic
…Last year I wrote about some very interesting research being done by Paul J. Heald at the University of Illinois, based on software that crawled Amazon for a random selection of books. At the time, his results were only preliminary,… Continue reading
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This Image Should NOT be Seen by the Whole World | How to be an Anthropologist
I find the Facebook meme distressing, not because of the Belo Monte Dan Project, but because the author and all of the people who share it have fed into and bolstered (even if unknowingly) a narrative that depicts indigenous people… Continue reading
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Tax Incentives to Companies Bleeding Towns Dry, With Few Results
A lot of the abatements & other supports to bring in business to townships & cities centers on one main process: job creation. Yet nobody tracks any meaningful statistics to see if the economic argument holds up. Yes we can… Continue reading
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The Constantly Rebooting Control-Jellyfish
The Society of Control operates through constantly modulating networks which are interconnected by countless channels & circuits. A nice metaphor for the quasi-living structure that generates the Book of Life would be squids and jellyfish. …Perhaps the Economist should have… Continue reading
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Survival of the biggest | The Economist
Interesting cover for this week’s Economist. Survival of the biggest | The Economist. Continue reading
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