The Laboratorium

November 6, 2010 at 1:29 PM

In the midst of an otherwise hit-or-miss review of The Social Network, Zadie Smith writes:

What Lanier, a software expert, reveals to me, a software idiot, is what must be obvious (to software experts): software is not neutral. Different software embeds different philosophies, and these philosophies, as they become ubiquitous, become invisible.

November 7, 2010 at 4:31 PM

john walker

Any representation of the world may or may not tell you much about the world, but that representation will always reveal all of the mind that constructed that ‘representation’.

November 8, 2010 at 12:51 PM

jessamyn

Just the idea of a “default” is pretty foreign to a lot of novice technology users. Explaining why a thing is set to do the things it does, who it’s more convenient for, goes a lot way towards explaining some of the things that otherwise just seem vexing and random.