While designers and technologists are all obsessed with usability (and rightfully so!), this little-observed topic of “abusability” deserves more attention.
Ashkan Soltani plans to give a talk centered on an overdue reckoning for move-fast-and-break-things tech firms. He […]
The first time I heard about Vasilis van Gemert’s experiment, in the lead-up to his talk at beyond tellerrand Berlin 2017, I openly admit it took me a moment to get my head around the idea. The thinking he applies to challenge and extend prevailing perspectives of “inclusion” can […]
This paper tickles my brain not just in the privacy domain, but neatly ties it into my interest in technology non-use. The researchers test the so-called shadow profile hypothesis: “the data shared by the users of an online service predicts personal information of non-users of the […]
The web can no longer be a career choice for people who want to work in a field where there are no obligations, no ethics, no rules, and no constraints.Heather Burns once and for all dismissing the legend of the martyr techie tortured by ever-increasing regulation around […]
Addressing the widespread concern with the big tech giants taking too much control over people’s lives, Kashmir Hill enrolls in a self-experiment:
The common retort to these concerns is that you should “just stop using their services.” So I decided to try.What […]
The makers of the Ghostery tracking blocker plugin use data from that plugin (on an opt-in basis) to analyze and present who web users are being tracked by.
In this thorough and historically grounded analysis of “sameness” in design (a write-up of a conference talk), Thomas Byttebier discusses various aspects of why a lot of things look alike, what might be problematic aspects of that, but also the undeniable benefits of widely accepted […]
“Whether or not it draws on new scientific research technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.”L. M. Sacasas ponders over this 1969 quote by Paul Goodman. He highlights Goodman’s position on technologists’ as moral philosophers for who it […]
An incredibly good, and equally important, essay on why the by-products of digital business are even more toxic than the pollution caused by the industrial age. It’s a challenge at societal scale and needs to be treated like that.
The feculence has become so dense that it is […]
An interesting hack project: a “teachable parasite” device (open source), feeding smart home assistants noise unless the user really wants to interact with them. It’s a small, remote-controlled device sitting on top of the home assistant, disturbing its microphones unless the user […]
A summary of Nick Couldry’s Nov 2018 lecture “Colonised by data: the hollowing out of digital society” at the Institut für Internet und Gesellschaft (HIIG) Berlin. The lecture builds on the comparison of today’s digital economy with traditional […]
This is a neat project: Ben Grosser’s browser extension “Twitter Demetricator” strips the Twitter UI of all displayed metrics such as likes, retweets etc. to inspire reflection on how these numbers affect us as we use the site:
[…] what are the effects of these […]
