You have to trust each other, yes, but even more you have to trust the box - that it knows what it is doing: you have to believe it is haunted, in the same way that you believe that Superman can fly or Gandalf can cast spells. You must believe it might have been on that mantelpiece, and that microscopic traces of Hardy’s fibrous muscular heart might still be found on the inside, and that if you concentrate really hard, you might very well be able to tune into the analogue impressions left by people’s hands, their voices, the waves that hit the atoms of the wood and dislodge them forever in an imprint that could be reconstrued and remade into the original sound like the self-destroying grooves of an antique wax cylinder.

UNITED MICRO KINGDOMS: A DESIGN FICTION The United Micro Kingdoms (UmK) is divided into four super-shires inhabited by Digitarians, Bioliberals, Anarcho-evolutionists and Communo-nuclearists. Each county is an experimental zone, free to develop its own form of governance, economy and lifestyle. These include neoliberalism and digital technology, social democracy and biotechnology, anarchy and self-experimentation and communism and nuclear energy. The UmK is a deregulated laboratory for competing social, ideological, technological and economic models.

Telegraph code books, in the hundred years of their use (ca. 1850-1950), served primarily as an information compression technology, matching a phrase or sentence with a code word, thus saving money on telegram costs. On occasion, they were also used for secrecy, since typically only someone possessing the same code book as the sender would be able to decode the message. In the books’ heyday, virtually every industry had its specialized version; shipping, banking, railways, carpets, and rubber all had code books designed especially for them, as did many other industries as well. In addition, general purpose code books also flourished, many going through multiple editions. The code books were widely used, especially by businesses but also private individuals. Estimates are that 95% of all transatlantic telegraph traffic was encoded, and a high percentage of domestic traffic as well. After the telegraph became obsolete, most libraries and individuals purged the books from their collections; of the hundreds of thousands of originals, perhaps only hundreds remain. Old enough to have progressed from junk to collectible, they have now become prized items and sell for fancy prices at online auction sites.

So alright you don’t like technology. Technology is the human. We’re the tool-making species. There is no human independent from its tool apparatus. The question is: does it have to be these tools? Absolutely not. So how does one reimagine the potential, the set of the scientific discoveries and their technical applications, and open up so life could be otherwise? That’s the critical task. There’s an absolute failure to perform the critical task in relation to technology. There’s a kind of “No, I don’t like the iPhone.” Well, what the fuck do you like then? What do you want? Describe another world. Describe it to me. For seven billion people. Among the Situationists, someone like Constant Nieuwenhuys did exactly that, he imagined an entire other planet based on mid 20th Century technology. That’s more of a conceptual exercise than a real engineering project, but it opens a door to asking question about how, well, how do you reengineer cities? So that they’re survivable would do for a start, but better than. We really could abolish work, y’know? Not completely. But we could really get it down to a few hours a day. So, well, how’s that project going? We’re gonna run out of cheap labor eventually. It can’t go on forever. There’s signs that China has turned a corner. They just don’t wanna do these boring factory jobs. Alright, so we’ll go exploit cheap labor in Vietnam. But it can’t go on forever. So that opens the question of, well, we’re only using this cheap labor ‘cause it’s so cheap, sitting there all day with a screwdriver assembling those cheap plastic toys. Now you look at all those plastic toys with ten screws in them. Well, they’re only designed to have ten screws because it’s cheaper to use the labor than to design the fucking thing properly so it snaps together. So at some point technology has to be part of the critical conversation. And that’s where hackspace culture, hacker culture, some of maker culture, is so incredibly helpful. It’s equipping people with a basic knowledge of how our world actually works. But you have to add the question of how could it work better, how could it work differently. And as a totality, not just “I want a better widget.” What would be a better system? That’s the whole critical design question. The central question to me now is the avant garde of design.

Debord is reading Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe, who is this great urban sociologist, the first person who was trying to map people’s pathways, and Debord, riffing off Henri Lefebvre’s The Critique of Everyday Life, is gonna start with the predictability of that. Now we’ve reached the point of real-time analysis and application—which runs almost exclusively to selling you stuff. One thing the Situationists were doing was looking for the free space in the Paris of the 1950s, with this massive police presence and surveillance. In the division between work time and leisure time and its routine, there was still a place of play, provided you live by the slogan Never Work. Well, there is no longer any difference between work and play. There’s no such thing as leisure and non-leisure. We’re all working all the friggin’ time. But when we’re working, we’re goofing off half that time anyway. Does anyone even know when they’re working anymore? I’m talking about in what the Situationists called the ‘overdeveloped’ world. I do all my work in coffee shops, and I see people constantly juggling stuff that’s either work or not work, god only knows what it is. As the grid tightens, it in certain senses becomes more diffuse. So it’s not to deny how geolocation is involved in surveillance or 3D printing is rapidly becoming proprietary, but it’s to figure out what can you produce within the space of those things that suggests another world entirely.

We have portrayed these machines as maniacal and destructive, conspiratorial and unfeeling. In so many cases those attributes have been evident in their speech – or their silence. We know too well that somewhere, behind the tin exterior of their inorganic bodies, a language of pure numbers reeled back and forth in billions, reverberates unchecked. We could never communicate with them in such terms.

In our exclusive TODAY Moms survey of 7,000 U.S. mothers, 42 percent said that they sometimes suffer from Pinterest stress – the worry that they’re not crafty or creative enough. Symptoms include staying up until 3 a.m. clicking through photos of exquisite hand-made birthday party favors even though you’ll end up buying yours at the dollar store, or sobbing quietly into a burnt mess of expensive ingredients that were supposed to be adorable bunny cookies for the school bake sale. “It tricks you into thinking that everyone is baking their own bread,” said Jenna Andersen, 28, a Palo Alto, Calif., mom of two, photographer and blogger behind the hilarious site Pinterest Fail, which chronicles Pinterest-inspired crafts and recipes gone oh-so-wrong. She’s still a fan of the site, but she’s learned not to let herself think that the artfully curated photos represent anyone’s reality. “Pinterest is largely a site of unrealized dreams.

when thinking about new technologies in legal terms, the metaphors we use to understand them are crucially important. Lawyers are used to understanding legal subjects metaphorically, especially in developing areas of the law like new technologies. If we get the metaphors wrong for robots, the lessons of cyber-law reveal that it could have potentially disastrous consequences. Finally, we argue that one particularly seductive metaphor for robots should be rejected at all costs, the idea that robots are “just like people” and that there is a meaningful difference between humanoid and non-humanoid robots. We call this idea “the Android Fallacy.

The world’s most powerful information companies have inserted some of the internet’s foundational optimism in their mission statements. These tech giants talk about themselves as heartwarming charities. Every billionaire CEO is his own private Dalai Lama. Pseudo-liberal jabberwocky of assumed universal validity permeates the junkspace of mission statements, annual reports, and TED talks, especially when it comes to the cloud. Microsoft wants to help everyone around the world “realize their full potential.”14 Facebook aims to give “people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”15 Skype makes it “simple to share experiences with the people that matter to you, wherever they are.”16 And Instagram, bought by Facebook, envisions “a world more connected through photos.

The political, legal and jurisdictional consequences of the cloud are slowly becoming apparent—right at the time when we are unlikely to withdraw from it. The cloud is just too good. We won’t stop using our iPhones, iPads, Androids and Kindles. Paypal is still our frenemy. Happily the captives of the cloud, we will tweet our critiques of it, and Facebook-broadcast our outcries over its government back doors. But the story is not over yet. Will the anarcho-libertarian roots of the internet kick back at the cloud’s centralized architecture—or are they forever overrun by it? Has the cloud assumed its final form, or is there still a time and a place for surprises?