HERE'S A QUICK typology of tech journalism today: news reporting ("Amazon Announces Layoffs Affecting 18,000 Employees"), gadget reviews, company and founder profiles, opinion essays (Zeynep Tufekci et al.), investigative work ("The Uber Files"), industry digests (TechCrunch), personal blogs, Substacks, and if you're feeling generous-Hacker News comments and GitHub "issues." It's an incomplete catalog, but you get the idea. Yet surveying this landscape reveals a curious lacuna: software criticism.
To be clear: Technology criticism is nothing new. Depending on who you ask, it goes way back to Lewis Mumford, Herbert Marcuse, Martin Heidegger, and Marshall McLuhan. More recently, I assume you've at least heard of popular books like The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and The Attention Merchants and may even be familiar with technology critics like Jaron Lanier, Evgeny Morozov, and Ellen Ullman. Or Fred Turner, Gabriella Coleman, and Sherry Turkle, to name a few from the academic flank.
But software criticism is not the same as technology criticism. A work of software criticism is to Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" what a New York Times book review is to Virginia Woolf's "Modern Fiction." The latter is a more synoptic assessment of the field, while the former is a focused interrogation of a single work.
So where are software critics? Like the rise of novels in the 18th and 19th centuries or jazz in the 1920s, isn't software a defining artifact of our time? How in Turing's name hasn't a culture of software criticism emerged?
Esta historia es de la edición July - August 2023 de WIRED.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 8500 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición July - August 2023 de WIRED.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 8500 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
Women at the Bottom of the World
They go to Antarctica with dreams of studying the unknown. What they discover there is the stuff of nightmares.
RUSSIAN, GO HOME
WHEN MY COUNTRY WENT TO WAR, I FACED A CHOICE: Flee to a world where the truth might kill me - or seek peace in censored oblivion.
The Fateful Eight
THE STORY BEHIND THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL TECHNOLOGICAL PAPER IN RECENT HISTORY.
Can the Internet's Greatest Authenticity Machine Survive Wall Street?
When thousands of subreddits went dark in protest last summer, it exposed the tension at the core of Reddit - on the eve of the company's IPO. Now that synthetic media is flooding the internet, does the web's most reliably human forum represent a gold mine for investors, or an old-fashioned dumpster fire?
The Unnerving Presence of Javier Bardem
He's known for playing fanatics and murderous psychopaths. In real life, he loves his wife (and Brad Pitt) and cries during E.T.
HAPPY HAUNTING
IN A CHARMING game called This Discord Has Ghosts in It, up to 15 participants at a time gather in a Discord server that has been reimagined as a haunted house. (Of course.) Inside lies a maze of (chat) rooms where each player takes the role of either an eponymous spirit or a paranormal investigator.
THE MYTH OF METAL
How I became a Python programmer - and learned to love our abstract world.
SO YOU WANT TO REWIRE BRAINS
There's a lot to like about brain-computer interfaces, those sci-fi-sounding devices that jack into your skull and turn neural signals into software commands. Experimental BCIS help paralyzed people communicate, use the internet, and move prosthetic limbs.
FOR GIANT LIZARDS, PLEASE HOLD
The sounds of Slack have a secret history.
THE NERD-KING VIBES OF JENSEN HUANG
The Nvidia CEO turned a graphics-card company into a trillion-dollar AI behemoth. Now he wants to transform the rest of the world-health care, robotics, autonomous driving, the works.
