“Videodrome is the best film ever made about the internet. When I first watched David Cronenberg’s 1983 masterpiece, I was studying the sociology of knowledge and beginning to apply these theories to the web, which researchers and everyday commentators seemed to treat as weirdly foreign.”
“I felt that we needed a fundamental shift in understanding when it came to what new, social technologies are: something implosive, interpenetrative, bloody and breathing, not something virtual, separate, or parallel, far away and cold as outer space.”
“Human bodies have always been technological, materiality and information always co-construct, as theorists like Donna Haraway and Katherine Hayles have long known.”
“Bodies mesh with media signals and merge with devices.”
“Cronenberg shows his humans diving into television sets or self-inserting Betamax tapes; his original screenplay title for Videodrome was Network of Blood. If The Matrix is Descartes, then Videodrome is Haraway and Network of Blood could be a synonym for real life.”
“I’ve argued that “online” and “offline,” like “body” and “mind,” aren’t like two positions on a light switch—a perspective I’ve called digital dualism. Instead, all social life is made of both information and material; it’s technological and human, virtual and real. Together with friends and colleagues, I’ve theorized an experience of the internet based less in cyberpunk and more in body horror—and not just horror but other things too, like joy.”
“Because social media are more like the social world than like traditional media, and because technology is bodied, our talk about contemporary technologies—and by “our” I mean everyone’s, not just that of experts and academics—should be as varied and complex and nuanced as our talk about the social world and inner experience.”
“Popular discourse on technology has sustained the idea that there is a digital space apart from the social world rather than intrinsic to it, while popular tech writing is often limited to explaining gadgets and services as if they’re alien, as well as reporting on the companies that provide them. This work is crucial, but writing about technology is too often relegated to the business section. On this site, it will be the main event.”
“We’re not a news or reviews site, but we will describe the tech world—specifically how that industry shapes the world we live in today. To that end, we aim to address the political uses of technology, including some of the worst practices both inside and outside the tech industry itself.”
“I’ll serve as editor-in-chief. Rob Horning, Alexandra Molotkow, and Sarah Nicole Prickett are the senior editors, and Soraya King is the managing editor.”
“Our backgrounds are largely not tech-oriented, reflecting the editorial philosophy that technology is best discussed as lived.”