iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

E z r a @bruit.eurosky.social · 20/10/2026

Sketching out a future project with a personal development i call the "spite stack"

A stack of book: robber barons, freaks of fortune, family values, against money, liquidated, and wall street; on a table, with a bookcase in the backgrounf

E z r a @bruit.eurosky.social · 19/10/2026

World's silliest grilled cheese: lao gan ma beans on one side and green tarragon mustard on the other, cheddar in between (multigrain)

A close up picture of molten cheese hinting at small black things underneath

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E z r a @bruit.eurosky.social · 17/10/2026

It should be illegal for imperialist propaganda art to be so fun to look at

Part of durer's triumphal arch for maximilien i from 1517

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E z r a @bruit.eurosky.social · 15/10/2026

Guys this show looks sick af

A tv on a small stand with a picture of gloves in the back

A setup image of a full ceiling artwork and an almost full wall next to it

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E z r a @bruit.eurosky.social · 10/10/2026

Really excited to host works by Alex Apostolidis ("Act IV", a multimedia installation ensemble of photo, sculpture, and electromechanical art) and Maddie Lychek ("Dyke Clothing Swap", which is exactly what its title says it is) for our second show at Biter Gallery, titled "My God Is A Jacket".

Show poster for "My God Is A Jacket" a show of installation, visual, and performance art. runs 13th through 22nd October 2026 (1-6pm or by appointment), vernissage on October 16th 5-8pm, dm for address or appointments

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E z r a @bruit.eurosky.social · 24/09/2026

can't believe this is 40 years old and I still have to deal with "computer literacy" (how do i @ every librarian on here?)

That information is a form of knowledge alienated from human bodily experience is rarely recognized by theorists of education. E. D. Hirsch’s recent best-seller, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987), is a striking example of the grotesque results that come from thinking of education or knowledge in terms of information. Information is a term central to his argument: &dquo;culturally literate&dquo; people possess certain pieces of information that others do not (and he and his collaborators kindly provide us with a list of &dquo;information&dquo; that culturally literate Americans possess). But consider the strange title of his book. Once &dquo;cultural literacy&dquo; would have been taken as a ridiculous redundancy: to be literate was to be cultured. Now literacy has become a name for a skill in handling various forms of information (computer literacy being another oxymoronic marriage of terms). Hirsch explicitly views culture as a content area, a pool of information (possession of which will naturally help you &dquo;communicate better&dquo;). It consists of an objectifiable array of facts, phrases, and allusions which will supposedly save American discourse from its well-known penchant for cheapness. But the cheapening has already taken place in Hirsch’s assumption that culture resides in a list rather than a life. To be awake to the possible varieties of human experience, present and historical, is the mark of an educated human being. True knowledge is not to possess information, but to throw it away. It is to run up against the borders of one’s own ignorance, to recognize one’s mortality and finitude. That is something that a computer cannot do, while a computer, in Hirsch’s terms, could quite easily be culturally literate. In sum, empiricism took the forms out of information, leaving it the chaotic &dquo;stuff’ of sensory experience. But it remained anchored in the human mind and senses.

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E z r a @bruit.eurosky.social · 24/09/2026

(sigh) there is nothing new under the sun [I'm highlighting every sentence]

presentation as statistics, newspapers, novels, and encyclopedias. People who, thanks to statistics, &dquo;see&dquo; something intellectually they could not see sensually, are put in a curious position. They know something that they can never experience for themselves. They have a kind of knowledge that no mortal can have. Statistics offer a kind of gnosis, a mystic transcendence of individuality, a tasting of the forbidden fruit of knowledge. But what a strange and ironically modem kind of gnosis! It is not a mystic insight into the nature of the universe, but a cross-sectional glimpse of a population’s behaviors at a single moment. The actuarial table is a kind of degraded mysticism, a form of secular omniscience (checked, as always, by probabilities). This new kind of knowledge-knowledge that absolves individuals from the claims of deixis, of existing at one place and at one moment is of course none other than information. Information is knowledge with the human body taken out of it. Information, which in empiricism had meant the experience of an individual, with statistics came to mean the experience of the state, insofar as the state can be said to have experience. Implicit in statistics is a kind of knower not subject to mortal limits. The nation poses starkly the problem of a collective subject of knowledge (Khoo, 1988). Statistical data (information) are of course gathered by mortals, but the pooling and analysis of them creates an implied-1 that is disembodied and all-seeing. Information is a secular return of the Augustinian God, a dispersed intelligence whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, sustaining and giving order to the world. Computers do efficiently and elegantly what the state already long was doing: they make vast invisible aggregates intelligible and manipulable. To use computer language, the &dquo;software&dquo;-the programs and practices-was already in place in the state long

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E z r a @bruit.eurosky.social · 23/09/2026

and maybe I missed earlier work but by 2018 Feenberg explicitly aligned his project with a post-marxist frankfurt school critical theory of technology rather than STS, see ch3 and 4 of "Technology, Modernity and Democracy", which seems mostly rooted in an unconvincing cognitive / regulatory debate

The field of science and technology studies has broken through barriers to the understanding of science and technology as social phenomena. The material of this chapter explains the social background of the success of this field in establishing itself academically and influencing a broad public. Scholars in this field have sought to deflate the technocratic claims supporting uncritical faith in scientific and technical expertise. Their scepticism has made a contribution to social movements around scientific-technical issues. But as fundamentalism becomes a serious threat we must find a better balance between the critiques of science and technology. The danger in confusing the cases is that democratic demands on technoscience will be understood to blur the line between cognitive and regulatory issues. Unless these issues are kept clearly separate the advocates of public involvement will appear to be irrationalists rejecting science when in fact they need it precisely in order to control the activities of technological actors such as corporations.

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E z r a @bruit.eurosky.social · 22/09/2026

co-construction is explicitly defined as a the "mutual shaping of users and technology" so I'm unsure how it's constitutively biased agaisnt the tech shaping of soc even though obviously some co-construction analyses were better than others

p3 of How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technology by Pinch and Oudshoorn 2003

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E z r a @bruit.eurosky.social · 22/09/2026

But people have been explicitly engaging with TD between marxisms and HaPoT regularly since at least the 70s? again we can disagree but I think this is enough to move the taboo into debate territory or at least historicize a transition e.g.

Bimber, Bruce. 1990. “Karl Marx and the Three Faces of Technological Determinism.” Social Studies of Science 20 (2): 2. https://www.jstor.org/stable/285094.
Dafoe, Allan. 2015. “On Technological Determinism: A Typology, Scope Conditions, and a Mechanism.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 40 (6): 1047–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243915579283.
Galambos, Louis. 1989. “Looking for the Boundaries of Technological Determinism: A Brief History of the U.S. Telephone System*.” In The Development Of Large Technical Systems. Routledge.
Peters, John Durham. 2017. “‘You Mean My Whole Fallacy Is Wrong’: On Technological Determinism.” Representations 140 (1): 10–26. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2017.140.1.10.
Scranton, Philip. 1995. “Determinism and Indeterminacy in the History of Technology.” Technology and Culture 36 (2): S31–53. https://doi.org/10.2307/3106689.
Shaw, William H. 1979. “‘The Handmill Gives You the Feudal Lord’: Marx’s Technological Determinism.” History and Theory 18 (2): 155–76. https://doi.org/10.2307/2504754.
Smith, Merritt Roe, and Leo Marx, eds. 1994. Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism. MIT Press.
Wengenroth, Ulrich. 1998. “Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Review).” Technology and Culture 39 (4): 755–58. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.1998.0088.
Wyatt, Sally. 2008. “Technological Determinism Is Dead; Long Live Technological Determinism.” In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, Third Edition. MIT press Cambridge, MA.

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E z r a @bruit.eurosky.social · 22/09/2026

Trevor Pinch, in his interview with Tosoni talked by 2016 about the way SCOT people eventually accepted partial and nuanced non-human agencies. I guess it's fine if we see this differently but to me the rejection was primarily boundary work, not philosophical critique