I read this document in the manner suggested in the Twitter stream: "read Abstraction Fashion out of order. Read down the table of contents and jump to whatever excites you most!" Mind you, except for novels and literature, that's how I read most things anyway. Life is pretty bring when the only way to read something is from beginning to end! I often read blog posts backwards, from bottom to top. Anyhow, I had read about half this 254 page PDF (double-spaced and a quick read) and had a pretty good sense of what was being said: computing is abstraction, algorithms are performative, the 'value' of networks is subjective. This all definitely seems right to me. And this: "the logical conclusion of anti-waste rhetoric is to justify all activity in terms of efficiency... (but) from this perspective, every action humans take and every desire we indulge may well be evaluated as wasteful... From the position of efficiency, the visual arts, for instance, can look like an exorbitant excess."
Today: 3 Total: 3 [Direct link] [Share]
