Machine maintenance
Technicians worry more about the social damage another technician can do in their territory than about what might happen with the machine, perhaps because the machine would be easier to repair than the delicate social equilibrium.
The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine by Stewart Brand in Books in Progress (2024)
Shockingly debilitating
We believe that computing as it is used in science today will be seen, in retrospect, as shockingly debilitating. The computer in its current form will be seen as disconnecting scientists from their models and data, from the physical world that they’re studying, and from each other. The computer will be considered a barrier to deep collaboration and deep understanding.
The communal science lab by Bret Victor, Luke Iannini, Shawn Douglas, and Joanne Cheung (2024) + the wider updated Dynamicland website
Algorithmic fairness
Algorithmic fairness should be understood not as a novel invention, but rather as an aspiration that reappears persistently in history. […] Each time, these efforts seek to reform judicial practice and to incorporate such prescriptions into the law. Yet, each time, affected people organize collective resistance against the prescribed definitions of fairness. The conflicts and definitions are increasingly complex, as each iteration has inherited ever more assumptions from the last.
The Long History of Algorithmic Fairness by Rodrigo Ochigame in Phenomenal World (2020)
Uchronia
Uchronie (l’utopie dans l’histoire) by Charles Renouvier (1876) (rediscovered in Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg (2010))
Plus a related article about using uchronian mapping:
If the aim of the uchronian map is to challenge the illusion of a deterministic reading of history as inevitable, this cannot be achieved by presenting a counter-history whose counter-facts themselves present an inevitable alternative trajectory
Future(s) Perfect: uchronian mapping as a research and visualisation tool in the fringes of the Olympic Park by Mara Ferreri, Rhiannon Firth, and Andreas Lang in Livingmaps review (2016).
