Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
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Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
"LOVE LOVE LOVE your futorological brickbats! Love them! You are in fine company with Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary with these." -- Paulina Borsook
"Devoted to highly rhetorical nitpicking, but it is fun to read." -- Chris Mooney
"Rather close but correct reading." -- Evgeny Morozov
"Mean, but true." -- Annalee Newitz
"Dale Carrico's skewering of the salvific pretensions of Silicon Valley's soi disant savior/founders never disappoints." -- Frank Pasquale
"Pretty breathless, but I guess it had to be said." -- Bruce Sterling
"An essential reality check for those who are too entranced by transhumanism to notice the sordid reality behind the curtain." -- Charlie Stross
2 comments:
> [W]hen did this 'become a thing' become a thing?
http://www.quora.com/When-and-where-did-the-phrase-its-like-a-thing-now-originate
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Satvik Beri, Human After All
"It's like a thing now" is really just another way of saying
"It's a thing", which mostly became popular in 2007 according
to Google Trends. Here "a thing" means something popular/part
of pop culture. For example, Vine is a thing now. Ponies are
a thing. Big Data is a thing. Netflix was a thing for a while,
then became not a thing as a lot of their content disappeared
and they lost a lot of steam in late 2011, but it's becoming
a thing again thanks to House of Cards and Arrested Development.
Facebook would not be considered a thing-it's too old. A thing
has to be recent enough to be in peoples' consciousness. People
may use Facebook all the time, but they don't talk about it as
much as they used to.
Path was a thing for a while last year, but it seems to have faded.
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I always assumed the pedigree included the Next Big Thing... but in the negative form now prevalent (how can this still be a thing? when did this become a thing? etc) the "thingness" seems ontologically different than the thing that was the Next Big one. I dunno.
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