Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, January 02, 2016

Retro-Future! Top Posts for 2015

These are more or less the most widely read posts I published on Amor Mundi last year, setting aside a few one-liners or snarky captions which seemed to me too insubstantial to care about whatever their popularity. Some of these still turn out to be quasi-storified twitter essays micro-blogged elsewhere before they were archived here (I did a lot of that this year and it remains an open question for me whether this has lowered the value of my online writing even as it has widened its readership), and a couple of them are far more interesting for the comments they occasioned than the content they began with. Most are worth a read if you happened to miss them but like what I write in general. I begin with the most popular post of the year.

A Neoliberalization of Basic Income Discourse?, February 19
AI Isn't A Thing, January 15
Welcome to New Readers Interested in the Racism and Sexism of Transhumanist Movements (UPDATED: Now With More Anarchy!), March 8
Robocultic Q&A With A Tech Journalist, December 19
Robot Gods Are Nowhere So Of Course They Must Be Everywhere, January 8
Ten Propositions on Taxes and Democracy, April 15
Scattered Speculations on Science Fiction Through the Futurological Looking Glass, September 11
The Graeber and Thiel Non-Debate on Technological Progress, October 17
Basic Income Politics Are Not "Beyond Left and Right," January 1
Will HBO's Westworld Be A "Film of Ideas"? August 16
Queen of the Libertechbrotarians, July 29
On Guns (Only) in America, October 3

There is no question in my mind that the reason the "Neoliberalization of Basic Income Discourse" post attracted so much attention was because Charlie Stross happened to link to it approvingly. This is worth mentioning not least because the post of mine which was actually read by the most people last year was written a few years back, Ten Things You Must Fail To Understand If You Want To Be A Transhumanist For Long, but also got mentioned by Stross this year and hence read by his audience. Of course, the piece of mine that has been most popular in the history of this blog by far, The Unbearable Stasis of "Accelerating Change," owes its readership to the mention the great Bruce Sterling once made of it and, yet again, to Charlie Stross' much appreciated positive discussion of it when I first posted it. I do think Stross' post on that post still draws dozens of readers to that raving rant a week! For the most part, I am happy to say that I tend to like myself the posts of mine which others seem to like, and it pleases me that the work which has had the most influence (if that is the word for a low-tier public intellectual like me) and is treated as most representative -- apart from the snarky screeds -- is still the Existenz piece Futurological Discourses and Posthuman Terrains, which is actually the piece of published writing of which I am personally most proud.

Related:

Top Posts for 2014
Top Posts for 2013
Top Posts for 2012

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