Restless Device

Today’s internet is not the utopia that the technology-builders promised. With disinformation campaigns, hate groups, bullying, advertisements, and corporate and government surveillance, it’s hard to feel optimistic about life online. These problems are not incidental to today’s platforms– they grow out of structures and assumptions that are built into the foundations of these systems. This episode introduces a series of episodes about the history of the elements that make up the social web. By looking at the underlying political philosophies, struggles and comprises between competing visions, and paths not taken, we can better understand the origin of the problems and imagine new kinds of solutions. References Read the episode script here. Music is from Broke for Free. Read Mark Zuckerburg’s 2012 Initial Public Offering Letter (here). Find his 2017 “Building Global Community” letter (here). The theoretical basis for this episode comes out of a variety of critical perspectives. I’ll dig into specific elements of those traditions in future episodes, but I can put a few stakes in the ground here by saying that lately I’ve been thinking about Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and Michel Foucault’s Language, counter-memory, practice. Also, the discussion of the power dynamics and importance of paying attention to multiple stories from multiple perspective also brings to mind Chimamanda Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” TEDGlobal 2009. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Steelmaking is an archetype of the rise and fall of American industry and has received a lot of attention in the run-up to and aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election. This episode is about steelmaking in the 1960s and 70s– at the turning point from growth to decline. I look at how a new automated technology (Basic Oxygen Furnace) disrupted the workforce and how trying to maintain racial segregation made the industry and union less prepared to adapt to the changes. This is a story about how once prosperous steelmaking regions became the rust belt, but it also offers lessons for facing the new kinds of automation that will soon transform every kind of work. Correction (1/22/17): In the episode, I mention that the US makes about as much steel now as it did in the 1960s. This was drawn from Collard-Wexler and De Loecke’s study (see references) which compared 130 million tons of steel in 1960 to 110 million tons in 2000. This was the period that saw the most dramatic drop in steel employment. During the 2009 recession, US steelmaking dropped by half and has not yet fully recovered, so 2016 production was still 30% lower than it was before the recession. Images References and Further Reading On the overall process of steelmaking and the basic oxygen furnace, the classic description is Harold E. McGannon and United States Steel Corporation. The Making, Shaping, and Treating of Steel: 9th Ed, 1971. For a more contemporary description see the American Iron and Steel Institute. For more on the spread of the basic oxygen process see Sharon Oster, “The Diffusion of Innovation among Steel Firms: The Basic Oxygen Furnace,” The Bell Journal of Economics 13, no. 1 (1982): 45–56. For the introduction of computers and automation in the steel industry, see Katsura, et al, “Computer Control of the Basic Oxygen Furnace,” The Journal of Metals 16(4), 1964: 340-345, and Harold Plant, “Computer Technology in the Metal industry,” Metals Engineering 11(3):4-7. For more on the effects of automation and technological change on the steel industry, see Allan Collard-Wexler and Jan De Loecke, “Reallocation and Technology: Evidence from the US Steel Industry,” American Economic Review 2015, 105(1): 131–171, or United States Bureau of Labor, Technology and Its Effect on Labor in the Steel Industry, 1994. For a big picture view of manufacturing in the US, see Michael J. Hicks and Srikant Devaraj, “The Myth and the Reality of Manufacturing in America,” Ball State University Study, 2015. For some terrifying, though well-founded, predictions on the future impact of automation, see Peter Andrew, John Ip, and John Worthington, “Fast Forward 2030,” CBRE Research Report, 2015, and Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerization?” Oxford Martin School Working Paper, 2013. For a history of black workers’ struggles from someone who was on the front line of the fight, see Herbert Hill, “Race and the Steelworkers Union: White Privilege and Black Struggles,” New Politics, vol. 8, no. 4 (new series), 2002, or hear from the steelworkers themselves in the documentary

People think 3D printing is going to change the world. They imagine ways that it might transform our society, economy, and culture. In this episode I look at why 3D printing is so compelling– why everyone is so interested in it right now. I talk about where 3D printing came from and how it’s changing, examine the structure of how people popularly imagine 3D printing, and look at the Utopian hopes that people attach to the technology. Notes, Images, and References: Here’s a quick summary of the early history of 3D printing: Amanda Davis “Layer-by-Layer: The Evolution of 3-D Printing” The Institute: IEEE News Source, 14 November 2014. Chris Anderson has a nice history of 3D printing and some interesting thinking about potential changes in manufacturing and entrepreneurship. Anderson is also the source for the analogy with the development of computers. Chris Anderson, Makers : The New Industrial Revolution. London: Random House Business Books, 2012. Make Magazine’s 2015 “Ultimate Guide to 3D Printing” featured some interesting reflections on the changes in the design and presentation of printers. Here are some examples of big predictions for 3D printing: Paul MacInnes. “The 3D Revolution in Your Own Front Room.” The Guardian. “How 3-D Printing Could Disrupt the Economy of the Future.” Bloomberg.com.

The Lisp programming language is strange, amazing, and beautiful. Some say it is the most elegant and powerful language ever created. You can learn all the basics in a few minutes, but the language is also subtle and sophisticated and learning it can bring you face-to-face with the underlying structure of thought. For decades, Lisp was the main language for artificial intelligence research and it was also the basis for two important teaching languages– Scheme and Logo. Recently, aspects of the Lisp way of thinking have also shown up in the United States’ Next Generation Science Standards. In this episode I look at where this language came from, how it works, and how it became part of the national discussion about education. Show notes, images, and resources: Here are some basic examples of Lisp code. This first example just adds two numbers. Note that the statement is really just a list. (plus 2 2) Here is a more complicated example that shows a function definition, a conditional, and the infamous lambda function. This function raises a number q to the s power. Note that the power function appears in its own definition. This is called recursion and it is an important part of Lisp programming. (def power (lambda (s q) (cond ((eq s 0) 1) (t (times q (power q (next-smaller s))))))) For a real sense of the flavor and power of Lisp, check out the code for Lisp’s “Meta-circular” evaluator. This is a Lisp function that evaluates Lisp functions. It also turns out to be almost identical to John McCarthy’s original mathematical description of the language. You can jump right into the deep end. There are a ton of resources for learning Lisp. You could try an interactive version of the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. For more on the technical history of Lisp, see John McCarthy, “History of Lisp,” Stanford AI Laboratory Memo, 1979. and Guy L. Steele and Richard P. Gabriel, “The Evolution of Lisp,” ACM SIGPLAN Notices 28, 3 (March 1993). For the original description of the language, see John McCarthy, “Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressionsand Their Computation by Machine, Part I,” Communications of the ACM 3(4):184-195. and John McCarthy, “A basis for a mathematical theory of computation”. In Computer Programming and formal systems, 1963. For more on Scheme, see Gerald Jay Sussman and Guy Lewis Steele, Jr’s Lambda Papers. For more on the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, check out the book or an archived online version of the course. For a lot more on the development of logo, and all the people involved, see the LogoThings webpage. You’ll find interviews with Solomon, footage from early experiments, and a lot more. Also, check out Seymour Papert’s original Logo papers, and his book,

What if we could build a machine that ran forever without using up any fuel? Such a machine would be a perpetual motion machine, and, sadly, it is impossible. Even so, people have been trying to build them for as long as people have been building machines. Perpetual motion machines appear in many early books about machines, and hundreds have been patented. In this episode I look at how and why these impossible devices have interested so many people for so long. The answer is related to how people see inventors and to a tension between thermodynamics and the technological imagination. In the end, perpetual motion machines also give us a way to think about today’s ecological concerns. Notes and References: For an overview of perpetual motion machines, see Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume, Perpetual Motion: The History of an Obsession (St. Martin’s Press, 1977). For a collection of primary sources, see Henry Dircks, Perpetuum Mobile, Or, Search for Self-Motive Power, during the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries (London, 1861). For a reflection on the importance of perpetual motion in the early 18th century, see Simon Schaffer, “The Show That Never Ends: Perpetual Motion in the Early Eighteenth Century,” The British Journal for the History of Science 28, no. 2 (June 1, 1995): 157–189. For more on the history of thermodynamics, see Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain (University of Chicago Press, 1999), or Crosbie W. Smith, “William Thomson and the Creation of Thermodynamics: 1840-1855,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 16, no. 3 (January 10, 1977): 231–288. For more about the relationship between religious and scientific ideas about a finite world, see Helge s. Kragh, “Cosmology and the Entropic Creation Argument,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 37, no. 2 (March 2007): 369–382. The term “restless technology” (from which the title of this podcast comes) is from Hans Jonas, “Toward a Philosophy of Technology,” in Hastings Center Report 9/1 (1979): 34-3, and reprinted in Robert C Scharff and Val Dusek, ed., Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition : An Anthology (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2003). Music for this episode is: Jiony, “Not Found (Invisible)” on Old Song EP, and Jiony, “A Veces” on Waiting for the Sun. [DISPLAY_ULTIMATE_SOCIAL_ICONS]

Technology can be strange and wonderful. It is a creative, expressive, and speculative pursuit that can tell us about who we are and where we’re going. In this episode, I introduce the topic of the podcast series and reflect on the similarity of engineering and art. Like artists, people who make technical things act as antennas: they pick up the invisible currents of life and translate them into tangible things. Just for fun, here are some more images of antennas: Sources and Notes: The Ezra Pound quote “Artists are the antennae of the race” is from: Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1951). It is probably better known from the introduction of Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (New York : McGraw-Hill, 1964). For some core text on the philosophy of technology look for: Robert C Scharff and Val Dusek, Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition, An Anthology (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), or, if you can find it: Anthonie Meijers, Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences: Handbook of the Philosophy of Science v. 9., (Netherlands: North Holland, 2009). Music for this episode is: Pocahaunted “Track 6” from Live at the OCCII – June 22, 2009 The featured image is from: Rankin Kennedy, Electrical Installations, vol. V, (London: Caxton, 1903), via the Wikipedia Commons. [DISPLAY_ULTIMATE_SOCIAL_ICONS]