Que ce soit Bitly avec Feelings, un système de signets permettant d’intégrer une appréciation simple et visuelle sur ceux-ci, Facebook avec le développement de la catégorisation des statuts, nombreux sont les systèmes (Path, Line, MessageMe pour n’en citer que quelques-uns de ceux qu’évoquaient Jenna Wortham pour le New York Times…) et les applications qui vous proposent d’associer de l’expressivité à ce que vous partagez, a minima via les fameuses émoticônes.

Like the relationships that we build within them, our platforms should yield satisfaction precisely because they’re non-trivial; they demand effort, which is another way of saying they require engagement with the world.

Cette thèse interroge le design depuis les pratiques de programmation en montrant qu’elles ne se réduisent pas à une industrie des programmes, qui empêche les inventions de naître tout à fait. Pour cela, elle confronte au sein d’une lecture non linéaire cinq moments de l’histoire du numérique (depuis Vannevar Bush en 1945, dont une traduction inédite est proposée en appendice, jusqu’aux usages contemporains du site web GitHub) à quatre formulations conceptuelles issues d’un corpus philosophique. Le choix d’auteurs qui n’ont pas directement voué leurs réflexions au design (comme Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt ou Walter Benjamin) permet de déconstruire un certain nombre de discours entourant la réception des technologies dites nouvelles. Critiquant nombre d’usages faits des notions de conception et de projet et s’appuyant finalement sur Gilbert Simondon, cette thèse s’intéresse à ce qui n’est pas prévisible dans les programmes. Elle soutient cinq axes ou directions pour une recherche dans le champ concerné : décentrer, authentifier, appareiller, traduire et désarticuler. La plausibilité de ces façons de faire du numérique, encore à l’état d’ébauche dans les productions contemporaines, peut intéresser les designers au-delà des spécialistes. Elle est avérée en fin d’ouvrage dans la description d’une fiction curatoriale.

Ce ne fut pas une guerre de scientifiques ; ce fut une guerre dans laquelle nous avons tous pris part. En mettant de côté leurs vieilles querelles, les scientifiques ont fait cause commune, partagé leur savoir et appris les uns des autres. Il fut passionnant de travailler en collaboration. Désormais, pour beaucoup, cela touche à sa fin. Quelle devrait être la prochaine mission des scientifiques ?

Pour les biologistes, particulièrement dans le domaine de la médecine, il devrait y avoir peu d’hésitation, la guerre ayant peu changé leurs habitudes de travail. En effet, beaucoup d’entre eux ont pu poursuivre les recherches entamées en temps de guerre dans leurs laboratoires habituels, une fois la paix revenue. Leurs objectifs resteront les mêmes.

Prenant acte d’une spécificité du design quant au travail des supports d’expression (Findeli, 2005), cet article se donne comme champ d’étude les formes de la recherche en design dans le contexte des thèses. En tant que jeunes doctorants/docteurs membres de l’association Design en Recherche [1][1]Réseau de jeunes chercheurs en design francophones créé en…, cet intérêt trouve son ancrage dans notre propre travail quant au développement d’une méthodologie adéquate, dans cette discipline encore récente sur le plan universitaire. Cette ouverture peut être considérée comme une opportunité pour les chercheurs en design, puisqu’ils peuvent construire eux-mêmes leurs méthodes d’écriture en empruntant et en « bricolant » d’autres disciplines. Il faut pourtant que cette liberté s’exerce dans un cadre, celui des structures institutionnelles susceptibles d’accueillir les recherches — environnement qui contraint par bien des aspects ce qui pourra être produit.

Cet article se propose d’étudier le template, objet graphique et numérique singulier qui structure une large part de l’environnement visuel et qui a profondément transformé les pratiques du graphisme depuis les débuts de l’informatique personnelle. À travers l’étude de ses évolutions au gré des développements des technologies numériques, cet article montre que les templates incarnent une rigidification progressive du travail de la composition graphique et qu’ils mettent en jeu une tension constante entre émancipation et contrôle des utilisateurs.

I have a vivid, recurring dream. I climb the stairs in my parents’ house to see my old bedroom. In the back corner, I hear a faint humming.

It’s my old computer, still running my 1990s-era bulletin board system (BBS, for short), “The Cave.” I thought I had shut it down ages ago, but it’s been chugging away this whole time without me realizing it—people continued calling my BBS to play games, post messages, and upload files. To my astonishment, it never shut down after all.

BBSes once numbered in the tens of thousands in North America. These mostly text-based, hobbyist-run services played a huge part in the online landscape of the 1980s and ‘90s. Anyone with a modem and a home computer could dial-in, often for free, and interact with other callers in their area code.

Dans un long et riche article pour The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic), l’historienne Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum, auteure du Crépuscule de la démocratie, Penguin Random House, 2020, non traduit) et Peter Pomerantsev (@peterpomeranzev auteur de Ce n’est pas de la propagande, Faber, 2019, non traduit) de l’Agora Institute de la Johns Hopkins University (@snfagorajhu), rappellent que pour Tocqueville, la démocratie américaine ne reposait pas tant sur des grands idéaux que sur des pratiques.

In a shockingly short amount of time, the internet has bound people around the world together and torn us apart and changed not just the way we communicate but who we are and who we can be. It has created a new, unprecedented cultural space that we are all a part of—even if we don’t participate, that is how we participate—but by which we’re continually surprised, betrayed, enriched, befuddled. We have churned through platforms and technologies and in turn been churned by them. And yet, the internet is us and always has been.

In Lurking, Joanne McNeil digs deep and identifies the primary (if sometimes contradictory) concerns of people online: searching, safety, privacy, identity, community, anonymity, and visibility. She charts what it is that brought people online and what keeps us here even as the social equations of digital life—what we’re made to trade, knowingly or otherwise, for the benefits of the internet—have shifted radically beneath us. It is a story we are accustomed to hearing as tales of entrepreneurs and visionaries and dynamic and powerful corporations, but there is a more profound, intimate story that hasn’t yet been told.

Et si nous réparions l’internet plutôt que les géants de la tech, explique le toujours pertinent Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) dans un édito pour la revue Communications de l’ACM (@cacmmag).

Plutôt que de chercher à réparer FB en le forçant à lutter contre la désinformation ou Google en l’obligeant à filtrer les contenus qui contreviennent au droit d’auteur – sans qu’il soit certain que ces approches portent leurs fruits, puisqu’il reste difficile de faire la distinction entre la parodie, le commentaire et leurs formes problématiques ou illicites – peut-être est-il temps d’opter pour une autre approche ? Et Doctorow de proposer de déporter notre regard pour mieux embrasser le problème. Pour lui, nous avons plutôt un problème de concurrence qu’autre chose. Les monopoles du « cartel des Big Tech », comme il les appelle, ne se résoudront pas en les contraignant à réparer leurs effets toxiques (au risque de leur donner toujours plus de pouvoir), mais en regardant ce qui cause et permet leur puissance. Pour Doctorow, c’est l’internet qu’il faut donc réparer. Pour combattre la concentration et la monopolisation des géants, c’est leurs silos qu’il faut abattre. Et pour cela, le régulateur dispose d’une arme assez simple et efficace et qui a déjà fait ses preuves : l’interopérabilité !

Elon Musk is just about the last person on earth (or Mars) you’d want in charge of communities, online or otherwise. He shares transphobic and anti-Semitic memes, promotes covid misinformation, has run afoul of the National Labor Relations Board for an anti-union tweet; the SEC even charged him with securities fraud over his tweets. Still it happened. Twitter accepted Musk’s out of the blue $44 billion buyout offer on Monday. Now the social media platform founded in 2006—and its two hundred million users—are set to be subject to the chaotic whims of the Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder.

Nous avons deman­dé à&nbsp;Hubert Guillaud, Rédac­teur en chef d’InternetActu et ana­lyste des grands mou­ve­ments et phé­no­mènes qui tra­versent le champ du numé­rique et de la poli­tique, son avis sur la pos­si­bi­li­té d’une poli­tique publique (pro­gres­siste) du numé­rique. <em>«&nbsp;Nous sommes cer­nés par des sys­tèmes néo­li­bé­raux aug­men­tés par le numé­rique et les sys­tèmes numé­riques de gauche sont inexis­tants&nbsp;»</em> constate-t-il. De l’orientation sco­laire aux mesures Covid, des pres­ta­tions sociales au tra­vail dans les pla­te­formes numé­riques, un délire cal­cu­la­toire s’est déployé et rend compte de la pro­fonde sym­biose entre pro­jet néo­li­bé­ral et pro­jet numé­rique. La pro­messe du logi­ciel libre est-elle suf­fi­sante pour chan­ger la donne quand une telle chape de plomb tech­no­ca­pi­ta­liste s’est enkys­tée dans nos vies&nbsp;? Com­ment faire pour repo­li­ti­ser la ques­tion numé­rique et l’in­clure dans un pro­gramme de gauche quand les États pro­fitent de la numé­ri­sa­tion pour pous­ser un agen­da néolibéral.

Qui possède la presse française ? 9 milliardaires possèdent 91% des quotidiens nationaux d'information vendus chaque jour en France, 44% de l'audience télévisuelle est réalisée par des chaines appartenant à 3 milliardaires.

About 10 years after TVs began to be ubiquitous in American homes, television broadcasting was a staggering financial success. As the head of the Federal Communications Commission observed in a 1961 speech to broadcast executives, the industry’s revenue, more than $1 billion a year, was rising 9 percent annually, even in a recession. The problem, the FCC chairman told the group, was the way the business was making money: not by serving the public interest above all but by airing a lot of dumb shows and “cajoling and offending” commercials. “When television is bad, nothing is worse,” he said.

Tech's market concentration—summed up brilliantly by Tom Eastman, a New Zealand software developer, as the transformation of the Internet into "a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four"—has aroused concern from regulators around the world.

Like a lot of singers, Piper Rockelle has a link at the top of her TikTok profile page where her over 8 million followers can check out her music. But instead of sending them to YouTube or Spotify, the link opens up an external landing page crammed with a little bit of everything. Splashed across a looping clip of Rockelle is a stack of hyperlinked blocks that direct fans to her merch store, her tour schedule, and her latest music video. You’ll also find a “love jar” that lets her accept tips, an “Ask Me Anything” form, an app where you can pay to pitch a dare for Rockelle to complete, and a private social feed that fans can unlock by either sending money or correctly answering a trivia question.

This is an image from the Snowden files. It is labeled “secret.”

Yet one cannot see anything on it.

This is exactly why it is symptomatic.

Marcella is eighteen and lives in a Texas suburb so quiet that it sometimes seems like a ghost town. She downloaded TikTok last fall, after seeing TikTok videos that had been posted on YouTube and Instagram. They were strange and hilarious and reminded her of Vine, the discontinued platform that teen-agers once used for uploading anarchic six-second videos that played on a loop. She opened TikTok, and it began showing her an endless scroll of videos, most of them fifteen seconds or less. She watched the ones she liked a few times before moving on, and double-tapped her favorites, to “like” them. TikTok was learning what she wanted. It showed her more absurd comic sketches and supercuts of people painting murals, and fewer videos in which girls made fun of other girls for their looks.

When you watch a video on TikTok, you can tap a button on the screen to respond with your own video, scored to the same soundtrack. Another tap calls up a suite of editing tools, including a timer that makes it easy to film yourself. Videos become memes that you can imitate, or riff on, rapidly multiplying much the way the Ice Bucket Challenge proliferated on Facebook five years ago.

Here is the optimistic read on the rise of TikTok, the latest online video platform du jour: never before has a generation been so inadvertently cineliterate. As Alexis Dickerson argued in her presentation on Film TikTok, young people - armed with mobile-friendly video editors and pandemic-induced boredom - are experimenting with the medium in the same way as Georges Méliès might. If the age of silent film was, as film critic and historian Pamela Hutchinson suggested in her Philip French Memorial Lecture, one of “young cinema” - protean, unpredictable, or downright weird - TikTok is as young as they get. 

On August 7, Donald Trump issued an executive order that would ban TikTok in the U.S., effective September 15, if its Chinese parent did not sell it to an American company. The stated reason is to combat any Chinese spying that might be facilitated by the app’s data collection practices and, more ludicrously, to address the app’s censorship of pro-minority protests and prevent the spread of conspiracy theories and disinformation about Covid-19 — things Trump is manifestly unconcerned about domestically. China certainly could be gathering TikTok’s data, as this piece by tech analyst Ben Thompson details. “That, though, is not the primary risk,” he writes. “What should truly concern Americans is the algorithm.”

As Diana Totok and her sister reached through the wire fence separating Romania from Ukraine to grasp her father’s hand, it occurred to her that she might never see him again.

Ukraine’s new wartime laws barred their father, a pastor, from fleeing the country with them. Nevertheless, he promised his teenage daughters and wife, Svetlana, that they would meet again soon.

“I was crying and having a panic attack … I was so frustrated and scared,” Totok says. “Still to this moment I’m not sure if I’m going to see him [again] or not.”

echnology frequently produces surprises that nobody predicts. However, the biggest developments are often anticipated decades in advance. In 1945 Vannevar Bush described what he called the “Memex”, a single device that would store all books, records and communications, and mechanically link them together by association. This concept was then used to formulate the idea of “hypertext” (a term coined two decades later), which in turn guided the development of the World Wide Web (developed another two decades later). The “Streaming Wars” have only just begun, yet the first streaming video took place more than 25 years ago. What’s more, many of the attributes of this so-called war have been hypothesized for decades, such as virtually infinite supplies of content, on-demand playback, interactivity, dynamic and personalized ads, and the value of converging content with distribution.

Leila has two identities, but Facebook is only supposed to know about one of them.

Leila is a sex worker. She goes to great lengths to keep separate identities for ordinary life and for sex work, to avoid stigma, arrest, professional blowback, or clients who might be stalkers (or worse).

Her “real identity”—the public one, who lives in California, uses an academic email address, and posts about politics—joined Facebook in 2011. Her sex-work identity is not on the social network at all; for it, she uses a different email address, a different phone number, and a different name. Yet earlier this year, looking at Facebook’s “People You May Know” recommendations, Leila (a name I’m using using in place of either of the names she uses) was shocked to see some of her regular sex-work clients.

On April 15, the Obama Administration formally launched its National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), a plan to work with the private sector to develop a private market for secure identity credentials for the Internet.

The plan calls for establishment of an "Identity Ecosystem," in which consumers can choose to obtain "trusted" IDs from one or more private or public credential providers. Consumers can then use their credentials to prove their identity when they're carrying out sensitive transactions, like banking, while staying anonymous when they're not.

"By making online transactions more trustworthy and better protecting privacy, we will prevent costly crime, we will give businesses and consumers new confidence, and we will foster growth and untold innovation. That's why this initiative is so important for our economy," President Obama said in making the announcement.

Internet est en état de surveillance. Internet est un état de surveillance. Que nous l’admettions ou non, et que cela nous plaise ou non, nous sommes traqués en permanence. Google nous trace, tant sur ses propres pages que sur celles auxquelles il a accès. Facebook fait de même, en traçant même les utilisateurs non inscrits chez lui. Apple nous trace sur nos iPhones et iPads. Un journaliste a utilisé un outil appelé Collusion (NdT : de Mozilla) pour déterminer qui le traçait  : 105 entreprises ont tracé son usage internet sur une seule période de 36 heures  !

We are the voluntary prisoners of the cloud; we are being watched over by governments we did not elect.

Wael Ghonim, Google's Egyptian executive, said: “If you want to liberate a society just give them the internet.”

But how does one liberate a society that already has the internet? In a society permanently connected through pervasive broadband networks, the shared internet is, bit by bit and piece by piece, overshadowed by the “cloud.”

Le Premier ministre Jean Castex a laissé éclater sa colère en fin de semaine dernière face à l'anonymat en ligne, comparant les réseaux sociaux au « régime de Vichy ». Depuis des années, la question oppose adversaires de la « haine et ligne » et défenseurs de la liberté sur Internet.

Le Premier ministre s’en est pris à l’anonymat sur Internet, qui permet selon lui au pire de se déverser. Mais Jean Castex se trompe : il n’y a pas d’anonymat en ligne. La loi offre tous les outils adéquats pour remonter jusqu’à l’identité des internautes, si nécessaire. Encore faut-il donner les moyens à la justice de le faire rapidement.

Today I’m gonna talk about games without players. And not just as a thought experiment, but as material necessity As a possible way to deal with the contradictions of the attention economy.

In the last decade we have witnessed a democratization of the means of production of videogames.
Anybody can make games thanks to tools, communities, attitudes. And thanks to the opening of digital distribution channels.

The most successful companies today don’t make money by selling content, services or commodities but by distributing it, by controlling their marketplaces. When we democratize the means of production and distribution we should expect a proliferation of cultural producers and cultural products.

« Les animations produites par ordinateur sont en train de devenir un modèle général, surpassant le cinéma ». Ces mots prononcés par Harun Farocki donnent le ton de la recherche qu’il mena sur les jeux vidéo. En est issue la série de vidéos Parallel, dernière production de l’artiste avant sa mort en 2014. Elle est présentée pour encore quelques jours au MAMAC de Nice, une exposition produite dans le cadre de MOVIMENTA – première édition niçoise d’un festival biennal de l’image en mouvement.  Nous vivons dans un monde producteur d’images de synthèse. Le marché des jeux vidéo est considérable, atteignant aujourd’hui près de 100 milliards de dollars pour ses ventes sur le monde entier. Un chiffre bien supérieur à celui de l’industrie du cinéma. Ce qui signifie, un nombre considérable d’utilisateurs confrontés à ce type particulier d’images. Pour Harun Farocki, qui toute son oeuvre s’est interrogé le sens des images, l’image de synthèse présente un cas d’étude singulier.

Imaginons une plage de l’Atlantique. Des dizaines de sportifs estivaux barbotent en uniforme néoprène le long de la côte agitée. Les vagues se forment et se brisent sans cesse. Ils guettent « la bonne » : celle avec laquelle il faudra composer les fameuses attitudes du surfeur. Joséphine Kaeppelin, jeune artiste sélectionnée au summer camp de Strabic, nous confie ses secrets de la glisse technologique. Elle compose au fil des questions de cet entretien des bribes d’errance pour nous exposer que surfer c’est déjà se mouiller.

A Twitter bot is a type of bot software that controls a Twitter account via the Twitter API.The social bot software may autonomously perform actions such as tweeting, re-tweeting, liking, following, unfollowing, or direct messaging other accounts. The automation of Twitter accounts is governed by a set of automation rules that outline proper and improper uses of automation.Proper usage includes broadcasting helpful information, automatically generating interesting or creative content, and automatically replying to users via direct message.

Parag Agrawal, un ingénieur informatique spécialiste de l'intelligence artificielle, a pris lundi la tête de Twitter, le réseau social resté "petit" par rapport à ses concurrents mais immense par son importance dans les débats actuels sur le modèle économique des plateformes.

"Ma confiance en lui en tant que directeur général vient du plus profond de moi-même", a assuré Jack Dorsey, le charismatique cofondateur de Twitter, dans une lettre où il annonce passer la main. Il y explique que c'est la personnalité de Parag Agrawal qui a guidé son choix.

This “burden on people” is the resources it would take for Twitter to actively combat hate and abuse on their platform. Facebook, for example, has hired thousands of moderators. If Twitter is hoping to outsource curation to shared protocols, it should be in addition to — not a replacement for — the type of effort that Facebook is undertaking.

(Reuters) - Twitter Inc plans to set up an independent research group to create an “open and decentralized” system for social networks, CEO Jack Dorsey said on Wednesday, which could relieve pressure on the company to appease critics of its content policies but also give rise to a new crop of competitors.

We deserve to have other technologies, something better than what we nowadays call “Information and Communication Technologies”. This book deals with its psychological, social, political, ecological and economic costs while it relates experiences to create Technological Sovereignty. The authors bring us closer to other ways of desiring, designing, producing and maintaining technologies. Experiences and initiatives to develop freedom, autonomy and social justice while creating autonomous mobile telephony systems, simultaneous translation networks, leaks platforms, security tools, sovereign algorithms ethical servers and appropriate technologies among others. The texts are by Alex Haché, Benjamin Cadon, COATI, Carolina, Kali Kaneko, Loreto Bravo, Maxigas and Margarita Padilla.

Soulseek is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing network and application. The term Soulseek might refer to one of the two networks, or one of the three official user client interfaces. Soulseek is used mostly to exchange music, although users are able to share a variety of files. Soulseek was created by Nir Arbel, an Israeli programmer from Safad.

At the end of the 90s, we ripped albums that we found in physical stores and took them to the internet. It was during this era that we built a content channel with a noble purpose, that of listening. Soulseek's directories were cities and “emigrate to a new land” was a common feeling. Back then, connecting to the Internet required a desktop computer, a good local provider, modem, and time.

Life was concretely and cybernetically constituted,a division that no longer exists and -without automatic playlists or advertising- finding material was the product of research so the user was, at the very least, selective. With free internet on the streets and the advent of the smartphone, the latest generations are now easy recipients of unrequested information. All this, before touching a wire or having a thoughtful moment.

When Blizzard suspended professional Hearthstone player, Blitzchung, for expressing his support for Hong Kong on a very public platform - the Hearthstone Grandmasters stream - one thing it probably didn't account for was the outpouring of support and the furore that followed. Long-time players threatened to boycott Blizzard games. Employees staged walkouts with umbrellas, a key symbol of resistance in the Hong Kong protest. United States senators, Ron Wyden and Marco Rubio, as well as representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mike Gallagher and Tom Malinowski, signed a letter to Blizzard, requesting the ban be fully reversed.

After almost five months, scenes of protesters running from riot police through streets filled with makeshift barricades are all too familiar to anyone living in Hong Kong. Now, an upcoming VR game aims to let people outside the city experience life as a front-line protester.

Mindless mobs, extreme violence: the depiction of riot and resistance in video games provides an illuminating glimpse into how we understand them on a cultural level. Triple-A developers tend to centre their stories on lone heroes versus cartoonish bogeymen, and where meaningful change is only brought about through violence. The reality of these movements is, however, far less straightforward, and these stories of demonstrations and defiance deserve to be portrayed in their full complexity.

Over the spring, our worlds got smaller, tighter. Yet like flour in a sieve we learned the contours of our constrained spaces, while also slipping into new ones. Many of the worlds we entered were virtual, with friends visiting each other on their Animal Crossing islands and on Zoom, in lieu of real life. Some of the worlds were relearning our own realities, parsing information—or many times, a lack thereof from officials in charge—on a day-to-day basis, trying to understand how to exist in a global pandemic.

Players in the Animal Crossing and Splatoon communities took this weekend to voice their support for the ongoing protests over the murder of George Floyd, by making art for their games, and spreading resources within their communities. While these statements and gestures encountered some opposition and controversy, they stood in stark contrast to other communities in the games industry where these issues are avoided or not even seen as a problem to be addressed.

Consider what might be the most rhizomatic technology of them all: the mesh network. In words it is the perfect rhizome. Independent nodes set up the same piece of software in their network router. Every router connects to every other router, forming a multi-dimensional web with no central point to be disabled. It is "legion," to use a familiar term from contemporary parlance: each point is not a separate unit, but n-dimensions of distributed power.

On January 7, 2010 I was ushered into a small private dinner with Secretary Hillary Clinton at the State Department along with the inventor of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and a few others. We were there to talk about technology and 21st Century Diplomacy. As we mingled I noticed next to me the small table that Thomas Jefferson wrote the first drafts of the Declaration of Independence. I was inspired by the history around us as we discussed the unfolding history before us. I was sitting in front of Secretary Clinton and when she asked me a question I said, “Secretary Clinton, the last bastion of dictatorship is the router.” That night seeded some of the ideas that were core to Secretary Clinton’s important Internet Freedoms Speech on January 21, 2010.

People do not riot every day, but they have rioted often enough in the past, especially since the onset of modernity. People continue to riot with alarming regularity in the present, especially in the so-called Global South, as the saga of modernity continues to unfold now in its global phase. This repeated and continued reliance on rioting as a distinctive, but historically and culturally variable, mode of collective action (if not agency) merits greater attention than it has hitherto received.

From The Matrix to Elon Musk’s eccentric ranting that we likely live inside an alien computer, the fear that our agency is an illusion and reality is determined by metalevel controllers is pinned on theories that life is inexplicably getting worse and whoever is in charge cannot figure out how to debug the malfunctioning simulation

In the Covid-19 age, protestors are finding novel ways to express themselves, from BLM rallies in The Sims to Hong Kong protests in Animal Crossing.

The COVID-19 pandemic has halted public demonstrations, so protesters are taking their cause to Animal Crossing.

"But, É. Urcades one of my favorite technologists on the interwebs, has challenged me to think differently about digital spaces. “websites”, he says, “are absolutely not places or architecture, they are temporary bodies… when you design interfaces you are -literally- designing the sensory organs people use to perceive information — interface design is organ design.”

"Every human lives in a world. Worlds are composed of contents, the identification of those contents, and by the configuration of content-relations within – semantically, operationally and axiologically. As spaces of inhabitation, worlds are made concrete through manners of doing and saying that affirm a coherence between its contents and the identities of its contents, as well as content-relations therein. The identification of the contents of a world and its relational configuration is what establishes frames of reference for practical orientation."

Worldbuilding as a visionary, collaborative practice has come of age. From planetary designs to pop culture, architect Hashim Sarkis, filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, and the Black Panther universe provide critical tools, methods, and inspiration to build future worlds.

"Climate change is arguably the most pressing threat the globe has ever faced. And yet despite (or perhaps, in part, because of) its urgency, science communicators have found it quite difficult to convey this threat effectively to the broader public..."

"The essay focusses on the game-like properties of projects such as Archizoom’s No Stop City, Constant’s New Babylon and Cedric Price’s Generator Project, proposing that their spatial dreams have in fact been realised, at least in part, by cooperative and connected game environments such as Minecraft. I also discuss work from our studio and others use videogames both as ways of conceptualising impossible worlds or alternatively to expose urban systems to new audiences."

"Software applications can utilize spatial interfaces to afford users powerful ways of thinking and interacting. Though often associated with gaming, spatial interfaces can be useful in any kind of software, even in less obvious domains like productivity tools or work applications. We will see spatial interfaces move into all verticals, starting with game-like interfaces for all kinds of social use-cases."

"The above aims to provide a starting point for a more expansive, and more critical discourse on website design. The engagement of liberal arts, humanities and engineering present in the architectural discourse is more timely than ever. Considering and expanding upon these aspects when building and critiquing websites may help us fulfilling our responsibility as contributors to the global digital infrastructure today."

"Zoom* is pretty good for 5 people because it works as a single conversation, this being the canonical conversation group size with associated psycho-physical limits. And it’s pretty good at 150 because it works like a presentation. But it’s pretty poor for 25.

* I reckon I’ll start using zoom as a generic for all group video calls, doing double-duty noun and verb, like hoover for vacuum cleaner/cleaning.

So what about 25 people? I’m excited about this new software MakeSpace because it tackles that problem in a fundamental way. As a participant, you place yourself on a 2D canvas, and then the sound is spatialised: if you’re near someone, you’re loud to each other; you get quieter when you’re further away. This allows for multiple simultaneous conversations and moving between them."

"Through a series of 15 hypotheses, this Critical Atlas of Internet aims to develop 15 conceptual spatialization exercises. The purpose of the atlas is to use spatial analysis as a key to understanding social, political and economic issues on Internet. The atlas seek to discern the shape of the Internet in order to understand the concrete issues and stakes involved."

"Our search for other worlds, and our attempts to build new ones, leap from our own sense of despair and isolation with regards to the exceptionalism of our own."

"Key Words: Poetics, World-Building, Structure, Mythos, Narrative, Ambiguity, Epistemic Disobedience, Non-Teleological Reading."

"The fact is that videogames are, above all, games. They are not and should not be perfect simulations of reality — instead, they simulate imaginary realities with their own logic that is both necessitated by technological constraints and shaped by the goals of the game designers. Whenever this logic clashes against the narrative a game might be trying construct, one legitimate option is to hide it, to use techniques that smooth out the discrepancy with what we would expect in our reality."

"This paper explores the notion of narrative game mechanics by apposing theories from the field of cognitive narratology with design theories on game mechanics. The paper aims to disclose how narrative game mechanics invite game agents, including the player, to perform actions that support the construction of engaging stories and fictional worlds in the embodied mind of the player. The theoretical argument is supported by three case studies. The paper discusses examples of games that employ mechanics and rules to create engaging story events, focusing on: building tension through spatial conflict, evoking empathy through characterization and creating moral dilemmas through player choices."

"What are the conditions for a computer user to gain agency, defined here as the ability to evade automatisms? What is the user’s horizon of autonomy within a built world made of software programmed by somebody else, when its logic is made inaccessible in the name of convenience?"

"Hi, I’m Ian Cheng. I’m an artist. Over the last six years, I’ve been creating a series of simulations that explore an agent’s capacity to deal with an ever-changing environment. These works culminated in the Emissaries trilogy, which introduced a narrative agent — the emissary — whose motivation to enact a story was set into conflict with the open-ended chaos of a simulation. In the process, I began to see the edges of a new layer of artistic activity. One that could organize my base ingredients — deterministic stories and open-ended simulations — into something more than the sum of its parts. Something meaningful yet alive, bounded yet transforming. I’ve been calling this activity Worlding."