Tag: programming
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Code Your Own Utopia
My latest at Al Jazeera, on Bitcoin’s most ambitious successor, Ethereum. This may or may not be the future, but for now it’s the hype: Even the most flexible platform comes with certain built-in tendencies. Ethereum, for example, makes it easier to build organizations that are less centralized and less dependent on geography than traditional…
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Hacking the World
My profile of anthropologist Gabriella Coleman in The Chronicle of Higher Education opens with a scene from the New York City memorial service for Aaron Swartz in January: The forces that seem to have hastened Swartz’s death were very much haunting the room. In the audience was a mischievous, greasy-haired hacker known as “weev,” who…
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You Have Searched Me and Known Me
Over at The Daily—my latest?commentary on consumer technology gets theological: Apple CEO Steve Jobs returned to the stage earlier this month to announce a long-awaited new product: iCloud. “We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device,” he said. “We’re going to move your hub, the center of your digital…
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All in Moderation?
I could be frantically live-blogging from this year’s American Academy of Religion meeting in Chicago. I won’t, per se. But in a number of places here I have been hearing lots of talk about religious “extremists” and “moderates.” It goes without saying that nearly all of the thousands of AAR attendees—mostly academics in religious studies…
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Hello World!
The Row Boat has been redesigned! Though only powers above mine can know if it was really necessary, I’ve spent the last two days obsessing over migrating from Little Logger to WordPress. All the old Row Boat material is still available on the Archives page, as well as through the search field on the sidebar.…