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(Originally published in Private Suite magazine, issue 6) Book review: The Void, by Isaiah Laing The Void is the story you'd get when the kids from "Stranger Things" grow up, start dating, land jobs, and acquire prescription narcotics. Isaiah Laing's novel tracks nine principal characters (mostly 20-somethings) whose lives crisscross in all-too-convenient ways, each flung from a relatively undifferentiated middle-class existence by the insidious machinations of some imperceptible evil. Unfoldi...

(Originally published in Private Suite magazine, issue 5) Album Review: PLASTIC WHATEVER, by Desired (Neon City Records) Desired's PLASTIC WHATEVER is a meditation on the hyperkinetic but dispassionate life, a synthetic hodgepodge of lollipop hooks and frenetic drops precisely engineered to keep us moving, two steps ahead of a blunt and crushing reality. The tableau is a pleasingly garish one. Tracks like "Plastic Life," "Neon Maze," and "Distorted Silhouette" make Side A a swirl of pink hous...

(Originally published in Private Suite magazine, issue 5) Book review: Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, by Grafton Tanner This isn't an especially pleasant moment to be living in the global West. It's fraught with trauma over rampant historical and geographic dislocation, obsession with humanity's imminent demise, anxiety about late capitalism's unfettered expansion, and a general suffusion of simulations upon simulations that feel like ghostly presences animating ...

Fewer figures have been as prolific and influential in the intellectual project of American cultural studies than my doctoral advisor Lawrence Grossberg. And I've been fortunate enough not only to learn from him but also to work and write alongside him for several years—a brief blip in his decades-spanning career (one that cuts across several generations of similarly fortunate students), but one I will forever treasure. So I was beyond delighted when incoming editor of the journal Cultural Stud...

Scott Nesbitt, proprietor of the excellent and indispensable Plain Text Project, has published an interview with me. We discuss my writing and editing habits, my tool preferences, and my plain-by-default workflow. I'm aware of no other place on the web that would grant me such room to explain my plain-text writing penchant in crushing detail. But I'm sure glad it exists. And I'm glad Scott's running it. On a related note: I suppose I should document here my current plain-text writing setup (si...

At Duke University this fall, I taught a course I named "Foundations of an Open Source World." That title is something of a misnomer given the themes I tried to stress during every class meeting. "Open" is a complex phenomenon—something with symbolic and material dimensions that have real effects on the way people live their lives—but even more important is the understanding that "open" is always shifting, fraught with tensions and contradictions that keep reshaping it. "Open," in other words, i...

The Open Education Consortium has declared this "The Year of Open" (sounds like a good theme for any year!). To celebrate, they're publishing long answers to straightforward questions on complex topics. I've contributed my own response to "What is the Open Web?" and it's now available: The "open Web" is the idea that the World Wide Web should remain accessible to as many people as possible. It has both technical and cultural dimensions. Technically speaking, the open Web is a series of techno...

My recent description of the Mother video game franchise represents my most significant attempt (to date) at describing precisely why I love the games so much. That shot at articulating the ineffable appears in the recently released 100 Greatest Video Game Franchises book from Rowan & Littlefield: At a time when players and critics alike tend to laud video games for some ability to help players transcend or project or escape, Mother reminds us that we are always right here, entirely aware ...

Of all the concepts that cluster loosely around this thing we call "openness," "meritocracy" has for me emerged as one of the most interesting. Theoretically speaking, meritocracy gestures toward a rich constellation of ideas and tensions that are not necessarily unique to open source communities, but that open source communities are uniquely suited to help us explore. And practically speaking, meritocracy underwrites a considerable number of the more compelling technical and programmatic innov...

I'm beginning to think my New Year's resolution is simply going to be some reformulation or specification of the robustness principle, Postel's Law, which in its original formulation, instructs us to: Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others. Seriously exhausted by an incredibly acrimonious election season, I'd hesitated to even consider anything buzzing with the kind of static electricity attached to words like "liberal" and "conservative." But I believe I t...

[Entry begins here] Next week I'll speak at the DGPLUG's open source summer training on an invitation from buddy Kushal Das, the program's intrepid coordinator for years. I'm both thrilled and humbled to be part of an event with such a rich and storied history, but realized this weekend I've never actually done anything quite like this. DGPLUG conducts its entire summer training program online, live, principally via IRC (the protocol's relatively low bandwidth requirements make it the preferre...

Today Opensource.com published my reflection on The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which I wrote in honor of the document's 19th anniversary: Whether Raymond's insights hold true—whether they "accurately" describe the contemporary political, social, and economic conditions for open source anything—are inconsequential in light of the way The Cathedral and the Bazaar actually functions today. Quite simply, what the book says is not nearly as important as what it does. ...

[Entry begins here] This week, I published an interview with Cory Doctorow as part of Opensource.com's ongoing coverage of the 14th annual Southern California Linux Expo, where Cory delivered a keynote. It's easily one of my favorite assignments from the past five years. Cory is an extraordinarily busy person, but he graciously agreed to chat with me via telephone for 30 minutes. Realizing my constraints, I knew I needed to limit my questions to only the most pressing inquires. The most impera...

The Communication Review recently published my review of Ganaele Langlois' Meaning in the Age of Social Media. The book really is one of the most sustained and provocative attempts at demonstrating the utility of Guattari's materialist semiotics for the study of computational media. I recommend it. ...

"Information is the currency of life," Christoph Adami recently told Quanta. "One definition of information is the ability to make predictions with a likelihood better than chance." I've never heard anyone define information in quite that way before—as an "ability" or capacity. It's pithy and catchy as far as it goes, yet I'm not so sure I'd use it to characterize Claude Shannon's position on information (something Adami has done elsewhere). Adami's "is" complicates the definition, for if info...

Today marks the 43rd anniversary of Stewart Brand's "Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums," a piece that first appeared in Rolling Stone issue 123. It's a delightful missive from an accelerating Information Age, both a simple a dispatch from the bowels of the computer lab and an elaborate pean to the hacker ethic. In typical breathless style, Brand reports on what's happening at campuses around the country: "Reliably, at any nighttime moment (i.e. non-business ho...

Recently an email about a new open source genetics research initiative appeared in my university inbox. Two scientists had seen me riff on open science and thought I might be interested in writing something about the effort. I was. The resultant article appeared on Opensource.com yesterday as "For UNC scientists, open source is the way forward." I really couldn't be happier with the way it turned out. ...

My article, "How to Play Games of Truth," recently appeared in a special issue of Syllabus devoted to "teaching with and about video games." Editors Jennifer deWinter and Carly A. Kocurek have assembled an outstanding resource for anyone interested not only in teaching in game studies but also in using games to create unique educational experiences across the curriculum. In keeping with the journal's open access policy, my article is available for download without restriction. ...

In August I agreed to an interview about my open source setup and workflow for Steve Ovadia's My Linux Rig. It appeared online this week, and I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. ...

I recently received notice that New Media & Society has assigned my article on "player-centric" game studies to an issue of the journal. It'll be part of Volume 15, Issue 6. This is welcome news for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that others can now properly cite the piece. Like other major journal publishers, Sage has implemented an "online first" publishing system, which allows editors to post electronic versions of finished articles online long before the pieces see "pri...

An article I recently wrote about theoretical and methodological trends in video game studies, "The active audience, again: Player-centric game studies and the problem of binarism," has been published in New Media & Society. Here's the abstract: This article intervenes in video game studies' recent turn to (and enthusiasm for) player-centered approaches to understanding video games' social, cultural, political, and economic implications. Such approaches repudiate ostensibly formalist or "s...