Strong Ideas

An exploration of how heteronormative bias is deeply embedded in the internet, hidden in algorithms, keywords, content moderation, and more.In The Digital Closet, Alexander Monea argues provocatively that the Internet became straight by suppressing everything that is not, forcing LGBTQ+ content into increasingly narrow channels―rendering it invisible through opaque algorithms, automated and human content moderation, warped keywords, and other strategies of digital overreach. Monea explains how the United States’ thirty-year “war on porn” has brought about the over-regulation of sexual content, which, in turn, has resulted in the censorship of much nonpornographic content―including material on sex education and LGBTQ+ activism. In this wide-ranging, enlightening account, Monea examines the cultural, technological, and political conditions that put LGBTQ content into the closet. Monea looks at the anti-porn activism of the alt-right, Christian conservatives, and anti-porn feminists, who

A proposal that we think about digital technologies such as machine learning not in terms of artificial intelligence but as artificial communication.Algorithms that work with deep learning and big data are getting so much better at doing so many things that it makes us uncomfortable. How can a device know what our favorite songs are, or what we should write in an email? Have machines become too smart? In Artificial Communication, Elena Esposito argues that drawing this sort of analogy between algorithms and human intelligence is misleading. If machines contribute to social intelligence, it will not be because they have learned how to think like us but because we have learned how to communicate with them. Esposito proposes that we think of “smart” machines not in terms of artificial intelligence but in terms of artificial communication.To do this, we need a concept of communication that can take into account the possibility that a communication partner may be not a human being but an al

From baby pictures in the cloud to a high school's digital surveillance system: how adults unwittingly compromise children's privacy online.Our children's first digital footprints are made before they

Life hacking as self-help for the creative class in the digital age: using systems in pursuit of health, wealth, and productivity.Life hackers track and analyze the food they eat, the hours they sleep

Why technology is not an end in itself, and how cities can be “smart enough,” using technology to promote democracy and equity.Smart cities, where technology is used to solve every problem, are hailed