People Make Games take a took a tour of VRChat and interviewed a whole range of people to find how they were making this new frontier work for them. At the same time that tech […]

The online world is run by tech companies that we depend on but deeply distrust. New books by Justin EH Smith and Ben Tarnoff ask: is an alternative possible? It is now quite ordinary to […]

Now, after many Predator movies, get ready for Prey – a new take on the alien-hunter tale, placing the franchise in a whole different era: the Comanche Nation, 300 years ago. From 10 Cloverfield Lane […]

Why we might need something like tenure for many more people, to cultivate more thinkers in a doer’s world. Scientists tend to develop technology that is unique, and engineers tend to use existing technology in […]

“It’s like a science-fiction show that is painted on a very large canvas of space and time,” says the Game of Thrones co-creator. Chinese author Cixin Liu penned The Three-Body Problem and its sequels, The […]

Virtual Reality simulations showed firelight would make images on engraved stones move and flicker. In 1866, a French engineer named Peccadeau de l’Isle was working on the construction of a railway line in southern France, […]

We’ve felt the tremendous weight of power that profane tech companies hold. The power comes from us. Why don’t we take it and distribute it among ourselves? I spend a lot of time online. Too […]

Erik Davis’ first book, the celebrated Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, was published almost twenty-five years ago. Still in print, this cult classic of media studies continues to inform conversations […]

Scott Free Productions has come on board to produce the bestselling book “The Infinite Machine” on the history of Ethereum. Ridley Scott, Tom Moran, and Vera Meyer of Scott Free Productions will produce the feature […]

Algospeak is an emergent lexicon of euphemisms deployed by social media users to avoid blocking or downranking from the algorithms that govern the biggest platforms After Facebook paid a Republican dirty-tricks company to stoke fear […]

Government eavesdropping and corporate data harvesting are worrisome, but what most of us really fear, even if we don’t think much about it, is the public eye. Social networks are not attractive simply because of […]

Rob Madole explores the rationalist fictions of the tech overlords favourite author, Neal Stephenson. If the art of Science Fiction lies in translating the plausible into the prophetic, there’s no practitioner more successful than Neal […]

A conversation with one of the few people who have real historical perspective on digital communities. In 2003, Wagner James Au was a young freelance writer in the Bay Area covering massive multiplayer games like […]

Expensive and laborious to produce, a single woodcut could be recycled to illustrate scores of different ballads, each new home imbuing the same image with often wildly diverse meanings. Just like early modern woodcut images, […]

Kerry Thornley’s long-lost epic poem, Illuminati Lady, has been rediscovered and scanned courtesy of the Discordian Archives At long last, for your reading pleasure, we present Kerry Thornley’s poem Illuminati Lady, which Robert Anton Wilson […]

Who was Thomas Buchler, the late creator of beloved Torah program TropeTrainer? And can anything be done to revive his life’s work? For two decades, Jewish clergy across the country had come to depend on […]

Despite the sci-fi trimmings—or, really, in perfect sync with them—the anxiety After Yang generates has the gentle, humming pervasiveness of real life. It’s trying its best to tell us about the world. When a malfunction […]

The immersive virtual reality artwork of Russian-French artist Anna Zhilyaeva are complete visual experiences, painted sculptures that immerse the viewer not only into the subject matter and message of the artwork, but also the process […]

Forty years since the death of Philip K Dick – whose stories have inspired films like Blade Runner and Minority Report – Adam Scovell explores how prophetic his work has been. I am in passport […]

If we want a good theory of bullshit, it will help if we consider a broader class of examples and expressions that are thought to be synonymous with bullshit. In a classic essay entitled “On […]

Neomelodica singers are often accused of colluding with the Camorra – sometimes by their actions, sometimes through their music. Neomelodica was born in the 1980s as a reaction to societal change and the crisis of […]

Has the Story Of The Pandemic Forever Changed The Stories We Tell? What does almost everyone know about storytelling? They know the theory of the hero’s journey. It is part of most lessons on storytelling, […]

It’s been nearly 40 years since Gibson’s seminal Neuromancer was published, Eileen Gunn writes at length about the meaning of that earthshaking book then and now. In Neuromancer, the United States is a relatively unimportant […]

The recent partial collapse of Facebook’s Metaverse seems a good occasion to revisit the idea that what we think is reality is in fact a “computer simulation”. Every epoch finds itself tempted to take its […]

The “Sleng Teng” riddim revolutionized reggae music in the mid-1980s, and has spawned hundreds of versions in the decades since then. “Under Mi Sleng Teng,” by Jamaican singer Wayne Smith, is one of the milestones […]

Jonas Čeika explores the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze using the drum machine as an example. Gilles Deleuze, along with his intellectual companion Félix Guattari, is one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century […]

Alexander Bard and other philosophical scoundrels of the Dark Renaissance movement critique the Game B movement. According to Limberg, Game B (inclusive of its relation to Game A) is: “Game A is the collective game […]

Cats are still-wild animals that depend on us for food and shelter. And it is precisely their innate wildness, bundled into small packages of cuteness residing in our homes, that make cat pictures the social […]

Don’t worry, even in a simulation, life is still perfectly meaningful. David Chalmers is a philosopher at New York University and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness. Chalmers is known for formulating […]

A top NASA official’s biblical remarks about the James Webb Space Telescope sparked an outcry. But they’re nothing new. It wasn’t just that he mentioned a religious holiday. After all, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson wasn’t […]