A tidy bit of analysis by a friend and former colleague of mine, Kevin Bankston. He has long advocated for many of the benefits to be found at the intersection of science fiction and policy. His article is rich with excellent examples, demonstrating a growing and broadening set of trends of purposeful exploration via science fiction.
Tag: science fiction
2015-12-19 The Command Line Podcast
This is an episode of The Command Line Podcast.
I will be attending SCALE in the latter half of next month if anyone else planning to be there wants to meet up.
I am also thinking about attending this year’s LibrePlanet, in March. Please consider donating to their scholarship fund to help attendees who might not otherwise be able to go to join the event and learn more about Free Software and the community that uses and supports it.
This time, I chat about some recent news stories that caught my attention, including:
- UK citizens may soon need licenses to photograph some stuff they already own
- MIT Creates Untraceable Anonymous Messaging System Called Vuvuzela
- Technical article about pond
- Major tech group backs Pacific trade deal
- Philips updates Hue, introduces lightbulb DRM
- Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform
- Add Verizon To The Growing List Of Companies Tap Dancing Around Net Neutrality With Zero Rating
- EFF Publishes “Pwning Tomorrow,” a Speculative Fiction Anthology
- EFF, Access Now, and the White House Sat Down to Talk About Encryption: The Details
- Panopticlick 2.0 Launches, Featuring New Tracker Protection and Fingerprinting Tests
You can subscribe to a feed of articles I am reading for more. You can follow my random podcast items on HuffDuffer too.
You can directly download the MP3 or Ogg Vorbis audio files. You can grab additional formats and audio source files from the Internet Archive.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Why Science Fiction is Part of My Own Narrative
I commonly field the question of what ties together all the threads I pursue on this blog and in my podcast. Cory Doctorow, in his most recent Locus column, has generously given me an excellent explanation at least for why I tend to ruminate so much on science fiction as a literature and why I find it woven so much into my thinking about technology and policy.
Science fiction exposes: it can be hard to understand or even see upheaval when you’re in its midst. But just as a doctor will swab your throat and grow a sample of the flora she finds there in a petri dish until it’s large enough to identify, so too can a science fiction writer construct a petri dish of a world in which a single technology or idea can grow to fill it, providing a magnified look at something that was too small to be detected in situ.
The exposure he so beautifully explains is just one of the functions this genre of work can serve. I won’t spoil the most compelling argument, rather urging that you read the article, if you haven’t already. Cory’s keen insight here is why I recently praised his skill as an essayist, a facet of his work that I don’t think garners as near as much attention and credit as his oratory and fiction.
A Vocabulary for Speaking about the Future, Locus Online