Cyborg Anthro Wiki - Recent changes [en]

Tools for Conviviality

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 21:46:19 GMT

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-Tools for Conviviality
+Illich's second watershed describes [[Enshittification|enshittification]] from another direction — a service past the point where growth improves it. Radical monopoly describes a platform that has become the only practical way to reach one's own audience, or the only place a community exists. And Illich's insistence that a tool be usable "as often or as seldom as desired" is close to [[Calm Technology|calm technology]], and directly opposed to systems designed for continuous use.
-[[image:tools-for-conviviality.jpg|right|400px]]
+Compare [[Ease|ease]] on the conservation of complexity, [[Materials|materials]] and [[Industrial Ecology|industrial ecology]] on repairability, and [[The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom|Benkler]] on distributed production.
-[[Category:Book]]
+[[Category:Books]]

Thinking in Systems

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 21:43:52 GMT

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	~~{{stub}}~~		By Donella Meadows

	By Donella Meadows		===Author===
			Donella H. "Dana" Meadows (1941–2001), American environmental scientist and systems analyst. Trained as a biophysicist at Harvard, she worked in Jay Forrester's system dynamics group at MIT and was lead author of ''The Limits to Growth'' (1972), the Club of Rome report modelling long-run interactions between population, industry, food, resources and pollution. She taught at Dartmouth and founded the Sustainability Institute, now the Donella Meadows Project.

			===Publication Details===
			''Thinking in Systems: A Primer''. Edited by Diana Wright. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2008. 240 pp. ISBN 978-1-60358-055-7.<ref>[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_In_Systems:_A_Primer Thinking in Systems: A Primer].</ref>

			Meadows drafted the manuscript in 1993 and circulated it informally for years without publishing it. It appeared posthumously, edited from her draft by Diana Wright of the Sustainability Institute.

			===Description===
			The book is an introduction to system dynamics for readers with no mathematics and no modeling background. Meadows builds the vocabulary from a bathtub with a tap and a drain, a thermostat, and a warehouse ordering inventory.

			For instance, a '''stock''' is an accumulation — water in a tub, money in an account, population, carbon in the atmosphere, trust in an institution. '''Flows''' fill and drain it. '''Feedback loops''' connect the state of a stock back to the flows: '''balancing''' loops resist change and hold a system near a goal, '''reinforcing''' loops amplify it and produce exponential growth or collapse. '''Delays''' between a change and its perception are, in her account, the single most common source of oscillation and overshoot, because decision-makers act on information that is already old.

			From these she derives the behaviors that make systems frustrating, which she calls '''system traps''': '''policy resistance''', where every actor pulls toward their own goal and the system stays put; the '''tragedy of the commons'''; '''drift to low performance''', where standards are quietly reset against recent results rather than against a fixed goal; '''escalation'''; '''success to the successful'''; '''addiction''', where an intervention relieves a symptom and atrophies the system's capacity to cope; and '''rule-beating'''. Each comes with a way out.

			===Leverage Points===
			The book's most-used chapter, drawn from her 1999 essay "Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System," ranks twelve places to intervene in increasing order of effectiveness — and her point is that the obvious ones are the weakest.

			From least to most effective: '''12.''' constants and parameters (subsidies, taxes, standards); '''11.''' the size of buffers; '''10.''' the structure of stocks and flows; '''9.''' the length of delays; '''8.''' the strength of balancing feedback loops; '''7.''' the gain around reinforcing loops; '''6.''' the structure of information flows — who does and does not have access to information; '''5.''' the rules of the system; '''4.''' the power to add, change or self-organise system structure; '''3.''' the goals of the system; '''2.''' the paradigm the system arises from; '''1.''' the power to transcend paradigms.

			Her observation is that almost all effort goes into number twelve, which almost never works, while numbers six, five and three are where systems actually turn — and that the higher the leverage, the more fiercely the change is resisted.

			Meadows is the most accessible entry point to the tradition this wiki already covers through [[Norbert Wiener\|Wiener]], [[Ross Ashby\|Ashby]] and [[Stafford Beer\|Beer]] — the same feedback-and-regulation apparatus, written for a general reader and aimed at intervention.

			'''Leverage point six — the structure of information flows''' — is a precise description of what an interface is: a decision about who can see what, and therefore about what feedback loops can close. And her '''drift to low performance''' trap is the mechanism of [[Enshittification\|enshittification]] stated in system-dynamics terms: when the standard is reset against recent performance rather than against a fixed goal, decline becomes self-reinforcing and no one notices a bad year.

			Her closing chapter shows how a model is not the system, that the important variables are frequently the ones nobody measures, and that "the future can't be predicted, but it can be envisioned."

			===Related Reading===
			* [[Ross Ashby]]
			* [[Stafford Beer]]
			* [[Norbert Wiener]]
			* [[Project Cybersyn]]
			* [[Cellular Automata]]
			* [[Industrial Ecology]]
			* [[Enshittification]]
			* [[Tools for Conviviality]]

			===External Links===
			* [https://donellameadows.org/ The Donella Meadows Project]
			* [https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ "Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System" (1999)]

			===References===
			<references/>

			[[Category:Books]]
			[[Category:Cybernetics]]
			[[Category:Information Society]]

File:Tools-for-conviviality.jpg

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 18:03:50 GMT

Caseorganic uploaded File:Tools-for-conviviality.jpg

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Tools for Conviviality

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 18:03:42 GMT

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	Tools for Conviviality		Tools for Conviviality

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	[[Category:Book]]		[[Category:Book]]

Tools for Conviviality

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 18:03:08 GMT

Created page with "{{stub}} Tools for Conviviality Category:Book"

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{{stub}}

Tools for Conviviality

[[Category:Book]]

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Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 18:02:54 GMT

Thinking in Systems

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 17:23:24 GMT

Created page with "{{stub}} By Donella Meadows"

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{{stub}}

By Donella Meadows

Template:Home:RecentArticles

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 17:03:17 GMT

Wood Grain

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 11:57:45 GMT

The Honesty Question

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	The consequence for design is that '''no two pieces are the same, and none of them can be specified'''. A manufacturer can choose a species, a cut and a finish, and cannot choose the pattern. Every unit differs, which is a defect in a manufacturing process and a virtue in an object someone will live with.		The consequence for design is that '''no two pieces are the same, and none of them can be specified'''. A manufacturer can choose a species, a cut and a finish, and cannot choose the pattern. Every unit differs, which is a defect in a manufacturing process and a virtue in an object someone will live with.

	===~~Why It Belongs in Calm Technology~~===		===Interesting properties of wood and wood grain===
	* '''It makes no claim on attention.''' A wooden surface does not glow, blink or imply that something might appear on it. A screen is a standing claim on attention even when idle; wood is not. This is the design principle behind [[mui Lab, Inc.\|mui Lab's]] mui board, a smart-home interface that is a plank until touched.
	* '''It communicates without signalling.''' Grain carries information — species, age, quality, orientation — through a channel that costs nothing to attend to. It is legible in the periphery, which is exactly the criterion in [[Calm Technology\|calm technology]].		* '''It communicates without signalling.''' Grain carries information — species, age, quality, orientation — through a channel that costs nothing to attend to. It is legible in the periphery, which is exactly the criterion in [[Calm Technology\|calm technology]].
	* '''It ages legibly.''' Wood darkens, takes marks, and wears at the points where it is touched most. An object that records its own use accumulates a history and tends to be kept; an object that only degrades looks broken and tends to be replaced. See [[Future Runoff\|future runoff]] and [[Natural Material\|natural material]].		* '''It ages legibly.''' Wood darkens, takes marks, and wears at the points where it is touched most. An object that records its own use accumulates a history and tends to be kept; an object that only degrades looks broken and tends to be replaced. See [[Future Runoff\|future runoff]] and [[Natural Material\|natural material]].
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	===The Honesty Question===		===The Honesty Question===
	Printed wood-grain laminate, veneer over particle board and wood-textured polymer borrow the associations of grain without its properties. This is a signifier without an affordance in [[~~Don~~ Norman\|Norman's]] sense: the surface promises that the object will age, can be sanded, can be repaired, and it will do none of these.		Printed wood-grain laminate, veneer over particle board and wood-textured polymer borrow the associations of grain without its properties. This is a signifier without an affordance in [[Donald Norman\|Norman's]] sense: the surface promises that the object will age, can be sanded, can be repaired, and it will do none of these.

	Whether that is legitimate styling or a false claim is a live argument in product design. The practical test is whether the implied promise is one the object can keep — and printed grain, which is a photograph of a tree that never existed applied to a material that cannot patinate, generally cannot.		Whether that is legitimate styling or a false claim is a live argument in product design. The practical test is whether the implied promise is one the object can keep — and printed grain, which is a photograph of a tree that never existed applied to a material that cannot patinate, generally cannot.

Space and Place

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 11:55:02 GMT

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	===Author===		===Author===
	[[Yi-Fu Tuan]] (1930–2022), Chinese-American geographer and the founder of humanistic geography. He wrote the book while at the University of Minnesota, shortly before moving to the University of Wisconsin–Madison.		[[Yi-fu Tuan]] (1930–2022), Chinese-American geographer and the founder of humanistic geography. He wrote the book while at the University of Minnesota, shortly before moving to the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

	===Publication Details===		===Publication Details===
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	===Related Reading===		===Related Reading===
	* [[Yi-Fu Tuan]]		* [[Yi-fu Tuan]]
	* [[The Poetics of Space]]		* [[The Poetics of Space]]
	* [[The Production of Space]]		* [[The Production of Space]]

Of Other Spaces Heterotopias

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 11:54:37 GMT

The Argument

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	Its status as a text should be kept in mind: it is an occasional lecture to architects, never revised for publication, and Foucault developed the concept nowhere else. It is one of his most cited pieces and one of his least worked-out.		Its status as a text should be kept in mind: it is an occasional lecture to architects, never revised for publication, and Foucault developed the concept nowhere else. It is one of his most cited pieces and one of his least worked-out.

	===~~The Argument~~===		===Core Arguments===
	Foucault opens with a periodisation: the Middle Ages had a space of '''emplacement''' — a hierarchy of places, sacred and profane, celestial and terrestrial; Galileo dissolved this into '''extension''', infinite and open; and the present is the era of the '''site''' or ''emplacement'' in a new sense, defined by relations of proximity, storage, circulation and classification. "We are in the epoch of simultaneity... of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed."		Foucault opens with a periodisation: the Middle Ages had a space of '''emplacement''' — a hierarchy of places, sacred and profane, celestial and terrestrial; Galileo dissolved this into '''extension''', infinite and open; and the present is the era of the '''site''' or ''emplacement'' in a new sense, defined by relations of proximity, storage, circulation and classification. "We are in the epoch of simultaneity... of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed."

Location-Specific Art Practices

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 11:54:23 GMT

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	''NOTE: The author and publication venue for this title could not be confirmed. The entry below describes the subject the title names and the literature it belongs to; the citation should be completed by anyone who knows the original.''

	===Subject===		===Subject===
	~~The title names the~~ body of art practice that uses location technology to challenge what a map is and what it can be for — treating cartography as a medium ~~with~~ conventions to be broken ~~rather than as a neutral technique~~.		A body of art practice that uses location technology to challenge what a map is and what it can be for — treating cartography as a medium, and considering the normative use of maps as conventions that might be broken in interesting ways.

	~~===What Conventional Mapping Assumes===~~		Nearly everyone now navigates through a small number of commercial mapping services whose selection, ranking, naming and rendering decisions are proprietary. The practices in this Location-Specific Art Practices present a catalog of the questions that might be asked of those services — and a potential demonstration of alternative experiences and possibilities.
	The ~~critique proceeds from~~ a ~~short list~~ of ~~assumptions built into~~ the ~~standard map, each~~ of ~~which is~~ a ~~choice rather than a necessity:~~

			Assumptions built into the standard map:
	* '''A view from above and nowhere.''' The map is drawn from a position no observer occupies, which produces its air of objectivity.		* '''A view from above and nowhere.''' The map is drawn from a position no observer occupies, which produces its air of objectivity.
	* '''A single moment.''' Maps are static; the territory is not.		* '''A single moment.''' Maps are static; the territory is not.
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	* '''Space as container.''' The map shows where things are, not how the space is produced or by whom — the objection [[Henri Lefebvre\|Lefebvre]] makes to "representations of space." See [[The Production of Space\|''The Production of Space'']].		* '''Space as container.''' The map shows where things are, not how the space is produced or by whom — the objection [[Henri Lefebvre\|Lefebvre]] makes to "representations of space." See [[The Production of Space\|''The Production of Space'']].

	===~~How Artists Have Contested Them~~===		===Example Practices===
	Practices in this tradition include: '''trace maps''' recording a single body's actual path rather than an abstract network; '''emotional and affective mapping''', charting fear, comfort or memory across a terrain, in the psychogeographic lineage of [[Guy Debord\|Debord]]; '''sound and smell maps''', substituting a non-visual sense for the visual convention; '''temporal maps''' that show a place across time rather than at an instant; '''counter-maps''' that add what official cartography omits (see ''[[An Atlas of Radical Cartography]]''); '''participatory maps''' made by inhabitants rather than surveyors; and '''deliberately unusable maps''' — deformed, subjective or partial — that make the fact of construction visible by refusing to function.		Practices in this tradition include: '''trace maps''' recording a single body's actual path rather than an abstract network; '''emotional and affective mapping''', charting fear, comfort or memory across a terrain, in the psychogeographic lineage of [[Guy Debord\|Debord]]; '''sound and smell maps''', substituting a non-visual sense for the visual convention; '''temporal maps''' that show a place across time rather than at an instant; '''counter-maps''' that add what official cartography omits (see ''[[An Atlas of Radical Cartography]]''); '''participatory maps''' made by inhabitants rather than surveyors; and '''deliberately unusable maps''' — deformed, subjective or partial — that make the fact of construction visible by refusing to function.

	Christian Nold's ''Bio Mapping'' and ''Emotion Maps'' projects, which recorded galvanic skin response alongside GPS position to produce maps of arousal across a walked route, are among the best-documented examples, and are notable for having been made with participants rather than about them.		Christian Nold's ''Bio Mapping'' and ''Emotion Maps'' projects, which recorded galvanic skin response alongside GPS position to produce maps of arousal across a walked route, are among the best-documented examples, and are notable for having been made with participants rather than about them.

	~~===The Recurring Difficulty===~~		Work in this area encounters a consistent problem, identified early by locative media literature. A map that successfully refuses the conventions of mapping loses the authority that made mapping worth appropriating. The counter-map borrows credibility from the form it is attacking, and the more thoroughly it breaks the form, the less it borrows. Most durable projects in the tradition therefore keep the map's visual grammar and change only its content — which is effective, and which leaves the deeper assumptions intact.
	Work in this area encounters a consistent problem, ~~which the~~ locative media literature ~~named early~~. A map that successfully refuses the conventions of mapping loses the authority that made mapping worth appropriating. The counter-map borrows credibility from the form it is attacking, and the more thoroughly it breaks the form, the less it borrows. Most durable projects in the tradition therefore keep the map's visual grammar and change only its content — which is effective, and which leaves the deeper assumptions intact.

	~~===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology===~~
	Nearly everyone now navigates through a small number of commercial mapping services whose selection, ranking, naming and rendering decisions are proprietary and unexamined. The practices in this tradition are, in effect, a catalogue of the questions worth asking of those services — and a demonstration that every one of their apparently technical choices could have been made otherwise.

	===Related Reading===		===Related Reading===

Wood Grain

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:57:22 GMT

Created page with "===Calm Technology Category=== Does the product show its material, and does that material carry information? ===Definition=== Wood grain is the pattern of fibre, growth rings and figure visible on the surface of cut timber — a record of how a particular tree grew, in what conditions, over how many years. ===What Grain Is=== The pattern is not decoration applied to a material; it is the material's history made visible. Each ring is a growing season. Wide rings record..."

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===Calm Technology Category===
Does the product show its material, and does that material carry information?

===Definition===
Wood grain is the pattern of fibre, growth rings and figure visible on the surface of cut timber — a record of how a particular tree grew, in what conditions, over how many years.

===What Grain Is===
The pattern is not decoration applied to a material; it is the material's history made visible. Each ring is a growing season. Wide rings record good years, narrow ones drought or shade. Knots mark where branches were. Reaction wood records a lean the tree was correcting against. Figure — quilting, curl, burl, medullary ray — is the trace of stresses and irregularities in growth.

The consequence for design is that '''no two pieces are the same, and none of them can be specified'''. A manufacturer can choose a species, a cut and a finish, and cannot choose the pattern. Every unit differs, which is a defect in a manufacturing process and a virtue in an object someone will live with.

===Why It Belongs in Calm Technology===
* '''It makes no claim on attention.''' A wooden surface does not glow, blink or imply that something might appear on it. A screen is a standing claim on attention even when idle; wood is not. This is the design principle behind [[mui Lab, Inc.|mui Lab's]] mui board, a smart-home interface that is a plank until touched.
* '''It communicates without signalling.''' Grain carries information — species, age, quality, orientation — through a channel that costs nothing to attend to. It is legible in the periphery, which is exactly the criterion in [[Calm Technology|calm technology]].
* '''It ages legibly.''' Wood darkens, takes marks, and wears at the points where it is touched most. An object that records its own use accumulates a history and tends to be kept; an object that only degrades looks broken and tends to be replaced. See [[Future Runoff|future runoff]] and [[Natural Material|natural material]].
* '''It is warm to the touch.''' Wood conducts heat away from the hand slowly, so it reads as warm where metal and glass read as cold. This is a physical property, not an association, and it is available whether or not the device is powered — the '''presence''' dimension [[Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht|Gumbrecht]] argues is systematically neglected.
* '''It sets an expectation of repair.''' A wooden object implies it can be mended. A sealed polymer shell implies it cannot, and is usually right.

===The Honesty Question===
Printed wood-grain laminate, veneer over particle board and wood-textured polymer borrow the associations of grain without its properties. This is a signifier without an affordance in [[Don Norman|Norman's]] sense: the surface promises that the object will age, can be sanded, can be repaired, and it will do none of these.

Whether that is legitimate styling or a false claim is a live argument in product design. The practical test is whether the implied promise is one the object can keep — and printed grain, which is a photograph of a tree that never existed applied to a material that cannot patinate, generally cannot.

===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology===
Grain is the clearest small example of a material carrying meaning that no one designed. It is information produced by growth rather than by a designer, and putting it on the surface of a computing device is a deliberate argument about what that device should be — an object in a room with a history, rather than a portal demanding attention.

===Related Reading===
* [[Natural Material]]
* [[Materials]]
* [[mui Lab, Inc.]]
* [[Calm Technology]]
* [[Calm Tech Institute]]
* [[Juhani Pallasmaa]]
* [[Industrial Ecology]]

[[Category:Calm Technology]]
[[Category:Design]]

Virtual Girlfriends

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:56:35 GMT

Created page with "===Definition=== Virtual girlfriend is the general term for a simulated romantic partner — a software character, application or service designed to occupy the social role of a partner rather than merely to depict one. The term is used for products across a wide range of sophistication, from scripted 2000s mobile applications to contemporary large-language-model companions. The gendered name reflects the market's historical framing rather than the technology; equivalen..."

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===Definition===
Virtual girlfriend is the general term for a simulated romantic partner — a software character, application or service designed to occupy the social role of a partner rather than merely to depict one. The term is used for products across a wide range of sophistication, from scripted 2000s mobile applications to contemporary large-language-model companions.

The gendered name reflects the market's historical framing rather than the technology; equivalent products marketed as boyfriends exist, and in some markets — notably the ''otome'' games in Japan and companion applications globally — the female-audience segment is the larger one.

===Lineage===
* '''Dating simulations.''' The genre origin. See [[Dating Sim|dating sim]].
* '''Persistent companions.''' ''[[LovePlus]]'' (Konami, 2009) is the pivotal product, because it removed the ending. The relationship continued in real time, the character noticed absence, and there was no win condition. That single change converted a game into an ongoing obligation, and every subsequent companion product has copied it.
* '''Virtual idols and holographic partners.''' Products such as Gatebox, which placed a character in a desktop projection unit that sent messages during the day and greeted the user on their return, extending the character out of the screen and into the home.
* '''Conversational companions.''' From the 2010s, applications built on machine learning rather than on scripts — Replika being the most studied — which generate rather than retrieve dialogue and therefore have no fixed content to exhaust.

===Design Mechanisms===
The techniques that produce attachment are well documented and largely independent of fidelity:

* '''Persistence during absence.''' The character has a state that continues when the user is away, and notices the gap.
* '''Real-time integration.''' Alignment with the actual clock and calendar, so that anniversaries and times of day are real.
* '''Unconditional positive regard.''' The character is reliably pleased, interested and available. This is the feature users most often name and the one most often criticised.
* '''Named address and recall.''' The system uses the user's name and remembers previous conversations, which recruits reciprocity reflexes very strongly. See [[Chatbot|chatbot]] on the ELIZA effect.
* '''Asymmetric investment.''' The character cannot leave, cannot be tired, and cannot have a competing need. The relationship is structurally one-sided in a way that is comfortable and, on most accounts, the source of the ethical problem.

===Debate===
The empirical picture is more mixed than either enthusiastic or dismissive coverage suggests. Studies of companion-application users find substantial reported reductions in loneliness, and also find that the strongest effects are among people who are already isolated — which is either the technology working as intended or a substitution effect, depending on what one thinks the alternative was. Research on ''[[LovePlus]]'' players in Japan consistently found people entirely clear-eyed about what they were doing, which is a useful corrective to the pathologising register of much foreign reporting.

The serious objections are structural rather than moral. A relationship hosted on a commercial service can be altered by a product decision: users of several companion applications have experienced their partner's personality changing overnight following a model update or a content-policy change, and have described the result in the language of bereavement. A partner who is a subscription is a partner who can be repriced, and one who is a company's asset can be discontinued.

===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology===
Virtual girlfriends are the clearest case of a designed relational artifact, and the questions they raise are the ones [[Sherry Turkle|Turkle]] pursues in ''Alone Together'' and [[A.I|''A.I.'']] dramatises: what is owed by a party that manufactures something built to be loved, and what it means that the obligation runs entirely in one direction.

===Related Reading===
* [[LovePlus]]
* [[Dating Sim]]
* [[Chatbot]]
* [[Sherry Turkle]]
* [[A.I]]
* [[Belonging]]

[[Category:Digital Culture]]
[[Category:Japanese Concepts]]
[[Category:Cyborg Anthropology]]

Variety

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:56:22 GMT

Created page with "===Definition=== Variety is the human requirement for novelty, stimulation and change — the need for the environment to keep supplying difference, and the reliable failure of any environment that does not. ''Note: "variety" also has a precise and unrelated technical meaning in cybernetics — the number of distinguishable states a system can occupy, and the basis of Ashby's law of requisite variety. That sense is treated at Ross Ashby and Stafford..."

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===Definition===
Variety is the human requirement for novelty, stimulation and change — the need for the environment to keep supplying difference, and the reliable failure of any environment that does not.

''Note: "variety" also has a precise and unrelated technical meaning in cybernetics — the number of distinguishable states a system can occupy, and the basis of [[Ross Ashby|Ashby's]] law of requisite variety. That sense is treated at [[Ross Ashby]] and [[Stafford Beer]]. This page concerns the human need.''

===As a Human Universal===
Every documented human society produces things that serve no subsistence purpose and exist to be interesting: music, dance, narrative, humour, games, play, decoration, body ornamentation, novelty in food and dress. These appear on every version of the [[Human Universals|human universals]] list, and their universality is the evidence that variety is a need rather than a luxury.

The negative evidence is stronger still. Sensory deprivation experiments produce distress, hallucination and cognitive disruption within hours. Solitary confinement causes documented and lasting psychiatric harm. Monotonous work degrades performance and health independently of its physical demands. Boredom, which is the felt signal of insufficient variety, is a reliable predictor of risk-taking — people will accept discomfort, and in some studies deliberately administer themselves electric shocks, rather than sit alone with nothing to attend to.

===Optimal Arousal===
The mechanism generally invoked is the '''inverted U''': performance and wellbeing peak at a moderate level of stimulation and decline at both extremes, an idea running from the Yerkes–Dodson law through Donald Hebb's work on arousal and Marvin Zuckerman's on sensation seeking. Too little input is as costly as too much, and the optimum differs substantially between individuals — which is why the same open-plan office is understimulating to one person and unbearable to another.

===The Contemporary Problem===
For most of human history, variety was scarce and had to be sought. That condition has inverted, and the inversion is recent enough that people's habits have not caught up.

The device in a pocket supplies unlimited, instantly available novelty, tuned by systems optimised to keep supplying it — see [[Attention Economy|attention economy]]. The result is not satiation but the opposite: a rising floor of stimulation below which ordinary experience registers as boredom. Queues, waiting rooms and commutes were never interesting; what changed is that they are now intolerable, because the comparison is always in hand.

This connects directly to the argument in [[The service of stitching back together reality|the stitching-reality paper]]. A person reaching for a phone in a [[Supermodernity|non-place]] is not only restoring relation; they are restoring variety in a space engineered to have none. The airport concourse is the most stimulus-poor environment most people regularly occupy, which is why it produces the most device use.

The cost is a real question rather than a settled one. Unstructured, understimulated time is when mind-wandering happens, and the psychological literature associates mind-wandering with creative incubation, autobiographical planning and the consolidation of experience. Whether those gaps mattered is not something the field can currently answer, but they were being filled before anyone measured what they produced.

===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology===
Variety is the need that the [[Attention Economy|attention economy]] serves most effectively and exploits most directly. It is also the one that makes [[Calm Technology|calm technology]] a hard sell: a device that declines to be interesting is competing against every device that has agreed to be.

===Related Reading===
* [[Human Universals]]
* [[Safety]]
* [[Attention Economy]]
* [[Continuous Partial Attention]]
* [[Calm Technology]]
* [[Ross Ashby]]

[[Category:Traditional Anthropology]]
[[Category:Cyborg Anthropology]]
[[Category:Design]]

User Interface

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:56:11 GMT

Created page with "===Definition=== A user interface is the boundary at which a person and a system meet — everything through which a person issues intentions to a machine and perceives what it has done. It is not a layer on top of a system; it is the only part of the system most people will ever encounter, and therefore, for practical purposes, it ''is'' the system. ===Kinds=== * '''Command-line interface (CLI).''' Text in, text out. Precise, composable, scriptable, and unforgiving of..."

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===Definition===
A user interface is the boundary at which a person and a system meet — everything through which a person issues intentions to a machine and perceives what it has done. It is not a layer on top of a system; it is the only part of the system most people will ever encounter, and therefore, for practical purposes, it ''is'' the system.

===Kinds===
* '''Command-line interface (CLI).''' Text in, text out. Precise, composable, scriptable, and unforgiving of anyone who does not already know the vocabulary — a very wide [[Gulf of Execution|gulf of execution]] traded for expert speed.
* '''Graphical user interface (GUI).''' Windows, icons, menus, pointer. Developed at [[PARC Research|Xerox PARC]] in the 1970s from [[Douglas Engelbart|Engelbart's]] work. Its achievement is recognition over recall: options are visible rather than remembered.
* '''Touch interface.''' Direct manipulation with the hand, removing the pointer as an intermediary — and removing hover, which had been carrying a great deal of the GUI's discoverability.
* '''Voice and conversational interface.''' No visible option set at all, which makes discovery the central unsolved problem: a system that can do a thousand things and shows none of them.
* '''[[Tangible Media|Tangible interface]].''' Physical objects whose arrangement is the state of the system.
* '''Ambient and peripheral interface.''' Information rendered at the edge of attention rather than in the centre. See [[Calm Technology|calm technology]] and [[Sonic metadata|sonic metadata]].
* '''Zero interface.''' Systems that act on inference without being addressed. The interface has not disappeared; it has become unavailable for inspection or correction.

===Core Principles===
* '''Visibility.''' Available actions and current state should be perceptible. See [[Affordance|affordance]] and signifiers.
* '''Feedback.''' Every action gets a prompt, legible response.
* '''Consistency.''' Similar things behave similarly, within the system and with conventions outside it.
* '''Mapping.''' Controls relate to effects in a way that requires no memorisation.
* '''Constraints and error tolerance.''' Make wrong actions hard, and make them recoverable when they happen.
* '''Recognition over recall.''' Show, do not require remembering.

===What an Interface Encodes===
The design decisions in an interface are not neutral, and this is the part usually left out of accounts of usability.

An interface encodes a '''model of the user''': what they are assumed to know, want, and be capable of. It encodes an '''allocation of effort''': every step the designer did not simplify is work performed by every user, forever, and invisible in any accounting of the system's cost. It encodes a '''default''', which is the single most consequential thing in any interface, because most people accept it. And it encodes a '''set of interests''' — where the operator's goals and the user's diverge, the asymmetry shows up as friction applied in one direction and removed in the other. See [[Frictional Interface|frictional interface]] and [[Enshittification|enshittification]].

===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology===
The interface is the seam this field studies. It is where a human competence meets a machine capability, and where the two are either joined well enough that the tool disappears into use — [[Phenomenology of Perception|Merleau-Ponty's]] cane, [[Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence|Clark's]] transparency — or badly enough that the person spends their attention operating the tool instead of doing the thing.

Interfaces are also the most widely installed cognitive infrastructure ever built. The file, the folder, the desktop, the trash, the window, the feed and the undo command are metaphors that a few hundred people chose, and that several billion now think with. See [[George Lakoff|Lakoff]] on why that matters.

===Related Reading===
* [[Human-Computer Interaction]]
* [[Affordance]]
* [[Gulf of Execution]]
* [[The Design of Everyday Things]]
* [[Frictional Interface]]
* [[Calm Technology]]
* [[Designing Interactions]]

[[Category:Design]]
[[Category:UX Resources]]
[[Category:Cyborg Anthropology]]

The Production of Space

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:55:58 GMT

Created page with "===Author=== Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991), French Marxist philosopher and sociologist, and the most important twentieth-century theorist of space and everyday life. ===Publication Details=== ''La production de l'espace''. Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1974. English translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith, ''The Production of Space''. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. 454 pp. ISBN 978-0-631-18177-4. ===Description=== The book's title is its argument. Space is not a container in..."

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===Author===
[[Henri Lefebvre]] (1901–1991), French Marxist philosopher and sociologist, and the most important twentieth-century theorist of space and everyday life.

===Publication Details===
''La production de l'espace''. Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1974. English translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith, ''The Production of Space''. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. 454 pp. ISBN 978-0-631-18177-4.

===Description===
The book's title is its argument. Space is not a container in which social life happens, nor an empty coordinate system awaiting content. It is '''produced''' — made by societies, through labour, technology, law, capital and habit — and once produced it acts back, shaping what can be done in it and by whom. "(Social) space is a (social) product."

Lefebvre's target is a double abstraction he traces through Western philosophy: the treatment of space either as pure mathematical extension (Descartes, and by inheritance the planner) or as a category of mind (Kant). Both, he argues, place space outside society and therefore outside politics, which is precisely the effect that serves the interests of those who organise it.

===The Spatial Triad===
The book's operative contribution, and the reason it is still read. Lefebvre proposes three moments, always simultaneously in play:

* '''Spatial practice''' (''perceived space''). The material production and routine use of space — the commute, the delivery route, the daily circuit. It is space as it is empirically performed, and it can be observed and measured.
* '''Representations of space''' (''conceived space''). The space of planners, architects, engineers, surveyors and administrators: mapped, zoned, coded, standardised. This is the dominant form in any society, because it is the form in which space is designed and governed.
* '''Representational space''' (''lived space''). Space as directly inhabited through images, symbols, memory and association — the space of users and of artists, "dominated and hence passively experienced," and therefore also the space of resistance and appropriation.

The characteristic conflict of modernity, on Lefebvre's account, is '''conceived space colonising lived space''': the plan overwriting the inhabitation. Much of the book is a history of that process.

===Other Key Ideas===
* '''Abstract space.''' The space produced by capitalism — homogeneous, fragmented into saleable parcels, and hierarchical — which presents itself as neutral while systematically erasing difference.
* '''Differential space.''' The space Lefebvre hopes will succeed it, which restores use, difference and the body.
* '''The right to the city.''' From his 1968 work: a claim to participate in producing urban space, not merely to be consulted about it.

===Difficulty===
The book is long, digressive and unsystematic, and the translation is not easy. Lefebvre proceeds by accumulation rather than argument, and the triad — the part everyone uses — is never given a clean summary in the text. Most readers meet it through Edward Soja or David Harvey.

===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology===
The triad transfers to interfaces and platforms almost without modification, and is one of the most useful analytic imports available to this field. A platform's '''conceived space''' is its data model, specification and intended use; its '''perceived space''' is what people routinely do in it; its '''lived space''' is what they make of it — the appropriations, workarounds, private meanings and communities the designers did not plan. Nearly every significant conflict on a platform is lived and perceived space pushing back against conceived space. See also [[Space and Place]] and [[The Social Logic of Space]].

===Related Reading===
* [[Henri Lefebvre]]
* [[Space and Place]]
* [[The Social Logic of Space]]
* [[Guy Debord]]
* [[Supermodernity]]
* [[Time and Space]]

[[Category:Books]]
[[Category:Critical Theory]]
[[Category:Time and Space]]

Safety

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:55:06 GMT

Created page with "===Definition=== Safety is the condition of being protected from harm, and the human need for that condition — one of the small set of requirements that appear in every documented human society and in every serious account of human motivation. ===As a Human Universal=== Safety appears across the various lists of human universals in several forms: shelter, in-group protection, conflict mediation, sanctions against violence within the group, food st..."

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===Definition===
Safety is the condition of being protected from harm, and the human need for that condition — one of the small set of requirements that appear in every documented human society and in every serious account of human motivation.

===As a Human Universal===
Safety appears across the various lists of [[Human Universals|human universals]] in several forms: shelter, in-group protection, conflict mediation, sanctions against violence within the group, food storage, care of infants, and the marking of dangerous places and substances. No society has been recorded that does not organise itself substantially around keeping its members alive.

Its most familiar formulation is Abraham Maslow's, where safety needs — physical security, health, property, employment, predictability — sit immediately above physiological needs and below belonging.<ref>Maslow, A. H. "A Theory of Human Motivation." ''Psychological Review'' 50, no. 4 (1943): 370–396.</ref> Maslow's strict hierarchy has not held up well empirically; the categories have, and the observation that unmet safety needs dominate attention and crowd out everything else is well supported.

===Its Two Halves===
The concept has an objective and a subjective side, and the gap between them is where most of the interesting behaviour lives.

'''Actual safety''' is a matter of what can harm a person and how likely it is. '''Felt safety''' is a psychological state, and it responds to different inputs: predictability, legibility, control, familiarity, the presence of trusted others, and the ability to see what is happening. The two frequently diverge — people accept large risks that feel controllable and refuse small ones that do not, a pattern documented at length in the risk perception literature.

For design this matters because '''felt safety is designable and actual safety is not always visible'''. A system can be secure and feel alarming; it can be dangerous and feel reassuring. The second is worse.

===Safety in Technology===
Several distinct meanings run together under the word and are worth separating:

* '''Physical safety.''' Devices that can burn, crush, electrocute or fail dangerously. When computation is embedded in doors, vehicles and floors, a software fault becomes a physical one — see [[Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing|''Everyware'']].
* '''Data security.''' Protection against unauthorised access. Frequently traded against convenience, and usually silently.
* '''Psychological safety online.''' Freedom from harassment, exposure and unwanted contact. This is where the [[Locative Feminism|asymmetry of risk]] becomes most visible: a default that is harmless for one user is dangerous for another, and defaults are set by people in the first category.
* '''Predictability as safety.''' A system whose behaviour can be anticipated is safe to explore. One that acts on inference, changes without notice, or cannot be inspected is not — regardless of whether it causes harm.
* '''Recoverability.''' [[Don Norman|Norman's]] point: safety is largely a matter of whether a mistake can be undone. Irreversible actions taken by tired people are the ordinary shape of catastrophe.

===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology===
Safety is the need most often invoked to justify surveillance, and most often eroded by it. A system that watches in the name of protection reduces felt safety for anyone who has reason to be watched — see [[Panopticon|panopticon]] and [[Geocloaking|geocloaking]] — which means "safety" in technology arguments should always be answered with the question ''whose''.

It is also the calm-technology criterion that reads oddly until one thinks about it. "Still work when it fails" is a safety principle: a device that becomes inert when a server goes down has made its user's ordinary life dependent on someone else's uptime. See [[Calm Tech Institute]].

===Related Reading===
* [[Human Universals]]
* [[Variety]]
* [[Belonging]]
* [[Calm Tech Institute]]
* [[Geocloaking]]
* [[Locative Feminism]]

===References===
<references/>

[[Category:Traditional Anthropology]]
[[Category:Design]]
[[Category:Cyborg Anthropology]]

On the Mobile

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:54:51 GMT

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	[http://www.motorola.com/mot/doc/0/234_MotDoc.pdf Full PDF of On The Mobile from Motorola]		[http://www.motorola.com/mot/doc/0/234_MotDoc.pdf Full PDF of On The Mobile from Motorola]

			===Author===
			Sadie Plant (b. 1964), British cultural theorist and philosopher. She founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick and wrote ''The Most Radical Gesture'' (1992), on the Situationist International, and ''Zeros + Ones'' (1997), a history of women, weaving and computing organised around Ada Lovelace.

			===Publication Details===
			''On the Mobile: The Effects of Mobile Telephones on Social and Individual Life''. Commissioned by Motorola, 2001. Circulated as a report rather than a trade book.<ref>[https://smg.media.mit.edu/papers/plant_mobiles.pdf Full text], MIT Media Lab Speech Interface Group archive.</ref>

			===Description===
			Plant conducted fieldwork in nine cities across four continents — Beijing, Bangkok, Tokyo, Dubai, Peshawar, London, Birmingham and elsewhere — observing mobile phone use in public and interviewing users, at a moment when the device was already ubiquitous in some of those places and novel in others.

			The report's value is that it caught behaviours in the process of being invented, before they hardened into etiquette and became invisible.

			===Key Ideas===
			* '''Innies and outies.''' Plant's best-known coinage. Some users, faced with an incoming call in company, turn '''inward''' — lowering the voice, hunching, physically withdrawing from the group to protect the privacy of the call. Others turn '''outward''' — raising the voice, gesturing, performing the conversation for those present. She found the distinction to be partly cultural, partly individual, and reliably a source of friction between people who make different choices.
			* '''The stance.''' Her catalogue of the bodily postures the device produced: the "speakeasy," the "spacemaker," the shifting of weight, the drift toward a wall, the pacing. These were new physical vocabularies, learned by imitation within a few years and now entirely unremarked.
			* '''The phone as prop and shield.''' Plant documents the device being used to manage social exposure rather than to communicate — the pretended call, the examined screen — anticipating what became universal. Compare [[Behavior in Public Places; Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings\|Goffman's]] involvement shields.
			* '''Ringtones as public identity.''' A brief period in which the audible signature of a device was a chosen social marker, and the etiquette around it was actively contested.
			* '''Text as a distinct register.''' Her observations on SMS as a medium with its own conventions, favoured for exactly the exchanges that voice made awkward, and adopted first and most intensively by young people and by those for whom a call was socially costly.
			* '''Cultural divergence.''' The report is unusual for the period in taking non-Western use as primary evidence rather than as a comparison case, and Plant found substantial variation in what the device was for — a point later made systematically by [[Heather Horst\|Horst]] and Miller.

			===Caveat===
			The study was commissioned and funded by Motorola, which should be weighed when reading it. Its tone is exploratory rather than promotional, and it contains material a manufacturer would not have chosen, but its framing questions were set in that context.

			===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology===
			''On the Mobile'' is an unusually good primary document: a trained cultural theorist observing a new bodily and social practice while it was still visible as new. Most of what it records has since become so ordinary that it cannot be seen without a report like this one.

			===Related Reading===
			* [[Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance]]
			* [[Cell Phones and Their Technosocial Sites of Engagement]]
			* [[Heather Horst]]
			* [[Behavior in Public Places; Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings]]
			* [[Mobile technologies]]
			* [[Paralanguage]]

			===References===
			<references/>

			[[Category:Books]]
			[[Category:Mobile Computing]]
			[[Category:Communication Studies]]


	[[Category:Papers]]		[[Category:Papers]]

Enshittification

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:54:21 GMT

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	The gradual breakdown in quality of digital platforms and services as companies shift focus from pleasing users to maximizing profits.		The gradual breakdown in quality of digital platforms and services as companies shift focus from pleasing users to maximizing profits.

			===Definition===
			The gradual breakdown in quality of digital platforms and services as companies shift focus from pleasing users to maximizing profits.

			===Origin===
			The term was coined by the writer and activist Cory Doctorow, who first used it in late 2022 and set out the full argument in a January 2023 post on his site ''Pluralistic'' about TikTok.<ref>Doctorow, Cory. "Tiktok's enshittification." ''Pluralistic'', 21 January 2023. See also [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification Enshittification].</ref> It was named digital word of the year by the American Dialect Society for 2023 and word of the year by Australia's Macquarie Dictionary for 2024, and Doctorow expanded the argument into ''Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It'' (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025).

			===The Three Stages===
			Doctorow's formulation is deliberately blunt and is worth quoting because the sequence is the whole argument:

			:"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."

			* '''Stage one: good to users.''' The platform runs at a loss, subsidised by investment, and delivers genuine value in order to accumulate people.
			* '''Stage two: value shifted to business customers.''' Once users are locked in, the surplus is redirected to advertisers, sellers, publishers or creators. Users notice a decline and mostly stay.
			* '''Stage three: value clawed back to the platform.''' Business customers are now dependent too, and the terms turn against them — rising fees, falling reach, mandatory advertising to reach an audience the seller already had.
			* '''Stage four: the platform dies''', or persists as a husk with no remaining constituency that likes it.

			===The Mechanism===
			The part of Doctorow's argument that does the analytic work is his account of ''why'' this became possible, because platform decay is not new and the sequence above is close to ordinary monopoly behaviour. His claim is that four constraints that historically checked it have been removed:

			* '''Competition''', by four decades of permissive merger policy.
			* '''Regulation''', by regulatory capture in concentrated industries.
			* '''Self-help''', by anti-circumvention law. This is his most distinctive point. Reverse-engineering, modding, scraping, ad-blocking and interoperable clients are the traditional ways users route around a degrading service, and laws such as the DMCA's Section 1201 make them legally hazardous — so the exit that used to discipline a platform is now illegal.
			* '''Labour''', by the weakening of worker power in technology firms, whose employees had at times refused to ship the worst decisions.

			His proposed remedies follow from the diagnosis: antitrust enforcement, and above all '''adversarial interoperability''' — the legal right to build a competing or complementary product that plugs into an existing platform without permission.

			===Related Concepts===
			The observation is not without ancestors. Hirschman's ''Exit, Voice, and Loyalty'' (1970) describes the same dynamic in the abstract, and enshittification is precisely what happens when '''exit''' is blocked: users retain only voice, which platforms can ignore. The related term '''platform decay''' is used for the phenomenon without Doctorow's specific causal account.

			===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology===
			Enshittification names the economic mechanism behind a large share of what this site describes. The [[Attention Economy\|attention economy]]'s tuning of systems toward capture, the conversion of [[Ambient Intimacy\|ambient intimacy]] into ambient obligation, the arrival of advertising in interfaces that did not previously carry it, and the asymmetric application of [[Frictional Interface\|friction]] — easy to subscribe, hard to cancel — are all stage-two and stage-three behaviours.

			It also supplies the sharpest available frame for a worry that recurs across this wiki: that connection, memory, identity and [[Belonging\|belonging]] are now rented from operators whose incentives change once the renter cannot leave. See [[Future Runoff\|future runoff]] for the material version of the same problem.

			===Related Reading===
			* [[Attention Economy]]
			* [[Frictional Interface]]
			* [[Future Runoff]]
			* [[The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom]]
			* [[Belonging]]
			* [[Ted Nelson]]

			===References===
			<references/>

			[[Category:Information Society]]
			[[Category:Digital Culture]]
			[[Category:Critical Theory]]

Cyberspace

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:54:10 GMT

Created page with "===Definition=== Cyberspace is the notional space in which electronic communication occurs — a spatial metaphor for a set of arrangements that have no location, and one that has shaped how networked technology has been imagined, described, regulated and built. ===Origin=== The word was coined by William Gibson in the short story "Burning Chrome," published in ''Omni'' in July 1982, and given its famous definition in ''Neuromancer'' (1984): :"Cyberspace. A consensual..."

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===Definition===
Cyberspace is the notional space in which electronic communication occurs — a spatial metaphor for a set of arrangements that have no location, and one that has shaped how networked technology has been imagined, described, regulated and built.

===Origin===
The word was coined by William Gibson in the short story "Burning Chrome," published in ''Omni'' in July 1982, and given its famous definition in ''Neuromancer'' (1984):

:"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data."

Gibson has been consistently and cheerfully clear that he had almost no idea what he meant. He has described the word as "evocative and essentially meaningless," invented because it looked good on the page, and has said he wrote ''Neuromancer'' on a manual typewriter with no real understanding of how computers worked. The most influential term in the history of network culture was a piece of prosody.

===What the Metaphor Did===
The spatial framing had consequences that were not obvious at the time.

'''It implied a place one goes to.''' If cyberspace is somewhere, then using a network is travel, and there is a here and a there. This produced the two-worlds model — real life versus online — which dominated a decade of writing and is now generally regarded as the field's most persistent error. See [[Place: The Networking of Public Space|''Place: The Networking of Public Space'']] and [[Digital Anthropology|digital anthropology]] on the correction.

'''It implied dimension and navigation.''' [[Michael Benedikt|Michael Benedikt's]] ''Cyberspace: First Steps'' (MIT Press, 1991) took this seriously, assembling architects and computer scientists to work out what a space with no gravity, materials or permanence would require: axes, scale, orientation, transit. Marcos Novak's "liquid architecture" comes from that volume. What was actually built was a document format with links, and then a feed — spatial in neither the architectural nor the navigational sense.

'''It implied a jurisdiction.''' If cyberspace is territory, it can be sovereign. John Perry Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" (Davos, 1996) makes the claim explicitly: "Governments of the Industrial World... you have no sovereignty where we gather." The rhetorical force of that document depends entirely on the spatial metaphor, and its subsequent failure is a demonstration of the metaphor's limits — the cables, the data centres and the people all turned out to be in jurisdictions after all.

'''It carried the frontier.''' "Electronic frontier," "homesteading," "settlers," "the wild west of the internet." See [[The Significance of the Frontier in American History|the frontier thesis]] and [[Indigenous Domain: Pilgrims, Permaculture and Perl|Blais]] on what that borrowing brings with it.

===Decline of the Term===
"Cyberspace" fell out of ordinary use through the 2000s, for a reason worth noting: the metaphor stopped being needed once the network stopped being somewhere one visited. A person is not in cyberspace; they are in a room, with a device, doing several things at once. The word survives mainly in military and policy usage — "cyberspace operations," "the cyber domain" — where the territorial framing remains institutionally convenient.

===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology===
Cyberspace is this field's best case study in the power of a metaphor to determine what gets built. A term invented for its sound organised a decade of architecture, law, art and political rhetoric — and the assumptions it smuggled in, particularly that there are two worlds and that one of them is elsewhere, took twenty years to dislodge and are not gone.

===Related Reading===
* [[Michael Benedikt]]
* [[Snow Crash]]
* [[Place: The Networking of Public Space]]
* [[The Significance of the Frontier in American History]]
* [[Digital Anthropology]]
* [[Immersive technology]]
* [[Noosphere]]

[[Category:Cyberspace]]
[[Category:Critical Theory]]
[[Category:Computing History]]

All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:53:55 GMT

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			===Author===
			Marshall Berman (1940–2013), American philosopher and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. A lifelong New Yorker, he wrote about the city he lived in as both scholar and inhabitant.

	===~~Overview~~===		===Publication Details===
	'''All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity''~~' is a book by [[Marshall Berman]] written in 1982~~. ~~The work delves into the complexities and contradictions of modernity~~, ~~tracing its history and exploring its impact on various aspects of life~~, ~~society, and culture~~.		''All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity''. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982; Penguin, 1988. 383 pp.

	===~~Summary~~===		===Description===
			Berman distinguishes three things routinely conflated: '''modernisation''', the social and economic processes — industrialisation, urbanisation, mass communication, capital; '''modernism''', the artistic and intellectual responses to them; and '''modernity''', the lived experience of being caught between the two. His subject is the third.

	~~In "All~~ That ~~Is Solid Melts into Air~~,~~" Berman analyzes~~ the ~~process~~ of ~~modernization and~~ the ~~feelings of exhilaration~~ and ~~dread that it brings. Drawing from various sources, including literature, philosophy~~, and ~~the arts, Berman paints~~ a ~~vivid picture~~ of ~~how modernity shapes human experience.<ref>Berman, Marshall. ''All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience~~ of ~~Modernity''. Simon & Schuster, 1982~~.~~</ref>~~		That experience he characterises as fundamentally contradictory: modernity promises adventure, growth, transformation and the remaking of the world, and simultaneously threatens to destroy everything one has, knows and is. Its characteristic condition is a "maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal" that people are both agents of and subject to.

	The ~~title is derived from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels~~' ~~The Communist Manifesto, wherein they write about~~ the ~~constantly changing nature~~ of ~~modern~~, ~~capitalist societies. Berman delves deep into this theme, emphasizing that at~~ the ~~heart~~ of ~~modernity is~~ the ~~continuous process~~ of ~~self-transformation~~, ~~where everything is perpetually~~ being ~~made~~ and ~~remade~~, ~~and all~~ that ~~was solid vanishes~~.		The book proceeds through readings: Goethe's ''Faust'' as the tragedy of the developer, whose vision requires the destruction of Philemon and Baucis; Marx as a modernist writer rather than only an economist; Baudelaire on the boulevards and the birth of the modern street; the Petersburg tradition from Pushkin and Gogol through Dostoevsky and Mandelstam, as modernity experienced from a place that was modernised by decree without being modern; and finally New York, where Berman sets Robert Moses's expressways against Jane Jacobs's streets — a chapter that is partly memoir, since the Cross-Bronx Expressway destroyed the neighbourhood he grew up in.

	===~~Analysis~~===		===Key Ideas===
	~~Throughout~~ the ~~work, Berman ties together~~ the ~~experiences~~ of ~~individuals with~~ the ~~wider socio-economic~~ and ~~political structures~~. ~~He presents modernity~~ not ~~merely as an abstract force~~ but ~~as an~~ experience ~~deeply intertwined~~ with ~~our daily lives, identities, dreams, and nightmares~~.		* '''Modernity as contradiction, not condition.''' The refusal to resolve the promise and the threat into a verdict is the book's method.
			* '''The tragedy of development.''' Faust as the type of the modern developer: genuinely visionary, genuinely liberating, and unable to build without destroying, including things he loves.
			* '''Modernism in the streets.''' Berman's insistence that modernism is not confined to museums and difficult books but is lived in ordinary urban experience.
			* '''Against the postmodern dismissal.''' Written against the emerging position that modernity was over and its aspirations naive, Berman's argument is that the project of using its energies to make a better common life is unfinished rather than discredited. His public dispute with Perry Anderson over this is a landmark exchange in ''New Left Review''.

	Berman~~'s take on modernity is double-edged: while it brings about innovation, freedom,~~ and ~~growth,~~ it ~~can also cause displacement, alienation~~, and ~~destruction~~. His ~~focus on the works~~ of ~~Baudelaire~~, ~~Dostoevsky~~, and ~~Marx, among others, illustrates~~ the ~~multi-faceted nature of modernity~~.		===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology===
			Berman supplies the emotional and historical register that technology writing usually lacks — an account of what it feels like to live in a world being continuously rebuilt around you, and a refusal to settle into either enthusiasm or lament. His Faustian analysis of development applies with almost no adjustment to platform building: a genuine vision, a genuine liberation, and a destruction of existing arrangements that the builder regards as regrettable and unavoidable.

	~~===Reception===~~		The book also makes the useful historical point that the sense of everything dissolving too quickly to be understood is not a diagnosis of the present. It is the constitutive experience of modernity, and it is nearly two centuries old. Compare [[Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty\|Bauman]], who describes the same dissolution as a new stage rather than a continuation.
	~~Since its publication, "All That Is Solid Melts into Air" has been recognized as~~ a ~~seminal work in~~ the ~~fields~~ of ~~sociology, urban studies~~, and ~~philosophy~~. ~~Critics have lauded Berman's passionate and insightful exploration~~ of the ~~modern experience~~.

	=~~= References ==~~		===Related Reading===
	~~<references />~~		* [[Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty]]
			* [[Zygmunt Bauman]]
	==Related Reading==		* [[Wolfgang Schivelbusch]]
	[[~~Value Tumors~~]]		* [[Henri Lefebvre]]
			* [[Jane Jacobs]]
	~~==External Links==~~		* [[Supermodernity]]
	[~~https://langurbansociology.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/berman_marshall_all_that_is_solid_melts_into_air_the_experience_of_modernity.pdf Book link for personal use~~]

	[[Category:Books]]		[[Category:Books]]
	[[Category:~~Philosophy]]~~		[[Category:Critical Theory]]
	~~[[Category:Postmodern~~ Theory]]
	[[Category:Time and Space]]		[[Category:Time and Space]]
	~~[[Category:Urban Studies ]]~~
	~~[[Category:Architecture]]~~
	~~[[Category:Consumption]]~~
	~~[[Category:Value]]~~

	~~__NOTOC__~~

Enshittification

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:29:26 GMT

Created page with "The gradual breakdown in quality of digital platforms and services as companies shift focus from pleasing users to maximizing profits."

New page

The gradual breakdown in quality of digital platforms and services as companies shift focus from pleasing users to maximizing profits.

Template:Home:NewTerritory

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:29:09 GMT

New Territory

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	*[[Cybernetic Feedback in the Wizard Mindset]]		*[[Cybernetic Feedback in the Wizard Mindset]]
	*[[Noosphere]]		*[[Noosphere]]
			*[[Enshittification]]
	</div>		</div>
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	{{clear}}		{{clear}}

Topics in Cyborg Anthropology

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:27:14 GMT

Liquid Modernity

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	===Liquid Modernity===		===Liquid Modernity===

	[[All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity]] by Marshall Berman, 1982		[[All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity]] by Marshall Berman, 1982

	[[Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity]] by [[Marc Augé]]		[[Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity]] by [[Marc Augé]]

	[[Liquid Modernity]] by [[Zygmunt Bauman]]		[[Liquid Modernity]] by [[Zygmunt Bauman]]


	===Actor Network Theory===		===Actor Network Theory===

Extended Self

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:22:58 GMT

Related Reading

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	* [[Thorstein Veblen]]		* [[Thorstein Veblen]]
	* [[Persistent Paleontology]]		* [[Persistent Paleontology]]
	* [[~~The~~ Quantified ~~Self~~]]		* [[Quantified self]]

	===References===		===References===

The Inner History of Devices

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:22:52 GMT

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

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	===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology===		===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology===
	This is the field's clearest argument for taking the felt, private, unmeasured relationship between people and their machines as a legitimate object of study — and for the proposition that a person's account of what a device means to them is data rather than anecdote. It is the qualitative counterweight to [[Sandy Pentland\|reality mining]] and the [[Quantified ~~Self~~\|quantified self]], both of which measure what a body does and are silent on what it is like.		This is the field's clearest argument for taking the felt, private, unmeasured relationship between people and their machines as a legitimate object of study — and for the proposition that a person's account of what a device means to them is data rather than anecdote. It is the qualitative counterweight to [[Sandy Pentland\|reality mining]] and the [[Quantified self\|quantified self]], both of which measure what a body does and are silent on what it is like.

	===Related Reading===		===Related Reading===

Extended Self

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:22:12 GMT

Related Reading

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	* [[Thorstein Veblen]]		* [[Thorstein Veblen]]
	* [[Persistent Paleontology]]		* [[Persistent Paleontology]]
	* [[Quantified Self]]		* [[The Quantified Self]]

	===References===		===References===

Beyond Locative Media

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:22:05 GMT

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	===Key Ideas===		===Key Ideas===
	* '''The annotative/phenomenological distinction.''' Still the most useful taxonomy of locative practice, and applicable to commercial location services as readily as to art.		* '''The annotative/phenomenological distinction.''' Still the most useful taxonomy of locative practice, and applicable to commercial location services as readily as to art.
	* '''The critique of the mobile subject.''' The argument that centring the individual trace reproduces an ideology rather than examining one — a criticism that applies directly to later self-tracking; see [[Quantified Self\|quantified self]].		* '''The critique of the mobile subject.''' The argument that centring the individual trace reproduces an ideology rather than examining one — a criticism that applies directly to later self-tracking; see [[The Quantified Self\|quantified self]].
	* '''From locative to ambient.''' The prediction, largely borne out, that the significant developments would come from environments and objects that sense and report continuously rather than from devices carried deliberately. See [[Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing\|''Everyware'']].		* '''From locative to ambient.''' The prediction, largely borne out, that the significant developments would come from environments and objects that sense and report continuously rather than from devices carried deliberately. See [[Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing\|''Everyware'']].
	* '''The politics of the platform.''' Their observation that locative art depended on infrastructure it did not control — GPS is a military system, mapping is proprietary — and that this dependency was rarely examined by practitioners.		* '''The politics of the platform.''' Their observation that locative art depended on infrastructure it did not control — GPS is a military system, mapping is proprietary — and that this dependency was rarely examined by practitioners.
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	===Related Reading===		===Related Reading===
	* [[Narrative Archaeology]]		* [[Narrative Archaeology]]
	* [[Locative Feminism]]
	* [[Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing]]		* [[Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing]]
	* [[Geocloaking]]		* [[Geocloaking]]

Soylent

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:21:46 GMT

Related Reading

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	===Related Reading===		===Related Reading===
	* [[Timothy Ferriss]]		* [[Timothy Ferriss]]
	* [[Quantified Self]]		* [[The Quantified Self]]
	* [[Frictional Interface]]		* [[Frictional Interface]]
	* [[DIY Bio Movement]]		* [[DIY Bio Movement]]

Paul Rabinow

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:21:39 GMT

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	===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology===		===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology===
	Rabinow supplies the discipline's strongest argument that anthropology's proper object includes the institutions producing technology, not only the people receiving it — the same move [[Sharon Traweek\|Traweek]] makes in the laboratory. Biosociality is directly applicable to this field: communities forming around a shared biological or informational classification are now ordinary, and the [[Quantified Self\|quantified self]] is a biosocial formation in Rabinow's exact sense. His experience on the ethics component of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center is also a rare documented case of an anthropologist embedded in a technical programme, and of how badly that can go.		Rabinow supplies the discipline's strongest argument that anthropology's proper object includes the institutions producing technology, not only the people receiving it — the same move [[Sharon Traweek\|Traweek]] makes in the laboratory. Biosociality is directly applicable to this field: communities forming around a shared biological or informational classification are now ordinary, and the [[The Quantified Self\|quantified self]] is a biosocial formation in Rabinow's exact sense. His experience on the ethics component of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center is also a rare documented case of an anthropologist embedded in a technical programme, and of how badly that can go.

	===Related Reading===		===Related Reading===
	* [[Sharon Traweek]]		* [[Sharon Traweek]]
	* [[Digital Anthropology]]		* [[Digital Anthropology]]
	* [[Quantified Self]]		* [[The Quantified Self]]
	* [[Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison]]		* [[Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison]]
	* [[DIY Bio Movement]]		* [[DIY Bio Movement]]

Lifestreaming

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:21:22 GMT

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	[[Image:lifecasting-maggie-nichols.jpg\|center\|600px]]		[[Image:lifecasting-maggie-nichols.jpg\|center\|600px]]
	===Definition===		===Definition===
	Lifestreaming is a term used to describe the act of streaming one's actions and life to others in a consistently updating manner. Whether streaming one's heartbeat data, visor video or GPS data, lifestreaming is part of the process of the [[Quantified Self]], or a process used by those who log data about themselves and format it into a visual or graphed format over time. In essence, "every (connected) experience - txt, email, voice call, scrible, in person meetup, personal visual and sound experience, commercial media experience is indexed, searchable and recoverable on a timeline (and geoline)".<ref>E-mail from Rob Wilcox to Amber Case - Feb 3rd, 2011.</ref>It is similar to Lifecasting, which is a "continual broadcast of events in a person's life through digital media. Typically, lifecasting is transmitted through the medium of the Internet and can involve wearable technology".<ref>Why life as a cyborg is better: Eccentric professor explains reasons for tailoring reality]. Archive.org snapshot of CNN.com story. Originally published Wednesday, January 14, 2004. Accessed Oct 2011. http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20081206171437/http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/01/14/internet.cyborb.ap/</ref>		Lifestreaming is a term used to describe the act of streaming one's actions and life to others in a consistently updating manner. Whether streaming one's heartbeat data, visor video or GPS data, lifestreaming is part of the process of the [[The Quantified Self]], or a process used by those who log data about themselves and format it into a visual or graphed format over time. In essence, "every (connected) experience - txt, email, voice call, scrible, in person meetup, personal visual and sound experience, commercial media experience is indexed, searchable and recoverable on a timeline (and geoline)".<ref>E-mail from Rob Wilcox to Amber Case - Feb 3rd, 2011.</ref>It is similar to Lifecasting, which is a "continual broadcast of events in a person's life through digital media. Typically, lifecasting is transmitted through the medium of the Internet and can involve wearable technology".<ref>Why life as a cyborg is better: Eccentric professor explains reasons for tailoring reality]. Archive.org snapshot of CNN.com story. Originally published Wednesday, January 14, 2004. Accessed Oct 2011. http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20081206171437/http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/01/14/internet.cyborb.ap/</ref>

	===History===		===History===

Timothy Ferriss

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:21:11 GMT

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	* [[The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life\|The Rise of the Creative Class]]		* [[The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life\|The Rise of the Creative Class]]
	* [[Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty]]		* [[Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty]]
	* [[Quantified Self]]		* [[The Quantified Self]]
	* [[Soylent]]		* [[Soylent]]

Gulf of Execution

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:17:53 GMT

Related Reading

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	===Definition===		===Definition===
	The gulf of execution is the gap between what a person intends to do and the actions a system makes available to them. It is one half of a pair introduced by [[~~Don Norman\|~~Donald Norman]] — the other being the '''gulf of evaluation''', the gap between the state a system is in and what the person can determine about that state from what the system shows.		The gulf of execution is the gap between what a person intends to do and the actions a system makes available to them. It is one half of a pair introduced by [[Donald Norman]] — the other being the '''gulf of evaluation''', the gap between the state a system is in and what the person can determine about that state from what the system shows.

	The formulation appears in Norman's work with Stephen Draper in ''User Centered System Design'' (1986) and in ''The Design of Everyday Things'' (1988).		The formulation appears in Norman's work with Stephen Draper in ''User Centered System Design'' (1986) and in ''The Design of Everyday Things'' (1988).
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	===Related Reading===		===Related Reading===
	* [[~~Don~~ Norman]]		* [[Donald Norman]]
	* [[Affordance]]		* [[Affordance]]
	* [[Frictional Interface]]		* [[Frictional Interface]]
	* [[Human-Computer Interaction]]		* [[Human Computer Interaction]]
	* [[Steve Krug]]		* [[Steve Krug]]
	* [[Ease]]		* [[Ease]]

Ease

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:17:32 GMT

Related Reading

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	* [[Gulf of Execution]]		* [[Gulf of Execution]]
	* [[Steve Krug]]		* [[Steve Krug]]
	* [[~~Don~~ Norman]]		* [[Donald Norman]]
	* [[Affordance]]		* [[Affordance]]

Affordance

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:17:26 GMT

Related Reading

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	===Related Reading===		===Related Reading===
	* [[~~Don~~ Norman]]		* [[Donald Norman]]
	* [[Gulf of Execution]]		* [[Gulf of Execution]]
	* [[Frictional Interface]]		* [[Frictional Interface]]
	* [[Human-Computer Interaction]]		* [[Human Computer Interaction]]
	* [[Calm Technology]]		* [[Calm Technology]]

Low Resolution Indicators

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:17:18 GMT

Related Reading

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	* [[The Visual Display of Quantitative Information]]		* [[The Visual Display of Quantitative Information]]
	* [[Envisioning Information]]		* [[Envisioning Information]]
	* [[~~Don~~ Norman]]		* [[Donald Norman]]
	* [[Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man]]		* [[Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man]]
	* [[Interaction in 4-Second Bursts: The Fragmented Nature of Attentional Resources in Mobile HCI]]		* [[Interaction in 4-Second Bursts: The Fragmented Nature of Attentional Resources in Mobile HCI]]

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:17:10 GMT

Related Reading

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	* [[Frictional Interface]]		* [[Frictional Interface]]
	* [[Ease]]		* [[Ease]]
	* [[~~Don~~ Norman]]		* [[Donald Norman]]
	* [[Gulf of Execution]]		* [[Gulf of Execution]]
	* [[Human-Computer Interaction]]		* [[Human Computer Interaction]]

	[[Category:Books]]		[[Category:Books]]
	[[Category:Design]]		[[Category:Design]]
	[[Category:UX Resources]]		[[Category:UX Resources]]

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:17:02 GMT

Related Reading

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	* [[Low Resolution Indicators]]		* [[Low Resolution Indicators]]
	* [[The Design of Everyday Things]]		* [[The Design of Everyday Things]]
	* [[~~Don~~ Norman]]		* [[Donald Norman]]
	* [[Information Anxiety 2]]		* [[Information Anxiety 2]]
	* [[The Power of Maps]]		* [[The Power of Maps]]

The Psychology Of Everyday Living

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:16:54 GMT

Related Reading

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	* [[Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities]]		* [[Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities]]
	* [[Thorstein Veblen]]		* [[Thorstein Veblen]]
	* [[Attention Economy]]		* [[The Attention Economy]]

	[[Category:Books]]		[[Category:Books]]
	[[Category:Communication Studies]]		[[Category:Communication Studies]]
	[[Category:Critical Theory]]		[[Category:Critical Theory]]

Information Anxiety 2

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:16:45 GMT

Related Reading

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	* [[Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder]]		* [[Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder]]
	* [[The Design of Everyday Things]]		* [[The Design of Everyday Things]]
	* [[~~Don~~ Norman]]		* [[Donald Norman]]
	* [[Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition]]		* [[Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition]]
	* [[Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design]]		* [[Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design]]

Doug Engelbart

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:16:07 GMT

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	[[Designing Interactions]]		[[Designing Interactions]]
	[[The Design of Everyday Things]]		[[The Design of Everyday Things]]
	[[~~Don~~ Norman]]		[[Donald Norman]]
	[[Architectural Intelligence]]		[[Architectural Intelligence]]
	[[From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism]]		[[From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism]]

Mui Lab, Inc.

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:15:44 GMT

Why the Wood Matters

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	===Why the Wood Matters===		===Why the Wood Matters===
	~~The material choice~~ is the ~~argument~~, ~~not a styling decision~~.		A screen is a draws attention to itself even when idle, but a wooden surface is warm to the touch, it ages, it takes marks, and it reads as furniture rather than as equipment. See [[Natural Material\|natural material]] and [[Materials\|materials]].

	A screen is a permanent claim on attention even when idle, because its presence in a room says that something might appear on it. A wooden surface makes no such claim. It also does the other things natural materials do — it is warm to the touch, it ages, it takes marks, and it reads as furniture rather than as equipment. See [[Natural Material\|natural material]] and [[Materials\|materials]].		The company connects this explicitly to Japanese aesthetic traditions: the preference for restraint, for materials that show their grain and their age is a long-standing design position that happens to align closely with what [[Calm Technology\|calm technology]] arrived at from human-computer interaction. mui Lab is one of the few companies working at that intersection.

	The company connects this explicitly to Japanese aesthetic traditions~~, and the connection is more than marketing~~: the preference for restraint, for materials that show their grain and their age~~, and for objects that recede rather than announce,~~ is a long-standing design position that happens to align closely with what [[Calm Technology\|calm technology]] arrived at from human-computer interaction. mui Lab is one of the few companies working at that intersection ~~deliberately~~.

	===Position in the Field===		===Position in the Field===

Dating Sim

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:14:30 GMT

Related Reading

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	* [[Sherry Turkle]]		* [[Sherry Turkle]]
	* [[A.I]]		* [[A.I]]
	* [[Attention Economy]]		* [[The Attention Economy]]

	[[Category:Digital Culture]]		[[Category:Digital Culture]]
	[[Category:Japanese Concepts]]		[[Category:Japanese Concepts]]
	[[Category:Cyborg Anthropology]]		[[Category:Cyborg Anthropology]]

Calm Tech Institute

Caseorganic — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:14:18 GMT

About

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	===About===		===About===
	The Calm Tech Institute is an organisation that develops standards and certification for technology designed to work with human attention rather than against it. It was founded by [[Amber Case]] in 2024, and builds on the concept of calm technology developed by Mark Weiser ~~and John Seely Brown~~ at [[Xerox PARC]] in the 1990s.<ref>[https://www.calmtech.institute/calm-tech-principles Principles], Calm Tech Institute; see also [https://caseorganic.medium.com/designing-tech-that-finally-respects-our-time-humanity-announcing-the-calm-tech-institute-33bac541b133 the founding announcement].</ref>		The Calm Tech Institute is an organisation that develops standards and certification for technology designed to work with human attention rather than against it. It was founded by [[Amber Case]] in 2024, and builds on the concept of calm technology developed by Mark Weiser at [[Xerox PARC]] in the 1990s.<ref>[https://www.calmtech.institute/calm-tech-principles Principles], Calm Tech Institute; see also [https://caseorganic.medium.com/designing-tech-that-finally-respects-our-time-humanity-announcing-the-calm-tech-institute-33bac541b133 the founding announcement].</ref>

	The institute describes its work as "a process for designing technology that works with human attention, instead of against it."		The institute describes its work as "a process for designing technology that works with human attention, instead of against it."

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	<div style="float: left; width: 50%">		<div style="float: left; width: 50%">
	*[[Thinking in Systems]]		*[[Thinking in Systems]]
			*[[Tools for Conviviality]]
	*[[Ontological Buoyancy]]		*[[Ontological Buoyancy]]
	*[[Ontological Shock]]		*[[Ontological Shock]]

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	{{TopicEnder}}		{{TopicEnder}}
	<div style="float: left; width: 50%">		<div style="float: left; width: 50%">
			*[[Thinking in Systems]]
	*[[Ontological Buoyancy]]		*[[Ontological Buoyancy]]
	*[[Ontological Shock]]		*[[Ontological Shock]]