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Cad62b69914e0610531ed1768d Logic is: Moira Weigel, Ben Tarnoff, Christa Hartsock, Jim Fingal, Xiaowei R. Wang, Celine Nguyen DM for details. Special thanks to Logic Patrons: Walter Korman, Peter Tarnoff, Margaret Pastor, Jason Barrett Prado Logic Magazine is published by the Logic Foundation, a California nonprofit public benefit corporation organized for the specific purpose of promoting education about technology. Rise and Fall of a Micropolis © Faber Futures 2017 Illustration of E. Coli © David S. Goodsell 1999 Reciprocal Biomimicry photos © Jonathon Keats 2017 OpenAg images licensed under Creative Commons Cover and interstitial pages: Xiaowei R. Wang Landsat 8 imagery courtesy of the United States Geological Survey, public domain Text Contents licensed under: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 ISBN: 978-0-9986626-4-0 ISSN: 2573-4504 Electronic Telegram: [email protected] Internet: https://logicmag.io scale LOGIC MAGAZINE Editorial 011 Go Ask Alice Technology shrinks to grow, and grows to shrink. Chatlogs 045 Don’t Read the Comments: Caroline Sinders on Online Harassment A design researcher at Wikimedia discusses how to define online harassment—and how to stop it. 111 Mining the Sky: Meehan Crist, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, and Denton Ebel on Astrocapitalism American entrepreneurs are teaming up with one of the world’s smallest countries to make outer space safe for extractive capitalism. 153 Do It Yourself: Matt Bruenig on Using the Internet to Build a Think Tank A conversation about building political alternatives with the internet. ISSUE 04 SCALE Features 017 The Internet of Women Moira Weigel / A reflection on #MeToo, the death of print media, and the structure of the internet. 059 The New Octopus K. Sabeel Rahman / An anatomy of today’s tech monopolies, and a proposal for how to tame them. 091 The Data is Ours! Ben Tarnoff / A radical blueprint for data democracy. 133 The Unicorn Hunters Kim-Mai Cutler / The past, present, and future of Silicon Valley’s venture capital industry. 173 “The Scale Is Just Unfathomable” Tarleton Gillespie / An inquiry into how social media platforms moderate content at an industrial scale. 215 See No Evil Miriam Posner / An investigation into how software wires global supply chains, and what code conceals. Patches 035 Words Are Weapons Marc DaCosta / How do we talk about technology in a way that helps us transform it? 079 The Factory Is Alive Christina Agapakis and Natsai Audrey Chieza / Living within our means might require making our technology come alive. 121 Shapeshifters Alexandra Pettet / A report on how digital technology has revolutionized gerrymandering. 161 Crawling the City Will Payne / Apps like Yelp and Foursquare don’t just map the city. They gentrify it. 189 Cyborg Tongues Ross Perlin / What happens when small languages collide with smartphones and the internet? 199 Farms Race Nina Sparling / What the hell is open-source agriculture? 231 Letter from Shenzhen Xiaowei R. Wang / A dispatch from the Other Bay Area. Assets 148 The Reciprocal Biomimicry Initiative Jonathon Keats / The world’s first program dedicated to systematically adapting human technologies to benefit other organisms. Contributors Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is a journalist and the author of The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen. Christina Agapakis is a synthetic biologist and the creative director at Ginkgo Bioworks, an organism design company based in Boston. Matt Bruenig is the founder of People’s Policy Project. Natsai Audrey Chieza is a London-based biodesigner, educator, and speaker. She is founder of Faber Futures. Meehan Crist is writer-in-residence in biological sciences at Columbia University. Kim-Mai Cutler is a partner at Initialized Capital, an early-stage venture firm that has invested in Coinbase and Patreon. She was previously a tech journalist at TechCrunch. Marc DaCosta is the cofounder of Enigma, a data technol- ogy company, and a fellow at the Brown Institute at the Columbia School of Journalism. Denton Ebel is chair of the division of physical sciences at the American Museum of Natural History, and the curator of the museum’s meteorite collection. Tarleton Gillespie is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research New England, and an affiliated associate profes- sor in the Departments of Communication and Information Science at Cornell University. Jonathon Keats is an experimental philosopher, artist, and writer. He is the author of six books, most recently You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future. His art is represented by Modernism Gallery in San Francisco. Will Payne is a PhD candidate in Geography and New Media at the University of California, Berkeley, where he explores how spatial information systems produce and reflect patterns of urban inequality. Ross Perlin is codirector of the Endangered Language Alliance and is working on a book about the languages of New York. Alexandra Pettet is a mathematician and data scientist living in the Bay Area. Miriam Posner is an assistant professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. K. Sabeel Rahman is an assistant professor of law at Brooklyn Law School and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Caroline Sinders is an artist and researcher. She currently works as a design researcher for the Anti-Harassment Tools Team at the Wikimedia Foundation. Nina Sparling is a writer based in New York whose work has appeared in the New Food Economy, Vogue.com, and The Rumpus. Ben Tarnoff is a founding editor of Logic. Moira Weigel is a writer and scholar currently at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She is also a founding editor of Logic. Xiaowei R. Wang is a hacker, thinker, and designer in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the creative director of Logic. From the Editors Go Ask Alice 1. “Being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing,” Alice tells the Caterpillar. Just think how the internet feels! It’s big enough to make the world feel small, and small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. It dissolves huge chunks of data into particles of light, then flings them across filaments of optical fiber roughly the width of human hair. Those filaments link continents — and the most intimate regions of our lives. What else runs under the Pacific Ocean and also keeps you company on the toilet? The internet’s vastly different scales don’t just coexist. They coproduce each other. The planetary and the personal, the tiny and the titanic, are locked, circling, in a spiral dance. Technology shrinks to grow, and grows to shrink. This isn’t the first time technology has rescaled the world. In the 1860s, when Lewis Carroll was writing Alice in Wonderland, new railway and telegraph networks were reshaping time and space. Journeys that used to take days now took hours. Letters that used to take weeks to arrive now took minutes. A web of wire and steel pulled whole continents together. “We have seen the power of steam suddenly dry up the great Atlantic Ocean to less than half its breadth,” one author marveled. “The Mediterranean… has shrunk into a lake.” 2. Moore’s Law says you can fit twice as many transistors on a chip about every two years. As the chips get smaller, our capacity to store and process information gets bigger. Computing becomes ubiquitous, digitization universal. The fountains of the great deep are broken up, and the face of the earth is covered with data. Miniaturization enables and demands new maximizations. Billions of connected devices require the construction of vast data centers. A startup with thirteen employ- ees acquires millions of users within months — and gets bought for $1 billion. A corner of Northern California for- merly occupied by orchards and canneries becomes short- hand for the future. Software eats the world. Software doesn’t actually eat anything, of course. The phrase is pure fetishism: relations between people 012 reimagined as relations between things. Somebody is always doing the eating — and somebody is always getting eaten. A cafeteria worker who helps reproduce the labor power of LinkedIn’s engineers with quinoa and kale shares a one-bedroom apartment with a dozen family members. A media worker whose industry is being liquidated by Facebook watches her income dwindle as she cranks out content she hopes will go viral. There is no limit to the scale of wealth and power that a few men are permitted to accumulate. Meanwhile, the rest of us are asked to live smaller, leaner, more flexibly; to enterpreneurialize ourselves into serfdom — “to eat a coffee for lunch,” as the infamous Fiverr ad puts it — to lower our expectations, and in some cases even our life expectancy, to adapt to a Lilliputian existence at the feet of our new kings. 3. This issue looks at how scale shapes technology and the tech industry — and how their bigness and smallness are reshaping us. Our writers explore why technologists come under pressure to think big and think small — to scale and to compartmentalize. VCs demand massive growth on a short timetable. Because the vast majority of the startups they fund will fail, the few that succeed must succeed hugely. At the same time, software itself is modular. Engineers organize code into abstractions that help them manage, and conceal, GO ASK ALICE / 013 complexity. The “black boxes” that result can be good for business, and bad for humans. The tech industry typically speaks the language of engi- neering and finance. Increasingly, however, its leaders are coming to realize that they may need to become conver- sant in other idioms as well: the social and the political. And the social and the political, as our writers make clear, are the territories where tech’s particular configurations of bigness and smallness must ultimately be understood. Social media is the site of much hatred and delusion.
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