New Criticals

Attending to the unattended.

Marc Yearsley on work and play in the digital age. 

You're always working online, especially when you're not working online.

Some factories have disappeared, driven from our borders towards cheaper labor and less regulation. As both the metaphysical and experiential nature of labor changes, the factory must take on some new forms.

Nothing's perfect.

The postmodern economics of information.

While today communication technologies represent essentially infinite possibility and value, it originally presented an obstacle to the revolution of industrial production.

On the development of industrial machines.

A look into the content, value, and effect of labor.

On Digital Writing

The leak of the NSA's PRISM program, a domestic electronic survelliance and data mining operation, threw information capitalism and rights-of-looking into the collective American consciousness, provoking one of the first true debates about homegrown spying since the Patriot Act, this time wholly digitized. Gone were the phone taps, now it's your Order History. Who uses a land-line anymore? 

Any thing worth anything needs protecting. How, by whom, and from what? If the Internet is our most precious resource, then shall we afford it every available protection? There are a host of security measures in place on the Internet to protect against a variety of cyber-crimes. What better than a test? This is the CAPTCHA, or Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.