Time, space and social media
The technology of time with Nanna Saeten
Summer is suddenly here, and so is the latest episode of the Anti-Dystopians!
On this episode, I spoke with Nanna Saeten, a PhD candidate in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge about her research on time, temporality and technology. We discussed how technologies of time have been used as tools of nation-building, why high-frequency trading and blockchain depend on human understandings of time (as well as algorithms), whether technology is really “speeding up” or changing our experience of time and how social media has changed the way we experience political events across time and space.
You can follow Nanna on Twitter @NannaLS, Alina Utrata @alinautrata and the Anti-Dystopians podcast @AntiDystopians.
As always, you can listen to it here or subscribe here (Spotify) or here (Apple Podcasts). If you like us, please rate, review and share the Anti-Dystopians to help us get new listeners. If you want to support the production of the show, you can visit here.
Further reading from the episode:
Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra Simulation (1995)
Davide Panagia - "On the Possibility of a Political Theory of Algorithms" Political Theory (2020)
Nanna Sæten - "Tilgivelse Muligheten for en ny begynnelse" Filosofisk Supplement (2019) [In Norwegian]
James Williams - Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy (2018)
Inside the Team at Facebook That Dealt with the Christchurch Shooting
Crypto assets are ‘worth nothing,’ says ECB’s Christine Lagarde
What I’ve been reading
After Elon Musk spoke to Twitter employees about “free speech”, his company SpaceX apparently fired employees who signed a letter criticizing him
WSJ has great reporting about Sheryl Sandberg leaving Meta amid allegations she misused company resources, including having employees help her with her “philanthropic” work and an investigation into whether she shut down a journalistic (ok, a Daily Mail) investigation into her then-boyfriend, Activision Blizzard Inc Chief Executive Bobby Kotick.
As Caitlin Flanagan noted of Sandberg’s departure (perhaps too kindly), “The simple truth is that you cannot simultaneously dedicate yourself to making untold fortunes for a giant corporation and to championing a social good.”
Amazon will begin ‘Prime Air’ drone delivery in first city. Why does it always have to be California?
For those of you following the crypto-crash, here is the fantastic (edited) latecomer’s guide to crypto as well as a great feature on Molly White, who spearheaded the edited article (check out her website Web3 is going just great—spoiler alert: it is not).
Tweet of the week
Mediations on the crypto-crash . . .
