🖼️"The Drawbridge" (ca. 1749-50) by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, from his Carceri d'Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons) series of etchings depicting enormous fantastical architectural spaces. Piranesi was 22 and allegedly delirious with malaria when he first sketched these impossible prisons. Public domain The inventory gave me a dependency graph.…
🖼️Cover Photo: "Woman with wax tablets and stylus," commonly called Sappho. 1st century AD fresco from Pompeii. National Archaeological Museum, Naples. The wax tablet she's holding was the original erasable desktop, you wrote with the pointed end of the stylus and erased with the flat end.…
🖼️"Ulysses at the Table of Circe (The Odyssey of Homer)." Line engraving after John Flaxman by James Parker, 1805. Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain. Flaxman developed this outline style in Italy, inspired by Greek vase painting. Flaxman's outline illustrations were so popular they were "…
Cover Photo: Pont'Ecciu, 1st century AD Roman bridge, restored and enlarged in 1157 during the period of the Giudicati, Allai, Sardinia. CC-SA 2.0 Carole Raddato I've spent most of my life trying to understand how information technology and people interact. Technology does what it says…
Cover Photo: Detail, door-hinge, inscribed with the name of Entemena of Lagash, c. 2400 BCE, from Iraq. Pergamon Museum, Berlin, Germany. CC-BY-SA 4.0 Osama SM Amin FRCP FOSDEM is a two day event where the Free University of Brussels (Specifically the ULB, or Université libre de Bruxelles, not to…
This blog has a new home. After years on WordPress shared hosting, it now runs on self-hosted infrastructure. Ghost on a VPS I manage, backed up to encrypted offsite storage, federated via ActivityPub. The name is new too. "Techverständiger" served its purpose, but it was always more job…
I'm writing this article within the context of the SOAM "RE:FUND OUR DIGITAL FUTURE: REIMAGINING FUNDING ARCHITECTURES FOR PUBLIC INTEREST TECHNOLOGY” residency program I'm taking part in to order to create a new speculative institutional model with the goal of empowering open hardware infrastructure…
The United Kingdom has just delivered the world's most expensive demonstration of why throwing technology at social problems doesn't work. After two years of ignoring expert advice and billions in compliance costs, the UK's Online Safety Act has achieved the opposite of its stated…