Metafarce <small>politics</small>

Book Review: Surveillance Valley

Tue 01 October 2024 By Andrew McConachie

When Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine was published in 2018 I took a rather perfunctory look at it and figured I wasn’t that interested in reading it. The little bit I could read on Amazon didn’t impress me and so I ignored it. Since then I’ve encountered …
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#3 The Great Transformation

Mon 07 January 2019 By Andrew McConachie

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, by Karl Polanyi

I like reading economic histories and this book is the best economic history I've ever read. I'm not alone in this opinion, The Great Transformation is widely recognized as one of the best works on the …
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#2 An Interventionist Pairing

Wed 02 January 2019 By Andrew McConachie

Use of Weapons, by Iain M Banks

The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government, by David Talbot

Our next pairing features a work of fiction and a biography.

Use of Weapons is set in Banks' Culture universe and features a protagonist hired by …
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Pervasively Distributed Trademark Enforcement

Sat 18 April 2015 By Andrew McConachie

This post explores similarities between ICANN's Domains Protected Marks List (DPML) process and Pervasively Distributed Copyright Enforcement (PDCE). The DPML operates on trademarks, while PDCE concerns copyright. However, similarities exist in the intentions and consequences of them.

I'll first introduce PDCE with a brief summary. Then I will explain the …
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Framing Network Neutrality for the American Electorate

Wed 28 January 2015 By Andrew McConachie

I originally wrote this paper for a class on conceptual metaphor taught by George Lakoff @ UC Berkeley's department of Linguistics. It borows a notation for metaphors(e.g. Affection Is Warmth), and many common conceptual systems(e.g. Moral Accounting), from Philosophy in the Flesh¹. All errors are mine …
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