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This qualifies in an interesting way what some people have seen as Latour’s technocratism, his own “love of technology,” which is suspect to many intellectuals (chiefly Heideggerians, but not only them). Because what Latour loves above all is the technology that could exist, and the social interactions that (can) help to bring it about. He’s not an apologist for the neoliberal order or the effects that technological culture has had, but he does insist on the reality of the networks that science and technology have created, and the possibility of using them to different ends than the ones they are currently used for. From this standpoint, he looks like quite a utopian thinker himself. And while Norbert, like Latour, is reluctant to attribute the failure of Aramis to leviathan-sized macro-actors (“Are you going to accuse the social system? Capitalism? Napoleonic France? Sinful man, while you’re at it?,” 197), there is more than a tinge of pathos in the fact that an innovation that would have helped solve ecological as well as transportational problems was scuttled by technocratic management. And while many of the explanations given by the actors are as good as any a sociologist could come up with, some are a lot less enlightened — e.g. M. Chalvan: “‘Cars belong to individuals; everyone looks out for them. But Aramis would have been collective property. The first time anything went wrong, people would have blown the whole thing up’” (71): a rare appearance of straight-up ideology in Latour’s work. [Cf. also “The Fear of Mob Rule” in “Do You Believe In Reality?”]

Of course, Average Score on its own is also not a great solution, and Average Score With Tweaks risks becoming too complicated for players to care. On a positive note, Spelunky’s Daily Challenge is the closest I’ve seen so far to an excellent solution to the high score problem. It’s clever, simple, and representative of general Spelunky skills. The only problem with the Daily Challenge is that posting a very high score in Spelunky involves a lot of somewhat tedious ghost mining. Also, I’m not good enough to do it, so it’s gotta be flawed somehow.

our hackers aren’t smashing the system; they’re fiddling with it so that they can get more work done. In this vision, it’s up to individuals to accommodate themselves to the system rather than to try to reform it. The shrinking of political imagination that accompanies such attempts at doing more with less usually goes unremarked

Language in all its forms, from poetry to cliché, was a continual source of intrigue for Fischli/Weiss. How to Work Better (1991) is a manifesto comprising 10 persuasive but empty sentences, each with the aim of improving workplace productivity and morale: “Know the problem”; “Accept change as inevitable.” Fischli/Weiss plucked these stock phrases from a factory in Thailand and painted them in large stencilled letters to cover the exterior of an office block in Oerlikon, Zurich, visible on the approach into the city centre by train from Zurich Airport.

It’s at 1:39 in the video where things really start going pear-shaped, as the fabric of the game’s reality comes apart at the seams for a few seconds before inexplicably transitioning to Mario-themed versions of Pong and Snake. […] Suffice it to say that the first minute-and-a-half or so of this TAS is merely an effort to spawn a specific set of sprites into the game’s Object Attribute Memory (OAM) buffer in a specific order. The TAS runner then uses a stun glitch to spawn an unused sprite into the game, which in turn causes the system to treat the sprites in that OAM buffer as raw executable code. In this case, that code has been arranged to jump to the memory location for controller data, in essence letting the user insert whatever executable program he or she wants into memory by converting the binary data for precisely ordered button presses into assembly code.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

So the key to restoring the balance of power between governments and the governed is not uncomprehending fear of surveillance, but understanding the mobility-surveillance trade-off equation, and figuring out how much increased mobility we can demand in return for consenting to increased surveillance. Once we figure out how to increase our mobility to match the limits of the new technologies of consent, the trade implied by the new social contract will be fair once again.

Her research for the book has involved hours upon hours of talking with people about conversation as well as eavesdropping on conversations: the kind of low-grade spying that in academia is known as “ethnography,” that in journalism is known as “reporting,” and that everywhere else is known as “paying attention.”