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I’m happy for the revival of Luddism in American culture that finds intractable problems associated with particular technologies, such that the only thinkable solution is to remove them from circulation. Let’s begin by rank ordering those most harmful to lives and freedom and begin with the most egregious of them. I’m sure we’ll eventually get to guns. But let’s be honest about the fact that dismantling dams, shutting down nuclear reactors, eliminating toxic synthetic chemicals, and reducing the numbers of vehicles on the roads and planes in the sky would be no more difficult a task and have a far more significant improvement on the quality and longevity of lives, human and otherwise. To select those technologies only based on their purpose in design (for instance, those designed to kill), while simultaneously disregarding the relative magnitude of their actual effects is to appeal to blind moralism. I’m too much of a materialist to believe we should focus only on intention and not on consequence.

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June 21st, 2014

US Policing and the State

In this blog, I synthesize multiple theories in order to produce an approach to policing sufficient to understanding police violence […]

February 20th, 2014

Troy Police Under Investigation for Pattern of Civil Rights Violations

A January 25, 2014, police riot in a bar in Troy, NY, was documented on video by numerous indoor security […]

February 13th, 2014

A Categorical Denial of Public Oversight of Police

Certifying Brutality In the weeks since Roshawon Donley and others were brutally beaten by Troy Police officers, Troy city and […]

January 29th, 2014

Video Footage Documents Police Brutality in Troy, New York

The videos below show a half hour of security camera [edit: and civilian cell phone camera] footage documenting the manufacturing […]

January 13th, 2014

Transparency, Accountability, Legitimacy

Perhaps, rather than a linear and causal relationship between transparency and accountability, these function more autonomously or the relationship is instead […]

January 13th, 2014

CFP: The Police and Theory of the State

Call for Papers: The Police and the Theory of the State Deadline: 28.02.2014 The editors of Theoria invite contributors to interrogate contemporary political […]

January 8th, 2014

Call for submissions on Critical Technology Studies

The following call for papers has just been released: Minority Report: The Rise and Fall of Critical Technology Studies Open […]

January 7th, 2014

If the WTO protesters were right, why didn’t they win?

Yesterday, The Atlantic published an article that declared “Seattle’s 1999 Protesters Were Right.” Author Noah Smith correctly explained that they […]

January 3rd, 2014

Raising the minimum wage: What does it mean to be “lifted out of poverty”?

In the present economic environment, “lifting 5 million out of poverty” will bloat what Newman and Chen call the “missing class,” those […]

January 1st, 2014

The Visibility of Police Violence as Transparency

I’ve been studying surveillance rather intensively for the past four years, and policing for a little less time. But my […]