Critical Futures

Critical Future is the new home of the blog that lived, for a time, at tychoish.com. Previously, Critical Futures had hosted a semi-regular science fiction publication of my original science fiction.

These days, I post Critical Futures most Tuesdays. The topics covered range from political economy, to labor studies, to digital media, to open source software development, and to technology/human/social (e.g. cyborg) discourses.

Archives

While, the archives for Critical Futures go back to 2002, most of the posts before 2007 aren't terribly useful. Many of the rest of the posts are, I think, pretty cool, but it's very hard to draw attention to those really cool posts.

This is a problem with a lot of blogs: they have a lot of great content, and they make it easy for people to write, publish, and conduct direct conversations with audiences and collaborators, but when there's enough content in a blog, it becomes incredibly cumbersome to find old and important posts. Though it's possible for a blog's content to endure, it is very difficult to organize content in a useful way.

Continue reading for more about Critical Futures Archives and Curration

(this page is in progress)

Discourse

While the commenting feature of most blogging software and services is defining, I think it's also fair to say that these services are universally horrible. If you comment on a blog, it's very difficult to track replies to your comment, it's very difficult to have a conversation of any complexity, and it's nearly impossible for conversations to go beyond the scope of a single blog post. Part of the problem is the fact that OpenID has taken a long time to really catch on, and even now adoption is spotty, with the end result being that it was difficult to preserve identity across multiple comment threads and multiple blogs. The fact that most comment systems have not supported threads is merely insult upon injury.

In light of this, one of my main goals that inspired the beginning of this wiki was to think about different ways to have conversations. One of the ways to do this is to have conversations in wiki pages, and now every post on Critical Futures includes a comment link to this page, where readers will (hopefully) feel inspired to create comments.