Ian Bogost’s Post

Excited to see the launch of the Master of Design in HCI and Emerging Technology, led by my colleague Jonathan Hanahan, who has been working hard on this project for several years now at WashU's Sam Fox School. Inaugural class will start in AY25!

I'm hiring a staff member in Film & Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, to manage our film screening, filmmaking, and programming efforts. The right person could also teach a class. Share with appropriate networks if you got em! https://lnkd.in/gd2QYjvU

For the last year or so, I've been noticing weird things with my Amazon returns. Messages that I haven't returned items I have, recharges for those items I have to unwind, weirdly complex returns processes that feel like they make mistakes easier, and so on. One in seven online retail purchases gets returned, which is unsustainable. But even Amazon? The company says it has only made returns easier. But have they, or is the ease only a way to mask increased friction, which might mitigate returns under the radar?

I have stopped renewing all the domain names I bought over the last three decades, most of which hosted projects that never went anywhere (or even got started). It made me realize that the domain name itself is over, as a form of cultural capital, as a shingle under which to hang a hat (personal or corporate), and as a remainder of value from the dot-com revolution, now long ended.

I wrote about the rise of colleges of computing in American universities. Their deans say these new institutions are necessary to meet CS demand and advance the field. But they also risk isolating computing even further from the world it now controls. When I raised this concern with Charles Isbell (the former dean of computing at Georgia Tech, also my prior employer), he said that the same reasoning could apply to any influential discipline, including medicine and business. He’s probably right, but that’s cold comfort. The mere fact that universities allow some other powerful fiefdoms to exist doesn’t make computing’s centralization less concerning. Isbell admitted that setting up colleges of computing “absolutely runs the risk” of empowering a generation of professionals who may already be disengaged from consequences to train the next one in their image. Inside a computing college, there may be fewer critics around who can slow down bad ideas. Disengagement might redouble. But he said that dedicated colleges could also have the opposite effect. A traditional CS department in a school of engineering would be populated entirely by computer scientists, while the faculty for a college of computing like the one he led at Georgia Tech might also house lawyers, ethnographers, psychologists, and even philosophers like me. Bala told me that her college was established not to teach CS on its own but to incorporate policy, law, sociology, and other fields into its practice. “I think there are no downsides,” she said.

So thrilled to see my co-host Becca Rashid on human-being television talking about our podcast, which you can listen to using podcasting.

People sometimes celebrate that nobody owns email, so everyone can use it in an interoperable way. But that's also why email is so terrible, because everyone can use it. There's no reforming email, which leaves only one choice: We must abandon it.

Have you ever wondered: Is there actually space for everyone to bring one carry-on bag on a plane? I did, so I investigated. Where I ended up after talking to airplane manufacturers, aircraft-interior industrial designers, domestic airlines, and civil engineers … well, you are not ready for it.

So, I got one, and then I wrote about it. "This is how I’d thought the Apple Vision Pro might best be used—as a virtual office, a place to work that is an actual place and not just a little screen on a table or a desk. The posture benefits were immediate: I was sitting upright, my back against a cushion, my head straight, my eyes focused on the horizon (and the future?). I felt like an illustration in a workplace-ergonomics poster. I felt good. But also disoriented. Before linking to my laptop, I’d already opened Microsoft Word, and now I couldn’t find that window. It was stuck, somewhere in virtual space, in another room of my house. Looking side to side, I finally saw the foreshortened sliver of my document in the living-room doorway. I tried to pinch it, but couldn’t quite reach. So I opened Word anew, on my laptop, in my headset. Now I began to feel afraid, like I’d gone so deep inside computerspace that I would never get out again. Thunder clapped in my ears from the background environment. I was alone in the wilderness, in the goggles wrapped around my head."

I talked to Brian Rosenberg, former college president and author of the book "Whatever it is, I'm against it," about what's wrong with American universities. It's not DEI; it's their very structure, which makes change difficult, maybe impossible.