Anticipazione: https://mailchi.mp/the-syllabus/tech-week32 ----- https://the-syllabus.com/ Welcome to the Syllabus! We are only launching in September. But we are quite happy that you found us this early. *What are we about?* Let’s first tell you what we do /not/ want to do: organize /all/ of the world’s information. We leave such utopian endeavours to others. Rather, we focus on salvaging the best, the deepest, and the most important bits from the ever-growing great pile of information. We thus aspire to unearth, polish, and promote the hidden gems that often go unnoticed in today’s cacophony of ceaseless notifications, absurd listicles, and surveillance-soaked clickbait. Our credo is simple: the vital information that one needs in order to interpret and change the world is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed. Over the last six years, we have developed a novel and eclectic method that pairs humans and algorithms to discover only the best and the most relevant information. And we do this in important categories that have been neglected by other platforms in their pursuit of surveillance/advertising revenues. We thereby uncover the best and most original items on a given theme amidst all the latest academic papers, books, talks and podcasts. Given our expertise in the history, economics and politics of technology – an area of critical importance to today’s debates – it is here that we have first deployed our algorithmic and editorial powers. Now that we are satisfied with our methodology, we want to make the results of our work available to others. Ours is not a view from nowhere. We seek to read reality from a critical perspective, tilting towards research that either offers bold and intellectually risky interpretations of the problems at hand or research that offers pragmatic, original, and transformative solutions to them. We have no patience for sentences without content that are in mass production in today’s factories of the obscure. We also do not doubt that 99% of academic papers, books, and conferences put most people to sleep – we are no exception – so we focus on finding the 1% that is rich and not boring, but that gets lost amid the arcane and the unnecessary. *What does all this mean for you?* In the months to come, we will be launching weekly curated selections of our best new readings, videos and podcasts on important or emerging issues, most of them related to technology: the future of work, the political and social impact of artificial intelligence, the policy debate surrounding Big Tech, the social and philosophical consequences of digitisation, the geopolitics of technology and cybersecurity, the many uses (and abuses) of the blockchain. Editions dedicated to many other topics are being “forged” as we write this. If you are interested in receiving any of our digests or finding out more about The Syllabus, please sign up with your email address below.