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1:15 AM, Pacific Time
Finn Brunton
Zoom Discussion|On the Threshold of the Spam Epoch
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Online Online
- Language English
- Price Free event
- Part of series: For The Protection of All Beings
This talk looks at a confluence of current, cutting-edge technologies — large language models, generative AI, engagement metrics, algorithmic curation, among others — alongside business models and cultural and political forces, to make the case that we are crossing the threshold into the epoch of spam as one of the dominant forces in digital culture. Looking back — all the way back to Turing’s collaborators in the 1950s, through the development of mass computing and the internet, to the present ad-driven platform moment — we can see our future, and plan to avert it.
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Finn Brunton (finnb.net) is a professor at UC Davis with appointments in Science and Technology Studies and Cinema and Digital Media. He is the author of Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (MIT, 2013) and Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Technologists, and Utopians Who Created Cryptocurrency (Princeton, 2019), and the co-author of Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest (with Helen Nissenbaum, MIT, 2015) and Communication (with Mercedes Bunz and Paula Bialski, meson press and University of Minnesota, 2019).
Register here
Finn Brunton (finnb.net) is a professor at UC Davis with appointments in Science and Technology Studies and Cinema and Digital Media. He is the author of Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (MIT, 2013) and Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Technologists, and Utopians Who Created Cryptocurrency (Princeton, 2019), and the co-author of Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest (with Helen Nissenbaum, MIT, 2015) and Communication (with Mercedes Bunz and Paula Bialski, meson press and University of Minnesota, 2019).