To look upon a freshly painted wall is to behold a smooth surface; to look at it through a magnifier is to see a rough and irregular landscape — but turn the magnification up sufficiently and see it become regular again, a geometric matrix of atoms held in molecular bonds. Keep magnifying and you enter
The copyright in the single digital market directive combines the deadliest ingredients in public policy: it is important, boringly complicated, and its effects are a long way off. This week, it was supposed to take a major step towards becoming law, but it has foundered – for now. The directive is largely technical tweaks to
Why would you send an anthropologist — as this book’s author, Gabriella Coleman, is — to study Anonymous, the indescribable hacktivist phenomenon whose operations (‘ops’) and giddy, menacing, profane video-manifestos have seized the media and the public consciousness from 2006 to the present day? Because Anonymous is, above all, an anthropological phenomenon. At first glance,
