Continue reading Buying Brexit: the politics of Google ads & the general election

Sergey Brin and Larry Page invented Google as students at Stanford in 1998. They knew from the beginning how advertising could interfere with the efficiency and integrity of their proposed search engine. In an appendix to their paper, on The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine, they noted that ‘the goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality … Continue reading How the Tories wrote my thesis: the political economy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine

My essay The Death of the Reader has been published in Under the Influence magazine. It’s a special issue on the subject of SPEED, so the essay reflects on the implications of machine reading, and includes a brief description of my own intervention against the quantification of language (specifically by Google’s AdWords platform) in my {poem}.py project. A PDF of the essay is available here: … Continue reading The Death of the Reader | UNDER THE INFLUENCE MAGAZINE

I’ve been playing around with some ideas for my upcoming presentation at the Research in Real-Time – Practice in Progress conference at NUI Galway next month. I’ll be using some material from the Engineering Fictions workshop I did with CONNECT writer in residence Jessica Foley in Dublin in February, where we experimented with writing the most expensive and cheapest love poems using Google AdWords suggested … Continue reading reclaiming poetry from the algorithmic marketplace

An alternative angle to the fake news and Google Ads debate. It’s more poetic, but by no means less political. “Control of language equals control of thought, and it is private capital and tech companies who are at those controls.”   I recently published a short piece on The Medium about the similarities between language in the age of Google and Orwell’s Newspeak in 1984. … Continue reading Politics, Poetry and Google: The Value of Words in an Age of Linguistic Capitalism

As the value of words shifts from conveyor of meaning to conveyor of capital, has Google become an all powerful usurer of language, and if so, how long before the linguistic bubble bursts? I’m giving a talk at Trinity College Dublin next week as part of the CONNECT centre and Engineering Fictions. I’ll be using a lot of the material from the talk I gave … Continue reading SUBPRIME LANGUAGE: The Precarious Value of Words in an Age of Linguistic Capitalism, Digital Advertising and #FakeNews

I’m giving a talk at NUI Galway on Wednesday 25th January as part of the Whitaker Institute Ideas Forum seminar series. It will be an explanation and exploration of all things Linguistic Capitalism, with a demonstration of my {poem}.py  project, as well as some new ideas about the role of Google advertising in the fake news debate. Most exciting of all is a guest appearance from … Continue reading Talk at NUIG 25th Jan – Linguistic Capitalism – technology & governance research cluster